James Long (1814–1887) was an Anglo-Irish priest of the Anglican Church. A humanist, educator, evangelist, translator, essayist, philanthropist and a missionary to India, he resided in the city of Calcutta, India, from 1840 to 1872 as a member of the Church Mission Society, leading the mission at Thakurpukur.
Long was closely associated with the Calcutta School-Book Society, the Bethune Society, the Bengal Social Science Association and The Asiatic Society. He also published the English translation of the play Nil Darpan by Dinabandhu Mitra, an act for which he was subsequently prosecuted for libel, fined, and briefly jailed.
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James Long was born in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland in 1814, when Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom, to John Long and his wife Anne. At the age of twelve he was enrolled at the newly opened Bandon Endowed School, where he learnt "Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and English languages; Euclid, Algebra, Logic; Arithmetic, Book-keeping, Reading, Writing, History and Geography".[1] He proved an excellent student, distinguishing himself especially in theology and the classics.
Long's application to join the Church Mission Society was accepted in 1838 and he was sent to the Society’s training college in Islington. James was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in 1839 and a priest in the following year.[2] Following two years's training at Islington the Reverend Long was sent to Calcutta to join the CMS mission there. He arrived in Calcutta in 1840, briefly returning to England in 1848 to marry Emily Orme, daughter of William Orme.[3]
From 1840 to 1848, Long taught at the school for non-Christian students run by the CMS at its premises located on Amherst Street.[4] Returning to India a married man in 1848, he was placed in charge of the CMS mission in Thakurpukur, at the time a hamlet a day’s journey out of Calcutta in the Bengal Presidency. By 1851, Long had set up a vernacular school for boys in Thakurpukur, while his wife Emily ran a corresponding school for girls. In an 1854 letter to F. J. Halliday of the Council of Education, he boasts a roll-call of "about 100 boys, Hindu, Mussulman, and Christians."[5] James acquired proficiency in several Indian languages including Bangla, Sanskrit and Persian, and soon came to be recognised as an orientalist. His long paper entitled "Comparative Philology" published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta (1843), aroused strong interest among other philologists of the contemporary world in the study of Indian languages. His Bengali Proverbs (1851) has been recognised as a significant addition to the burgeoning Bengali literature of his time.[6] He devoted the next two decades to further study of Bengali proverbs and folk literature. In course of his study of Bengal society Long published A Catalogue of Bengali Newspapers and Periodicals from 1818 to 1855 (1855), and the Descriptive Catalogue of Vernacular Books and Pamphlets which was forwarded by the Government of India to the Paris Exposition of 1867 .
In 1861, at the height of the Indigo revolt by the ryots in Bengal, Long received a copy of the Bengali play Nil Darpan (also transcribed as Neel Darpan or Nil Durpan) from its author Dinabandhu Mitra, one of Long's former students at the CMS school on Amherst Street. The play, published anonymously the previous year in Dacca, was sympathetic to the abject condition of the ryots or labourers on indigo plantations and critical of the British land-holding class who kept the ryots in slave-like conditions.[7] Long brought it to the notice of W.S. Seton-Karr, Secretary to the Governor of Bengal and ex-President of the Indigo Commission. Seton-Karr, sensing its importance, mentioned Nil Durpan in conversation with the Lieutenant Governor, J.P. Grant. Grant expressed a wish to see a translation of it and print a few copies to be circulated privately amongst friends. Long had it anonymously translated into English "By A Native" (Long refused to divulge the name of the translator to the trial court; Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay later attributed the translation to Michael Madhusudan Dutt, although this attribution remains contentious[8]) and printed in either April or May 1861.[9] In his introduction to the play, he wrote that "[i]t is the earnest wish of the writer of these lines that harmony may be speedily established between the Planter and the Ryot..."[10] Long sent the translated manuscript to Clement Henry Manuel, the proprietor of the Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press, to print five hundred copies at the cost of some three hundred rupees. Unknown to the Lieutenant Governor, Long began sending out copies in official Government envelopes to prominent Europeans both in India and abroad that had the heading: "on her Majesty’s Service."[11]
The circulation of the play "generated hostility from indigo planters, who brought a lawsuit against Long on the charges that the preface of the play slandered the editors of the two proplanter newspapers, the Englishman and the Harkaru, and that the text of the drama brought the planters a bad name."[12] As soon as the planters noticed the circulation of the play, W. F. Fergusson, the Secretary of the Landholders' and Commercial Association, wrote to the Governor of Bengal. He enquired as to which parties had sanctioned the play and whether the authority of the Bengal Government had given permission to publish it. He also threatened those who had circulated "foul and malicious libel on indigo planting, evoking sedition and breaches of the peace".[13] He wrote that they must be prosecuted "with an utmost rigour of the law".[14] The Lieutenant Governor replied that some officials had caused the offence; the planters, unsatisfied with the answer, decided to institute legal proceedings with a view to ascertain the authors and publishers of the Nil Durpan. The words mentioned in Long’s Introduction to the play stated that what was presented in it was "plain but true"; this was subsequently used by the planters in their prosecution of Long for publishing defamatory statements. C. H. Manuel, whose name was mentioned as printer of Nil Durpan, was indicted in the Calcutta Supreme Court on 11th June, 1861. He pleaded guilty, and his counsel (acting on Long’s advice) named Long as his employer in the matter of publishing.
Long’s trial lasted from the 19th to the 24th of July, 1861, at the Calcutta Supreme Court. Mr. Peterson and Mr. Cowie prosecuted, Mr. Eglinton and Mr. Newmarch appeared on behalf of the defendant, and Sir M.L. Wells presided as judge. Wells found Long guilty of libel,[15] fined him one thousand rupees and sentenced him to one month’s imprisonment, which he served in the period of July-August 1861.[16] Kaliprasanna Singha paid the fine of Long's behalf.
Following three years of home leave following the indigo controversy, Rev. and Mrs Long returned to Calcutta. Mrs Long died of amoebic dysentery while on a voyage back to England in February 1867.[17] After her death, Long shared a house in Calcutta with the Rev. Krishna Mohan Banerjee, a longtime friend and associate who had lost his wife the same year. Together the two men hosted joint Indo-British soirees—rare events in those segregated times—and generally sought to foster a rapprochement between the British colonizers and the natives. Guests included Bishop Cotton and Keshub Chunder Sen among others.
As Long continued his educational work, he developed a keen interest in Russia, which he visited for the first time in 1863, and twice after his retirement in 1872. In his paper entitled Russia, Central Asia, and British India published in London in 1865, he wrote of his optimistism about the prospects of serf emancipation, and against the current attitude of paranoia towards Russia about the valuable role of the Russian government and of the Orthodox Church in propagating Christianity in central Asia to serve as a bulwark against Islam.
In 1872, the Reverend James Long retired from the Church Mission Society and left India for good. He lived for the rest of his life in London, where he continued to write and publish until his death on March 23, 1887. In his obituaries he was portrayed as an outstanding orientalist and humanist. Long set up a posthumous endowment called the Long Lectureship in Oriental Religions in 1885, for the appointment of one or more lecturers annually to deliver lectures at certain centres of education in Britain.[18]
Rev. Long lends his name to James Long Sarani, a major thoroughfare running through Thakurpukur.