4  The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’

Christian missionaries and the edifice of ‘Hinduism’

When, sometime towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the formidable Scottish missionary Alexander Duff referred to Hinduism as ‘a stupendous system of error’ (Quoted in Laird 1972: 207), his view was representative of many contemporary missionary opinions on the matter. Around the turn of the century, the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 could still speak in militaristic metaphors of harvesting the fields of the ‘heathens’ for Christ. A few years later in 1913, Julius Richter, Professor of Missions at Berlin, argued that ‘[w]herever missionary enterprise comes into contact with non-Christian religions, it sets itself to oust them, and to put Christianity in their place’ (Quoted in Dewick 1953: 41). However, an influential stream of Christian thinking had begun to move, as we have noted in Chapter 3, towards the similarity end on the identity-difference continuum in the form of ‘inclusion’ models. Most clearly perhaps in the writings of J. N. Farquhar, Hinduism was not any longer a perfidious nest of superstitious damnations, but a ‘preparation’ for the gospel (praeparatio evangelica). Nevertheless, while such figures were moving away from vitriolic denunciations of Hinduism as a satanic perversion, they operated by and large with the dominant understanding of ‘mission’ as an enterprise launched by European missionaries for the spiritual–material aid of the natives. It was accepted that the correct ‘theology’ would be worked out in the relative tranquillity of European contexts, and that the missionaries were simply the storm-troopers to implement the message in the heat and dust of Hindustan. The possibility that in the process of implementation the missionaries might uncover certain truths that could be unsettling for the originating theology was not seriously considered. From the earliest Protestant missionary conferences around the turn of the nineteenth century to the eve of Indian independence, Indian Christians routinely complained of the ‘imperialistic’ attitudes of British missionaries to the question of the native Church. Somewhat in the manner of British liberals who believed that Indians were being gradually prepared for self–government – but they were not yet fully self-determining individuals – British missionaries too often expressed the view that the time for an indigenous Church had not yet arrived. As we shall note, the charge of ‘missionary imperialism’ which is often raised by the Hindu critics of Christian missions was in fact levelled by some Indian Christians themselves at the British missionaries for having ‘denationalised’ the converts from their wider cultural contexts and written off their agential capacities to run their own churches.

Nevertheless, one of the outcomes of the early attempts at ‘rethinking Christianity’ in India during the late nineteenth century was that the mutual boundaries between the colonisers, the missionaries, and the colonised became clearer than before. The liberals and the Orientalists divided humanity between a ‘progressive’ west and a ‘retrograde’ east, whereas for missionaries the more significant divide was between the ‘saved’ and the ‘unsaved’. Consequently, from a soteriological point of view, all human beings were in a fundamental sense equal, and the missionary enterprise was predicated on the assumption that even the most ‘degraded’ natives were still capable of exercising reason and turning towards God. Again, the ‘dynamic’ west versus ‘primitive’ east gulf could no longer be mapped neatly onto the ‘saved’ versus ‘unsaved’ one when numerous scholars and administrators (some of whom had Christian commitments) began to translate and edit the ‘sacred texts of the east’, for it turned out that these scriptures were a venerable source of wisdom from whose fonts – in the opinion of some missionaries at least – Christians themselves had much to learn. After around a century of Christian diatribes, a new ‘religion’ called Hinduism began to emerge from an intricately-layered mass of polycentric traditions that British administrators, scholars, and missionaries had begun to investigate. A product of complex interplays between indigenous traditions, Orientalist translations, and missionary criticisms, Hinduism became an unstable product: at times a signifier of an ancient civilisation that had not only succeeded in sustaining itself but also could now provide succour to European humanity in search of a soul, and at other times a pointer to the country’s atavistic submersion in a superstitious past from which the administrators and the missionaries had to redeem it in their somewhat different ways.

Defining ‘Hinduism’

The various oppositions that missionaries had to encounter from the British administrators notwithstanding, their acceptance of the assortment of liberal, Orientalist, and Darwinian notions was to prove crucial by way of influencing their views on ‘Hinduism’. During the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the painstaking labour of several generations of British Orientalists and administrators played a significant role, partly through the study of Sanskrit-based texts and partly through their Brahmin interlocutors who interpreted them, in the emergence of certain understandings of Hinduism as a religious system centred around texts, doctrines, and priests. Therefore, scholars who point to the crystallisation of Hinduism at the confluence of complex textual, administrative, and legal currents often challenge the presentation of Hinduism as an ‘eternal religion’ (sanātana dharma), which has always existed fully formed through history, without any additions or emendations. Such scholars, who have been labelled ‘constructionists’, claim that British scholars and administrators ‘invented’ Hinduism sometime around 1800 as comprising of Sanskritic texts, and this invention was later internalised by the Indian elites. However, this claim has been contested by David Lorenzen who draws upon various late medieval texts to show that they already display a notion of Hindu unity which was centred in certain beliefs and practices, and sharpened through rivalry with the Muslims (Lorenzen 2005: 52–80). In a new contribution to this debate, A. J. Nicholson criticises both these views of ‘Hinduism’ – as eternal religion and as modern invention – as oversimplifications of premodern history and argues that between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, some figures began to treat as a relatively unified whole a set of diverse texts such as the Upaniṣads, the Purāṇas and the writings of the philosophical schools, and this shared understanding gradually led to the formation of a proto-‘Hindu’ identity (Nicholson 2011: 2–5). For our purposes, however, what is more important is not so much the precise dating of the emergence of this identity but the specific changes that were introduced into it by, on the one hand, the colonial officers and the missionaries, and, on the other, the creative agency of those who came to be known as the ‘neo-Hindus’. New forms of religious subjectivity emerged, as we shall see, through complex negotiations between the colonial state, the Christian missionaries, and the neo-Hindus.

