Bengal

Bengal is depicted as a place where the British government barred American missionaries from remaining in Calcutta and ordered them out of India in 1812. The narrative makes the episode a pointed contrast: restrictions intended to shut the region to missionary work instead redirected the missionaries to Burma, while a change to the East India Company charter the following year secured greater toleration for missions in India.

Setting and Restrictions

The account places the missionaries’ confrontation with the government in Calcutta, which it describes as their brief stay in Bengal. After they had been there about ten days, Adoniram Judson and Newel were summoned to Calcutta and read an order requiring them to leave the country immediately and return to America. The government, the narrative says, suspected that they meant to remain in Bengal.

The missionaries tried several ways to pursue their purpose, but the authorities would allow no delay. Ann Judson’s account describes a further order directing that they be sent immediately aboard a Company vessel bound for England. A petty officer accompanied Hill and Adoniram Judson to their lodging and asked them not to leave without permission. The narrative emphasizes the coercion of this treatment, comparing the Christian missionaries’ surveillance to the pursuit of felons.

Expulsion and Redirection

The expulsion did not end the mission. Rather, the account presents the missionaries’ removal from India as a turn in its course: sent to Burma, they established a mission that the author says succeeded and continued with marked prosperity. The sharp reversal gives the episode its governing irony. The attempt to prevent missionary activity in Bengal helped direct the missionaries toward another field of work.

Ann Judson’s diary, written in 1812, supplies a contrasting perspective on the government’s restrictions. She describes the East India Company as strongly opposed to missionaries and says the missionaries placed their confidence in God to protect and direct the mission. Her hope that a way forward would open, or that they would be sent elsewhere, anticipates the narrative’s account of their departure for Burma.

Changing Policy in India

The narrative sets the expulsion against a rapid change in policy. When the East India Company charter was renewed in 1813, the efforts of Wilberforce, Smith, Thornton, Fuller, and other British supporters of missionary work altered its passage through Parliament and secured toleration for missions. The account also notes that the British possessions in the East were made an Episcopal see under a bishop and three archdeacons, beginning with Bishop Middleton, followed by Bishop Heber.

It describes a corresponding shift in official and resident attitudes in India: fears about missionary work had subsided, and government officers and European residents were now disposed to support it. Bengal thus belongs to a larger narrative movement from exclusion toward permission, though the evidence centers on the missionaries’ expulsion from Calcutta and the wider change in Indian policy.

Narrative Significance

The episode is used to argue that political obstruction cannot determine the ultimate course of the gospel. The author condemns the government’s treatment of the missionaries while interpreting their forced departure as providential redirection; the later opening of missionary work in India supplies a second reversal, as restrictions give way to toleration. Bengal is therefore significant not as a fully described setting, but as the site where the narrative makes its contrast between human authority attempting to close a door and events opening another path.