Debating 'conversion' in Hinduism and Christianity 9781138847019, 9781315726991, 1138847011

Table of contents :
1. Prologue2. Locating the Debates3. The Ideologies of Empire: Christian Missionaries in a Victorian Age4. The 'Heathens' and their 'Idols': Christian Missionaries and the Edifice of 'Hinduism'5. Preaching the Kingdom: 'Caste' and 'Conversion'6. Christian Orthodoxy and Hindu Spirituality: 'Particularity' versus 'Universalism'?7. Donning the Saffron Robe: The Many Meanings of 'Mission'8. The Bounds of 'Toleration': Hindus and Christians in 'Secular' India9. Conclusion

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Debating ‘Conversion’ in Hinduism and Christianity

Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of ‘conversion’ provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds. The book draws upon several historical case studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries. By analysing some of the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of ‘conversion’, it demonstrates that these encounters revolve around three main contested themes. Firstly, who can properly ‘speak for the convert’? Secondly, how is ‘tolerating’ the religious other connected to an appraisal of the other’s viewpoints which may be held to be incorrect, inadequate, or incomplete? Finally, what is, in fact, the ‘true Religion’? The book demonstrates that it is necessary to wrestle with these questions for an adequate understanding of the Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’. Questioning what ‘conversion’ precisely is, and why it has been such a volatile issue on India’s political–legal landscape, the book will be a useful contribution to studies of Hinduism, Christianity, and Asian Religion and Philosophy. Ankur Barua is Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK. His articles have been published in journals such as the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Oxford Journal of Hindu Studies, Sophia, International Journal of Hindu Studies, and Journal of Ecumenical Studies.

Routledge Hindu Studies Series Edited by Gavin Flood, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

The Routledge Hindu Studies Series, in association with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, intends the publication of constructive Hindu theological, philosophical and ethical projects aimed at bringing Hindu traditions into dialogue with contemporary trends in scholarship and contemporary society. The series invites original, high-quality, research-level work on religion, culture and society of Hindus living in India and abroad. Proposals for annotated translations of important primary sources and studies in the history of the Hindu religious traditions will also be considered. Epistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Inquiry Doctrine in Madhva Vedanta Deepak Sarma A Hindu Critique of Buddhist Epistemology: Kumarila on perception The ‘determination of perception’ chapter of Kumarilabhatta’s Slokarvarttika translation and commentary John Taber Samkara’s Advaita Vedanta A way of teaching Jacqueline Hirst Attending Krishna’s Image Chaitanya Vaishnava Murti-seva as devotional truth Kenneth Russell Valpey Advaita Vedanta and Vaisnavism The philosophy of Madhusudana Sarasvati Sanjukta Gupta Classical Samkhya and Yoga An Indian metaphysics of experience Mikel Burley

Self-Surrender (prapatti) to God in Shrivaishnavism Tamil cats and Sanskrit monkeys Srilata Raman The Chaitanya Vaishnava Vedanta of Jiva Gosvami When knowledge meets devotion Ravi M. Gupta Gender and Narrative in the Mahabharata Edited by Simon Brodbeck and Brian Black Yoga in the Modern World Contemporary perspectives Edited By Mark Singleton and Jean Byrne Consciousness in Indian Philosophy The Advaita doctrine of ‘awareness only’ Sthaneshwar Timalsina Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy Christopher G. Framarin Women in the Hindu Tradition Rules, roles and exceptions Mandakranta Bose Religion, Narrative and Public Imagination in South Asia Past and place in the Sanskrit Mahabharata James Hegarty Interpreting Devotion The poetry and legacy of a female Bhakti saint of India Karen Pechilis Hindu Perspectives on Evolution Darwin, dharma, and design C. Mackenzie Brown Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition Salvific space Knut A. Jacobsen A Woman’s Ramayana Candravati’s Bengali epic Mandakranta Bose and Sarika Priyadarshini Bose

Classical Vaisesika in Indian Philosophy On knowing and what is to be known Shashiprabha Kumar Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology A history of reception in premodern India Ajay R. Rao Hinduism and Environmental Ethics Law, literature and philosophy Christopher G. Framarin Hindu Pilgrimage Shifting patterns of worldview of Srisailam in South India Prabhavati C. Reddy The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi Makarand R. Paranjape Bhakti and Embodiment Fashioning divine bodies and devotional bodies in Kr.s.n.a Bhakti Barbara A. Holdrege Textual Authority in Classical Hindu Thought Rāmānuja and the Vis.n.u Purān.a Sucharita Adluri Indian Thought and Western Theism The Vedānta of Rāmānuja Martin Ganeri Debating ‘Conversion’ in Hinduism and Christianity Ankur Barua