The British administrators and the Orientalists sought to uncover from the plurality of the socio-religious traditions that they encountered a coherent system of texts, doctrines, ecclesiastical organisations, and institutional practices that would reflect their understanding of ‘religion’ drawn from Judaeo-Christian sources (King 1999: 100–3). Figures such as Sir William Jones who were simultaneously scholars and officials believed that they had unearthed in texts such as the Dharmaśāstras, on the authority of Brahmin scribes and interpreters, a set of moral and juridical codes that had pan-Indian applicability. Such hermeneutical moves led them to assert that they were retrieving the ‘pristine Vedas’ that had been nearly obliterated in the course of the centuries, especially during the ‘Dark Ages’ of the Muslim rulers, and to claim legitimacy for their practical administration on the ground that it was based on authentically ‘Hindu’ norms and practices. This recovery of a ‘canonical Hinduism’ resulted not only in the conception of a community of the ‘Hindus’ whose authenticity was to be measured in terms of their fidelity to these texts, but also the consequent repudiation of the masses saturated by a ‘popular Hinduism’ whose retrogressive beliefs and stagnant customs were viewed as stalling their entry into modernity. Consequently, as C. A. Bayly points out, ‘Hindu and Muslim law as operated in British courts became more rigid, reflecting the norms of the high castes and the most orthodox interpretations rather than the pragmatic and fluid adjudications of the pandits and jurists of the past’ (Bayly 1988: 115). In this manner, the Orientalists reaffirmed the self-understanding of Brahmin elites as the upholders of spiritual and ritual orthodoxy by enlisting their help in the codification of Hindu law and the production of critical editions of Sanskritic Ur-texts. This distinction between ‘esoteric Hinduism’ and ‘exoteric Hinduism’ appears as early as 1810 in Edward Moor (1810:3): the first being the monotheism of ‘unadulterated’ truths enshrined in the texts of the Brahmins which spoke of the ‘infinite, incomprehensible, self-existent Spirit’ and the second the popular mythology of the masses who were immersed in idolatry and superstition.

The missionary attitude to the emerging construct of Hinduism, and the significant role played by the missionaries in the process, has to be placed in this conjuncture of the views of the Orientalists and the British administrators on the one hand, and the responses of the Hindus themselves on the other. G. Oddie (2003) has pointed to some of the complex interactions between Protestant Christian missionaries and the Hindus that were responsible for the emergence and the acceptance of the term ‘Hinduism’ as referring to a system of closely integrated beliefs and practices. While the term ‘Hindu’ was used in pre-British times by Persians and Muslims in a geographical/ethnic sense to refer to those who lived on the ‘other’ side of the Indus (sindhu in Sanskrit), early missionaries such as William Ward and William Carey, and administrators such as Charles Grant (himself an Evangelical) often made references to ‘Hindooism’ and ‘the Hindoo system’, taking these to be a set of creeds and philosophical arguments. These missionaries usually perceived Hindooism as an ‘other’ to their own Protestant Christianity (understood here primarily in its doctrinal aspects), and therefore projected the notion of a unified homogenous system of Hinduism into which local variants and divergences were submerged or assimilated. Numerous colonial and missionary voices from around this time outlined the character of Hinduism, though in somewhat contrary terms: some perceived a chaotic assemblage of cults and practices, and others highlighted the systemic aspects that they claimed to detect underneath the wild proliferation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Alfred Lyall found himself ‘looking down upon a tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions, upon ghosts and demons, demigods, and deified saints; upon household gods, tribal gods, local gods, universal gods; with their countless shrines and temples, and the din of their discordant rites … looking down upon such a religious chaos’ (Lyall 1882: 2). Other writers, however, presented Hinduism as a much more organised structure. Towards the close of the nineteenth century, James Johnston could write: ‘Hinduism defies the tooth of time and the tool of the engineer to disintegrate it … When Hinduism falls, it will fall as those grand old towers fall which have outlived the age and state of society for which they were constructed …’ (Johnston 1880: 54–5). Certain voices at the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910 carried on this line of attack: the non-Christian religions were ‘[p]erfect specimens of absolute error and masterful pieces of hell’s inventions which Christianity was simply called upon to oppose, uproot and destroy’ (Sawyer 1978: 271). In the words of John Mott: ‘It is the decisive hour for the non-Christian nations … These nations are still plastic. Shall they set in Christian or in pagan moulds? … Shall our sufficient faith fill the void? (Mott 1910: 279–80). Consequently, documents of conferences such as Edinburgh are loaded with the military terms of ‘soldiers’, ‘army’ and ‘council of war’. As the Indian Christian theologian Samuel Rayan points out, the understanding of Christ’s ‘uniqueness’ has often led to an a priori denunciation of Hindu religious beliefs and practices: ‘Imperialist missions have projected Christ as a new, religious, Julius Caesar, out to conquer … We ask about the subterranean connection between the Western conception of Christ’s uniqueness and authority on the one hand and the Western project of world domination on the other’ (Rayan 1990: 133). The ‘subterranean connection’ between a confidence in the superiority of western civilisation and the triumphalist utilisation of the symbol of the cross for the conquest of the ‘heathen’ often structured the attitudes of the missionaries. For instance, raising the question of the number of missionaries needed to evangelise India within the generation, Robert Stewart from the Punjab replied that the Madras Decennial Conference of 1902 had made scientific calculations to the effect that one missionary would be needed for every 25,000 natives (Gairdner 1910: 76).

The early missionary response to Hinduism

Hinduism and the horrors of ‘idolatry’

The missionary construction of ‘Hinduism’ and the understanding of the significance of missionary activity formed two sides of the same coin: if ‘Hinduism’ consisted of systematised structures of superstition, then the mission to the Hindus could be conceived of as the attempt to demolish these structures. While the ‘iconoclastic’ aspects of the missionary centuries have been severely castigated in recent literature, the distinctively theological reasons underpinning such iconoclasm are usually not highlighted. An analysis of these early theologies of mission reveals that the missionary conception of Hinduism as a ‘demoniac’ edifice whose numerous deities were close analogues of Graeco-Roman ‘idols’, the missionary motivation to deliver fellow human beings from bondage to this edifice, and the emergence of a resistant Hinduism in response to such assaults are three closely intertwined moments on the socio-cultural landscape of late colonial India.

The two steering theological beliefs of the missionary societies that emerged from the crucible of the Evangelical revival at the turn of the eighteenth century were the ‘depravity of Man’ and the ‘sovereignty of God’. Steeped as they were in the Old Testament’s derivation of humanity from a common root and its denunciations of the figure of ‘idolatry’ as a convenient summary of all human perversion, the missionaries were aghast at the colourful panoply of the ‘heathenish’ customs that greeted them in the distant lands (Wardlaw 1818: 8). Not only did the profusion of ‘idolatrous’ deities amount to a high affront to the divine sovereignty but also its consequence, that the ‘heathen’, unless they turned away from such transgressions by accepting Christ’s lordship, would eternally perish in the fires of damnation, both agonised the missionaries and charged them with a zeal to urgently propagate the gospel. Consequently, most missionaries from around this time, when explaining their motives in undertaking journeys to faraway countries to spread the gospel, speak in terms of the evocative images of the teeming masses of ‘idolaters’ perishing in the lake of fire and brimstone. As Eric Stokes has pointed out:

The ‘notes’ of the Evangelic mind were a consuming earnestness and conviction, born of a transfiguring religious experience … The experience of being saved was one of a sudden illumination coming after the consciousness and repentance of sin, and its fruit was the gift of true self-government … It made the path of duty plain. That path lay, firstly, in the preservation of the soul in its state of grace through prayer and work, and secondly, in the mission to evangelize.

