Robert Clark (missionary)

Robert Clark (1825–1900), and his colleague Thomas Henry Fitzpatrick, were the first English Church Mission Society (CMS) missionaries in the Punjab. Clark was the first missionary to the Afghans, and was the first agent of the Church to enter the city of Leh.

He was the founder of the CMS mission station in Amritsar, the CMS Afghan mission station in Peshawar, and the Kashmir mission – especially Medical missionary work to open a dispensary in Srinagar and Kashmir.

Clark was born on the 4th of July at Harmston, Lincolnshire, England. He was reared in an evangelical home, and trained in commerce in Germany. He served with a Liverpool-merchant firm before his call to the ministry in 1844. He was educated at Trinity College. Having decided to prepare for the ministry, he studied at the University of Cambridge; he was amongst the Wranglers of 1850. He was ordained by the CMS and sent to India at the age of twenty-six, when American Presbyterians at Ludhiana urged the CMS to join the work. In 1851 he sailed to Calcutta (present Kolkata), and from there went to Punjab.