Debating ‘Conversion’ in Hinduism and Christianity

Ankur Barua

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Ankur Barua The right of Ankur Barua to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-84701-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72699-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

For Julius Lipner

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Contents

Preface

x

1

Prologue

1

2

Locating the debates

12

3

The ideologies of empire: Christian missionaries in a Victorian age

43

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’: Christian missionaries and the edifice of ‘Hinduism’

62

5

Preaching the kingdom: ‘caste’ and ‘conversion’

83

6

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality: ‘particularity’ versus ‘universalism’?

115

7

Donning the saffron robe: the many meanings of ‘mission’

150

8

The political bounds of ‘toleration’: Hindus and Christians in ‘secular’ India

172

Conclusion

201

Index

213

4

9

Preface

This book is my extended commentary on the intellectual friendship, against the shadow of empire, between my two parama-gurus, Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Freer Andrews. In working my way through the debates that I outline here, I have often asked myself what Andrews might have said to a Hindu critique of Christian understandings of ‘conversion’ and how Tagore might have countered a Christian response to this critique. Though Tagore and Andrews do not appear anywhere on the pages of this book, they are in fact ‘absently present’ in the dialectical weaves of all its arguments. I have incurred numerous debts in the course of tracing these densely textured weaves. I thank my students at my own alma mater, St Stephen’s College, Delhi, for teaching me, through vociferous arguments on the idyllic greens of Andrews’ Court, that one person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens. At Cambridge, I have received much illumination from the distinctive ‘catholic’ visions of Jonardon Ganeri, Martin Ganeri, Christopher Bayly, Douglas Hedley and Janet Soskice. In California, Madeleine Haser keeps on reminding me that the spirit freely blows where it wills, across all boundaries – ethnic, national, and, dare I say it, religious. My readers should regard whatever insights they might discern in the pages of this book as mere variations on the vidyā that I have received over the years in the lineages of my guru, Professor Julius Lipner, though they must, of course, attribute whatever errors they (will probably) find there to projections of my own avidyā.

1

Prologue

Exactly twenty years ago, I took a sheet of paper and started writing down my responses to this question: ‘Is it possible to develop patterns of argument that will demonstrate the cognitive, experiential, and spiritual superiority of Christian discipleship over a life-form centred around devotion to Vis.n.u – or vice versa?’ Though I had thought then that I would be able to answer this question within a few days, I have to report that twenty years down the line I am yet unable to do so in either the affirmative or the negative. However, over the course of these years my thoughts on this question have rambled down the alleys of history, theology, postcolonial theory, sociology of knowledge, and philosophy of religion, and gradually taken the shape of this book. I begin with this glimpse at the audacity of my youthful self partly to provide one token of the type of question that I believe lies at the conceptual heart of Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ and partly to point to certain topics that I do not directly address in this book. First, this book is not a fine-grained historical survey of conversion movements in different parts of the Indian subcontinent over the last three hundred years. I seek to bring together several such existing studies with the philosophical literature on the problem of ‘epistemic peer conflict’: given that knowledgeable, sincere, and truth-seeking individuals across religious boundaries disagree over how to conceptualise the human predicament and the ultimate reality, is it possible to demonstrate that one of these is more consistent, coherent, and adequate than the others on cognitive, experiential, and spiritual grounds? Even a brief survey of polemical Hindu responses to Christian conversion shows that a key question that repeatedly turns up is: ‘who got it right, then?’ I show at several places in this book that several Christian and Hindu responses to this problem of epistemic peer conflict both share the following dialectical structure. They propose ‘the Religion’ as the ultimate truth which encompasses, to different degrees, the truths of ‘the religions’, though they sharply disagree, of course, over what ‘the Religion’ is – whether a form of life rooted in Christ for mainstream Christian theology, the transpersonal ultimate for Advaita Vedānta, devotion to Vis. n. u for Vais. n. avism, and so on. This structure provides several strands of Christian and Hindu philosophical theology with the conceptual lens through which religious diversity is assessed, classified, and, to different degrees, accommodated. However, whether

