Debating ‘Conversion’ in Hinduism and Christianity

With the question of the conversions of the ‘lower’ castes and the ‘untouchables’, the Christian missionaries found themselves catapulted into the political arena of the empire, and soon had to deal with low caste ‘mass movements’ as well as mobilisations of Hinduism against the background of the parliamentary representations introduced by the colonial government. With the natives themselves playing an increasingly active role in the matters of conversion, the missionaries were forced, not for the last time in Hindu–Christian encounters, to take a hard look at some of the elements of their own faith.

An early attempt to ‘inculturate’ the gospel had been made by Robert de Nobili (1577–1656) who lived in the manner of a Brahmin and avoided contact with the ‘lower’ castes. While this approach was in some ways less intrusive than that of some Portuguese Jesuits who had tried to Europeanise their converts, de Nobili’s strategy had two major implications for later Christian missionary attitudes to the natives. First, some missionaries adopted a trickle-down approach to conversions, believing that the leavening effect of the gospel on the higher educated classes would slowly percolate down to the ‘lower’ castes. This was another point of contact for the missionaries with the liberal ethos of the British empire: the colonial government believed that in the process of educating the natives, it had to raise a group of Anglicised Indians who would carry home the values of liberalism and parliamentary democracy to those who were not yet within the circle of European civilisation (O’Malley 1934: 177–8). Second, Roman Catholicism in India dilly-dallied on the caste question, treating ‘caste’ as an adiaphora which was not significant in matters relating to salvation. Protestant missionaries, on the other hand, seem to have taken a more strident view towards caste, and their attempts to dissolve caste consciousness led to numerous splits among their congregations.

As scholars have noted, in some cases it was the members of the ‘lower’ castes who made various demands on the missionaries before and after conversion, pace the view articulated by Hindu critics that they were the unsuspecting victims of missionary imperialism (Goel 1989: 328). Consequently, the view that they were preyed upon and violently extricated from their indigenous contexts by the missionaries, which ignores their agential capabilities, needs to be revised for a more dynamic account of the complex forces at play. Further, these converts were often clear that the motives that had guided them towards the Christian fold were not particularly ‘spiritual’ but were straightforwardly material ones relating to security, dignity and self-respect. Partly in response to this demand for conversion from the ‘lower’ castes, Christian missionaries sometimes altered an earlier ‘spiritualising’ version of the gospel in terms of redemption of the individual from sin, to a more ‘materialistic’, and arguably Biblical, interpretation of salvation as the liberation of the whole person from earthly bonds. While these different moves are often read by Hindu critics as mere opportunistic strategies to garner more souls, they were also partly rooted in somewhat conflicting Christian theological views of the relationship of ‘Christ’ to ‘culture’, as we shall discuss in greater detail in Chapter 8. Roughly speaking, for Roman Catholicism there are elements of continuity between the ‘natural’ world which has not yet been redeemed and the supernatural domain into which human beings are introduced through grace, so that on certain occasions Catholic missionaries accommodated socio-cultural practices under the category of adiaphora (beliefs which are neither divinely endorsed nor forbidden). Forms of Protestantism, such as the Reformed traditions, on the other hand, usually draw the line between the social contexts from within which converts seek baptism and the ones that form the new community of the Church much more sharply, repudiating the notion that are any grace-filled elements in the natural world before it has been regenerated by Christ. Consequently, Protestant missionaries in India were perhaps better suited to pick out the elements of caste that conflicted with aspects of Christianity. Historians of conversions from the ‘lower’ castes in south India and elsewhere have noted how the natives, far from being the unwitting victims of missionary conspiracy, were sometimes quite alive to these intra-Christian differences. Thus, under the threat of having to share mutual spaces with the ‘lower’ castes, ‘higher’ caste converts to Protestant churches sometimes moved over to those Roman Catholic ones which were more lax in breaking down caste boundaries (Johnston 1888: vol. 1, 86).

Before we proceed, a terminological clarification is in order: the Sanskrit terms that are used to speak of ‘caste’ are varṇa and jāti. The former is usually traced to a hymn in the Ṛg Veda X, 90 which speaks of the four varṇas of the brāhmaṇa or the priests, the rājanya (later referred to as the kṣatriya) or the rulers, the vaiṣya or the merchants, and the śūdra or the servants. On the other hand, the jātis are endogamous groups which are associated with certain myths, food practices, and occupations. There are, however, no clear-cut associations between a specific jāti and one of the four varṇas: the brāhmaṇa varṇa itself encompasses a great number of jātis, and for many jātis, their location in a particular varṇa remains matters of ambiguity and contestation (Quigley 2003: 495–508).

Missionaries and caste

Salvation of the soul or social uplift?

At least three factors played a crucial role in shaping the attitudes of Protestant missionaries towards ‘caste’: first, the debate over whether the Christian message was centred primarily around the salvation of the soul or the amelioration of socio-economic distress; second, whether caste itself was a specifically religious institution or simply a social structure that could be left untouched by the missionaries; and third, whether the most efficient way to spread the gospel was by targeting the ‘higher’ castes and hoping that it would percolate down to the lower levels, or by moving straight to the ‘lower’ castes.

To begin with, a dominant belief guiding the enterprises of a significant number of Protestant missionaries throughout the nineteenth century was that the Christian message was concerned not with social amelioration but with reformation of individuals by making them aware of their depths of sin and drawing them towards the font of baptismal grace. For instance, the Revd William Harper expressed the view in 1889 that missionaries in India should remember that Christianity is concerned primarily not with the removal of socio-political ills but with the eternal salvation of the soul, the latter being the ‘one great need of India today’ (Quoted in Mathew 1988: 121–2). However, back at home, this ‘spiritualist’ version of the gospel had been criticised by figures such as B. F. Westcott, the first president of the Christian Social Union, who emphasised that Christians must take an active interest in the social and the political questions of the day. Such changing theological currents in England began to affect missionary thinking in India as well. During the centenary missionary conference in London in 1888, medical missions, for instance, were put forward not as a mere appendage to missionary activity but as the very ‘embodiment of the Divine Idea, enunciated by the Master himself when he commanded the gospel to be preached among all nations’ (Johnston 1888: vol. 2, 104). Missionaries who understood salvation in terms of the restoration of the whole person realised that in some instances it was only with the removal of socio-economic injustices that conditions could be created that would be more conducive to the preaching of Christianity and its reception. Therefore, they became engaged in a number of social and political movements revolving around the question of child-marriage, the condition of the ‘outcastes’ in Madras, and so on.

Second, the majority of the Protestant missionaries believed that caste was a ‘religious’ institution so that converts who retained caste distinctions among themselves were still, in effect, clinging on to remnants of the old religion. In a letter of 5 July 1833, the bishop of Calcutta, Daniel Wilson declared: ‘The distinction of castes … must be abandoned, decidedly, immediately, finally; and those who profess to belong to Christ must give this proof of their having … “put on the new man”, in Christ Jesus’ (Manickam 1988: 49). By 1850, almost all the Protestant denominations in the country agreed that caste had to be eradicated from their churches, and the Madras Missionary Conference’s minute on caste in 1858 was signed by around a hundred missionaries from churches such as the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and others. The Conference noted that caste notions were directly in conflict with those scriptural texts which declared that all humanity had been created by God to be of one blood (Acts 17: 26) and that there was nothing that was unclean of itself (Romans 14: 14), so that the retention of caste distinctions amounted to a rejection of the Christian proclamation that in Christ there was no more any distinctions between Greek and Jew, bond or free (Colossians 3: 11) (Forrester 1980: 42–3).

Third, some of the early missionaries approached the intellectual elites with the assumption that once Christianity had taken firm roots among the members of this class it would percolate down to those of the lower ones. This ‘diffusionist’ belief is reflected, for instance, by a missionary from the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Reverend Rowland Bateman, a man with ‘a passion for souls, and a willingness to do what was necessary to win them’, who argued that the key to the Christianisation of India lay in winning converts from the upper educated classes who would then use their influence in spreading Christian values downwards (Cox 2002: 3–4). After the 1860s, however, when large numbers from the ‘lower’ castes began seeking baptism in groups, Protestant missionaries were faced with the necessity of revisiting a settlement on the caste question that they had arrived at by the early half of the nineteenth century. They had more or less unanimously regarded the presence of caste notions, which they held as being fundamentally opposed to the ‘egalitarianism’ of Christianity, as one of the greatest obstacles to the spread of the gospel. In the wake of various mass movements from the ‘lower’ castes to Christianity, Protestant missionaries were faced with the delicate task of negotiating a dilemma. On the one hand, they were convinced that caste structures were productive of social iniquities which could not be condoned by the gospel, and feared that the retention of caste solidarity would lead to the burgeoning of large numbers of ‘caste churches’. On the other hand, however, the attempt to break out from the ‘chain of caste’ would produce converts who were disconnected from their wider social contexts, and lead to frictions and tensions with their caste Hindu neighbours.

Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries on caste

Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries dealt with this problem in two distinct ways, guided by a divergence in their overall theological outlooks concerning the relation of the gospel to culture. This momentous question has exercised the intellect and the imagination of several generations of Christian theologians and missiologists who broadly agree that it is both historically and theologically mistaken to project a ‘raw Christ’ that is de-contextualised from all cultural locales and is not enfleshed in specific socio-historical contexts. However, the question of ‘inculturating’ the gospel raises, in turn, the thorny issue of which aspects of a certain cultural system of beliefs, practices, and customs are in fundamental opposition to the gospel and which ones can be safely categorised as belonging to the range of the adiaphora.

