Under Gilchrist's leadership, Fort William also became a centre for Urdu prose. The language they taught was meant for young British people to acquire a general practical knowledge for administrative purposes, and not for native speakers of the language. He gathered around him writers from all over India who were able to produce a simple Urdu style that was "intelligible to British officers and merchants who had no use for poetry". One of Gilchrist's pupils was the missionary Henry Martyn, an Anglican priest and chaplain for the East India Company, who revised the Hindustani version of the New Testament and later translated it, together with the Book of Psalms and Book of Common Prayer, into Urdu and Persian. By the early nineteenth century, the Persian language was gradually replaced by Urdu as the vernacular to serve as the administrative language in a growing colonial bureaucracy.