In his 1862 volume Hutom Pyancha’r Naksha (Surveys of the Hooting Owl), social commentator and satirist Kaliprasanna Singha (1841–1870) reflected on one of the most prominent Christian conversions of the last decade. The epitome of the liberal Calcutta aristocrat, Singha was well known for his translation of the Mahabharata into Bengali from the original Sanskrit version. Under his pseudonym Hutom Pyancha, or the Hooting Owl, he also diligently chronicled the life and times of the new imperial city of Calcutta. Among the targets of his acerbic pen were the vagaries and fashions that swayed public opinion in Bengal, including the Khristiani hujoog, or the “conversion to Christianity craze”:

There was a new craze that every one seemed affected by! We have heard that some of the Brahmin Thakurs of Bhatpara will convert next. But instead of the people from Bhatpara, it was Babu Prosonnocoomar Thakur’s son Gyanendramohan who went outside the fold! Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay offered up his daughter to this new coreligionist…

The situation was such that Enlightenment spread and light broke free from the holes in people’s roofs; some were disinherited, some repented and fell into real hard times. The Khristiani hujoog was like a lantern held up by a stranger at night – it illuminated the path for a while, but in its passing, left behind a deeper darkness!

Singha, hereafter referred to as Hutom, was alluding to the highly public fallout between two of the most influential members of a colonial Bengali aristocratic elite family: Babu Prosonnocoomar Tagore or Thakur (1801–1868) and his only son and heir Gyanendramohan (1826–1890). Prosonnocoomar, who had duelled in print with Krishnamohan Banerjee in the 1830s, had by the early 1840s risen to become an eminent legal scholar and lawyer – and in 1854 the first Indian member of the governor-general’s Legislative Council. Under the guidance of his father’s old nemesis Krishnamohan Banerjee, Gyanendramohan converted to Christianity in 1851 and married Krishnamohan’s daughter amid enormous public scandal. In response, Prosonnocoomar disinherited his son and willed his ancestral properties to his nephew Maharaja Jatindramohan Tagore instead. Gyanendramohan contested his father’s will in a legal case that would come to be known as the Great Tagore Will Case. Moving from the civil court in Calcutta to the Privy Council in London, where it was finally resolved in 1872, the case pitted two of the most influential members of the Tagore family against one another and involved properties valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling. The events that precipitated it illuminate a tangled web of debates over converts’ legal rights to their inheritance, the conversion of Hindu boys to Christianity, and the spiritual roles of husbands and wives in sustaining the orthodox Hindu family structure. The outcome of the case in turn catalysed important legal precedents regarding the rights of Christian converts to inherit ancestral property.

Since the early 1800s, the Anglo-Indian legal system had been adapting to the peculiar circumstances of colonial rule, further complicated by the existence of innumerable local customary laws and practices. These laws and practices often conflicted with British lawmakers’ understanding of the legal landscape – which relied on precedence, rigid codification, and a sense that laws were fixed as written. Indeed, British lawmakers favoured the dharmashastras and especially the Manusmriti – thereby mistranslating a commentary on social morals and their legal applications into a code of positive Hindu law. The facts of the Great Tagore Will Case proceed from the complications that surrounded inheritance in India after the passage of the controversial Lex Loci Act in 1850. This law confirmed that converts to Christianity in India could not be disinherited by their fathers from ancestral and paternal property. The Lex Loci Act was a joint effort between missionaries like Alexander Duff and British administrators sympathetic to evangelism in India. From the 1830s, Duff and other missionaries campaigned relentlessly to prevent converts from suffering economic losses through disinheritance. When the draft of the law was published in 1845, many Indians saw it as a direct religious assault on Hindu identity. It had evolved from the Bengal Code Regulation VII of 1832, which first promised a modicum of legal safeguard for converts with regard to their inheritance. The Lex Loci Act, ratified as the Caste Disabilities Removal Act XXI, thereby contravened customary practices of inheritance rules in Bengal and comprehensively provided (or seemed to provide) ironclad assurances to converts that legally they could not be excluded from inheriting their ancestral and patrimonial properties just because of their conversion. Conversion, in other words, no longer posed a disqualification from inheritance, and the Lex Loci Act seemingly took away the power of Bengali patriarchs to dispose of their estates as they wished. This was its essence:

So much of any law or usage now in force within the territories subject to the Government of the East India Compan y as inflicts to any person forfeiture of rights or property, or may be held in any way to impair or affect any right of inheritance, by reason of his or her renouncing, or having been excluded from the communion of, any religion, or being deprived of caste, shall cease to be enforced as law in the Courts of the East India Compan y, and in the Courts established by Royal Charter within the said territories.

The Great Tagore Will Case played an important role in establishing the primacy of Hindu laws of inheritance in disputes between family members, especially in cases of conversion to Christianity by male heirs. Although the colonial government protested that it was justified on grounds of enlightenment and toleration, the native feeling of persecution by “missionaryism” led to an outpouring of anger and a consolidation among the various dals or sections of Hindu and Muslim elites in Calcutta and Madras. Indians had long suspected the British were privileging the rights of converts above those of Hindus and Muslims. The Lex Loci Act only stoked these suspicions, and many feared that it might be used as a tool to require mass conversions in the future.