(Stokes 1959: 29–30)

A somewhat dramatic instance of this mentalite can be found in Duff, who wrote:

And when we think of the unappreciable value of an immortal soul … of the grandeur of that heaven to which by grace, it may be privileged to rise: – when we strive to realize the appalling fact, that there are millions of such souls now wandering, sunless and starless, in the waste howling wilderness … shall we remain mute and unconcerned spectators? Impossible!

(Duff 1839: 43–4)

In short, for some missionaries at least, one of the primary motivations was simply the common humanity that they shared with the natives who would, without the gospel, perish in damnation. Another motive that guided some British missionaries, more particularly those of the London Missionary Society (LMS), as they set out towards India, was their conviction that they had received forgiveness for their sins and the promise of redemption through the gospel and their compelling wish to bring to other human beings the blessings that they believed they had received from Christ. A significant number of them emphasised that they were responding to Christ’s commandment to spread the gospel. For instance, J. Knox wrote: ‘In obedience to that command, I entered College and in obedience to it I now offer myself to you in foreign service’ (Quoted in Oddie 1974: 66–7). Most of them were imbued with a vivid sense of the realm of sinister darkness that they believed the people of the ‘heathenish’ lands were steeped in, which generated in them the desire to work, with divine aid, for the amelioration of their spiritual conditions. Some missionaries were convinced that they were constrained by the love that Christ had for them in turning them around from their sinfulness, and they wanted to reciprocate this love by becoming his human instruments in carrying the good news to the ‘heathen’ (Oddie 1974). Some applicants to the missionary societies also seem to have been drawn by the perception that the status of a missionary was highly respectable and carried with it a certain element of social prestige. While many others stated that they were aware of no other motive than to glorify God through seeking the salvation of the ‘heathen’, the missionary societies and the missionaries themselves were often concerned that these motives might not be as ‘pure’ as they would want them to be. A committee of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) noted in August 1829 that the consideration that on becoming a missionary an individual would receive certain material benefits and conveniences, an elevation in social status, certain provisions should he become disabled by sickness, and the surety that his widow and children would be taken care of on his death might instil into the candidate motives that were ‘less pure than they ought to be in aspiring to the Missionary office’ (Piggin 1984: 126). Therefore, missionary societies such as the LMS, the CMS and others often asked the candidates a number of questions concerning their motivations for seeking employment in these organisations. The preamble to these questions in the LMS application solemnly reminded the candidates that they would be held accountable on the ‘Day of Judgement’ before the God who searches the hearts of everyone. On the other hand, though it is possible that some missionaries were indeed attracted by the promise of pecuniary advantages, especially since the organisations began to pay a regular salary, there are instances when individuals became missionaries well aware that this move would result in a reduction of their annual income (Piggin 1984: 129).

Missionaries in the contact zone

The embattled position in which the missionaries found themselves – on the one hand, driven by their faith to spread the gospel, and on the other hand, resisted or even opposed by the colonial administrators and, as we shall see, by the natives – highlights two significant points for our discussion in this and the next section. First, the natives often appropriated some aspects of European intellectual and cultural systems and used them against the colonial administrators and the missionaries. Second, the natives were partly instrumental in the construction of Hinduism, whose texts they put forward as the repositories of ancient wisdom, so that Hinduism could no longer be castigated as merely a primitive collection of falsities. Consequently, the charge sometimes raised against Christian missionaries that they ‘colonised’ the subjectivities of the Hindus they encountered is somewhat exaggerated – Hindus themselves were soon stridently responding to missionary invectives by offering, on occasion, sophisticated theological responses to key elements of the Christian message.

To begin with the first, scholars who accept the Saidian argument that the British epistemological strategies for acquiring knowledge of India were in fact impelled by a colonial thirst for domination over the country have also stressed the ‘dialogic’ nature of the processes through which colonial knowledge was created. Against the notion of a ‘disinterested knowledge’ Edward Said demonstrated that the processes through which knowledge is produced are enmeshed in a complex matrix of technologies of power and that the study of these configurations is vital to understanding how ideas and values are propagated and perpetuated. However, his critics have argued that he failed to sufficiently stress the specificities of the historical processes through which Orientalist discourse was produced in the face of active contestation. Consequently he would seem to have unwittingly promoted the notion of the ‘passive Orientals’ by overlooking their oppositional stances to the master narratives of imperialism (Porter 1993). As a matter of fact, colonial representations, without which the mundane tasks of administration would have been impossible, were grounded to a significant extent in local forms of knowledge that were interpreted to the administators by indigenous figures. On the other side of the divide, the colonised often responded to western influences by appropriating its idioms in some highly creative ways, as Tapan Raychaudhuri notes in his study of members of the Bengali intelligentsia such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94) and Swami Vivekananda. Their perceptions of the west and their selective appropriations of certain elements of European thought and culture were shaped by a number of contingent factors such as the precise ways in which the exclusivities built into the colonial apparatus impinged on their lives, their contacts with Europeans, their own personalities, their locations within the indigenous contexts, and so on (Raychaudhuri 1988: 5). Consequently, in place of conceptualisations of the intellectual and the cultural exchanges between India and England during the colonial era in terms either of active masters causing their passive subjects to flower into a ‘Bengal Renaissance’ or of confrontations devoid of any mutual influences, it would be more accurate to regard these encounters as long drawn-out dialogic and interactive processes which involved complex relations of negotiation, accommodation, and exchange. As Bayly has noted, Indians soon began to increasingly produce ‘their own knowledge from reworked fragments of their own tradition melded with western ideas and conveyed through western artifacts. Orientalism in Said’s sense became reactive and embattled before it had taken on any kind of shape at all’ (Bayly 1996: 371–2). Therefore, it is important to emphasise that rather than remaining passive onlookers to a ‘Hindu-isation project’, Hindus sometimes challenged, subverted, and co-opted the classificatory frameworks of the colonial bureaucratic machinery as well as the religious idioms of the Christian missionaries.