Before de Nobili there had been few attempts to comprehend the intricacies of Hindu theology, and the missionaries had directed most of their efforts in trying to overcome what they saw as the crucial obstacle to conversion, namely, caste. The question that was put to those who sought baptism was, ‘Do you want to enter the parangi (western) community?’, and to Hindus whose social existence was traditionally lived out within the constraints of caste purity, an affirmative answer to this query would entail having to share ties with those characterised by ‘unclean’ practices such as eating beef (Bayly 1989: 389). However, once he settled in the temple town of Madurai in south India in 1606, de Nobili started learning Sanskrit, the ‘Latin of the Brahmans’, and reading the Sanskrit texts of the Brahman ‘doctors’. He began to dress like a Brahman sannyāsin, employed Brahman cooks, kept away from ‘polluting’ meat and alcohol, and avoided contact with the ‘lower’ castes (Neill 1984: 281). Following Thomas Aquinas, de Nobili believed that before certain actions could be condemned as ‘pagan’ one had to take note of the goal (finis) towards which they were directed because it was the intention with which they were performed that made them subject to moral approval or censure (Zupanov 1999). Consequently, he made a distinction between the ‘religious’ aspects of Hinduism which had to be rejected and its ‘social’ dimensions expressed through its customs that were theologically ‘indifferent’. Certain practices such as the use of sandal paste, the keeping of a tuft of hair (kudumi), and the wearing of the sacred thread were simply ‘social’ conventions which had to be carefully distinguished from the ‘religious’ errors of pagan ‘idolatry’. De Nobili would seem to have set the tone for the Catholic attitude to caste which was somewhat more relaxed than the Protestant. An early instance of this contrast appears in a complaint made by the Reverend H. Williams of the CMS at the centenary conference of Protestant missions in 1888:

Ten years ago we had a great caste disturbance in our [Protestant] Church. The [Roman Catholic] priests were ready. At once they came in and began trying to reap a harvest, saying that it was utterly wrong for Protestant Missions to try to keep caste out of the Christian Church. They said, ‘Keep your caste and become Roman Catholics’,

(Johnston 1888: vol. 1, 86)

However, the Catholic view that caste distinctions were a matter of ‘indifference’ in the Church did not always smoothly lead to more converts but, in fact, was the cause of various clashes between the different castes.

One instance of how the ‘lower’ castes, through various tussles with the missionaries and the ‘higher’ castes over the issues of caste rank and precedence, achieved some degree of success in their moves towards social elevation concerns the brick wall in the Holy Family Church built in 1872 in Vadakkankulam in Tamil Nadu. This wall separated the ‘lower’ caste Shanars on the left-hand side from the ‘higher’ caste converts on the right, and a decree passed soon after declared that only the ‘higher’ caste Vellalas could serve at the mass, sing hymns, and carry sacred regalia during the festival of the Assumption. The Shanars who were thereby denied the ceremonial honours they had been demanding and were instead grouped together with the ‘untouchables’ now turned to other Church organisations such as the Catholics in Goa and the Anglican missionaries from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In the face of this threat that the Shanars would switch their ecclesiastical affiliation, the Jesuits offered in 1877 some limited gains in caste rank to the Shanars who gradually began to demand access to the right-hand side of the Church during ceremonies (Bayly 1989: 437–52). Another case where members of the ‘lower’ castes were able, within the Catholic Church, to assert their autonomy and to appropriate the signs of dominance was the movement among the Pallars for a more dominant role in Church festivals. During the nineteenth century, they had made significant economic gains through investment of capital or jobs in the police and the military, and found in the Catholic Church, with its ideal of religious equality, an institutional context where they could assert their demands for a ritual status comparable to that of the ‘higher’ castes. In 1919, the seating arrangements were altered to allow the Pallars greater equality in receiving the sacraments at the St James festival. After a series of violent conflicts over several decades, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) took a democratising stance in 1981, abolishing caste privileges during the festival which was now to be organised by a committee of members of all castes. While this declaration resulted in a widespread boycott of the festival by the ‘higher’ castes, the festival itself lost its effectiveness as an arena for social mobilisation, and the Pallars began to seek other means of securing a social status proportionate to their economic position, for instance by appealing to the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution (Mosse 1994).

It is therefore clear that the somewhat simplistic view that the ‘lower’ castes were poached by Christian missionaries needs to be qualified: firstly, missionaries, depending on their Catholic or Protestant affiliations, had different views not only of the nature of caste itself but also of whether their preaching should be directed at the ‘higher’ or the ‘lower’ castes, and, secondly, members of the ‘lower’ castes themselves often played an active role in negotiating, as it were, the terms of the transfer through intense conflicts with the missionaries over status and rank. In fact, it is sometimes charged that Catholic missionaries in particular gave too much significance to caste in this transaction, and divided the Church into the two groups of ‘Brahmin Christians’ and ‘Dalit Christians’. For instance, the missionaries in Goa arrived from a hierarchically structured European society, in which they themselves occupied the higher ranks, and they seemed to have been particularly favourable to the conversion of the members of the ‘higher’ castes, who were given administrative jobs and various privileges in the Catholic rituals (Robinson 2003: 48). Therefore, Dalits who moved into Christianity with the hope of escaping various types of caste discriminations have often experienced ‘not only disappointment but tension because of the evident gap between a religious rhetoric of equality and a social praxis of discrimination’ (Amaladoss 1997: 23). Christians of Scheduled Caste Origin (CSCO) suffer from numerous discriminations from ‘upper caste’ Christians in some churches – they are denied participation in the choir, they have separate seating arrangements, they receive sacraments such as baptism after the other Christians, they cannot interdine or intermarry with their ‘higher caste’ co-religionists, and sometimes they are even given different cemeteries. Indeed, this gulf between ideality and actual practice is often accurately noted by Hindu critics of conversions to Christianity: ‘Unwittingly they are conceding that a Dalit remains a Dalit even after becoming a Christian and thus proving that the claims of equality in Christianity is an untruth, a fraud’ (Indian Bibliographic Centre 1999: 84).

However, recent observations made by the CBCI show that the Catholic Church has adopted a much more strident stance against the persistence of the ‘caste mentality’ in Christian life. After Vatican II, the various meetings of the CBCI at Bangalore (1968), Nagpur (1971) and Patna (1972) expressed the view that a fundamental aspect of the ‘inculturation’ of Christianity is an active engagement with the socio-political realities of oppression and injustice within which millions of Indians live out their daily existence (Mattam 1997: 59). In 1981, it noted that the continuation of caste discrimination was a denial of Christianity – that the delay in its removal was more than merely a question of human rights, but fundamentally a betrayal of the Christian vocation (Stanislaus 1999: xxviii). As a matter of fact, the division between the two groups of the ‘higher’ caste and the ‘lower’ caste Christians in the Roman Catholic Church, which can be traced to de Nobili’s distinction between religious errors that had to be removed and merely social structures such as caste which could be retained, continued to plague even the Protestant churches during the colonial era. By 1900, the Protestant missions had become intensely focused on the concerns of the ‘lower’ castes, so much so that, as G. Oddie notes, ‘the casual observer might well have been excused for thinking that the churches existed solely to serve the needs of the depressed, the deprived and the outcastes’ (Oddie 1977: 69). Protestant missionaries too had to struggle with the caste question within their churches: they often complained that the ‘higher’ caste converts were not accommodating towards converts from the ‘lower’ castes, but if they tried to be heavy-handed in uprooting caste divisions, the converts ceded in large numbers from their Church, sometimes joining another Church where such distinctions were more acceptable or moving back towards Hinduism (Oddie 1977: 53–4). Nevertheless, Protestant missionaries often insisted that converts renounce certain social customs and rules of endogamy connected with caste that they had carried over into the churches. More specifically, they sometimes demanded that they should demonstrate their renunciation of caste by participating in a ‘love-feast’ with fellow-Christians where the food was usually cooked by a ‘lower’ caste person.

On many occasions, however, it was the converts who retained the upper hand, by searching out churches where they could, as it were, take Christianity and keep their caste too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the ‘lower’ caste Nadars in Tamil Nadu moved to Christianity in large numbers, often by villages, and so did not run the risk of being outcasted by the community. Such Christian Nadars continued to maintain marriage alliances with their Hindu caste fellows and though they would dine with a Hindu Nadar they would not sit at the same table with a Christian of a ‘lower’ caste, leading a pastor to complain: ‘Caste sticks to the people as closely as their skins.’ (Quoted in Hardgrave 1969: 91). Numerous anthropological studies of lived Christianity from various parts of the country point to the resilience of caste-groupings within the churches, and these cases of ‘caste in Christianity’ highlight the point that the responses of the converts – whether from a ‘higher’ or a ‘lower’ caste – have often been shaped by their search for identity, rank, and privilege within environments stratified along the lines of economic status and power.

The question of ‘conversion’

The motives of the converts

While ‘lower’ caste converts to Christianity were often involved in power struggles with their missionaries over issues of status and rank in the churches, they were themselves subjected to fierce criticism from the Hindu intelligentsia for having allegedly succumbed to material inducements. A recurring charge against such ‘rice Christians’ has been that their conversion was the product not of a reflective conscious decision on their part but of the exploitation of their poverty and ignorance by the missionaries who had employed deceptive tactics. To analyse this charge, we need to investigate three interconnected issues: (a) whether the historical data supports the claim that the sole or dominant motive in conversions was the prospect of material improvement, (b) the implicit understanding of conversion that underlies the claim that to promise material welfare to the converts is to resort to a fraudulent tactic, and (c) the crucial term ‘conversion’ itself.

Social historians of conversions to Christianity have pointed out that the motives of the converts were often of a mixed nature, including the hope for temporal advantages and social security. Missionaries themselves often acknowledged that the incentives for conversion among the natives were not always thoroughly ‘spiritual’. Indeed, as Daniel Potts notes, ‘One of the most difficult and indeed insoluble problems connected with a study of missionary enterprise is to determine how many of the converts … were sincere in their resolve to become Christians’ (Potts 1967: 41). The missionary preoccupation with the ‘mixed motives’ of their possible converts emerges clearly during the mass conversions of the ‘lower’ caste Chuhras in the Punjab during the 1880s. On their part, the Chuhras were attracted to Christianity not only because of the possibility of entering into an egalitarian community but also because they saw the missionaries as more benevolent patrons than their landlords. The missionaries, however, not only turned down their requests for material assistance but also pointed out to them that they were in the country to provide ‘spiritual bread’ and that any patron-client relationship between them and the converts must be stamped out (Webster 2002: 103). Around a decade later in 1909, the Revd Peachey, who was associated with the CMS in and around Hyderabad, too would note temporal concerns as the primary motivation for conversion: ‘As I have repeatedly stated, the movement [among the ‘lower’ caste Waddars and Erkalas] is a social one. The chief desire seems to be to escape police worry and supervision and the position is not without great anxiety’ (Quoted in Oddie 1977: 76).