2 Prologue rational argumentation can settle the most momentous question of what is, in fact, ‘the Religion’, remains an intensely contested matter within Christian theological circles. Some influential strands of contemporary Christian thinking argue that the ‘knowing subject’ cannot settle this question through a ‘spectatorial’ stance because it needs to undergo a volitional transformation through Christ’s ‘cognitive grace’ before it is able to properly assess the evidence (Thiemann 1985; Wainwright 1995; Moser 2010). More concretely, it is claimed that fallen human reason cannot arrive at God through a ‘dispassionate’ investigation of public evidence that is accessible from third person perspectives – it needs to be regenerated by grace so that it can develop the sensitivities to see aspects of the natural world as pointers to the Christian God (Evans 1998). The ‘hermeneutical loop’ within which Christian knowing is dialectically interrelated with Christian faith was already noted by Sydney Cave in 1939 when he argued that these epistemological debates in Hindu– Christian contexts ‘will not be solved by the academic discussion of two alternative world-views. Interesting and illuminating as such discussion can be, it can never be decisive, for the values by which men [sic] judge are dependent on their ideals, and these ideals are created in part by the doctrines they already hold’ (Cave 1939: 236). For a more recent articulation of this view, we may turn to M. A. Rae who argues that the Christian news that in Jesus God has dwelt amongst humanity ‘can only be confessed and proclaimed. It cannot be the subject of rational verification; nor can it be confirmed within the categories of secular historiography’ (Rae 2011: 92). If ‘neutral’ reason is indeed unable to adjudicate these matters (we will encounter some dissenting views in Chapter 6), this cognitive failure can be seen as an instance of the ‘rather depressing general truth’ noted by Peter van Inwagen (2006: 2) that ‘no philosophical [and theological] argument that has ever been devised for any substantive thesis is capable of lending the same sort of support to its conclusion that scientific arguments often lend to theirs’. Fierce debates continue to rage in religious epistemology between, on the one hand, philosophers who seek to develop arguments that would present Christian theism as true over and against other religious systems (Swinburne 1993; Yandell 1993; Taliaferro 2011), and, on the other hand, philosophers who claim that there are no good truth-indicating grounds for establishing the cognitive superiority of one such system over others (Schellenberg 2007; Gellman 2008). The significance of these somewhat abstract issues for Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ can be seen by considering the structure of Swami Vivekananda’s (1863–1902) argument: ‘Plainly, if all religions are true, there would be no point in exchanging one true religion for another. Conversion, then, must be vigorously resisted . . . ’ (Quoted in Sharma 2011: 47). The argument runs as follows: Premise 1: If truth-values are equally distributed across the religious matrices of the world, ‘conversions’ across religious boundaries are sociologically and metaphysically futile.

Prologue 3 Premise 2: Truth-values are equally distributed across the religious matrices of the world. Conclusion: ‘Conversions’ across religious boundaries are sociologically and metaphysically futile. However, no major Hindu religious tradition – whether Advaita Vedānta, Vais.n.avism, or Śaivism (with its diverse Tantric configurations) – has accepted the ‘epistemic parity’ thesis of Premise 2 (for one example, see Sarma 2005: 15–18). Therefore, the vital questions are whether all religions are true, whether ‘objective’ reason is capable of assessing the cognitive integrity of religious systems, and whether it is possible to adjudicate truth-claims across religious traditions. Through a careful examination of the pronouncements of Hindu apologists such as Swami Vivekananda, we will show that what they, in fact, mean to say is that ‘the religions’ of the world have truth-filled elements to the extent that are they are fragmentary approximations to ‘the Religion’ of Advaita Vedānta. This is the view that is reflected in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s (1888–1975) more cautious remark that while ‘Hinduism . . . affirms that all relevations refer to reality, they are not equally true to it’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 49). For Radhakrishnan, one of these ‘revelations’, namely, Advaita Vedānta, is ‘the Religion’ which hierarchially encompasses the limited, provisional, and partial truths of ‘the religions’ of the world. Second, I seek to highlight the point, in a number of chapters in this book, that Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ sometimes lack conceptual precision. Terms such as ‘exclusivism’, ‘dogmatism’ and ‘conversion’ itself (often regarded as dirty words), on the one hand, and ‘toleration’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’ (often regarded as nice words), on the other, are sometimes bandied about in these debates without an explication of their inner logic. For instance, the term ‘toleration’, as I use it in this book, does not mean merely the practices of ‘being nice’ to the neighbours but also of acknowledging the rights of others to hold views which are believed to be wrong, incorrect, or inadequate. That ‘tolerating’ others does not imply a diffuse sense of ‘respect’ for other life-worlds can be seen by considering whether one would wish to ‘tolerate’ a group that practises genocidal violence. In other words, ‘toleration’ requires clearly articulated conceptual bases (or, at the least, an accepted modus vivendi with its own conceptual presuppositions) which specify what, if any, are the moral limits of ‘toleration’. Therefore, the crucial question involving ‘toleration’ in Hindu and Christian debates is not whether but why, which, and whose ‘toleration’. Some Christian and Hindu responses to this question employ the above dialectical structure: because all human beings are encompassed by the fundamental reality intimated by ‘the Religion’, even if they themselves are not aware of this reality, therefore their ways of life are to be tolerated, in the sense that I have specified. For an initial sample of how this dialectic is worked out in some Christian and Hindu universes (the detailed argument is in Chapters 5, 6 and 7), consider the following examples from an Anglican Christian, a Vais.n.avite Hindu and an Advaita Vedānta Hindu perspective respectively. Rowland Williams argued in 1856 that the truths

