Krishna Pal
Krishna Pal was the first Indian convert to Baptist Christianity due to the missionary activity of William Carey, the founder of the Baptist Missionary Society, and his co-workers.
Krishna Pal was born in 1764 in Calcutta, India. In his mid-thirties, he broke his arm doing his carpentry job. This led him to Dr. John Thomas, a doctor from the Baptist Missionary Society who told Krishna Pal with the help of Joshua Marshman, of a "disease" they said was even more deadly—sin. Pal was very moved by the story of God's salvation and was baptised by William Carey in the River Ganges a month later, in December 1800, making him the first Bengali convert to Christianity. He renounced his caste at around the same time while he was eating in public with missionaries.
For the next twenty years, until his death in 1822, Pal devoted himself to the ministry of the people in Calcutta and built a church there. In these twenty years he wrote hymns such as "The Shipwrecked Sinner Looking to Jesus," "O Thou, My Soul, Forget No More" and "Salvation by the Death of Christ." Many of these hymns were translated from Bengali to English by John Clark Marshman.