Notwithstanding the concern of the missionaries, and occasionally the converts themselves, regarding the ‘purity’ of motives, the prospect of economic advantage, while it played an important role in bringing some individuals towards Christianity, was seldom the only one: there were many other powerful incentives such as the quest for dignity and self-respect. In a study of conversions to Christianity among the Satnamis in present-day Chhatisgarh, Chad Bauman notes a wide range of motives ranging from the prospects of non-degrading employment, food during famines, and debt relief. Some of the Satnamis even perceived Christianity as an escape route from expensive rituals relating to weddings and funerals (Bauman 2008: 77–81). This mixture of religious and material interests can be seen also in the reports of an American missionary John Clough, who joined the ongoing relief measures during the famine of 1877–78 in the Telugu country, and took up a contract for digging a section of the Buckingham canal. He discovered that the ‘lower’ caste Madigas did not want to take up work on it fearing that they would be oppressed because of their caste status. However, in his camp, the Madigas were well-treated and when large numbers of Madigas came forth to seek baptism after the famine Clough believed that what they sought was primarily not material benefit but the recognition of their human dignity (Forrester 1977: 42). Many other reports by missionaries working among the ‘lower’ castes in different parts of the country substantiate the point that their movements towards Christianity were directed by a complex of ‘spiritual’ reasons and the hope of obtaining justice and protection in cases of oppression. Missionaries often noted that though the promotion of the material welfare of the ‘lower’ castes was not their immediate aim, the relative temporal advantages that the converts enjoyed often made a good impression on their non-Christian neighbours. A similar mix of motivations was recorded by the CMS in the members of a ‘lower’ caste called the Kartabhajas whose movement towards Christianity was accelerated by a famine in 1838 when about 3,000 of them came forward for baptism. Missionaries were aware that they had sought baptism for a variety of motivations; for instance, one of the converts declared that in the Church was to be found ‘pity, as also money and rice, which they did not obtain from the zamindars’ (Quoted in Forrester 1977: 59). Nevertheless, large numbers had relapsed by 1857, and the persistence of caste distinctions so appalled the missionary James Vaughan in 1875 that he called for a litmus-test communal dinner among the ‘Hindu Christians’, the ‘Mussulman Christians’ and the ‘Mochie (leather-worker) Christians’. The test led to large-scale defections to the Catholic Church though some remained with the CMS and accepted Vaughan’s strictures on commensality. This conflict over caste divisions created a favourable impression of these Protestant missionaries among the ‘Mochie Christians’ who believed that the former would stand for the cause of the ‘lower’ castes.

From certain Hindu perspectives, however, it is alleged that to provide any such temporal securities is to practise deception on individuals from the ‘lower’ castes who are supposed to be incapable of considered reflection on the options available to them. That is, their conversion, so runs the allegation, is not truly a ‘spiritual’ act but merely an expedient step to avail of better financial prospects. However, for the converts who saw in what the missionaries were offering them an undifferentiated ‘package deal’, the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘temporal’ motivations were often inseparably connected with one another. For their part, the missionaries often claimed that their primary reason for approaching the ‘lower’ castes was simply that they had been commanded to do so by Christ himself, who had spent time with the outcastes of his own time. Responding to the objection that most of the converts to Christianity came from a ‘lower’ caste background, Richard Temple declared: ‘I must say that this is not a very Christian objection, because we have divine authority for specially attending to this class, and one of the distinguishing marks of our religion is that it has to be preached to the poor, the degraded and the miserable’ (Temple 1883: 134). Further, the missionaries sometimes noted that Christianity conveyed good news not just for the spiritual afflictions of the soul but also for the welfare of the whole human person. Pointing out that when the news spread that Jesus possessed great powers of healing, and many of the blind, the lame, and the maimed came to him, Duff asked rhetorically whether they did so for the sole purpose of hearing the words of salvation:

Did the blessed Saviour reproach them for the secularity of their motives? Did he send them away as betraying a state of worldly feeling … ? Did he sharply rebuke them, for supposing that he had anything to do with the physical, the corporeal, and the temporal comforts of man?

(Duff 1839: 83)

Ironically enough, as we noted earlier, Christian missionaries themselves sometimes accepted the theological position that since salvation was to be understood in terms of the redemption of the soul, the material well-being of the body was not immediately relevant to missionary activity. These two mission trends among Protestant groups in India have been termed by F. Hrangkhuma as ‘mission from above’ and ‘mission from below’. The first is favoured by theologians and missiologists who emphasise the trans-cultural themes of the Christian message: Christ has come into a world of sinful humanity with the good news of salvation and those who have responded to him are set onward on a journey to him, a journey that awaits it eschatological culmination. The second trend is focused on the elimination of the socio-economic and the political injustices that have marginalised ‘downtrodden’ groups such as women, indigenous peoples, and others. The key themes here are a deep engagement with the ‘dense’ contexts from within which oppressed human beings cry out for liberation and the fostering of alliances among them, irrespective of their religious affiliations, to develop new communities characterised by more harmonious, peaceful, and ecological modes of existence (Hrangkhuma 1997: 51–4). The gradual shift from the first trend to the second played a crucial role in shaping Protestant missionary approaches to the ‘lower’ castes and the concern with their spiritual as well as material welfare. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, many of the Christian missionaries approached the ‘lower’ castes with a gospel that was strongly accented with the Anglo-European Evangelical themes of individual regeneration that involved shaking off the bondage of sinfulness and turning with hope towards the God of salvation. However, a theology with somewhat different motifs emerges in three statements produced in 1936 and 1937 by some Protestants concerning the Christian approach towards the ‘depressed classes’ in the wake of controversies surrounding the ‘politics of numbers’ as it applied to conversions from Hinduism (Webster 1992: 191–9). The gospel of Christ, it was claimed, is addressed to the whole human person and Christ himself is present in the world bringing about transformations at all levels, including individual regeneration and social elevation. Roman Catholic theology too has moved away from earlier understandings of Church growth with a one-dimensional emphasis on the saving of individual souls. The Indian Jesuit Samuel Rayan points out that factors such as the emphasis on socio-economic liberation, one of the guiding concerns of Marxism, which has inspired many human beings to seek social justice; the association of the Christian churches with the colonial enterprise; the realisation that religious systems have often fostered an attitude of passivity towards gross injustices; the awareness that newer forms of colonialism continue to operate throughout the world in relationships between the ‘First World’ and the ‘Third World’, and so on have all have led to a re-examination of various dichotomies such as the salvation of the soul and the temporal needs of the body. Rayan insists that the ‘mission field’, properly understood, is the entire world with its dense textures of human relationships, social institutions, political structures, economic establishments, and value systems which have not become wholly informed by fraternal love: ‘Mission is not to take individuals from earth and rocket them into heaven. It is rather to build a beautiful community here on earth, or to use the words of Jesus, to build the kingdom of God on earth’ (Rayan 1979: 103).

The various dimensions of conversion

While the mainline Christian churches have, over the last fifty years or so, come to view salvation, mission, and service to one’s neighbour as integrally connected, this ‘materialist’ slant to Christian preaching of the Kingdom of God is picked out for sharp criticism by Hindu critics who allege that such evangelism involves promises of temporal benefits which are ‘fraudulent’ incentives to conversion. There are at least two presuppositions that structure these allegations that appeals to material interests are devoid of true spirituality, on the grounds that such appeals are ‘baits’ offered to unwary individuals who lack discriminative capacities to see through these ruses.

The first assumption is that the trans-empirical fulfilment of human existence should be conceived of entirely in terms of the transformation of a spiritual component, so that any concern with material welfare is an anti-spiritual distraction. However, according to the ‘incarnationalist’ conceptualisations of the gospel that we have noted in the previous section, the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’ cannot be quarantined from each other; hence, an individual’s spiritual redemption and material well-being, on these conceptions at least, should be viewed as parts of a unified whole. Consequently, whether or not a concern for material prosperity is properly ‘spiritual’ depends on the understanding of what, in fact, constitutes the ‘spiritual’ life. The crucial debate here is ultimately one over the metaphysics of the human person – religious worldviews that are tied to a substantial dualism of ‘spirit’ and ‘body’ (some traditions of Hinduism and some forms of Christianity) tend to view with suspicion talk of material welfare in a spiritual context, but others with a more ‘holist’ understanding of the nature of human embodiment would not view such well-being as irrelevant to the spiritual life. As Gunnel Cederlof points out in connection with the charge that converts during the so-called mass movements were not true Christians for their conversion was guided by material and not spiritual reasons: ‘This is a normative position, sometimes slightly moralizing. The question ‘Did they come for material or spiritual reasons?’ presupposes an ideological (or theological) position in which the human being is divided into body and soul’ (Cederlof 1997: 184).

The second is an inadequate notion of conversion as a one-off event, triggered in naive individuals by external agents through fraudulent means. Conversion is improperly characterised as merely an external transformation into which the converts are willy-nilly dragged, the converts themselves regarded as incapable of conscious intentional action and instead as directed by extrinsic forces which they cannot control. For when individuals encounter the advocates of a different religious way of life, the encounter often leads to some degree of conflict, reciprocation, and adaptation, and the converts accept from the message brought by the former what they want and reject what they find undesirable. It is more accurate to think of conversion not as an instantaneous rejection of one’s religious status, but a durative process over which one acquires newer sets of beliefs, roles, and identities (Lamb and Bryant 1999). Therefore, our understanding of the phenomenon of conversion must deal with the following questions which are, of course, interconnected: what are the different dimensions and stages of the process called ‘conversion’ and what are the possible sources of benefit for individuals when they ‘convert’? (Heredia 2007).