4 Prologue of Hindu universes had to be transcended by Christianity which would meet more completely their religious needs: For it [Christianity] mediates and harmonizes between them [the non-Christian religions], adding to the strong belief of the Hebrew, something of the largeness of thought of the Hindu and of the heroic humanity of the Greek, while it sobers these with the household virtues of the Roman, and with the deeper sense of truth and right. . . . (Hedges 2001: 84) On the Hindu side, Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), argues that ‘[a] directly Kr.s.n.a conscious person is the topmost transcendentalist because such a devotee knows what is meant by Brahman or Paramātmā. His knowledge of the Absolute Truth is perfect, whereas the [Advaitin] impersonalist and the meditative yogī are imperfectly Kr.s.n.a conscious’ (1972: 318). Prabhupada was drawing on the medieval theologian Jīva Gosvāmī who noted, in his commentary on the Brahmasūtras, that the supreme object of meditation is Vis.n.u alone and not others gods such as Śiva (śivādayaś ca vyāvr.ttāh.) (Gupta 2007: 139). In contrast, Swami Sivananda argues that ‘[n]on-dualism is the highest realisation . . . The [theistic] Dvaitin and the Visistadvaitin eventually reach the Advaitic goal or Vedantic realisation of Oneness’ (Quoted in Miller 1986: 178). Or one can, in place of the ‘ladder’ metaphor, choose the planar one of the ‘circle’, and argue, as does Swami Nikhilananda, that just as numerous radii converge upon the centre of a circle, so too the religious streams of the world converge into the Advaitic non-dual Brahman (Swami Nikhilananda 1963: 126–30). In other words, the imperfect truths of ‘the religions’ are somehow elevated to the fullness, the ultimacy, and the perfection of ‘the Religion’ – whether the latter is Christian discipleship for Williams, Kr.s.n.a consciousness for Swami Prabhupada, or Advaitic insight for Swami Sivananda and Swami Nikhilananda. More schematically, the argument can be laid out as follows: Premise 1: All humanity is rooted in the Fundamental Reality = X. Premise 2: Not all the religious traditions of the world are centred around a conscious recognition of or an orientation towards X. Premise 3: To be directed towards X one must minimally cultivate a conscious recognition of or an orientation towards X. Conclusion 1: Therefore, not all the religious traditions of the world are directing their adherents towards X. Conclusion 2: Regarding the religious traditions noted in Conclusion 1, it may be possible to place them on a scale such that their location on it would indicate whether they are more X-directed or less X-directed. This argument is the conceptual core of Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’. Both Christian thought and the major Hindu soteriological systems such