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The Hindu inhabitants of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa raised an immediate challenge to the law in the form of a petition containing 8,401 signatures. This petition, which sought a repeal of the Lex Loci Act, was eventually presented by Lord Monteagle in the British Parliament on May 26, 1853. Its language and construction closely resemble those of Prosonnocoomar Tagore’s essays on inheritance and his will. It is very likely that Prosonnocoomar drafted this petition or perhaps consulted on the language of the draft. The petition was supported by Sir Herbert Maddock, the ex-governor-general of India Lord Ellenborough, and the Earl of Granville. Lord Ellenborough, when he spoke in favor of repealing the act, noted that Indians were justifiably alarmed by its passage:

The number of converts, pseudo-converts, to Chris tian ity was at the present time so infinitely small, that there were very few cases indeed in which the Act could be called into operation. Let the House observe what immoral motives the existing Act suggested to the native population of India. It was not to be wondered at that such a law excited the remonstrances of the natives of India. They w ere entitled to look upon this as only the first indication of an intention on the part of the Government to interfere with their religion.

As his reference to “pseudo-converts” indicates, the suspicion that Indian converts were insincere and motivated by material gain – which had been evolving in the Indian public sphere since Rammohan Roy – was shared by many British civilians as well.

The 1853 petition also articulated one of the most important objections to Christian converts inheriting ancestral property: the fact that these converts could no longer fulfil the religious obligations required of Hindu sons who inherited ancestral property from their fathers. As the petition said:

By the ancient Hindu law, a man’s right of inheritance to ancestral property is made to depend on his capacity for the performance of certain religious duties towards his ancestors, a disqualification for which, either by reason of loss of caste, physical deformity, or moral degradation, subjects him to forfeiture of that right to property which he derived from his “beneficial acts

Inheritance under the prevalent customary usage in Bengal – based on the Dayabhaga, a treatise written by Jimutvahana – also made clear that performing these customary religious duties was mandatory for a son hoping to inherit his patrimony. In most cases, a son’s conversion meant that he was deracinated – and therefore no longer fit to perform the last rites of his parents or the Hindu rituals of sraddha. This meant, in turn, that the gates of heaven were forever barred to the unfortunate parents. The petition pointed out why a son’s conversion was a disaster on a cosmological scale, why deracination and disinheritance had to happen as a consequence, and ultimately why the Lex Loci Act was a terrible intervention by the Anglo-Indian legal system into Hindu customs:

A religious Hindu having an only son looks to that son as his assurance, that those religious rites wil l be duly performed, on which he believes his salvation and that of his immediate ancestors to depend. If the son becomes a Christian, or from any other cause is deprived of caste, the father is entitled by Hindu law to adopt another son, who would by the same law take the inheritance. The Act in question by severing the inheritance from the adoption, and securing it to the original son, virtually and practically annuls the Hindu right of adoption.

Gyanendramohan’s conversion to Christianity in 1851 and the desperate grief it brought to his father Prosonnocoomar and the Tagore family seem to be the hidden subtext to this petition. Gyanendramohan’s subsequent second marriage to Kamala, Krishnamohan Banerjee’s daughter, meanwhile proved to be the final impediment to any reconciliation with his own father. For Calcutta’s elite Hindu society, this incident became the most important illustration of how the British administration had used the Lex Loci Act to legally protect and encourage Christian conversion. To be sure, Gyanendramohan was one in a long line of elite young Bengalis who had converted since the early 1830s, many under the influence of Duff. Yet he was also the only son and heir of the Pathuriaghata branch of the Tagore family, one of the most illustrious of Calcutta’s affluent families.13 Because of the circumstances of his birth and upbringing, Gyanendramohan – even more so than previous young Bengali converts – incited an uproar when he was baptized in 1851. According to the mouthpiece of the Serampore Baptists The Friend of India, “There have been many converts from the upper ranks of Hindoo society, but this is the first instance, we believe, in which sacerdotal rank has been combined with wealth, and it has created a proportionate sensation.”

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Gyanendramohan’s case illustrates the legal complications that arose when the question of the inheritance of Indian Christian converts came into consideration under the Anglo-Indian legal system. Customs of Hindu and Bengali inheritance laws were unequivocal regarding the power of Hindu fathers to alienate their property away from a son who had been disqualified as a result of their character or conduct, until the Lex Loci Act of 1850. The Lex Loci Act ran counter to that long-accepted regional legal interpretation and brought Anglo-Indian legal reformism in favour of converts into direct and open conflict with the religious and legal rights of Hindus in colonial India. In the cases of habeas corpus, the young schoolboys remained with their missionary preceptors and refused to return home or abjure their conversion, lost their patrimony, and had to rely on their new evangelical Christian connections to eke out a living. One important example of this, as we have seen, was the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutta, who was reduced to penury in later life as a result of his disinheritance. The Great Tagore Will Case illustrates the ways in which Christian converts fought back against their disinheritance, holding out hope that the Lex Loci Act provided them legal security against such financial violence. The social prominence of the parties to the Great Tagore Will Case, the enormous bequest that was being contested, and ultimately the legal question about right and security to property that Prosonnocoomar’s will brought to the fore as a result of him entailing his estates on his nephews make this case an exemplar of the tangled web of religious, social, economic, and financial losses that were the fate of Christian converts. The Great Tagore Will Case further illustrates the ways in which contests over inheritance in the Anglo-Indian legal arena constituted an important way for apologetics regarding faith and belonging to be performed in colonial Bengal. By staking certain kinds of legal rights, both the Hindu father and the Christian son were making claims of security to practice their religion of birth or choice, without interference, and claiming protection under Anglo-Indian law. The result of the Great Tagore Will Case, as we will see, established the primacy of the Hindu father’s rights over any claims of the Christian convert child and paved the way for further social, legal, and economic marginalisation of India’s converts.

Excerpted with permission from The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India, Mou Banerjee, Harvard University Press.