Religious conversion has been studied from various angles by psychologists who have focused on the convert’s sense of crisis and mental development, sociologists who have highlighted the social determinants of the process and Christian theologians who, without ignoring the former perspectives, have spoken of the role of God in the transformation (Malony and Southard 1992). Lewis Rambo has argued that in order to grasp the personal, social, cultural, and religious dimensions of the context within which the multifaceted, sequential transformation called conversion occurs, we need a framework that would include perspectives from sociology, social anthropology, and religious studies. Describing ‘conversion’ as ‘a process of religious change that takes place in a dynamic force field of people, events, ideologies, institutions, expectations, and orientations’, Rambo proposes a process-oriented model in which conversion proceeds through stages which are interconnected in that shifts across these can take place: context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences (Rambo 1993: 5). Under context he places both the overall systems of political institutions, economic organisations, and religious associations, and the more intimate world of an individual’s family, friends, and ethnic group, and whether or not an individual undergoes conversion, and if she does the direction in which she moves, are issues that are vitally related to the sort of complex negotiations that she makes through these spheres of influence. This transformation is triggered by certain crises and conflicts in an individual’s life, such as a vague sense of unease that there might be something beyond the empirical world, and when someone in quest of a new religious option comes into contact with its advocate, a series of dialectical relationships can be set in motion. In the subsequent stage of interaction, the convert begins to learn the new religious system, its beliefs, practices, rituals and organisational structures, and a new reconstructed self gradually emerges with varying degrees of continuity with the old deconstructed self. The convert is introduced into a new sphere of influence where she participates in the ritual life of the community, acquires its theological vocabulary, and takes on specific roles within it. At the stage of commitment, the potential convert demonstrates her conviction, often through a public ceremony, to turn away from certain aspects of her previous life and to become a member of the community that she is moving into. This is usually followed by various transformations, which are sometimes dramatic but which usually appear in a cumulative fashion only over a longer duration in the convert’s life, such as a change in the pattern of her beliefs and activities, in her self-understanding of her location in the cosmos, and in her sense of purpose in the world (Rambo 1993).

The key insights of Rambo can be applied to an analysis of the different factors that operated on the ‘lower’ and the ‘higher’ caste converts to Christianity in colonial India. Members of both the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ castes had to weigh the options – the ‘pull’ factors in terms of possible benefits and the ‘push’ factors in terms of consequent social alienation – before seeking baptism. While Christianity held out several promises for them, in the form not only of protection from police atrocities, education in mission schools, and so on, but also some sort of liberation from the various evil powers which were feared to populate the religious world, on accepting Christianity they might have to endure social ostracism and associate with Christians from other caste backgrounds. As the Reverend James Vaughan of the CMS noted in 1876:

The higher his caste, the heavier the cross which threatens him. To be loathed by all who once loved him, to be mourned for as dead by her who bore him … to be doomed for life to social ostracism as a polluted thing, is the penalty of conversion which caste inflicts….

(Vaughan 1876: 37)

Vaughan’s claim is supported by studies which have shown that for members of the ‘higher’ castes conversion often led to a sharp break from their familial backgrounds whereas for the ‘lower’ castes, where conversion sometimes involved entire families or villages, the rupture was more gradual. Social mobility is therefore often influenced by the context: certain milieus allow a greater degree of innovation than others during times of transformation when myths, rituals, and symbols are reconstituted so as to make them more adaptive to the changing times and environments. Therefore conversions in late colonial India cannot be pinned down to purely economic considerations: even in the case of Hindus who experienced various degrees of alienation from their cultural milieu, only a handful came out to receive baptism by ‘breaking caste’ (Copley 1997: 54).

The agency of the converts

Further, Rambo’s basic thesis that while conversion may be instigated by some specific event or series of events and in some cases bring about radical transformations in a person’s life, it should be understood as a progressive, multi-layered, and interactive process whose course runs through several stages, can be substantiated by analysing the processes at work on five converts in colonial India: Nehemiah Goreh, Master Ram Chandra, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, H. A. Krishna Pillai and Pandita Ramabai. While some scholars have viewed conversion through the Pauline trope of ‘rupture’, as bringing about a decisive break with local contexts of action, conviction and language, others have criticised the view that conversion produces such a radical discontinuity, instead emphasising the ongoing tensions, patchy overlaps, and contested negotiations between a gradually emerging Christian identity and pre-Christian beliefs and practices. The conversions to Christianity of these figures, sometimes resulting in hybrid Hindu–Christian identities, were influenced by some specific socio-political forces as well as by the theological contours of the Christianity that was offered to them. As we shall see, these cases illustrate the point that the crucial question ‘why?’ in connection with conversion will receive different answers depending on a wide variety of factors such as the (potential) convert’s location on the socio-economic spectrum and their ability to interweave their newly-acquired conceptions of the nature of ultimate reality and human existence with the older ones.

In a study of two Hindu converts to Christianity, Nehemiah Goreh (baptised 1848) and Master Ram Chandra (baptised 1852) and two Muslim converts, Avril Powell demonstrates that they went through a crisis which was (partly) resolved through conversion, which must be understood not as a single event but as an ongoing process that gradually brought about a spiritual re-orientation. Moreover, these crises, which often emerged as a result of encounters, debates, and disputations initiated by Christian missionaries or Indian Christians, had intellectual, cognitive, spiritual, social, and economic components. Whereas Goreh continued to be plagued by bouts of depression and doubt even after baptism, often requesting the Reverend William Smith for rational ‘evidences’ of the truth of Christianity, Ram Chandra seems to have undergone a more decisive change from an agnostic theism through a study of the New Testament to an affirmation of the lordship of Christ. At the socio-cultural level, Goreh was baptised secretly, fearing social ostracism from his family and relatives, and Ram Chandra was concerned about his financial problems and the difficulties of marrying off his daughters on becoming an ‘open Christian’ (Powell 1997: 18–31).

The European clothes of the Catholic religion should be removed as early as possible. It must put on the Hindu garment to be acceptable to the Hindus. This transformation can be effected only by bands of Indian missionaries preaching the holy faith in the Vedantic language, holding devotional meetings in the Hindu way and practising the virtue of poverty conformably to Hindu asceticism.

(Quoted in Lipner and Gispert–Sauch: 1991–2002, vol. 2, 207)

Further, from around 1900 he began to express strong nationalist sentiments in the Sophia and the Twentieth Century, and four years later he started the Bengali newspaper Sandhya in which he began to draw upon Hindu symbols and images to articulate more forcefully anti-British views (Kopf 1979: 211). He became increasingly disenchanted with the Catholic Church, especially because the papal representative in India, Monsignor Zaleski, who had looked unfavourably on the figure of an Indian Catholic in the garb of a Hindu ascetic with a Sanskritic name, had forbidden his Sophia and Twentieth Century for Catholic audiences, and poured cold water on his project to set up an institute for training Indian Christian missionaries who would tour the country in the style of Hindu ascetics.

In the case of Pandita Ramabai, we notice a similar range of forces at play – an intellectual searching for a faith that she hoped would go beyond the boundaries of caste and gender, combined with a desire to forge a distinctive space within the communion of the Anglican Church without any ecclesiastical interference. Ramabai’s father Anant Shastri Dongre remained something of a rebel and a pilgrim throughout his life, and with their children (Ramabai being the youngest) the couple toured the country, visiting pilgrimage centres, reciting the Purāṇas, and living on the alms and the gifts of their listeners (Kosambi 2000: 115–18). After her parents died, she arrived in Calcutta in 1878, where she was soon drawn into the circles of the Brahmo Samaj and, at the request of some of the pandits, began to deliver public lectures on the duties of women as laid down in the śāstras. As she began to study the Mahābhārata, the Dharmaśāstras as well as the books of the ‘higher’ caste men of her time, she realised that they were in unison in their belief that all women were unholy and that the only way they could attain liberation was through the worship of their husbands, by utterly surrendering their wills to them. Later, in 1883, she set sail for England and was received by Sister Geraldine of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage, who took her under her fold and became her ‘spiritual mother’. She was introduced to the work of the Sisters among the sick and infirm women in London, and reflecting on the condition of such women in Hindu society in the light of her reading of John’s gospel, she became convinced that Christ was the saviour who could ‘transform and uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India and of every land’ (Kosambi 2000: 307–8). Although she was baptised in 1883, it was eight years later when reading an Anglican clergyman Mr Haslam’s ‘From Death unto Life’ that she realised that though she had found the Christian ‘religion’, she had not yet encountered Christ, the ‘Life of the religion’. She had, for example, believed that baptism had in a somewhat mechanical way wiped out all her sins and that her personal determination to give up sin was sufficient for her to be forgiven. Now she began to understand that, as she put it, through his redemptive death Christ had atoned for the sins of humanity, and that it was by surrendering herself through faith in her redeemer that she could be reborn of the Holy Spirit.

