A Visit to Durgapur
Diocesan Press Service. September 7, 1964 [XXIV-4]
M. A. Stephens, assistant editor of Canadian Churchman, who visted eastern India in the late Spring.
This year the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada will supply funds to enable the Bishop of Calcutta to establish Anglican work in a new industrial area which has spring up in the last eight years amid rice paddies and jungle. Episcopal funds will come from the 1964 missionary offering.
Durgapur, about 100 miles N. W. of Calcutta on the main highway and main railway line connecting that city with central India, already has a population estimated at 150, 000. The core of the development is a modern steel plant owned and operated by the government of India. It already employs upwards of 15, 000 people and is expanding. A dozen other industries have been established or are planned in the area.
Each of the industries has its own township, where homes and services are supplied for its employees and their families. The facilities include schools, hospitals, clinics, and community and shopping centres. But these are for company employees and their families only. Around the planned area, which covers 50 square miles, have settled people who have flocked to the area to supply services to the workers -- people like laundrymen, barbers, rickshaw and taxi operators. A movie house and a dry cleaner's give the bazaar area some resemblance to an American Main Street.
Durgapur is on the eastern edge of a North-East India industrial basin which contains 80% of the country's heavy industry. Here are the two main coal fields of India and a plentiful supply of iron ore. The other five principal centers of production in this basin are older settlements where the Anglican Church has been long established. Four of the five are in the diocese of Chota Nagpur and the other in Calcutta diocese.
To Durgapur people have come from all over India; it is estimated that twenty languages are spoken. The steel mill was constructed by English capital and English skill, but most of the English people have now gone home. The three largest groups at Durgapur now are South Indians, speaking Malayalam; Bengalis, who speak Bengali; and Biharis, who speak Hindi.
In all its industrial development India is determined to stand on its own feet. In order to conserve foreign exchange the governments seeks from outside only things which it cannot produce itself. Such a determination results in some curious juxtapositions of new and old. The Durgapur steel plant, for example, is more modern - more automated - than those visited in Canada; but excavation for the extension being built this year was done by hand shovel and the dirt removed in baskets on hundreds of coolies' heads. There is plenty of labor hungry for jobs in India, but no dollars for big earth movers.
It is estimated that there are 1,800 Christians among the 150, 000 people in the area - 900 Roman Catholics and 900 others, of whom three quarters are Anglicans, Methodists or Syrian Christians from the Malabar coast.
This was a Methodist field when the industrial expansion began, and the two British Methodist missionaries who have been in charge during the eight years have done their utmost to develop a genuine united church serving all non-Roman Christians. They have a dual-purpose place of worship, opened at Easter, 1961.
So far Anglican Communion services have been held - in the united church - one Sunday morning a month by a visiting priest. The Bishop of Calcutta has now secured the gift of 15 acres, some six miles from the Methodist church, on which he wants to build as soon as he has the money a parsonage, a multi-purpose church building, and (at the request of the West Bengal government) a girls' school. Space will be allotted for a cemetery and for an Ecumenical Social and Industrial Institute sponsored by the Bengal Christian Council. Bishop de Mel hopes to find an experienced and well-educated Indian priest, speaking several languages, to staff the new mission.
The difficulties of pastoral work are immense. Apart from differences of language and culture, there is the sheer difficulty of finding the Christians in this haystack of Hinduism. Township officials have code numbers by which they can identify houses; street names and numbers to guide the uninitiated are not yet supplied. There are phones but no telephone directory.
Only the top officials possess or have access to cars. To take his family to worship at a central point may cost a worker a day's wages in taxi fares. It is done at great festivals. Between them the pastor must hold house services, and he will have to have a car or at least a motor scooter.
Anglicans in the area come from all places and backgrounds. Here are notes about three typical Anglican families in Durgapur whom the Methodist missionary took the author to visit:
P.K. Biswas comes from Putimari in Barrackpore diocese. He is married with three children. His brother is vicar of the Dum Dum parish in Barrackpore diocese; Calcutta international airport is in his parish. Mr. Biswas has worked as a ship's engineer in the Navy, for the Calcutta Port Commissioners, and for the Asiatic Steam Navigation Co. For the last two years he has been a project engineer in a factory where boilers and other pressure vessels are made.
His wife, Sabita, was a Brahmin. She was baptized in 1953 at a spectacular ceremony - by complete immersion in the "tank" beside the chapel of Bishop's College, Calcutta, by the Bishop of Barrackpore in the presence of the principal (Canon Sambayya) and about 30 other priests. The Biswas have a car and can get to church. Bengali is their mother tongue; they speak excellent English.
Mr. and Mrs. D.J. Abraham came from Bangalore in Mysore state four and a half years ago. They belonged to the Church of South India; but were confirmed by Bishop de Mel last year. Mr. Abraham has been shipping supervisor for the English group which built the steel mill; as the plant is now being expanded, he expects the job to last till the end of 1965.
Mrs. Abraham, a graduate in arts, has been running a private school mornings for European children over 11 for whom no other provision is made. Mr Abraham's mother looks after the only child. Their mother tongue is Malayalam; their second language is Hindi; they are fairly competent in English.
Walter Hiles was secunded from the Appleby-Frodingham Steel Co. of Scunthorpe. Lines., England, to be a casting bay foreman in the steel mill. Mrs. Hiles and their teenage daughter Louise accompanied him for his three-year hitch. Louise will be glad when they go home in August. There is no school for English speaking pupils her age, and the number of teenagers of European stock has dwindled from 30 to four. Fortunately for her, one of the four is an American boy who has transportation and has helped to fill her days!