SAMUEL HEBICH AND THE HINDUS – An Early Business as Mission Missionary to India

Tim Freeman
M. S. Thirumalai

The Basel Missionary Society – Leader in Business as Mission

The Basel Missionary Society was probably the first and the most successful and well-organized society in introducing businesses and trades and getting the nationals trained in professional skills in India. Samuel Hebich was an important missionary in developing business as mission in India.

Writing on the Basel Missionary Society work in India, Stephen Neill writes, “What distinguished it from other missions was the long-continued and intense effort to enable converts to earn their own living, if conversion had led to the disruption of caste and family ties” (Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India 1707-1858, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1985). The Basel Missionary Society, consisting of pietists, entered the British Indian Territory in 1834. Samuel Hebich gets a notice in Stephen Neill’s excellent book under the caption Eccentricity in the Service of the Mission.

Two Contrasting Pictures of Samuel Hebich, Missionary to India

While Stephen Neill draws a picture of Samuel Hebich, which is not very complimentary, showing Samuel Hebich to be to be impatient to learn Indian languages, etc., a book of missionary biographies written and published perhaps in early 20th century pays encomiums to the dynamic efforts and contributions of Samuel Hebich.

Stephen Neill on Samuel Hebich

Stephen Neill writes,

Samuel Hebich (1803-68) was a man who never found it easy to work with others. An ardent and impetuous evangelist, he was almost a caricature of what the West imagines a missionary to be. He had little sympathy with the forms of non-Christian religion by which he was surrounded. Too impatient to learn an Indian language well, he was throughout dependent on interpreters. It must have been a relief to his colleagues when he moved to Cannanore, where one English and two Indian regiments of the Company’s army were located. It was not long before Hebich turned his attention to the officers and non-commissioned officers of these regiments, and it was among them that he won his most notable success. Although it was calculated that his vocabulary in English never exceeded 550 words, he was amazingly effective in making his rather simple understanding of the Gospel intelligible to those who were willing to listen to him. Few found themselves able to resist the direct and at times almost brutal methods employed by Hebich. Such was his influence that one of the British regiments came to be known as Hebich’s Own, a distinction usually reserved for members of the royal family. One of the officers who came to living faith in Christ at this time was Lieutenant R.S. Dobbie, whose grandson, General Sir William Dobbie (1874-1964), won fame as governor of Malta during the Second World War; the Christian tradition has been carried forward into the fifth generation of this family (p. 351)

Alexander Hay Japp on Samuel Hebich

The biographical essay on the life of Samuel Hebich written by Dr. Alexander Hay Japp and presented below is very appreciative of the work of this great missionary. We also learn from this essay that there was an earlier and larger biography on the life and ministry of Samuel Hebich. Samuel Hebich’s contributions were recently remembered by school children in Bangalore in India.

Samuel was an extra-ordinary missionary with zeal to provide for the new Christians in India through modern means and to foster among them useful and productive skills and work ethics. True, he did not and was not able to learn the local language/s, but his love for the Indian people around him enabled him to contribute his energies toward developing business skills in them. He recognized his talents in evangelizing the Europeans in the district and so he used these to evangelize the European population he came into contact. In this way, Samuel was able to cater to the needs of all that he came across in the district where he lived and ministered.

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