C. F. Andrews

Charles Freer Andrews was born on February 12, 1871, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England ^[1]. His father, John Edwin Andrews, was a minister in the Catholic Apostolic Church, a small millenarian denomination sometimes called the Irvingite church, and the family later moved to Birmingham, where Charles spent most of his childhood ^[2]. The household was large, devout, and often short of money. A serious illness in boyhood left Andrews with a lasting sense of physical fragility and, by his own later account, deepened his religious feeling ^[2].

He won a scholarship to King Edward's School, Birmingham, and went on to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read classics and theology and took first class honours ^[1]. At Cambridge he underwent a decisive religious conversion, moving away from his father's church toward the Church of England. He was ordained a deacon in 1896 and a priest in 1897 ^[3]. His first pastoral work was among the poor of south London, at the Pembroke College Mission in Walworth, an experience that turned his attention permanently toward questions of poverty and social justice ^[2].

From 1899 to 1903 Andrews served as a fellow of Pembroke College and vice principal of Westcott House, the Cambridge theological college ^[3]. He might have settled into a comfortable academic and clerical career in England. Instead, news of the death of a college friend who had worked in India, together with a growing conviction that his vocation lay overseas, led him to volunteer for the Cambridge Mission to Delhi ^[2].

Andrews reached Delhi on March 20, 1904, and joined the teaching staff of St Stephen's College, an institution run by the Cambridge Mission ^[1]. Any account of the C. F. Andrews biography turns on this moment, because India changed him far more than he changed India. He came as a missionary in the conventional sense; within a few years he had concluded that the racial arrogance of many Europeans in India was a scandal to the Christianity they professed, and he said so publicly ^[4].

At St Stephen's he formed close friendships with Indian colleagues, above all with Sushil Kumar Rudra, who in 1907 became the college's first Indian principal, an appointment Andrews strongly supported against considerable opposition ^[3]. He learned to see Indian religious and intellectual traditions with sympathy rather than condescension, and he began writing for the Indian press in support of Indian aspirations. His book The Renaissance in India, published in 1912, argued that a national and spiritual awakening was under way in the country ^[2].

During these Delhi years Andrews also met Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, in London in 1912, and the friendship became one of the anchors of his life ^[5]. In 1914 he resigned from the Cambridge Mission and formally left missionary work, later relinquishing his ministerial licence as well, because he could no longer accept doctrinal constraints that seemed to him to divide people. He moved to Tagore's school at Santiniketan in Bengal, which remained his home base for the rest of his life ^[5].

In January 1914 Andrews sailed to South Africa with his friend W. W. Pearson to assist the Indian community in its struggle against discriminatory laws. On the dock at Durban he met Mohandas Gandhi for the first time and, to the astonishment of white onlookers, bent down and touched the Indian leader's feet in the traditional gesture of respect ^[4]. The two men worked together during the final phase of Gandhi's South African campaign, and a friendship began that lasted until Andrews died.

Gandhi called him Charlie, one of the very few people permitted such intimacy, and the initials C. F. A. were affectionately expanded by friends into "Christ's Faithful Apostle" ^[4]. Andrews was among those who urged Gandhi to return to India, and after Gandhi did so in 1915 Andrews acted repeatedly as his emissary, sounding board, and candid critic. He did not always agree with Gandhi: he was uneasy about aspects of the non-cooperation movement of the early 1920s, and he told Gandhi frankly when he thought fasting was being used unwisely ^[6].

Their correspondence, sustained over a quarter of a century, records an unusual relationship: an English clergyman and an Indian nationalist leader who trusted each other completely across the racial divide of empire ^[6]. Gandhi later wrote of Andrews with a warmth he extended to few others, and historians of the independence movement have treated the friendship as evidence that the struggle against British rule was never simply a struggle against Britons ^[4].

Among C. F. Andrews achievements, none mattered more in practical terms than his long campaign against the indentured labour system, under which Indian workers were shipped to colonial plantations on contracts that bound them for years in conditions close to servitude. After his 1914 visit to South Africa, Andrews and Pearson travelled to Fiji in 1915 and 1916 to investigate the treatment of Indian labourers on the sugar estates there. Their report documented overcrowded housing, degrading conditions for women, and high rates of suicide, and it caused a stir in both India and Britain ^[7].