However, Ramabai’s movement into the Church through baptism was only the first moment in a tortuous process of doctrinal innovation that was marked by fractious disputes with the Sisters, during which she tried to develop a form of Christianity that was closer to her own spiritual inclinations and that would be grounded on the scriptural text that in Christ there was ‘neither male nor female’. The Sisters, exasperated with her ‘arrogance’, often felt that she was fashioning a Christianity that bore no resemblance to their own, and their attempts to draw her closer to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church were countered by her response that in religious matters she had her own voice and free will in choosing her direction. Ramabai repeatedly emphasised in her letters that the Church she had joined was ‘catholic’, that is, universal, and because through her baptism she had bound herself to God, she would not allow the Sisters to interfere with her judgement or hem her in with matters of ecclesiastical law. When Sister Geraldine expressed her opinion that Ramabai was yet a child who required careful guardianship lest her vanity, ignorance, spitefulness, and immaturity drive her away from Anglican orthodoxy, Ramabai stoutly resisted such attempts to draw her into the space of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and demanded a more dialogical relationship with the Sisters: ‘So if you agree not to be a lawyer but a searcher after truth in all your arguments I will most gladly bring my difficulties before you’ (Quoted in Burton 1998: 102). One of the issues over which she was drawn into a serious controversy with the Anglican Church concerned her appointment to teach boys at a college. This was severely criticised by the visiting bishops of Lahore and Bombay who claimed that she would become a ‘denationalised’ English lady and cause a scandal among the native men and women. When Sister Geraldine urged her to heed the advice of those who were seasoned judges in Indian affairs, she replied: ‘I know India and its people … better than any foreigners … Your advisers, whoever they may be, have no right to decide anything for me …’ (Quoted in Shah 1977: 50–1). The series of interchanges that took place between Ramabai, Sister Geraldine and several Anglican clergymen demonstrate that their personal relationships, even in England, were structured by the notions of colonial and gendered hierarchy that often grounded the social interactions between missionaries and native converts in India. Ramabai’s vehement responses, however, threatened to subvert the ‘natural order’ characterised by the submission that was expected of both the native convert to the English ecclesiastical hierarchy and of the Sisters to the male clergy. As Gauri Viswanathan notes, ‘When reprimanded that it was indelicate of her – a Hindu widow – to teach men or visit “gentlemen friends”, especially given her own orthodox background, Ramabai rebuts with one of the most sustained anti-Orientalist diatribes in nineteenth-century letters’ (Viswanathan 1998: 151). The British missionaries were probably highly discomfited with the ‘dissenting’ views of a convert whom they had recovered from the lands of the benighted ‘heathen’ only to realise that she was turning her gaze towards them, minutely examining the ruptures and the frictions below the surfaces of Anglican orthodoxy.

These five instances of conversion to Christianity from Hindu life-worlds demonstrate that a religious story becomes meaningful for converts when it intersects at ‘impression points’ with certain aspects of their lives, so that on realising the import of this religious narrative to their own existence they are able to internalise it and domesticate it as vitally relevant (Stromberg 1985: 60–61). These points are the loci of intersection between a new self-understanding, an understanding of the symbolic system within which the individual is located and a feeling of commitment to the new set of symbols. In his study of the spread of Christianity during the 1830s and the 1840s among the Kartabhajas around the town of Krishnanagar in Bengal, G. A. Oddie demonstrates that one of the reasons why they were receptive to the Christian message was because they possessed indigenous belief-systems with certain parallels to the Christian themes of the ‘unity of God’ and the ‘incarnation’. The Kartabhajas claimed that their sect was rooted in the devotional movement started by Caitanya in the sixteenth century, and among their distinctive beliefs and practices were the worship of the one God Viṣṇu who would ‘incarnate’ himself into the world to establish righteousness in it, their opposition to caste hierarchies (even though this antagonism was not demonstrated through a public rejection of caste distinctions), and their reverence to their guru, the Karta, who like Jesus, was supposed to possess supernatural powers. Moreover, the Kartabhajas had a long and fluid history of changes in religious affiliation, for while some of their ancestors had become Kartabhajas, others had converted to Islam and were now moving in the direction of Christianity (Oddie 1997: 63–9). On the other hand, writing about the conversion of the ‘lower’ caste Pulayas in south India to the Anglican Church in the middle of the nineteenth century, George Oommen argues that one of the reasons why the communication of Christian themes to them was minimal was because these doctrines were sharply opposed at several points to their pre-existing belief system. Their religious universe was multi-tiered with a supreme inaccessible deity at its apex ruling over a host of subordinate agents such as the malignant spirits of the dead ancestors, and the subservient status of these agencies reflected their own subsidiary rank in the social hierarchy. Consequently, they were apparently not able to appreciate the Christian proclamation of an incarnate God who is approachable: ‘Indeed, such a notion of God was in complete contradiction to their traditional religious experience’ (Oommen 1997: 87). Nevertheless, some Pulayas were attracted by certain motifs such as the loving God who was the creator of human beings of all castes, a Christianity that recognised no caste distinctions but taught all human beings to love one another as brothers and sisters, and the power of the living God who would prevail over all demoniac forces.

The ‘lower’ castes and mass movements

The active role sometimes played by the ‘lower’ castes in their conversion has been noted also by historians studying mass movements in the subcontinent towards the Arya Samaj, Buddhism, and occasionally Islam. The Arya Samaj (established in 1875) started the practice of śuddhi or ritual purification through which the ‘untouchables’ who were regarded as a source of pollution by the caste Hindus were given access to Vedic rites as well to village wells, taught the sacred Gāyatrī mantra, and allowed to wear the sacred thread. The rise of the śuddhi movement has been characterised as a ‘mimetic reaction’, fuelled partly by census reports which indicated the decline of the category of ‘Hindus’ in numerical strength through conversions to Christianity. Though śuddhi was based on Hindu ritual practices, it emulated certain aspects of missionary activities to seek out the ‘lower’ castes which were moving away from the Hindu fold into other socio-religious systems (Jaffrelot 2010: 146). Nevertheless, śuddhi was not institutionalised, being regarded as an exceptional measure to meet crises, and when in the 1920s the perceived threat of conversions to Islam and Christianity diminished, the movement lost its momentum. However, the initial move towards śuddhi came from the ‘untouchables’ themselves: it was after they had tried for a year to join the Aryas in Jullundur that some of the ‘untouchable’ Rahtias were accepted by the Lahore branch (Jordens 1977: 152). The case of Ambedkarite Buddhism too is well documented, and shows that Ambedkar’s (1891–1956) move towards Buddhism was not a reflex reaction to monetary incentives but the outcome of a carefully considered decision that he arrived at after analysing the various options which he thought were available to the ‘untouchables’. In a classic definition, A. D. Nock viewed conversion as ‘the re-orientation of the soul of the individual, his [sic] deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right’ (Nock 1933: 7). A ‘re-orientation’ of this type can be noted in Ambedkar’s unequivocal rejection of the conceptual baggage associated with the Brahmanical understanding of karma in his declaration after he became a Buddhist: ‘I have no faith in the philosophy of reincarnation; and it is wrong and mischievous to say that Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu … I will not perform Shraddha [traditional Hindu funeral rituals] … Buddhism is a true religion …’ (Quoted in Keer 1981: 500). Eleanor Zelliot has drawn up a list of the ‘necessities’ which Ambedkar believed any religion that the ‘lower’ caste Mahars in Maharashtra would convert to should possess: ‘absolute equality, rationalism and intellectual creativity, the possibility of converts continuing their newly-won special privileges from the government as Depressed Classes … a birthplace in India and a position of respect there’ (Zelliot 1977: 126). Therefore, to the ‘untouchables’ of his time, Ambedkar declared: ‘My conversion is not for any material gain … Nothing but spirituality is at the base of my conversion … However, for you, for spiritual as well as for material gains conversion is a must’ (Ambedkar 2007: 30).

Nevertheless, the conversion of the ‘untouchables’ towards Buddhism or Christianity continues to be read simply as a response to financial pressures on the grounds that they allegedly do not possess any active agency and reflective powers and hence cannot be the dynamic subjects of their own struggles. The charge that the ‘lower’ castes lack such discriminative abilities was repeated during the much–publicised mass conversion of ‘untouchables’ in Meenakshipuram to Islam in February 1981. However, the testimonies of the converts themselves show that they were not forced by poverty to move to Islam. They were relatively educated and socially mobile and claimed that the repressions that they had suffered within the Hindu social system had led them to seek a path out of it (van der Veer 1994: 28). The cases that we have discussed highlight, therefore, the deficiencies of a ‘brainwashing’ model of conversion according to which it is the product of devious forces acting on unsuspecting individuals – for as we have noted, figures such as Brahmabandhab, Ramabai, and Ambedkar, as well as many members of the ‘lower’ castes, consciously sought to appropriate certain elements of the incoming messages and forged distinctive identities which were located at varying distances from orthodoxies, both the newer ones as well as the older (Snow and Machalek 1984).

Conversion and Hindutva

One of the reasons why from a ‘higher’ caste perspective Dalits and indigenous groups are often regarded as lacking the rational agential capacities to move out of contexts which the latter regard as oppressive is because of the widespread belief that the ‘Hindu system’ is truly ‘inclusive’, so that such moves are regarded as instigations by alien forces through fraudulent devices. When Hindu reformers argued for the uplift of the ‘lower’ castes, what was essentially required, according to them, was often not so much the dismantling of the classical system of varṇāśramadharma which divided individuals across four social orders and stations of life, but an attitudinal change on part of the ‘higher’ caste Hindus who had to undertake a process of atonement for the oppressions inflicted on the ‘untouchables’. The notion that it is the ‘higher’ castes who must bring about structural transformations on behalf of or in place of the Dalits, since the Dalits themselves are allegedly incapable of making any contributions in this regard, is one that is strongly criticised by many contemporary Dalit writers. Dalits have often viewed such ‘higher’ caste overtures as disguised attempts to co-opt their struggles against discrimination by inserting them into the caste hierarchy through the processes of Sanskritisation. According to M. N. Srinivas (1989), Sanskritisation refers to the set of processes through which a ‘lower’ caste imitates the beliefs and rituals of a ‘higher’ caste with the gradual consequence that this caste begins to acquire a higher social status in the caste hierarchy. Such a stance was condemned by Jagjivan Ram who called Hindu addresses to the ‘untouchables’ as ‘give-up-meat-and-develop-cleanliness lectures’, and claimed that having earlier reduced them to a sub-human status the campaigners were now simply adding insult to their injury (Ram 1980: 45). The reformist movements of this sort are read by James Massey as an indication that though some ‘higher’ caste Hindus are aware of the manifold brutalities and indignities suffered by the Dalits down the centuries, they do not have sufficient faith in the abilities of the latter to bring about radical changes in the institutional contexts within which these have been legitimised. Massey argues, however, that an act of true solidarity will be one where they reject the entire system which perpetuates this violence and come forward to work not for but with the Dalits (Massey 1997).