An ‘Oriental passivity’ of this type is suggested by the view that western scholars and Christian missionaries imposed on the natives a reified conceptual unity called Hinduism, and that their ‘imagination’ of Hinduism as structured by belief cores and forms of worship shaped Indological discourses which appropriated ‘the power of Indians … to act for themselves’ (Inden 1986: 403). However, in response to the view that colonial projects tried to systematise various aspects of Indic culture through classificatory systems such as the census, thereby producing essentialist constructions of Hinduism, Michael Haan has argued that the census reports show that the British officials were in fact unable to arrive at any modular definitions of ‘Hinduism’ and were themselves clear that their ‘Hinduism’ was merely a pragmatic classificatory tool. J. T. Marten, the 1921 Census Commissioner, for instance, stated that ‘Hindu is an unsatisfactory category in the classification of religion, but one that would remain. In the first place, Hinduism is not only or essentially a religion. The term also implies country, race and a social organization’ (Haan 2005: 25). The census officials used numerous tests such as reception of instruction from a Brahmin priest, acceptance of the Vedic texts, worship of specific gods, caste affiliation, and so on, none of which were found to be sufficiently discriminatory (Haan 2005). In other words, systematised pan-Indian Hindu structures gradually appeared through complex negotiations between precolonial idioms and European categories, and these processes were steered by Hindu figures who often interrogated, appropriated, and contested the latter. For instance, the members of the Arya Samaj, formed in 1875, began to claim in 1890 that they should be classified not as ‘Hindu’ but as ‘Aryan’, and around a decade later, voices could be heard from Muslim sections arguing that if groups such as the ‘Animists’ were removed from the category of ‘Hindus’, the proportion of the ‘Muhammadans’ to the ‘Hindu majority’ would be significantly increased (Haan 2005: 23).

A close analysis of missionary reports shows that missionaries too, for all their attempts to be in a commanding position from which they could assault the monstrous structures of Hinduism, had to admit that the Hindu fortresses seemed to be going quite strong. Andrew Leslie, who joined the Protestant mission at Monghyr, Bengal, in 1823, was soon to experience despair at the lack of response to the gospel on the part of the natives, and in April 1836 felt driven to write: ‘Nothing can possibly be so disheartening as missionary work in this country’ (Quoted in Copley 1997: 98). Another missionary connected with the same station, John Lawrence, wrote in 1839 that whereas at certain times he would regard himself as a worthless servant for carrying out the divine purpose, at others he would believe that though the Lord’s time for converting the Hindus and the Muslims had not yet arrived, it was his duty nevertheless to stick patiently to his spiritual labours (Copley 1997: 98–9). While some missionaries might have comforted themselves with such millenarian hopes, by and large the missionary mood was one of dejection at the paucity of conversions. C. E. Driberg, who came to Barripur, Bengal, in 1845 as a missionary with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, realised that in spite of visiting the native population three times a week, missionaries were rarely successful in bringing about genuine conversions that would go beyond a mere intellectual assent to the truths of Christianity (Copley 1997: 80–1). If anything, missionary reports from around this time reveal that some of the Hindus themselves had gone into an adversarial mode, flatly denying certain crucial assumptions of the Christian message. For instance, in a letter in 1849, John Lawrence recounts that a Brahmin pandit told him that the sacrifices made by the Hindu ascetics were equivalent in their spiritual power to that of Christ’s self-sacrifice (Copley 1997: 100). Not surprisingly, therefore, the Baptist missionary to Muttra (modern day Mathura) T. Phillips declared his intention in 1853 that he would never allow himself to lose an argument with the Hindus, and particularly their ascetics who had to be ‘convinced as well as silenced’ (Quoted in Copley 1997: 121).

Missionaries and the Hindu backlash

During the 1870s and the 1880s, the Hindu opposition reinforced itself for a more frontal assault on Christianity, and it became increasingly difficult for the missionaries to counter it. Some ‘orthodox’ Hindus adopted a militant stance against the missionaries so that the bazaars and the streets, once the favourite haunt of itinerant preachers, became inhospitable for them. The religious scene in the Punjab in the 1880s was marked by a stiff competition between the Christian missionaries and the Arya Samaj that was conducted through reports of conversions and reconversions, debates, pamphlet wars, street preaching, and so on. At a fair near Pind Dadan Khan, Jhelum district in the Punjab, Aryans had gathered from several places to combat Christian proselytisers:

They formed themselves into different parties and vigorously preached the Vedic faith throughout the fair. The Christian missionaries could not give the ‘joyful tidings’, to the benighted heathen to their hearts’ content, for no sooner would any minister of the Gospel commence his discourse in a loud key, than a party of Aryan preachers would come into view, determined to contest the ground with him.

(Jones 1976: 142)

What was particularly distressing for the Christian missionaries was that those who were at the helm of this opposition were often the highly educated Indians, precisely the group they had believed would turn to Christianity and then disseminate it among those below them in the social strata. As a matter of fact, however, currents of rationalism and free thinking circulated among the western-educated Hindu intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century, and the writings of figures such as Tom Paine, August Comte, and John Mill were plundered by them for intellectual resources to develop oppositional stances against both the indigenous traditions and the Christian missionaries. They drew upon these radical deist and nonconformist views circulating in Europe to forge distinctive strategies for eradicating what they perceived to be the excrescences of Hinduism and for criticising Christianity, a ‘revealed’ religion, as a sinister ruse through which the clergy deluded the masses. One such radical figure in Bengal, Akshaykumar Datta, argued that the Vaiśeṣika system of classical Indian philosophy was superior to the others for it postulated no creator God but explained all natural phenomena through the interactions between atoms. Such naturalistic views, however, were in the course of time embroidered with fanciful beliefs, and to remove the falsities that had clustered around them, Datta argued that Indians ‘were in want of someone to lead them. They were in need of one Bacon, one Bacon, one Bacon’ (Quoted in Raychaudhuri 1999: 56). Such godless Indians, the missionaries complained, had rejected not only Hinduism but all religions as systems of priestcraft invented to enslave the masses, and had thereby descended into a ‘universal scepticism’. Figures such as Datta would have been anathema also to those missionaries who had believed that the study of English literature, imbued with a Christian ethos, would lead to a moral regeneration of the Indians, remove some of their prejudices on the path of conversion, and draw them towards Christianity. However, as Gauri Viswanathan has noted, there was a tension in the Evangelicalism of Christians such as Charles Grant between their belief that a consistent pursuit of western empiricism would debunk Hindu metaphysics and mythology, and their attempt to safeguard the revealed tenets of their Christian faith from science and history. This tension ‘did not go unnoticed by colonial subjects … If Christianity were truly a religion based on reason, evidence and history as projected, many asked, why did confirmation in that religion depend entirely on accepting two central doctrines [of revelation and grace] that demanded faith rather than the exercise of reason?’ (Viswanathan 1989: 99). Thus Rajnarain Bose, a member of the Brahmo Samaj formed in 1828, attacked the claim that Christianity was the most advanced stage of religious evolution by arguing that it was in fact full of superstition, mystery, and miracles such as the ‘absurd notion of a triune Godhead’, the ‘revolting doctrine of the eternal punishment’, and so on, which the ‘rational Hindu’ could not believe (Kopf 1979: 174).

