Missionaries, Converts, and Zamindars: The Formation and Development of the Baptist Church Community in Barishal, c. 1828–1971

Abstract

This article reconstructs the formation and early development of the Baptist Christian community of Barishal district, one of the earliest sites of sustained Protestant conversion in what is now Bangladesh. It argues that the community emerged not from missionary evangelism transplanted from Serampore, but from a contested interaction between foreign missionaries, Bengali evangelists, a pre-existing heterodox devotional movement, and the coercive structures of the zamindari system. The study uses an archival-documentary method, cross-reading missionary records, a contemporary statistical directory, and Bengali-language congregational and denominational histories. It traces the mission's institutional origins in 1828–29, its rapid rural expansion after an indigenous religious leader's conversion in 1846, and its consolidation into a largely indigenous-led institution across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Baptist Sangha records document a marked decline in dependence on foreign funding between 1960 and 1970, and a recent account of one landlord assault extends the analysis of anti-convert violence to its gendered dimension. The findings indicate that indigenous religious agency, rather than missionary initiative, drove the community's decisive growth. They also show that institutional self-governance was slower and more contested than conversion itself, and that landlord hostility is better explained as a structurally predictable defence of agrarian authority than as an isolated instance of religious antagonism. The article offers a cross-denominational synthesis of an otherwise fragmented historiography and identifies the archival gaps that still limit confidence in the community's mid-twentieth-century trajectory, with implications for the study of subaltern conversion and mission-colonial power in South Asia.