Whether or not the ‘lower’ castes were indeed capable of exercising agential capacities was, however, not always the main bone of contention between the rising Hindu intelligentsia on the one hand and the converts and the missionaries on the other. The main aspect of conversions to Christianity that often heckled the advocates of an emerging Hindu nationalism in the colonial period was the entrance of the converts into a new community which, in turn, implied the diminution of the number of Hindus. For instance, the census report for 1891 showed that between 1881 and 1891 the number of Christians in the Punjab had risen from 253 in 1881 to 9,711 in 1891, which provoked the following response from a member of the Arya Samaj:

Few people have any idea of the rapidity with which the number of the Indian Christian community is being swollen by the conversion of the people of the lowest castes. In fact if conversions go on at this rate there will no longer remain any ‘low castes’ at a not very distant date and the ‘higher castes’ will have to exert all their energies in protecting themselves from being pushed to the wall….

(Jones 1976: 144)

Though caste hierarchies existed in India before the colonial period, the British census operations that went underway from 1882 arguably helped to rigidify caste distinctions; similarly, the early administrators’ attempts to codify ‘Hindu’ and ‘Mohammedan’ law led, in due course, to the notion of a Hindu ‘majority’ engulfing a Muslim ‘minority’ and to the emergence of ‘communal electorates’. Therefore, the emergence of two distinct ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities, with their own leaders to represent them, was partly facilitated by colonial classifications which were instrumental in the rise of religious nationalisms (van der Veer 1994: 19–20). After the second half of the nineteenth century, there gradually emerged a public realm which became a highly contested site where religious power and violence began to be expressed around the issues of communal representation, voting blocs, and separate electorates. Consequently, efforts were made to clearly etch the boundaries of a ‘Hindu’ community because representation through religious community provided access to power and economic resources (Thapar 1989). Such concerns are reflected in a tract published by the Hindu Tract Society, founded in Madras in 1887, which raised the question as to why Muslims were not being converted to Christianity, and replied that the reason was that Muslims were strongly organised because of their sense of identity. Likewise, Hindus too ‘should not fight among themselves, calling themselves Thenkalais, Vadakalais, Saivites, Vaishnavites, Advaitins, Visishtadvaitins and Dvaitins; they should act as one man [sic] and oppose the Christian religion’ (Oddie 2010: 48). From the beginning of the twentieth century, therefore, the notion of a religious community began to play a progressively greater role on the socio-political terrain, and processes went apace of constructing proposed ‘imagined communities’ of ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, and ‘Sikhism’ out of various classes and regional groups, each involved in disparate struggles for status and self-expression.

The debates over the mass conversions of the ‘lower’ castes to Christianity and Buddhism – and the allegation that such conversions were driven by fraudulent means – have to be located in this political context, for with the British government’s creation of ‘communal’ Hindu and Muslim electorates the question of whether the ‘lower’ castes were to be regarded as Hindus became an intensely volatile matter. The movement of these castes towards other religions became a matter of great concern to figures involved in the consolidation of a Hindu community. Around this time, the Adivasis or the aboriginal peoples emerged as an increasingly important constituency, with the Hindu nationalists seeking to include them within the fold of Hinduism in opposition to the alleged ‘encroachments’ by Christian missionaries. The politics of conversion became a major anxiety for these consolidators of the Hindu nation, for conversions to Christianity seemed to reveal the domestic cracks in the solid front they sought to raise, and suggest that the boundaries between selves, communities, and nations are somewhat permeable (Viswanathan 1998). They alternately responded to these social upheavals sometimes by initiating programmes of Sanskritising reform and at other times instead by reaffirming the traditional hierarchies (Sarkar 2005). In their attempt to realise a civilisational unity that would go beyond the hetereogeneities of caste, region, gender, and class, their goal was the recovery of the holy land (puṇyabhūmi) of the indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent (Bhāratavarṣa). The emergence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded by K. B. Hedgewar at Nagpur in 1925, can be seen against this backdrop as an attempt to legitimise the Hindu nation, whose past glory it sought to reclaim against the religious others such as the Muslims and the Christians who were of ‘foreign’ origin. Specifically for V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966), who provided the theoretical impetus for Hindutva, India was the homeland of the Hindus, the members of the ‘Aryan’ race, who must stand united against foreigners such as Muslims as long as the latter refused to give up their alien religions and cultures. As the President of the Hindu Mahasabha from 1937 and 1944, Savarkar travelled through India to develop Hindu solidarity with the slogan: ‘Hinduise all politics and militarise all Hindudom’ (Quoted in McKean 1996: 71). Fearing that the Adivasis and the ‘untouchables’ would move towards Islam or Christianity, Hindu nationalists therefore started massive movements towards bringing these groups to declare their allegiances to the Hindu community. For instance, the Gait Circular, issued by the Imperial Commissioner E. A. Gait, directed the provincial commissioners to report the criteria employed to classify an individual as ‘a genuine Hindu’ and also suggested the introduction of separate tables in the 1911 census for groups referred to as ‘debatable Hindus’, such as the ‘untouchables’ and the ‘tribals’. In response, the ‘learned pandits’ of Benares, according to Lala Lajpat Rai, woke up one morning ‘to learn that their orthodoxy stood the chance of losing the allegiance of 6 crores of human beings who, the Government and its advisers were told, were not Hindus … The possibility of losing the untouchables has shaken the intellectual section of the Hindu community to its very depths …’ (Rai 1915: 124–5). Such concerns were also reflected in 1912 by the Gaikwar of Baroda, who was involved in work among the ‘depressed classes’: ‘Millions have in the past been driven … to desert Hinduism for the [Muslim] Crescent and the [Christian] Cross. Thousands are doing so every year. Can Hindus contemplate without alarm this annually increasing dimunition in their number?’ (Quoted in Webster 1992: 68).

However, the notion of a rigidly organised and monolithically structured entity called Hinduism, which gave rise to such concerns over the boundaries of the Hindu community, was, as we noted in earlier chapters, a product of complex intersections between Orientalist perspectives and indigenous appropriations of the former. Many contemporary scholars reject such monolithic conceptualisations of Hinduism and regard it in terms of various traditions which have existed in complex processes of polycentric interaction with one another. Heinrich von Stietencron (1991: 16) argues that we should see Hinduism as a civilisation that includes within itself a set of distinctive religious traditions that have developed patterns of interaction and co-existence over the centuries. Such an understanding of Hinduism as an assortment of many-layered, polymorphous and polyglot traditions enables us to see that ‘conversion’ in the subcontinent, whether to Jainism or Buddhism in classical India or to Sikhism or Christianity in the nineteenth century or to Buddhism in the post-independence period, was often an expression of dissent and challenge to the prevailing socio-religious formations. Historians who operate with the notion of a ‘traditional’ precolonial India have sometimes accepted the Dumontian perspective that the hierarchically ordered caste distinctions expressed the cooperative interdependence of the castes and enshrined a fundamentally religious vision of wholeness (Dumont 1980: 107). However, a number of scholars have argued that caste-based classifications could not have been propagated simply though the notions of purity and pollution; rather, one must emphasise the politico-economic frameworks within which such notions operate and highlight the economic power and control that the ‘higher’ castes have exercised over the ‘lower’ (Dirks 1987). Therefore, we need to emphasise both the prevalence of powerful Brahminical ritual and social hierarchies and the influence of streams of bhakti and other forms of spiritual egalitarianism which sought, to different degrees, to subvert notions of purity and pollution. As a matter of fact, ‘sectarian’ movements have been quite common in classical and medieval India, and also in the colonial regime, and they have encountered varying degrees of strain and opposition from the wider ‘orthopraxies’ of Hindu social life. For instance, Paul Dundas has argued that though Jainism is not usually classified as a missionary religion its spread throughout parts of classical India implies that it was concerned at some periods to re-orient individuals from their Vedic-Brahminical culture to the patterns of existence centred around the teachings of the Jain leaders (tīrthaṅkaras), especially Mahāvīra. On the basis of his analysis of some early Jain texts, Dundas writes that it is meaningful to speak of conversion in this context in the sense of an awakening. The convert becomes the awakened (pratibodhita) one who accepts the Jain teaching as emanating from a new source of authority, Mahāvīra (Dundas 2003: 128–34).

In short, we need to challenge the view that emerges in certain studies of Indian society through ‘equilibrium-adjustment’ models which overemphasise the elements of continuity, harmony, and stability across social strata, and sideline the points of discontinuities, stress, contradictions, conflicts, tensions, and fissures (Malik 1977: 1–11). Such approaches produce distorted images of Indian civilisations as largely based on unchanging ‘religious’ traditions, with ‘dysfunctional’ movements of dissent, protest, and reform as marginal aberrations. Instead, we need to underline the presence of various nonconformist movements, especially centred around egalitarian notions, which were expressed in different ways in socio-cultural, economic, and value systems. Groups centred around medieval figures such as Kabir and Guru Nanak promoted devotional identities that transcended the exclusive religious identities of the ‘Hindu’, centred around the Vedas, caste-identities and so on, and the ‘Turk’ associated with the Quran and so on. Consequently, in place of Hinduism as centred in an unchanging civilisational core, we should view it in more processual terms as composed of various dynamic layers of beliefs, practices, and institutions, some of which departed from idealised norms and ways of life (Larson 1997: 145). Such an understanding of Hinduism as a composite of civilisational patterns which, however, contains numerous instabilities, tensions, and points of contact with external influences enables us to see that while missionaries were sometimes engaged in drawing individuals away from their cultural backgrounds, it would be mistaken to see them as the sole agents in effecting such destabilisation. Missionaries should rather be seen as a catalyst in a wider picture with numerous criss-crossing factors which are present in all cultures, no matter how ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ they are (Shorter 1972: 24). Therefore, by rejecting the ‘essentialist’ view that every culture has an inviolable core embodying some immutable principles, we should rather emphasise the dynamic character of cultures and their struggles to adapt themselves to changing circumstances. One instance of how the ‘higher’ Sanskritic traditions of Hinduism – which have often projected themselves as inclusive – have been contested is that of the various contemporary movements which seek to rouse ‘Dalit consciousness’. For instance, Kancha Ilaih writes that whereas Dalits were earlier treated as the ‘other’ and were kept fixed in the bounds of their ‘lower’ castes, more recently because of political exegencies they are being ‘co-opted’ into the manifold of Hinduism. However, both these acts indicate, according to Illaih, that the ‘higher’ caste Hindus regard them as beings ‘whose culture, consciousness and ideology have no identity’ (Illaih 1996: 166).