Missionaries were equally shocked by natives who did accept substantial aspects of the Christian message, but configured it with indigenous themes. A study of the conversion narratives of individuals such as Pandita Ramabai and Brahmabandhab Upadhyay reveals, on the one hand, that they had actively searched for Christian life-worlds that they believed to be more liberating than the ones they had been born into, but, on the other, that they were not unreflective recipients of the Christian messages that their supervisors had handed out to them. The conversions of such individuals to Christianity, and in some cases their subsequent movements away from it, were mediated by complex interactions with the missionaries, and should not be viewed as a unilinear imposition on them of either some colonial ideology or missionary teaching. For instance, R. F. Young (2002: 37–60) shows how the interactions of three nineteenth-century Hindu pandits with missionaries produced three distinct responses: while the Christian message challenged all three and plunged them into varying degrees of spiritual crises, the consequences were different. The first, Krishna Shastri, remained confirmed in his opposition to the gospel and to the missionaries whom he believed to be arrogant and insolent. The second, Arumuka Pillai, educated by the British Wesleyans in Jaffna, had various doubts about the claims of the Bible, and rediscovered the Śaivism of his family. Only the third, Nilakantha Goreh, converted to Christianity after having expended much energy in refuting its claims, and became well known as Nehemiah Goreh.

Such creative syntheses were not restricted to these paradigmatic figures – as historians have noted, lesser-known individuals often entered into various sorts of oppositions and alliances with the missionaries as they responded to their preaching. Even before certain areas of southern Tamil Nadu began to respond to Christian missionaries in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the hinterland had witnessed several itinerant ‘seekers’ who developed distinctive interweavings of their traditional Hindu beliefs and practices with some of the teachings that they had received from foreign missionaries. Jesuit reports from the early eighteenth century throw some light on such wandering ascetics who, while identifying themselves as Christian, were involved in their own spiritual quests which led them to adopt lifestyles usually associated with Hindu bhakti or Muslim sufi practices (Bayly 1989: 385–7). Nearby in the Malabar, some Indian converts of the Plymouth Brethren who preached a radical form of Christian egalitarianism, anti-clericalism, and a deeply ‘personal’ response to the authority of Christ, began to exercise a galvanic effect on some of the Thomas Christians. One of these was Justus Joseph, who had become a pastor of a CMS church, but who, to the utter dismay of his spiritual supervisors, declared in 1874 that he had received a commission by God to prepare humanity for the return of Christ on 2 October 1881. Breaking away from the Anglican Church, he formed an independent sect which numbered as many as 12,000 followers as the movement reached its height, and changed his name to Yuyoralison, combining the words Jehovah, Joseph, Rama, Ali, and Wilson. In their emphasis on an egalitarian association of believers, vegetarianism, and teetotalism, members of Yuyoralison’s group were drawing upon certain motifs common to south Indian bhakti sects, and they attracted large numbers of both Hindu and Christians. What this movement demonstrates, according to Susan Bayly, is ‘how readily they [the Thomas Christians] could adapt mainline missionary teachings to suit their quest for a radical new creed which might solve their chronic problems of authority and spiritual leadership’ (Bayly 1989: 310–11). For another example of such trans-creation of Christian motifs, we may turn to the case of the Mundas in eastern India who, after the failure of a series of violent uprisings against the British, turned towards the ‘apocalyptic’ intervention of Birsa from around 1895. Victoria Luker argues that this millenarian prophecy was forged out of the symbolic resources of traditional Munda beliefs, Hinduism, and Christianity, thereby giving rise to a vision of the restoration of the ‘golden age’ into which his followers would enter. The presence of traditional themes is highlighted by the fact that Birsa was viewed by his followers as an ‘incarnation’ of Singbonga, the Munda deity; drawing on the Hindu mythic cycles of time, the Mundas believed that they were living through the evil age; and finally, Christian missionary preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven probably fuelled such millenarian expectations (Luker 1998).

The rise of ‘neo-Hinduism’

In a manner parallel to the colonial administrators, whose attempts to transplant European values and institutions on a colonial landscape fissured by the identity-difference dialectic led to complex relations of collaboration with and opposition to the natives, missionaries too soon realised that, their rhetorical flourishes about the soldiers of Christ notwithstanding, their vigorous preaching had often been rejected by the natives with whose life-worlds they had to enter into more sympathetic relations. Indeed, the acrimonious attacks that the early nineteeth-century missionaries often levelled at Indian ‘primitivism’ gave rise to a counter-blast from the east. The difference between a pure deist form of religion and its later polytheistic accretions which, as we noted earlier, had been articulated by the Orientalists, was soon appropriated by various Hindu thinkers and nationalist leaders who believed that through a recovery of these primal elements they could effect a spiritual and cultural renaissance of Hinduism. A host of ‘reformers’ such as Rammohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, and Swami Dayananda (1824–83) accepted, in their distinctive ways, the argument that the Hindu religious and social systems had suffered a degeneration from a ‘golden age’ centred around the Vedas (e.g. Ghose 1885–87: vol. 1, 40).

