Alexander Duff (25 April 1806 – 12 February 1878), was a Scottish missionary in India; where he played a large part in the development of higher education.

He was a Moderator of the General Assembly and convener of the foreign missions committee of the Free Church of Scotland and a scientific liberal reformer of anglicized evangelism across the Empire.

He recognised that holding out the prospect of upward mobility, by offering a western education, would bring the children of the affluent classes into his range of influence, which could then be extended to encompass religion.

Whereas Duff and many of his fellow evangelists saw Christianity and Hinduism as diametrically opposed, Hindus did not generally consider the knowledge either tradition provided as mutually exclusive with the other.

[7] Duff opened a school in which all kinds of secular subjects were taught, from the rudiments upwards to a university standard, alongside the Bible.

[8] Within the British Indian community of that era, there were not lacking those "Orientalists" who saw value in the traditional learning of India and wished to support and encourage it.

They opposed Duff's policy of stringently disregarding the same while assiduously promoting the spread of western education, culture and religion.

[9] Shortly after landing in India in 1830, Duff opened his institution in a house located at upper Chitpur Road in the Jorasanko neighbourhood of Calcutta.

During this stint in India, Duff gave much thought and time to the University of Calcutta, which owes its examination system and the prominence given to physical sciences to his influence.

In 1870 he was the principal force in founding the Anglo-Indian Christian Union (an alliance of Protestant churches to minister to scattered British communities in India), of which he became the first President, and sent Rev.

By his will, he devoted his personal property to found a lectureship on foreign missions at New College (now part of the University of Edinburgh) on the model of the Bampton Lectures.

Of his many Scottish friends, Dr Robert Hall was a leading academic, a powerful orator, with a large retentive memory whose impulsive liberalism formed his early beliefs.

They helped him publish a pamphlet English Education in India which formed part of his address to the General Assembly of the Kirk in Edinburgh in 1837, which he dedicated to the students of the four ancient universities.

A passionate advocate of reform he banished corporal punishments for girls, striving to Christianise education through humane methods of teaching.

In seeking out William Hopkins Pearce[18] for a new Baptist mission, he emphasised the inter-denominational character of united prayer events.

In one article he made an advancement in liberal theology exposing the cruelty of Female Infanticide in Central and Western India (1844).

Its title "The Sole and Supreme Headship of the Lord Jesus Christ over His Own Church, or a voice from the Ganges relative to the courses which led to the recent disruption..." symbolised his conviction in the supremacy of Christianity to bring enlightened education to Indians.

Mahendra Lal Bazak and Khailai Chandra Mukherjya were closely watched by Dr Thomas Chalmers, a renowned writer and church leader.

Duff knew him well in the cultural capital of Scotland pursuing moral, material and spiritual development while steering his charges away from the temptations of Heathenism.

Exhibiting a strong sense of Scottish character he personified individual freedoms, baptising Jewish refugees, overcoming prejudice, and persisting in the face of prohibitive rules among the Hindu caste system.

Eloquent, he recalled the poems of Ossian as closely as he expounded the values of liberal Zionism, richly endowed by a Jacobite tradition that informed a fierce feeling of injustice.

After sipping the Malvern Spa waters for a cure, he decided on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Holy Land with his friend Dr James Lumsden.

He married 30 July 1829, Anne Scott Drysdale, Edinburgh (died 22 February 1865), and had issue – Alexander Duff was incredibly influential in Indian education and government and set several precedents.

Almost as soon as he arrived his evangelising changed Indian education: in 1832 another Scot, John Wilson (Scottish missionary) established a school in Bombay.

Duff's methods were widely imitated and his cumulative twenty-five years in the subcontinent were largely characterised by the establishment of western-style educational institutions warmly received by Ram Mohan Roy.

Hindu scriptures forbid people of higher castes from touching dead bodies, which prevented medical students from performing cadaver dissections.

Students from Duff's college expressed that their liberal, English education had "freed their minds from prejudice and the dissection of the human body was not objectionable to them.

While Duff was a highly skilled scholar who was devoted to India, his evangelistic ideals and western prejudice may have influenced his students in ways that he did not anticipate.

Because Alexander Duff was regarded well, his character served as a model to his students and friends and his teaching did eventually lead to some reformist movements within Hinduism.