Therefore, though many cultural contacts, in the Indian postcolonial context and elsewhere, are characterised by violence and relations of power-asymmetry, the complex processes that are set in motion are better described not in terms of destruction but of mutation in which some of the dominant peculiarities of each culture may become suppressed and the hitherto latent ones brought to the fore. For instance, though in areas of the Malabar and Tamil Nadu the escalation of disputes over caste status was associated with varied factors such as the loosening of traditional bonds effected by economic changes, the nation-wide transport system constructed by the British, the activities of Hindu reformist organisations and so on, such clashes were characteristic of socio-cultural life even in precolonial India where different parties were engaged in disputes over their precedence in the social hierarchy. Consequently, when some ‘lower’ caste Hindus turned to Christianity, this conversion should be read not so much as an abrupt transition to ‘modernising’ Christianity as an appropriation by them of one of the many available channels through which they sought to enhance their social rank (Bayly 1989: 447–8). Similarly, while the census records of the British government are sometimes believed to have instigated the ‘lower’ caste movements for the enhancement of social status, it has been argued that peasants had been sporadically making claims to the status of the ‘higher’ kṣatriya caste in certain parts of Gangetic India as early as the late eighteenth century (Pinch 1996: 118). Such considerations can lead us to revise the colonial view of India as frozen into a timeless state of rigid caste life-styles from which the British retrieved the natives, to a more nuanced view of precolonial social existence as characterised by some fluidity and mobility across caste boundaries.

Speaking for the convert

In short, the key question which underlies these complex issues seems to be this: ‘who speaks for the convert?’, one which parallels the question that has been intensely debated in the area of subaltern studies, ‘who speaks for the subaltern?’ The charge that the voices of the subaltern classes such as the peasants are marginalised in elitist versions of history, which centre around the activities of only the British administrators and the native elites, seems to have an interesting parallel in our observation in the previous sections that the agential capacities of the converts are often denied in certain accounts of their conversions to Christianity. It can be argued that converts to Christianity, whether from the ‘higher’ or the ‘lower’ castes, exhibited varying degrees of subalternity vis-à-vis the British colonial regime, the Christian missionaries and the Hindu nationalists. We have noted that the missionaries sometimes found themselves in subaltern locations relative to the British administrators, and the ‘lower’ castes even more so with respect to the former. Therefore, arguing that missionary studies can be regarded as an instance of ‘subaltern studies’, J. C. Ingleby remarks:

Let us by all means ‘deconstruct’ a history of the times which suggests that only the rich and the powerful are the makers of history, and that the consciousness of every subordinate group can only be defined by the rich and the powerful. But this means that we must allow the missionaries, too, to make their own history, and not just the missionaries, but the Indian Church that they struggled to bring into being.

(Ingleby 2000: xvii–xviii)

However, as we will point out, both ‘postpostcolonial’ missionary studies and subaltern studies – which seek to retrieve native agency from official histories – share not only certain parallels but also certain paradoxes.

Scholars of subaltern studies seek to provide alternative contestatory readings of the colonial pasts through the excavation of historical documents which were largely the products of the elites, such as the British administrators, bureaucrats, and Indian nationalist personalities. Ranajit Guha (1982: 1–8) criticises ‘elitist historiography’ for its assumption that it was the British administration with its institutions and bodies such as the Indian National Congress which established the functional constraints for the domain of Indian political engagement, for this leads to the conclusion that politics is to be equated with the activities of only those who were located in these bounds. However, a conundrum that subaltern historians have tried to grapple with in their self-reflexive moments is the question of whether or not they have fallen into the same trap that they have accused nationalist historians of having become immured in. That is, whether or not in trying to recover the voices silenced by the dominant modes of discourse they are subtly appropriating the subalterns into their historical projects and claiming to speak on their behalf by filling up the empty spaces, negations, and absences. As Ania Loomba reminds us, it has not been easy ‘to maintain a balance between ‘positioning’ the subject and amplifying his/her voice’ and she warns us that it is at times all too easy to fall into ‘essentializing the figure or community of the resistant subaltern’ (Loomba 1998: 233). Subaltern historians consequently have attempted to retrieve the subalterns as agents of their own histories with a sufficient degree of autonomy for purposeful action, but also to show how their ideational and cultural responses were circumscribed by and mediated through the structural features of the colonial worlds (McLeod 2000: 109).

To avoid the representations of subaltern autonomy in terms of reflex reactions or sporadic irruptions, what needs to be emphasised is that patterns of subaltern resistance were diverse modes of responding to a complex array of mediations such as material pressures, indigenous socio-religious traditions, the mobilising activities of the elite, colonial oppression, and so on. As we have noted, a similar question seems to underlie debates over ‘conversion’, namely, whether converts are passive victims or active initiators of their personal transformation. Indeed, Rambo writes that at the heart of such disputes is a ‘fundamental philosophical problem’, namely, ‘What is the ultimate nature of humans, are they capable of intentional action for goals or merely directed by external and internal forces over which they have no control?’ (Rambo 1993: 59). Consequently, the divergence between those who regard conversions merely as unreflective reactions to various kinds of inducements, and those who view them as many-layered processes of accommodation to, and sometimes even rejection of parts of, a different religious scheme ultimately stems from two different conceptions of human agency. We have noted that one significant form of criticism of conversions to Christianity among the ‘lower’ castes stems from a Hindu nationalist standpoint which views conversion as a crucial socio-political issue concerning the consolidation of a unified Hindu nation. The Hindutva perspective rightly draws our attention to the fact that religious choices are exercised not in a social vacuum but against a dense socio-cultural background. While such a position is in line with criticisms of a methodological individualism according to which all forms of complex social life can be broken down to the rational calculations of individual actors, it often goes too far in denying that religious behaviour can sometimes be understood as the attempt to develop ‘explanations’, that is, statements about how individuals may obtain rewards in terms of the fulfilment of certain basic needs and what costs they may have to incur in the process. In this context, we may use a Weberian perspective which sees religious responses as guided by complex sets of relationships between religious ideas, the world images that are systematically formed out of these ideas, and interests which can be both material or ideal. Ideal interests, in particular, lead human beings to develop ideas of salvation, astral determinism, the world as a cosmos, and so on, and it is these interests which, along with material ones, guide human conduct (Gerth and Mills 1958: 267–301). Therefore, while not denying the influence of political and economic conditions on the development of religious views, Max Weber argues that the latter cannot be understood as simple ‘reflections’ of the socio-economic basis for only those views are propagated in a community which can be adapted to people’s religious needs. In place of one-sided emphases either on the passivity of the converts who can easily be deceived through fraudulent means and are determined by forces beyond their control or on the quasi-economic rationality of the convert who is quarantined from the surrounding environment, we need to emphasise the dialectical nature of the encounter between the subaltern converts and their ‘thick’ contexts.

Religious behaviour, to use Anthony Gidden’s term, is ‘dually constructed’ both through the intentional actions of individuals and through the background contexts which supply various possibilities, and delimit others, for such actions (Giddens 1984). On the one hand, a convert’s personal responsiveness is constrained by the degree of control that social networks constituted by family, friends and others, as well as various kinds of socio-economic factors, exercise on her. For instance, as a woman with no close associations such as parents, a husband, or a community, Pandita Ramabai would have enjoyed a high degree of intellectual freedom and social mobility. For many other ‘higher’ caste converts the crucial threat, after conversion, was that of being socially ostracised by their family and caste-neighbours, so that they had to weigh the options more carefully. On the other hand, individuals who are in a quest for newer beliefs, organisations, rituals, and practices will seek those which will hopefully serve their cognitive, emotional, and affective needs. For instance, before Nehemiah Goreh moved to Christianity he had already altered religious affiliation from the Śaivism of his family to Vaiṣṇavism on the grounds, as he explained in a letter to Monier Monier-Williams, that the study of textual and historical traditions had convinced him that Viṣṇu occupied the chief position in the Hindu religious sources (Young 1981: 103). The new option for individuals such as Goreh will ideally provide a more or less unified, plausible, and coherent framework within which they may fruitfully try to make sense of their lives and their relationships to the social world (Rambo 1993: 81–6).