Prologue 5 as Advaita Vedānta, Vas.n.avism, and Śaivism accept Premises 1, 2 and 3. They differ, of course, over what they take X to be: a covenantal fellowship between God and humanity that is centred in Jesus Christ, the transpersonal ultimate (nirgun.a Brahman), Vis.n.u, and Śiva respectively. On the Christian side of these debates, theologians have employed different formulations of this argument to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity through the conceptual lens of what might be called Karl’s Kaleidoscope: those who use this kaleidoscope with the slant of Karl Barth (1886–1968) accept Conclusion 1 but usually reject Conclusion 2, while those who look through it from the perspective of Karl Rahner (1904–84) accept both Conclusions 1 and 2. On the Hindu side, while the classical Vedāntic traditions emphasise Conclusion 1, some medieval and most modern forms of Hinduism have affirmed Conclusion 1 as well as Conclusion 2. The reason for spelling out this argument in such detail is as follows. The Christian theological view that the ‘lower’ truths of Hindu spirituality can be ‘supplememented’ by the ‘higher’ pattern of Christian discipleship is often castigated, as we will see in Chapter 8, as a species of imperialist arrogance. However, as our initial sample above has indicated, this charge of ‘arrogance’ is a red herring because this logical move has been repeatedly made also in Hindu life-settings, with, for instance, Advaitins arguing that the lower truths of Vais.n.avism and of the Abrahamic monotheisms can be sublated by the higher truths of Advaita. For two contemporary examples, let us turn to Radhakrishnan and Swami Prabhupada who use a similar turn of phrase in positioning ‘the religions’ at a provisional level with respect to ‘the Religion’. While Radhakrishnan argued that ‘[Advaita] Vedānta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 23), Swami Prabhupada could have been responding to Radhakrishnan when he claimed that ‘[t]he religion of the Bhagavad-gītā is not Hindu religion or Christian religion . . . It is the essence of religion . . . To accept Kr.s.n.a as our Lord . . . this is bhakti, or real religion’ (Baird 1987: 122–3). Therefore, so far as the logical form of this argument is concerned, Christians, Advaitins, Vais.n.avites, Śaivites, and others are all epistemic peers. To break this epistemic deadlock, one of these groups would have to provide substantive reasons to demonstrate the cognitive superiority of its conceptualisation of X to that of the others. I do not myself explore in this book the possibility of such a demonstration (though in Chapter 6 I discuss some Hindu and Christian attempts in this direction): I only note that this question is the hinge around which many of the debates turn. Third, a recurring motif of the chapters of this book is that debates over ‘conversion’ in contemporary India often commit the ‘genetic fallacy’ of conflating descriptive historical statements with theological-metaphysical presuppositions. For instance, on the basis of the premise that ‘religion’ is a specifically Abrahamic product which was imported to Indic life-worlds after the nineteenth century, the conclusion is sometimes drawn that ‘religion’ is intrinsically alien to these indigenous environments. Whether or not ‘Abrahamic religion’ resonates with certain aspects of Hindu devotional universes is a question that I consider in Chapter 2; for now, I highlight the point that such an argument fallaciously moves

6 Prologue from a historical premise (about when ‘religion’ supposedly came to India) to a metaphysical conclusion (about what the conceptual structure of Hindu life-worlds should be). To see this point, consider the ‘argument from analogy’ that moves from the historical premises that Advaita Vedānta arrived in New York after 1893 or the Hare Krishna movement in Los Angeles after 1965 or Śaivism in Hawaii after 1970, to the conclusions that Advaita, Vais.n.avism, or Śaivism are inherently incompatible with the western Christian ethos. In response to such an argument, an Advaitin, for instance, could reply that the historical question of when Americans first encountered Advaita has no direct bearing on the metaphysical truth that all human beings, whether or not they have had access to the Upanis. ads, are always already rooted in the transpersonal ultimate (Brahman). For a Vais.n.avite example, we may turn to Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī (1874–1937), who undertook the unprecedented task of spreading Caitanya Vedānta beyond the shores of India on the grounds that the ‘Lord [Kr. s.n.a] desires His word to be preached to all living beings’ (Sardella 2013: 140). Indeed, as F. Sardella notes, Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī attempted a ‘deterritorialization’ of Hindu motifs by delinking them from their classical territorial locations in the Indian subcontinent (Bhārata-vars.a), and sent his disciples to England to spread Bengal Vais.n.avism and to set up transnational communities of devotees (Sardella 2013: 178). Therefore, from Christian, Advaitin, Vais.n.avite, or Śaivite perspectives, the heart of the matter is not merely the historical question of when these soteriological perspectives crossed geographical boundaries but also the metaphysical one of whether they can be shown to possess cognitive and spiritual integrity. Fourth, however, the ‘argument from analogy’ noted above does have a powerful disanalogy: most of the debates over ‘conversions’ that I discuss in this book took place not in an ‘ideal speech situation’ but against the backdrop of the colonial power of the British empire, which raises the vexed issue of the relation between ‘religion’ and ‘violence’. A theme that is often articulated by Hindu polemicists against Christian conversion is that Christianity is intrinsically violent, and that Hinduism is intrinsically peace-engendering. More generally, it has been argued that ‘Abrahamic monotheisms’ lead to violent expressions against the others who are ‘constructed’ as evil, perverse, or wicked, and who need to be reined in, even if through coercive mechanisms, to see the truth. They provide a cosmic authorisation to these processes of othering through which the base community forges its own identity: ‘Whether as singleness (this God against the others) or totality (this is all the God there is), monotheism abhors, reviles, rejects, and ejects whatever it defines as outside its compass’ (Schwartz 1997: 63). While I do not directly address the issue of ‘religious violence and monotheism’ (because it is the sort of question that calls for a collaborative effort between sociologists, philosophers, and political scientists that goes beyond my individual academic competence), I wish to ‘frame’ it in the following manner for the chapters of this book. Firstly, as historians of religion have regularly pointed out, terms such as ‘Christianity’ and ‘Hinduism’ refer not to monolithic essences but to a wide variety of internally related (and sometimes internally conflicted) dynamic processes. Consequently, statements such as ‘Christianity caused the burning of

