Henry Martyn was one of the first Protestants to attempt to preach Christianity in East India Company territories in north India. He was a Company chaplain from Cornwall, educated and ordained at Cambridge, who was employed in 1806 to provide spiritual succour to the Company's European troops and to officiate at their baptisms, marriages and funerals. Martyn joined a small group of chaplains all inspired by the Cambridge-based evangelical preacher, Charles Simeon. As a ‘Simeonite’ Martyn hoped that, in spite of Company embargos on bazaar preaching, he would succeed in taking the Gospel to Indians, thus facilitating the conversion of India in his own time. In the event, his time was very short. Prone to tuberculosis, Martyn proved physically too weak to itinerate, even if the Company had encouraged public preaching to Indians. During less than five years in north India his audiences were restricted to the small numbers of Europeans, soldiers’ Indian wives, and to the crowds of beggars who came to his compound and services of their own volition. However, being a skilled linguist and philologist, Martyn set himself the alternative formidable task of preparing for publication some new translations of the Old and New Testaments, and the Anglican liturgy, into Hindustani (Urdu), Persian and Arabic, the three languages familiar to educated Muslims in north India. It is for his contribution to this biblical translation project, and his personal piety, that Martyn became esteemed by like-minded evangelicals in Britain as “the first modern missionary to the Mohammedans” (George Smith, 1892). His reputation was further strengthened in evangelical circles by his lonely death, aged 31, during a long trek across Persia and Anatolia to improve his Persian translation of the Scriptures, a tale romanticised by journals and letters revealing his unfulfilled love for a Cornish neighbour.
Scott Ayler has achieved the formidable task of publishing in one volume the letters that Martyn wrote assiduously from 1803 to 1812, mainly to fellow evangelical chaplains in north India, to his Cambridge sponsors and friends, and to family and friends in Cornwall. Many letters and excerpts were previously available in nineteenth-century published memoirs and collections, beginning with a fellow-student's tribute only four years after Martyn's death, continuing with a two-volume collection by Samuel Wilberforce in 1837, and culminating in George Smith's biography in 1892. Ayler has greatly facilitated current scholars’ access to Martyn's mind and experiences, not only by collating these separately published collections but by seeking out some previously unpublished letters, hitherto unknown to scholars. Over 300 letters are now placed in chronological sequence, within sub-sections distinguished by the key phases in Martyn's short evangelical journey. Accessibility in one volume is obviously very advantageous, as is the identification of individuals, place names and linguistic terms in detailed footnotes placed immediately after each letter. Such consideration for the reader has inevitably resulted in some repetition which cross-referencing to ‘first mention’ might have reduced, plus a reduction in the size of the volume. Such abundant information certainly aids the task of any reader investigating a particular phase in Martyn's life, rather than that of the cover-to-cover reader.
Particularly valuable is a 58-page introductory essay in which Ayler situates Martyn in his times, and indeed contributes importantly thereby to critical scholarship on the early Protestant evangelical movements more broadly. Among other advantages, Ayler feels, is that the full letters provide a clearer picture of the nature and dynamics of Martyn's relationships with friends and colleagues. Earlier biographers, he maintains, have painted Martyn, “as too much of an individual in his ministry to India”. Now he can be seen as “an integral member of a team”, that of the ‘Evangelical Chaplains’, which is especially revealing of his relationships with chaplains, Daniel Corrie and David Brown. Over half the total letters are to these two colleagues, situated either side of him, yet still hundreds of miles physically distant along the lower and middle Ganges. He and Corrie wrote to each other every week providing ‘the best-documented relationship we possess’ on their mutual concerns, and missionary hopes and disappointments. The emphasis Ayler places here on their inter-chaplaincy relationships is especially useful, given that no scholarly reassessment of either Corrie or Brown has been attempted in recent times; in Brown's case, the sources for so doing seem to be no longer extant. Ayler's introduction also probes the relationship of these Anglicans with the trio of Baptist ‘fully-fledged’ missionaries (Carey, Marshman and Ward) already established in the nearby Danish settlement at Serampore, to show some interesting nuances in the inter-denominational relationship he discerns in their correspondence, including some class and educational differences.
Henry Martyn's role as a Bible translator has always been recognised as highly important to later missionary enterprise in India and the Middle East. Yet, without his Indian, Iranian and Arab munshis (translators/language teachers) his completion of the Testaments would have been impossible. The full letters, arranged in chronological sequence, now allow a more nuanced understanding not only of Martyn's own translation dilemmas, and, in his own term, ‘mania’ to achieve perfection in translation, but also of his munshis’ characters, skills and roles. The relationship was often fraught on both sides. Martyn's account of his struggles with Jawad ibn Sabat, an Arab Christian convert, his assistant for ‘his’ Arabic New Testament, provides insight into the psychological problems in trying to reconcile with the Christian duty to ‘love’ any such brother convert, the intense loathing he sometimes felt for Sabat's character and habits, a trauma all too evident in the letters to friends as well as in the journals. However, recent scholars now utilise such translating partnerships for some new purposes, to elicit the outcomes of such exchanges for Muslim scholarship and technology. The work of Nile Green, in particular, shows a causative relationship between the evangelical emphasis on the printing and publishing of Christian religious texts, and the almost immediate take-off of print culture by Muslim scholars themselves, but in the new interest of furthering Islam and some other secular agendas. If, before c. 1820, there was very little book printing by Muslims, they quickly adopted the necessary technology following interaction with Christian missionaries such as Martyn, making printing machines the “crucial assets for a new generation of Muslim religious entrepreneurs and their firms seeking to defend, reform or reorganize Islam” (Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam, OUP, 2014, pp. 27–8; 69). Such evidence of the catalytic effects of Martyn and other missionaries’ translation, printing and publishing activities need no longer be limited only to exploration of the linear history of Bible translation.
In Ayler's view the letters give a new access to the ‘real’ Martyn, whose paradoxes and extremes of character generated strong verdicts in his short lifetime and posthumously. For evangelicals, his personal piety, pioneer missionary ardour and self-sacrifice elevated him to near saintly status; the re-editions of his journal ensured that a cult-like admiration continued into the high imperial age. But from the beginning Martyn had critics in India, followed by some commentators in Britain, who resented his over-zealousness, apparent aloofness and his sharp critiques of some innocent pleasures enjoyed by Company officials. More latterly there have been attempts to reconcile these portraits by drawing on contemporary evidence for some more human, life-asserting qualities. For his part, Ayler leaves it very much to a reading of the letters in their entirety to resolve the ‘character’ issue, but feels they now ‘reveal him as a man, and not merely as a hagiographic cipher’ (p. 57). He urges that the complete letters improve on previously available sources, to uncover the “warp and woof” of Martyn's daily life to suggest “a brilliant, self-critical and devout man with an underlying genial and warm-hearted temperament” (p. 58). Yet, for this reader, substantially the same single-patterned cloth finally comes off the loom. For the Martyn of the newly added letters seems much the same figure, so certain of the uniqueness of the Christian truth as to be harshly critical of all non-Christian religious practices and practitioners, and yet at the same time strangely indifferent to most other aspects of his Indian environment, if slightly more appreciative of the Persia he travelled quickly through. The availability in one volume of all the letters now known to have been penned by Henry Martyn will provide to those searching either for his soul or for his biblical scholarship an extremely useful, fully annotated source-book for further exploring his evangelical context, pre-fixed as this volume is, by a stimulating introductory chapter.