The consolidation of a corporate Hindu identity consequently became an undertaking that had as its intended end the establishment of an overarching framework within which a unified nation would confront, and ultimately shake off, the colonial power. H. von Stietencron points out that western scholars, because of their preconceived notion that what they were dealing with on the subcontinent was a unified religious system ‘saw Hinduism as a unity. The Indians had no reason to contradict this; to them the religious and cultural unity discovered by western scholars was highly welcome in their search for national identity in the period of struggle for national union’ (von Stietencron 1991: 15). Nationalist historians occupied an ambivalent position with regard to the constructions of a ‘spiritual’ India by the Orientalists: on the one hand, they largely carried over the disjunction between India and Europe as two large homogenous entities, but on the other, they released the former from its assigned role of ‘passivity’ and ascribed to it the resurgent status of ‘activity’. Such historians often hearkened back to the glorious ages of the Vedic past where art, culture, and spirituality had flourished, the people had prospered economically and were bound by a perception of a national unity. As we shall note in Chapter 8, in these constructions of Hindu nationalism, the glorification of an archaic Hindu past was based on a comparison between ‘the vitalism, dynamism and resilience of the ancient Hindus and what was perceived as the degeneration and stagnancy of contemporary Hindu society’ (Bhatt 2001: 12). This conception of a religious system that could somehow weld the diverse cultural elements of the land into an integrated whole was often employed by members of the educated upper classes in their attempts to put up a united front when many Hindus began to migrate to Christianity (Frykenberg 1976).

The ‘pure’ message of Hinduism was now claimed, by proponents of what has come to be termed ‘neo-Hinduism’, to be the spiritual essence of the different religions of humanity. Missionaries were quite puzzled by this movement, for though these educated Hindus, such as the members of the Brahmo Samaj, had rejected the ‘crudities’ and the ‘superstitions’ of the traditional Hindus and were even deeply interested in the figure of Christ, they almost unanimously rejected the orthodox Christian claims about his divinity. Further, missionaries were often particularly irked by the claim that while Europe had become immersed in gross materialism and had lost its soul, the wisdom of Hinduism, as pristine as ever, shone forth as the one hope for the world’s spiritual malaise. As Swami Vivekananda claimed:

Let others talk of politics, of the glory of acquisition of immense wealth poured in by trade, of the power and spread of commercialism … these the Hindu mind does not understand … Touch him [sic] on spirituality, on religion, on God, on the soul, on the Infinite, on spiritual freedom, and I assure you, the lowest peasant in India is better informed on these subjects than many a so-called philosopher in other lands. I have said … that we have yet something to teach to the world.

(1972: vol. 3,148)

One important aspect of this response to Christianity was the attempt to include its ‘lower’ truths in the ‘higher’ message of neo-Advaita, which can be seen as a form of fulfilment theology, with the crucial difference, of course, that it is not the gospel but certain reformulated versions of the Advaita of Śaṇkara (788–820 CE) which are placed at the apex of the evolutionary development of the religions of the world. In neo-Advaitins such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Swami Vivekananda, and others, it was not Christianity’s ‘penultimate’ truths about saviours and salvation but Advaita’s transcendental ‘experience’ of an intuitive awareness of non-duality between the self and the absolute that constituted the summit. In a lecture delivered to the Brooklyn Ethical Association on 27 February 1895, Swami Vivekananda claimed that the Buddha had foreshadowed the coming of Christ; algebra, geometry, and astronomy could be traced back to ancient India; and Sanskrit was the font of European languages which are but ‘jargonized Sanskrit’ (1972: vol. 2, 510–12). Consequently, Hindu responses to Christian criticisms now received a new impetus, for it was claimed that in opposition to ‘Semitic’ creeds which are imperialistic, native Hindu wisdom breathes the air of ‘inclusivity’.

Missionaries and the native Church

Around this time of the emergence of a ‘militant Hinduism’, provoked to some extent by the vituperative denunciations of Indian culture by colonial administrators and missionaries, the missionary attitude to Hinduism underwent a gradual, but decisive, shift. According to the newer missionary conception of Hinduism, provided the blemishes in Hindu thought and practice were carefully weeded out, Hinduism would flow into Christianity which was its true culmination. If Hinduism had been placed in this manner on a continuum with Christianity, the missionary organisations often argued that the native churches too were on a continuum with the European churches which had founded them. However, Christian missionaries till the eve of Indian political independence often held the view that the foundation of a native Indian Church had to be postponed into the indefinite future.

In short, both colonial administrators and missionaries were often unwilling to push their ‘liberalism’ to its logical conclusion: the grant of full-fledged autonomy to Indians, whether in the form of citizenship or self-governing local churches. The fundamental problem was highlighted by Evan Maconochie: ‘[w]hile human nature is the same everywhere and throughout the ages, environment and opportunity are different. Hitherto we have been able to help India because of the differences and, when that ceases to be so, the chief justification for our presence there will have gone’ (Maconochie 1926: 257). Along these lines, after declaring that the ‘[t]he essential point is that British rule should be openly confessed and authoritatively proclaimed to be a means, not an end’, William Archer postpones the question of whether this end, a self-governing state, should be within or outside the British empire: ‘Many a long year will have to pass before India is ripe for self-government …’ (Archer 1917: 19–20). Given that British administrators saw the natives as ‘children’ whom they were slowly raising to the autonomy of adulthood, they often argued that they could not leave Indian shores until they had ‘honourably discharged’ the responsibilities that they had undertaken. Similar sentiments were often echoed by the missionaries, with regard both to the empire and to the foundation of a native Church. Though British missionaries often expressed the opinion that Indian Christians would play a decisive role in the spread of Christianity in the country, they were not willing to accept the proposition that the latter would be able to provide able leadership for the local churches, and were particularly appalled at the prospect of a British missionary serving under an Indian bishop. Thus, around the middle of the nineteenth century, an Indian convert, Lal Behari Day, who had expected that after conversion he would receive the status of spiritual equality with his western friends, was soon to be disappointed for some of the missionaries associated with the Scottish Mission Council were, according to him, concerned more with the management of funds from home than with admitting native converts into its membership. In an address ‘Searchings of Heart’ delivered in 1857, he lamented the lack of fellowship between the missionaries and their Indian converts and asked them to examine themselves in the light of the gospel: ‘Do I look upon my converts as my sons in the faith – as brethren in Christ, not as subordinates and servants?’(Quoted in Neill 1985: 403). The absence of communion is highlighted by the fact that the missionaries who selected Indian Christians to be their personal assistants in the role of evangelists or catechists often did not regard them as being at par with themselves or place them in a status of independent authority. Indeed, they emphasised their distinctive locations in a racially ordered social space through a variety of ways such as by living in the missionary bungalow while the Indian pastor would be allocated a place in the servants’ quarters (Hollis 1962: 51–4).