Andrews returned to Fiji in 1917, and his evidence strengthened the hand of Indian nationalists and British reformers pressing for abolition. The Government of India suspended indentured emigration in 1917, and the system was formally ended in 1920 ^[7]. Andrews did not stop there. Over the following two decades he travelled to British Guiana, Kenya, and elsewhere to report on the condition of Indian communities overseas, and he pressed colonial governments to honour their obligations to former labourers ^[3].

He made several visits to Kenya in the 1920s to support Indian settlers resisting discriminatory legislation, and in 1925 and 1929 he toured Fiji again to follow up on the lives of freed workers ^[3]. It was this sustained advocacy for the poorest Indians, at home and abroad, that earned him the name by which India remembers him: Deenabandhu, friend of the poor ^[1].

Andrews threw himself into Indian public life well beyond the indenture question. He supported the founding cause of organised labour in India and in 1925 was elected president of the All India Trades Union Congress, an office he held again in 1927, a striking position for an English former missionary ^[3]. He mediated in industrial disputes, worked for famine relief, and campaigned alongside Gandhi for the removal of untouchability.

His pen was rarely idle. Andrews wrote steadily for Indian and British newspapers and produced a stream of books, including studies of Indian politics, an account of the opium trade, and works on religion. His Mahatma Gandhi's Ideas appeared in 1929, followed by edited volumes of Gandhi's autobiographical writings that introduced Gandhi to a wide Western readership ^[6]. In Britain and the United States he lectured tirelessly to explain the Indian case for self-rule, serving as an unofficial ambassador for the nationalist movement at a time when it had few sympathetic English voices ^[4].

At Santiniketan he taught, helped Tagore with translations and with the running of the institution, and formed a second great friendship to set beside the one with Gandhi. Tagore and Gandhi differed on many things, and Andrews, close to both, often carried messages and softened disagreements between the two most famous Indians of the age ^[5].

In the 1930s Andrews returned to a more explicit Christian identity. He had never ceased to be a Christian, but he had distanced himself from institutional religion for two decades. A renewal of personal faith led him to resume his Anglican ministry in 1936, and his late books, among them Christ in the Silence and The Sermon on the Mount, are devotional rather than political ^[2].

He remained active in public causes almost to the end. He continued to advise Gandhi, supported negotiations between Indian leaders and the British government, and kept up his advocacy for Indians overseas. Andrews never married; his family, in effect, was the circle of friends and students gathered around Santiniketan and Gandhi's ashrams ^[3].

His health, never robust, failed in early 1940. Andrews died on April 5, 1940, in Calcutta, now Kolkata, after an operation, and was buried in the Christian cemetery there ^[1]. Gandhi, who was not given to extravagant tributes, wrote that in Andrews's death India had lost one of its truest friends, and messages of grief came from across the political and religious spectrum of the country ^[6].

The essential C. F. Andrews facts, his birth in Newcastle in 1871, his four decades of service in India, his role in ending indenture, and his death in Kolkata in 1940, only partly explain why he is still remembered. What set him apart was the direction of his loyalty. At the height of empire, an ordained Englishman chose to identify himself with the colonised rather than the colonisers, and did so without bitterness toward his own country ^[4].

India has honoured him in ways given to few foreigners. Schools and colleges bear the name Deenabandhu, streets in Indian cities are named after him, and Deenabandhu Andrews College in Kolkata commemorates him directly ^[3]. In 1971 the Government of India issued a postage stamp marking the centenary of his birth. Biographies by Benarsidas Chaturvedi and Marjorie Sykes, and later by Hugh Tinker and Daniel O'Connor, have kept his story in print ^[2].

For historians of Christian missions, Andrews remains a test case in what a missionary vocation can become when it takes the humanity of others with full seriousness. For historians of Indian nationalism, he is a reminder that the movement drew allies across lines of race and creed. Gandhi's own verdict, that Andrews embodied friendship without reserve, is the judgment that has endured ^[6].