Christians And Public Life In Colonial South India 1863 1937

This book tells the story of how Catholic and Protestant Indians have attempted to locate themselves within the evolving Indian nation. Ironically, British rule in India did not privilege Christians, but pushed them to the margins of a predominantly Hindu society. Drawing upon wide-ranging sources, the book first explains how the Indian judiciary's 'official knowledge' isolated Christians from Indian notions of family, caste and nation. It then describes how different varieties and classes of Christians adopted, resisted and reshaped both imperial and nationalist perceptions of their identity. Within a climate of rising communal tension in India, this study finds immediate relevance.

How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. A family dispute resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. Chandra Mallampalli uses this case to examine the lives of those involved, and shows that far from being products of a 'civilizing mission' who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately - when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system - obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.

Despite the remarkable growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the twentieth century, there is a dearth of primary material produced by these Christians. This volume explores the problem of writing the history of indigenous Christian communities in the Global South. Many such indigenous Christian groups pass along knowledge orally, and colonial forces have often not deemed their ideas and activities worth preserving. In some instances, documentation from these communities has been destroyed by people or nature. Highlighting the creative solutions that historians have found to this problem, the essays in this volume detail the strategies employed in discerning the perspectives, ideas, activities, motives, and agency of indigenous Christians. The contributors approach the problem on a case-by-case basis, acknowledging the impact of diverse geographical, cultural, political, and ecclesiastical factors. This volume will inspire historians of World Christianity to critically interrogate—and imaginatively use—existing Western and indigenous documentary material in writing the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include J. J. Carney, Adrian Hermann, Paul Kollman, Kenneth Mills, Esther Mombo, Mrinalini Sebastian, Christopher Vecsey, Haruko Nawata Ward, and Yanna Yannakakis.

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia's Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians' location between Hindus and Muslims. Mallampalli begins with a discussion of South India's ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia's Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He then underscores efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavours, but rarely succeeded at yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of post-colonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly untouchable) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.

India’s Nonviolent Freedom Struggle focuses on the Thomas Christians, a group of Christians in South India who waged a nonviolent struggle against European colonization during the politically volatile period of 1599-1799. This book has three related objectives and unique characteristics. First, it offers a comprehensive study of primary sources that scholars have referenced but rarely studied in-depth. Second, it argues that the Thomas Christian narratives provide a unique position to challenge prevalent estimations found in canonical and postcolonial critical discourse on the nation. Third, it considers how an account of a nonviolent struggle by Thomas Christians further complicates received ideas of the postcolonial nation. It sheds light on the often-overlooked contributions of the Thomas Christians in India’s nonviolent freedom struggle and challenges readers to reimagine the complex and often contentious relationship between colonizers and colonized. A groundbreaking book that offers a fresh perspective on the Indian freedom struggle and the study of Indian history, this book is an essential read for scholars of colonialism, anticolonial movements, and the history of India.

This book highlights the transformative potential of democratic Church and Christian community in India. In the light of both ongoing and, also to some extent, foregone sociopolitical and theological challenges confronting Indian Christianity, this book invokes the need to democratize Indian Christianity in terms of its theology, liturgy, teachings, practices, resources, leadership roles, and institutional power relations/sharing by keeping contemporary “social realities” of Indian Christians at the core of its approach and discourse. It explores internal challenges – of caste, class, gender, and regional contestations – and external forces of communalism and majoritarianism confronting Indian Christianity today. Further, it underlines the importance of dignity, equality, fraternity, freedom, and responsibility emerging at an organizational level through strong mechanisms of deliberation, decision-making, and execution. A major contribution to religious studies in India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of religion, especially Christian theology, South Asian studies, politics, and sociology.