[METHODIST MISSIONARY'S VOYAGE TO INDIA, TYPESCRIPTS 1920-1921]. "Travel Letters August 1920 - January 1921. My own personal Private Copy

1921. Good. Quarto (10 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches). 46 leaves, including 4-page "Circular Letter" to friends (detached) and 1-page text "What Drought Means in India" (detached, text incomplete). With a few handwritten corrections and additions. WITH: Autograph letter signed: Deaville Walker to his son, written from Ceylon, dated Sept. 20, 1920. Contemporary thick paper wrappers, two brass fasteners (wrappers worn along spine and extremities, typescripts with some toning or creasing). A British Methodist missionary's travels to India. The letters were composed (and typed?) either on the Indian continent, or at sea aboard the S.S. Kitano Maru or S.S. Atsuta Maru.

This typescript records a well-known Methodist missionary's epistolary diary from a trip to India between August 1920 and January 1921, with a visit to Marseilles, before proceeding through the Suez to Ceylon, Madras, Conjeeveram, Bangalore, Tumkur, Hassan, Mysore, Gwalior, Landour, Bulandshahr, Haidarabad, Secunderabad, and more. It includes descriptions of the voyage from England to India and his travels across India doing mission work (visiting colleges, boarding schools, and hospitals) with much on the peoples encountered. It also discusses visits to Hindu temples and fortresses and Muslim mosques and various festivals.

Deaville Walker (1878-1945), the long-time editor of the WMMS newsletter Foreign Field and a prolific author, would publish his impressions of India in a monograph entitled "India and Her Peoples" (London: Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 1922). The present collection of letters to his family and friends does not appear to have been published at all.

Wesleyan missions in the British colonies began in 1786, with the first mission in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) being established in 1814, in Madras (present-day Chennai) in 1817, and further missions in Negapatam, Hyderabad, Mysore, Calcutta, Lucknow and Bombay by 1903. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), which coordinated these foreign mission activities, was established in 1818.