Numerous voices from this period reveal the ‘paternalistic’ attitude of the missionaries towards the native Christians, particularly regarding their alleged incapacity to manage their own affairs. At the General Missionary Conference at Allahabad in December 1872, Robert Clark raised the issue of the local churches whose independence, he believed, was the ultimate end of the endeavours of the missionaries. Nevertheless, this independence was a distant goal: ‘For the present, the Native Church of India can no more dream of such independence than a child at school can think he can live independently of his father’s care’ (Quoted in Copley 1997: 21). Indian Christians sometimes regarded the missionaries as arrogant individuals who had little interest in their welfare and who undertook little effort to overcome the barriers of language, culture, and education that separated the two groups. The Indian convert Reverend Goloknath even depicted the financially well-off missionaries as ‘paid agents of a Religious Company’ who were more interested in garnering converts than in becoming involved with the Indians whom they had received into their fold (Copley 1997: 20). As late as 1931, J. C. Winslow lamented that ‘it remains true … that, in the vast majority of cases, the Indian Christian regards his fellow English Christian as one separated from him by a subtle consciousness of superiority – one whom he may respect as a good man but not love as a brother’ (Winslow and Elwin 1931: 186).

At the same time, however, a significant number of missionary, as well as native, figures began to affirm the importance of setting up a Church which would be distinctively Indian. Preaching to a group in Dacca (Dhaka) in 1818, the missionary Owen Leonard even declared he wished them to become ‘Christian Hindoos’, that is, they would renounce the worship of ‘idols’, turn away from sin, and seek to become holy, but would otherwise remain rooted in their social contexts (Potts 1967: 225). The taunt that the natives who had accepted Christianity had become one of the foreigners began to be levelled at the converts from around this time, and the latter sometimes reacted strongly to it. For instance, the Reverend ‘Abd al-Masih (born in Delhi in the 1760s and baptised in 1811) protested in these terms: ‘I was born in Hindoostan: my colour is black, my dress different from that of the Sahibs, and I have a beard like yourselves: how then can you call me a Feringee [foreigner]? If you call me a Christian you will call me right’ (Quoted in Powell 1997: 51). By the middle of the century, however, missionaries began to strike a greater note of urgency in ‘indigenising’ the gospel into Indian cultural forms. As early as 1855, the CMS issued the following statement as a part of its policy directives to its missionaries: ‘The ultimate object of missions, viewed in their ecclesiastical aspect, is the settlement of Native Church, with Native Pastors, upon a self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending system’ (Quoted in Cox 2002: 42). As we will see in Chapter 8, from the first half of the twentieth century, the distinction between the gospel of Christ and Europeanised forms of Christianity began to be drawn more clearly than earlier, with the acknowledgement that the ‘younger churches’ had been modelled on Europeanised prototypes.

The arrival of indigenised Christianity

In short, as Christian missionaries agonised over the question of whether, and to what extent, the Christian message could be ‘inculturated’ into Indian forms, their usual response for much of the nineteenth century was that Christianity should be kept as ‘uncontaminated’ as possible from the influences of Hindu thought and practice. An early complaint comes from P. C. Mozoomdar, a member of the Brahmo Samaj:

When I express my ardent love for Christ and Christianity, they [‘the Christian leaders’] are kindly in sympathy; but the moment I say that Christ and his religion will have to be interpreted in India through Indian antecedents and the Indian medium of thought, I am suspected of trying to blend Christianity to heathenism.

(Quoted in Chatterjee 1984: 176)

For most of the nineteenth century, Indian Christians were made to adopt Europeanised forms of Christianity in all ways possible, and S. C. Chatterji argued that because of this imitative process, Christianity had become, during the time of the growth of a national consciousness, an object of suspicion and contempt. Long before postcolonial theorists began to point out Europe’s projections of ‘ethnocentric’ universalisms, Chatterji already claimed that it was ‘perhaps a peculiar weakness of the English race, which has always seemed to think that what is best for England must be so for the entire world’ (Chatterji 1914: 212). Around this time, another Indian Christian, K. T. Paul, complained that by plucking Indians out of their socio-cultural contexts, missionaries had produced ‘denationalised’ Indians who were largely unaware of their rich traditions of folklore, art, and music. The initial group of Protestant missionaries had, in the attempt to prevent any ‘contamination’ of the Christian message, instilled into their converts a horror of the indigenous traditions, and this had softened over time, Paul believed, only to emerge as an attitude of deep suspicion towards them (Paul 1919).

Some Indian Christians who opposed this ‘denationalisation’ of Indians after their entry into the churches attempted to ‘inculturate’ the gospel in Indian contexts by forming organisations to press the demand for the relegation of powers to them. At the Second Decennial Missionary Conference at Calcutta in 1882, an Indian Christian, P. M. Mukerji, declared that the ‘time has come when the Native Church may be safely left alone to a certain extent at least’ (Quoted in Thomas 1979: 68). A few years later, K. C. Banerji founded the Christo Samaj in 1887 with the aim of the propagation of Christian truth and the welfare of Indian Christians, and the organisation became a meeting point for the early pioneers of the National Church Movement who were seeking the establishment of a Church that would be regulated by the natives. At the Bombay Missionary Conference in 1892/93, Banerji distinguished between ‘substantive Christianity’, that is, the set of its foundational principles and the doctrines based on them which must remain invariant in all environments, and ‘adjectival Christianity’, that is, the specific forms of ecclesiastical organisation or creedal confession with which the former are clothed. Towards the beginning of the next century, the National Missionary Society was formed in 1905 in Serampore by sixteen Indian Christians who sought to initiate an all-India movement for independence from western missionary societies that would be based on the three foundational principles of ‘Indian leadership’, ‘Indigenous methods’, and ‘Indian money’ (Thomas 1979: 148–9).

