Race, Caste, and Conversion in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia Guest edited by (2024)

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets

Christian communities have existed in India since at least the 4th century ce, the likely result of relatively well-established trade connections between India and the Near East in the early centuries of the Common Era. While Christians maintained a lively and well-documented existence in the centuries after that, particularly in southern India, the size of the Christian population, as well as its geographical spread, began to increase dramatically after the arrival of European traders and missionaries in the late 15th century. European contact with India through trade and then, later, colonization led to greater European interest in Indian cultures and religions. While for some that interest was scholarly and dispassionate, for others it grew out of the evangelical impulse, that is, the desire to promote Christianity and “convert the heathen.” That said, some of the most useful ethnographic data and analyses on Indian culture and religion in this era of Indo-European interaction co...

Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection, 2021

The article first presents a brief historicaloverview of the complex Indian cultural roots by highlighting the stagesof growth of the Indian legal culture and Indian ecclesial presence andthen moves on to present the contemporary challenges that this hasprovoked within the civil society and the Indian Church. The secondpart also discusses some ecclesial challenges like adapting ecclesiasticallaws for the Churches in India, relationship between the sui iurisChurches, commitment towards equality in the Church, and need forinculturation and inter-religious and ecumenical dialogue in India today.

For centuries, various denominations of Christian missionaries have contributed in a larger way towards the spread of Christianity among the people of Indian sub-continent. Each Church had its own principles of preaching the word of God and undertook welfare activities in and around the mission-stations. From establishing schools to providing medical aids, the Christian missionaries were involved in constant perseverance to improve the ‘indigenous’ societies not only in terms of amenities and opportunities, but also in spiritual aspects. Despite conversion being the prime motive, every Mission prepared ground on which their undertakings found meanings and made an impact over people’s lives. These endeavours, combining missiological and theological discourses, brought hope and success to the missionaries, and in our case study, the Basel Mission added to the history of the Christian Mission while operating in the coastal and hilly districts of Kerala during the 19th and the 20th cent...

pentecostal history india

Christianity in South and Central Asia, 2019

West India, inclusive of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa, is the most urbanised and socio-religiously progressive part of India and constitutes 14.32% of its total population (2011). Christians can be traced back to the sixth century. The arrival of Vasco de Gama ushered in a new epoch of Roman Catholic mission in India. Protestant missionary work among the low castes challenged upper-caste reformers to combat social evils. Pentecostal and Charismatic groups, such as the New Life Fellowship, began to permeate the urban landscape in the late twentieth century. Today, the church in West India remains largely stagnant, often struggling with leadership and property issues. Converts hailing from both upper and lower castes contributed to produce liturgy written in the local dialects. With the emergence of Dalit theology, some West Indian theologians faded into the background, and engagement from a subaltern perspective dominated the theological scene. Religious fundamentalism continues to p...

Brill Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 2012

Constructing Indian Christianities. Culture, Conversion and Caste, 2014

By the time of the Vatican II Council, creative renewals in the so-called ‘inculturation’ movement were already well underway in India. But these renewals were invigorated by the Council’s relatively positive valuation of the diversity of cultures and religions, as demonstrated, for example, in the Dignitatis humanae Declaration’s acceptance of religious freedom for all humankind. Because of this, in the 1970 and 1980s, the inculturation project thrived in India, manifesting itself in different ways, such as in the Catholic ashram movement, Indianised liturgies and the development of different types of dialogue. By the late 1980s, however, the movement was beginning to run out of steam. The inculturation project came to be seen by some Indians as something artificial and imposed, and ferocious critiques against its putatively ‘imperialist’ origins and tendencies emerged. As we shall see, non-Christian critics like Sita Ram Goel (1988) deemed Catholic Ashrams sinister and predatorial, while within the Church, theologians began to be more vocal about ‘the need for a reinterpretation of the Gospel in tune with the requirements of radical social action’ (Kappen 1985: ii). Thus, liberation, Dalit, tribal, feminist, and ecological theologies progressively gained momentum, and came to be seen as the new theological vanguard. In this context, intercultural and interreligious initiatives began to languish and lose energy, it seems, while these newer innovative theological movements took the initiative.But is the inculturation project now moribund? Are indigenisation and inculturation ventures now irrelevant, nothing more than a passé fad of a bygone era? This paper examines the curious process by which inculturation became tremendously problematic for many (though not all) Indian Christians. My intent is not to critique the theological bases of inculturation in a normative way, but rather to articulate and enumerate the factors that explain its historical decline. The analyses focus mainly on inculturation in the Roman Catholic context, though I will also attend occasionally to Protestant voices. The structure of this chapter is quite straightforward. At the beginning, I define the boundaries of my analysis, clarify what is meant by the (Catholic) notion of inculturation (and similar concepts such as indigenisation), and present a short historical review. Afterwards, I examine the factors involved in the decline of inculturation, focusing both on social/political and theological factors.

Journal of Global Catholicism

Nidān: International Journal For Indian Studies, 2022

The Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies

Over the past four decades, since the 1960s, there has been a steady flow of Africans moving to India for short-term activities: education, medical treatment and trade. There is a visible African diaspora in many localities in India. This diaspora is a layered one, consisting of diverse groups of people with different degrees of attachment to India: Africans settled in India with kinship ties, mobile professionals and students, and itinerant traders. Its composition and strength are in a constant flux. This paper will explore how debates and rituals in primarily Pentecostal- Charismatic churches – which have emerged as the focal point of community interaction for contemporary Africans in India – become crucial in shaping, reconfiguring and showcasing the markers of an imagined Africanness. Complex Pan-African diasporic subjectivities are invented, performed, and transmitted (from older residents to new arrivals), in conversation with prejudices and expectations of the host culture. ...

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 2019

Contemporary Research: An Interdisciplinary Academic Journal, 2021

Introduction: There is debate whether most Nepali people still want Nepal to be a Hindu state. A significant number of opinions wish to see the country as secular, where people are respected with dignity without any discrimination where people can profess, practice, and protect their religions, whichever religion it may be. Methods: This paper is based on public opinion surveys through interviews and discussions with100 individuals, including key informant interviews with 25 religious leaders from different religions conducted between September 20019 and February 2020 and secondary data from various literature reviews. Results: The paper's finding reveals that the public's preference toward the Hindu state is not accepted in all sub-national levels; a secular state preference is evident in some of the sub-national levels, which cannot be undervalued. The mindsets of most of the elder populations interviewed still want Nepal to be the only Hindu state in the world, whereas th...

Thesis, 2018

This dissertation explores on the growth of the church of God post the Kandhamala Persecution of 2007. It also identifies some of the real issues facing the church in terms of mobility and spread.

International Journal of Asian Christianity, 2018

Since 1950, the Government of India has maintained its policy of denying affirmative-action benefits to Dalit converts to Christianity. Debates about Dalit Christian reservations are most often centered on contemporary political trends. Far less attention is paid to developments during the colonial period, when sharp differences between religious ‘communities’ were formulated as policy. As much as the colonial state attempted to grapple with ethnographic realities on the ground, it ultimately embraced an idealized notion of a ‘casteless Native Christian community’. Against massive data that revealed the persistence of caste among converts, this idea of casteless Christianity was readily appropriated by the postcolonial state, which has been all to eager to use it as the basis for denying affirmative action to Dalit Christians. Dalit Christians seeking a change to this policy must therefore grapple with the past, by refuting assumptions embedded in nineteenth-century missionary rheto...

INAC, 2022

The Strange Case of CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA Part I of a 4 part serie