page_title: William Carey (missionary)
section_title: Translation, education and schools
hierarchical_section_title: William Carey (missionary) / Translation, education and schools
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographed at the Serampore College, Hooghly.
context_page_description: William Carey was a British Christian missionary, Particular Baptist minister, translator, social reformer and cultural anthropologist who founded the Serampore College and the Serampore University, the first degree-awarding university in India.
  He went to Calcutta in 1793, but was forced to leave the British Indian territory by non-Baptist Christian missionaries. He joined the Baptist missionaries in the Danish colony of Frederiksnagar in Serampore. One of his first contributions was to start schools for impoverished children where they were taught reading, writing, accounting and Christianity. He opened the first theological university in Serampore offering divinity degrees, and campaigned to end the practice of sati.
  Carey is known as the "father of modern missions." His essay, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, led to the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society.
context_section_description: Carey devoted great efforts and time to the study not only of the common language of Bengali, but to many other Indian vernaculars including the ancient root language of Sanskrit. In collaboration with the College of Fort William, Carey undertook the translation of the Hindu classics into English, beginning with the three-volume epic poem the Ramayana. He then translated the Bible into Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, Sanskrit and parts of it into other dialects and languages. For 30 years Carey served in the college as the professor of Bengali, Sanskrit and Marathi, publishing, in 1805, the first book on Marathi grammar.
  The Serampore Mission Press that Carey founded is credited as the only press which “consistently thought it important enough that costly fonts of type be cast for the irregular and neglected languages of the Indian people." Carey and his team produced textbooks, dictionaries, classical literature and other publications which served primary school children, college-level students and the general public, including the first systematic Sanskrit grammar which served a model for later publications.
  In the latter 1700s and early 1800s in India, only children of certain social strata received education, and even that was limited to basic accounting and Hindu religion. Only the Brahmins and writer castes could read, and then only men, women being completely unschooled. Carey started Sunday Schools in which children learned to read using the Bible as their textbook. In 1794 Carey opened, at his own cost, what is considered the first primary school in all of India. The public school system that Carey initiated expanded to include girls in an era when the education of the female was considered unthinkable. Carey's work is considered to have provided the starting point of what blossomed into the Christian Vernacular Education Society providing English medium education across India.
caption: Carey's desk at the Serampore College
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