Rare images of Indian mission

Rare photographs of a Cork-born missionary who served as bishop in an Indian diocese at the start of the last century have come to light. The Right Reverend Eyre Chatterton, who was born in Monkstown, was an eminent Anglican author who served as a Bishop in Chota Nagpur district of northeastern India from 1903 to 1926. Rare images of him, along with other Irish Protestant missionaries in India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been unveiled after they were found in the deanery at Killaloe, Co Clare, and have been digitally remastered and published online by the Church of Ireland.

The images, which total over 200, depict scenes of India at the time, with Irish Protestant matrons and mission workers tending to orphans along with clerical gentlemen. Memoirs of Rev Chatterton, who recalled that the “bulk of its (Chota Nagpur) population consists of very low-caste Hindus with caste prejudice which made the work of their evangelisation far more difficult than that amongst the simple aborigines of the other districts” also allow an insight into missionary work in the region at the time.

Canon Billy Marshall of Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur (DUMCN) said that the slides depict the Mission at the early stage of its development, outlining that the image of Rev Chatterton along with four pioneering missionaries sitting on the steps of Trinity College could only have been taken before December 1891 when they departed.

Two of the images were also reproduced in Rev Chatterton's book to mark the 50th anniversary of the mission work in the region, The Story of Fifty Years’ Mission Work in Chota Nagpur, which also dates the collection at the end of the previous century.

The images are now available to view on ireland.anglican.org.

The first Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur(DUMCN)  missionaries on the steps of the Museum Building, Trinity MoreCollege presumably prior to their departure to India. L to R: C.W. Darling, G.F. Hamilton, Eyre Chatterton (Head of the Mission 1891-1900), J.A. Murray, K.W.S. Kennedy.

Brotherhood bungalow, chapel in centre
 

Seven men, probably mission workers