In addition to challenging the liberal-styled view of the missionaries that the Indian Christians were their ‘spiritual children’ who were not responsible enough to handle the affairs of their churches, Indian Christians also began to contest the assumption that ‘Church’ and ‘empire’ had been brought together providentially. Indian Christians adopted varying stances towards British imperialism, sometimes regarding it as their duty to submit their allegiance to the powers of the day, and at other times arguing that they must oppose the empire along with the nationalist movements of their time. These variations can be traced ultimately to a long tradition of Christian reflection on the relation between Church and state, with a prominent, though not uncontested, line holding that Christians must submit to legitimate government (Romans 13: 1–7). This understanding was reflected by Bishop Azariah of Dornakal when, during the Quit India Movement, he appealed to the Christians of his diocese not to participate in civil disobedience, arguing that the scriptures had commanded Christians to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’. Though Christians did support the cause of freedom, they must not, according to Azariah, seek to wrest power from their rulers, the ministers appointed by God. Soon thereafter, however, other Christians such as V. Chakkarai pointed out that civil disobedience towards a government that did not serve the interests of the people and was not recognised by them was justified (Thomas 1979: 225–8). In the years leading up to political independence, a greater number of Indian Christians began to challenge this assumption that their religious views had no bearing on the wider issues of race and empire. After the passing of the Quit India resolution in 1942, several Indian Christians, including the students of the United Theological College at Bangalore, declared that Christians in India could not distance themselves from the nationalists who were struggling against the repressive regime of the British and had to express their solidarity with the movement for the grant of immediate self-government. Towards the close of the Second World War, some Indian Christians began to point out certain similarities between British imperialism and missionary ‘imperialism’, and claimed that while the non-Christian Indians were under one imperialistic control, the Indian Christians were under two, that of the empire and of the missionaries. Some of them argued that there was a parallel between the manner in which the British government tried to delay the grant of self-government, in spite of making protestations to the contrary, and the practice of the missionary societies to shrink back from devolving responsibility upon the Indian Christians despite their declared intentions. In an article published in 1945, M. C. Chakravarty (Thomas 1979: 235) declared that as long as the leadership of the Churches remained vested primarily in foreign hands, Muslims and Hindus would continue to believe that they were merely instruments for the perpetuation of British imperialism.

The question of ‘inclusivity’: Christianity or neo-Advaita?

The emergence of fulfilment theologies, at a time of the greater appreciation of the truths of Hinduism and of the recognition of the importance of native churches, further highlights the shifting locations of Hinduism on the identity-difference continuum by the beginning of the twentieth century. Hinduism was, by and large, not viewed any longer as a radically different ‘demoniac’ perversion; however, it was encrusted with various imperfections which the gospel had to purge. Given the common conflation in missionary circles between Europeanisation and Christianisation, these imperfections were usually attributed to the Indian cultural contexts. Therefore, missionaries sought to keep the Indian churches tightly under their control and opposed attempts to ‘translate’ Christian truth into indigenous phraseology. However, though the missionaries who operated against the backdrop of the colonial regime had imbibed some of its liberal motifs, their primary purpose was to convert through persuasion, and it is precisely this mode of approach that placed them at the shifting interstices between the colonisers and the colonised. On the one hand, through their association with the mission and its resources, they were often economically better-off than the Indians around them, and were also, at least in their own perception of the matter, spiritually superior to them since they had, after all, come to proclaim the saving truth. On the other hand, they were also crucially dependent on their Hindu interlocutors, for they had to understand, as best as they could, the latter’s beliefs, perceptions, practices, cultural patterns, and so on, with the hope that they might move towards Christianity. As G. Oddie points out, for missionaries, generally speaking, ‘the dichotomy of ultimate importance was not Europe versus the Orient, but the saved versus the damned. While cultural factors may have given impetus to the missionary movement, for the missionaries themselves the fundamental distinction was neither cultural nor regional, but spiritual’ (Oddie 1999: 181).

Consequently, missionaries often found themselves in highly ambivalent positions with respect to the British administrators and also to the Indians. However, the complex negotiations that missionary figures undertook over roughly three centuries are usually not highlighted, as Brijraj Singh notes, in three groups of writers on missions: mission historians, nationalist writers, and postcolonial critics. Writers in the first group usually produce quasi-hagiographical reports of the missionaries, sometimes even raising them above the plane of human fallibility. Those in the second group work with the assumption, which is usually allowed to remain unquestioned, that the missionaries and the colonisers were hand in glove with one another. Our discussion in this chapter has highlighted the point that missionaries on the field often experienced bouts of anxiety and despair, and that, though they shared some of the ‘civilising’ assumptions of the colonisers, the relations between these two groups were far from being mutually supportive. Christian missionaries in British India should therefore be viewed not as imperialist agents but as concrete actors in specific historical settings in which they entered into various negotiations with indigenous figures. Postcolonial theorists, finally, usually ignore the Christian missionary aspects of modern Indian history entirely, and even when some bring up this topic for a brief discussion, the tendency, so argues Singh, remains to paint the missionaries as instruments who helped the imperialists to promote their hegemonic mastery over ‘colonised’ minds. In response to this last group, Singh writes that one must distinguish in this connection between the ‘textual’ hegemonists and the missionaries. While the former, through their various translations and editions of the local texts ‘essentialised’ them by smoothing out the various fissures and contradictions within them, the latter, while they too were involved in a similar hegemonic process of seeking the assent of the local population, were engaged in daily interactions with the latter who often disputed, challenged, and confounded the arguments produced by them (Singh 1999: 151–4).

Indeed, as we shall note in the next chapter, the British missionary attempts to ‘fix’ the Indian Christians into definite stereotypes, for instance, as replicators of the messages handed down to them by their superiors, quite often produced polymorphous identities characterised by ‘hybridity’ and ‘ambivalence’. The missionary ‘imperialism’ which sought to forge stable and unitary identities of both the missionaries and the converts was undercut by various contradictory processes and the cracks, indeterminacies, and slippages that opened up provided the spaces for highly creative transformations of the gospel, both by the converts themselves and by the Hindu opponents of Christian conversion. These long-drawn processes need to be highlighted to emphasise that the natives, far from emerging with colonised subjectivities from the missionary encounters, responded in a variety of ways to the Christian message, ranging from strident rejection to creative assimilation of some of its aspects. As we have noted, the shift from the denunciations of Hindu ‘idolatry’ as a mass of superstitions to the notion of the fulfilment of Hinduism in Christianity was concurrent with the emergence of neo-Hinduism which placed certain types of Advaita Vedānta at the pinnacle of humanity’s religious development. From the standpoint of Advaita, which began to be referred to as the ‘higher Hinduism’, it seemed that not much had changed in Christian approaches to Hinduism, for they remained focussed on the pivot of the ‘uniqueness’ of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the extent of the ‘inclusivity’ of the models that Christian theologians and missionaries were developing became a moot point, leading to a delicate question: who is more inclusive, the Christians or the neo-Advaitin Hindus? The more or less received wisdom in some Hindu circles is that Hinduism, especially in the form of neo-Advaita, is genuinely inclusive. Unfortunately, insufficient attention is paid to two crucial questions: first, precisely who is included, and, second, what are the theological–philosophical grounds of this inclusion? These questions were forced upon Christians and some ‘higher’ caste Hindus by one of the most volatile issues in colonial and contemporary India: conversions from the ‘lower’ castes to Christianity.

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