Against the backdrop of the last two chapters, it would seem that Christian evangelists are often in a no-win situation. If they preach an ‘exclusivist’ version of Christianity rooted in the claim that the entirety of divine truth can be located exhaustively within Christian texts and traditions, they are castigated as being merely a spiritualising branch of western imperialists. If they proclaim an ‘inclusivist’ message which, in Farquhar’s style, claims to complete the rudimentary strivings towards the Christian God in the Hindu religious streams, they are charged with being wolves in sheep’s clothing who have picked up a clever guise to harvest more souls. Having entered the Hindu fold Trojan-like, donning Hindu garbs and speaking an indigenised vocabulary, missionaries under the ‘inclusivist’ banner seek, it is alleged, to perpetuate the older game of conversion through different means. Further, if missionaries preach a ‘spiritualised’ gospel that proclaims the redemption of the soul, they have to counter objections from a neo-Advaitin standpoint which suggest that such talk is to be located merely at a ‘penultimate’ level and not at the ‘ultimate’ level where all talk of selves and salvations falls away. On the other hand, if they emphasise a ‘material’ gospel that speaks to the whole embodied person engaged in socio-economic and cultural struggles against oppression, they are charged with trying to entice the ‘lower’ castes to the Church through devious means. To make matters even more complicated, various intra-Christian groups have claimed that the ‘higher’ caste converts to Christianity have formulated Sanskritised versions of the gospel which not only do not quite speak to the experiences of millions of ‘lower caste’ Christians but also fail to highlight the point that Christ came into the world for the oppressed. In the forms of Dalit Christianity that are being developed, the Christian attempts to indigenise the gospel into ‘higher’ caste Hindu idioms are criticised as being complicit in the continuing oppression of Dalits throughout the country (Massey 1998).

While from some Hindu perspectives these various meanderings through the mission fields are viewed as mere opportunistic attempts to win over souls by every possible subterfuge, they have also, in fact, been informed by Christian reflections on the very meanings of ‘mission’ over the last one hundred years or so. All these considerations bring us to a sticking point of great significance in Hindu–Christian encounters over ‘conversion’: given that the Christian approach to Hinduism has undergone various transformations over the last two hundred years – from a blistering attack to a more benign accommodation – should Christianity still hold on to the last ‘scandal’, that of the ‘uniqueness’ of Christ himself? From some Hindu perspectives, while the Christian contributions to education, health, and social welfare in contemporary India are widely praised, the message that Christ is the saviour of all humanity seems to be an optional extra – indeed an irritating thorn in the body politic of India’s legal apparatus – that should be dropped.

References

A Native Church for the Natives of India, Giving an Account of the Second Meeting of the Punjab CMS Native Church Council Held at Umritsar, 24–27 December 1877, Lahore, 1878.

Amaladoss, Michael (1997) Life in Freedom, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.

Ambedkar, B. R. (2007) Conversion as Emancipation, New Delhi: Critical Quest.

Bauman, Chad (2008) Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947, Michigan, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Bayly, Susan (1989) Saints, Goddesses and Kings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burton, Antoinette (1998) At the Heart of the Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cederlof, Gunnel (1997) Bonds Lost, New Delhi: Manohar.

Copley, Anthony (1997) Religions in Conflict, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Cox, Jeffrey (2002) Imperial Fault Lines, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dirks, Nicholas (1987) The Hollow Crown, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Duff, Alexander (1839) Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church, Edinburgh.

Dumont, Louis (1980) Homo Hierarchicus, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Dundas, Paul (2002) ‘Conversion to Jainism: Historical Perspectives’, in Religious Conversion in India, ed. R. Robinson and S. Clarke, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 125–48.

Forrester, D. B. (1977) ‘The Depressed Classes and Conversion to Christianity, 1860–1960’, in Religion in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, London: Curzon Press, pp. 35–66.

Forrester, D. B. (1980) Caste and Christianity, London: Curzon Press.

Gerth, H. H. and C. W. Mills (ed.) (1958) From Max Weber, New York: Oxford University Press.

Giddens, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity.

Goel, S. R. (1989) History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, New Delhi: Voice of India.

Hardgrave, R. L. (1969) The Nadars of Tamilnad, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guha, Ranajit (ed.) (1982) Subaltern Studies I, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Heredia, R. J. (2007) Changing Gods, New Delhi: Penguin.

Hrangkhuma, F. (1997) ‘Protestant Mission Trends in India’, in Mission Trends Today, ed. J. Mattam and S. Kim, Mumbai: St Pauls, pp. 37–54.

Hudson, Dennis (1972) ‘Hindu and Christian Theological Parallels in the Conversion of H. A. Kṛṣṇa Piḷḷai 1857–1859’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 40, 191–206.

Illaih, Kancha (1996) ‘Productive Labour, Consciousness and History: The Dalitbahujan Alternative’, in Subaltern Studies IX, ed. S. Amin and D. Chakrabarty, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 165–200.

Indian Bibliographic Centre (Research Wing) (1999) Christianity and Conversion in India, Varanasi: Rishi Publications.

Ingleby, J. C. (2000) Missionaries, Education and India, Delhi: ISPCK.

Jaffrelot, Christophe (2010) Religion, Caste and Politics in India, Delhi: Primus Books.

Johnston, James (ed.) (1888) Report of the Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World, London: James Nisbet.

Jones, K. W. (1976) Arya Dharm, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jordens, J. T. F. (1977) ‘Reconversion to Hinduism, the Shuddhi of the Arya Samaj’, in Religion in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, London: Curzon Press, pp. 145–61.

Keer, Dhananjay (1981) Dr. Ambedkar, Bombay: Popular Prakashan.

Kopf, David (1979) The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kosambi, Meera (ed.) (2000) Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 295–324.

Lamb, C. and M. D. Bryant (ed.) (1999) Religious Conversion, London and New York: Cassell.

Larson, G. J. (1997) India’s Agony Over Religion, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Lipner, J. and G. Gispert-Sauch (ed.) ([1991]–2002) The Writings of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, Bangalore: United Theological College.

Loomba, Ania (1998) Colonialism–Postcolonialism, London: Routledge.

McLeod, John (2000) Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Malik, S. C. (1977) ‘Introduction’, in Dissent, Protest and Reform in Indian Civilization, ed. S. C. Malik, Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, pp. 1–11.

Malony, H. N. and S. Southard (ed.) (1992) Handbook of Religious Conversion, Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press.

Manickam, S. (1988) Studies in Missionary History, Madras: CLS.

Massey, James (1997) Down Trodden, Geneva: WCC Publications.

Massey, James (ed.) (1998) Indigenous People, Delhi: ISPCK.

Mathew, A. (1988) Christian Missions, Education and Nationalism, Delhi: Anamika Prakashan.

Mattam, Joseph (1997) ‘Mission as Social Concern – In Official Church Documents and Recent Missiological Literature’, in Mission Trends Today, ed. J. Mattam and S. Kim, Mumbai: St Pauls, pp. 55–75.

McKean, Lise (1996) Divine Enterprise, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Mosse, David (1994) ‘Idioms of Subordination and Styles of Protest Among Christian and Hindu Harijan Castes in Tamil Nadu’, Contributions to Indian sociology, 28, 67–106.

Neill, Stephen (1984) A History of Christianity in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nock, A. D. (1933) Conversion, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Oddie, G. A. (1977) ‘Christian Conversion among Non-Brahmans in Andhra Pradesh’, in Religion in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, London: Curzon Press, pp. 67–99.

Oddie, G. A. (1997) ‘Old Wine in New Bottles? Kartabhaja (Vaiṣṇavas) Converts to Evangelical Christianity in Bengal, 1835–1845’, in Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 57–77.

Oddie, G. A. (2010) ‘Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance of the Term “Hinduism”, c. 1787–1947’, in Rethinking Religion in India, ed. Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde, London: Routledge, pp. 41–55.

O’Malley, L. S. S. (1934) India’s Social Heritage, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Oommen, George (1997) ‘Strength of Tradition and Weakness of Communication – Central Kerala Dalit Conversion’, in Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 79–95.

Pickett, J. W. (1933) Christian Mass Movements in India, New York: Abingdon.

Pinch, W. R. (1996) Peasants and Monks in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Potts, E. D. (1967) British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Powell, Avril (1997) ‘Processes of Conversion to Christianity in Nineteenth Century North India’, in Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 15–55.

Quigley, D. (2003) ‘On the Relationship Between Caste and Hinduism’, in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. G. Flood, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 495–508.

Rai, Lala Lajpat (1915) A History of the Arya Samaj, Delhi.

Ram, Jagjivan (1980) Caste Challenges in India, Delhi: Vision Books.

Rambo, L. R. (1993) Understanding Religious Conversion, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rayan, Samuel (1979) Breath of Fire: the Holy Spirit: Heart of the Christian Gospel, London: G. Chapman.

Robinson, Rowena (2003) Christians of India, New Delhi: Sage.

Sarkar, Sumit (2005) ‘Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva’, in Making India Hindu, ed. David Ludden, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 270–93.

Shah, A. B. (ed.) (1977) The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai, Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture.

Shorter, Aylward (1972) Theology of Mission, Notre Dame: Fides Publishers.

Snow, D. A. and R. Machalek (1984) ‘The Sociology of Conversion’, Annual Review of Sociology, 10, 167–90.

Srinivas, M. N. (1989) The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stanislaus, L. (1999) The Liberative Mission of the Church Among Dalit Christians, Delhi: ISPCK.

Stromberg, P. G. (1985) ‘The Impression Point: Synthesis of Symbol and Self’, Ethos, 13, 56–74.

Temple, Richard (1883) Oriental Experience, London.

Thapar, Romila (1989) ‘Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’, Modern Asian Studies, 23, 209–31.

van der Veer, Peter (1994) Religious Nationalism, Berkeley: University of California Press.

von Stietencron, Heinrich (1991) ‘Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term’, in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. G. D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, pp. 11–27.

Vaughan, John (1876) The Trident, the Crescent, and the Cross, London: Longmans, Green and Co.

Viswanathan, Gauri (1998) Outside the Fold, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Webster, J. C. B. (1992) A History of the Dalit Christians in India, San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press.

Webster, J. C. B. (2002) ‘Dalits and Christians in Colonial Punjab: Cultural Interactions’, in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 92–118.

Young, R. F. (1981) Resistant Hinduism, Vienna: De Nobili Research Library.

Zelliot, Eleanor (1977) ‘The Psychological Dimension of the Buddhist Movement in India’, in Religion in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, London: Curzon Press, pp. 120–44.

Zupanov, Ines (1999) Disputed Mission, Oxford: Oxford University Press.