Prologue 7 witches’ and ‘Hinduism caused the self-immolation of widows’ remain empty abstractions, unless we specify which historically shaped dimensions of these religious traditions are being considered. The point is not to deny that various forms of violence directed at the ‘religious alien’ have sometimes been associated with the Christian and the Hindu universes, but to suggest that the real debate is over whether this ‘association’ should properly be understood as a necessary implication of their inner logic or as a contingent entanglement of this logic with numerous socio-political processes (Cavanaugh 2009). A careful investigation of the ‘location’ of these instances of religious violence would show that they do not follow with ‘deductive necessity’ from the scriptural sources (whether the New Testament or the Upanis.ads) but are mediated by complex ensembles of historical factors such as court intrigues, shifting balances of state power, economic instabilities, political upheavals, patriarchal constructions, and so on (Hinnells and King 2007). Various historical studies have demonstrated that religious violence is by no means unheard of in Hindu social spaces, so that we should reject representations of ‘Hindu India’ as steeped in an Arcadian peace that was rudely interrupted by western ‘intrusions’ (van der Veer 1994: 71; Pinch 1996). For a concrete example of how ‘locating’ a religious tradition within a matrix of power relations can help us to understand the patterns of violence that may be associated with it, we turn to the twelfth-century Tamil Śaivite text Periyapurān.am which speaks of violence in the name of devotion to Śiva. A. E. Monius (2004) argues that to understand these violent descriptions, which have been a source of intense discomfort for theologians and commentators in that tradition, we have to ‘locate’ these texts in the twelfth-century milieu where Tamil Śaiva identity was constructed in opposition to Jains who were depicted as lacking in virtue because they had strayed away from Śiva. A standard trope in Tamil Śaivism was the critique of Jain self-denial and a retrieval of the Jain notion of ‘dispassionate’ asceticism (tapas) as a prerequsite for fervent devotion to Śiva. Monius argues that we may see Cēkkilār, to whom the text is attributed, as opposing the Jain emphasis on the cultivation of tranquillity by employing the categories of literary theory to speak . of the ‘heroic’ sentiment (rasa) directed towards the Lord Siva and of a passionate engagement with the world. At a wider level, the intellectual development of the Hindu traditions has been shaped by an internal tension between, on the one hand, the ideals of the householder, who is often involved, for instance, as king or soldier, in violence of various sorts, and, on the other, the values embodied by the ascetic who abjures all kinds of violence. The classical literature consisting of texts such as the Upanis.ads, the Manusmr.ti, the Bhagavad-gītā and the theologi. cal elaborations of systematisers such as Śamkara and Rāmānuja has variously emphasised one of these two over the other, or tried to synthesize them, so that J. D. Long concludes: ‘To generalize, mainstream Hindu thought is ambivalent toward violence’ (Long 2011: 196). Secondly, once again, we must be careful not to conflate historical description with theological interpretation, that is, to argue from the historical premise that ‘Christianity’ (if the monolith be allowed) is associated with the persecution of heretics and conclude that its truth-claims are thereby falsified. The reason why, from

8 Prologue the perspective of Christian theology, the conclusion does not logically follow is because the argument can be strengthened by supplying the crucial missing premise – flawed, sinful human beings often deviate from the path of Christian love (caritas) of neighbour. For instance, after noting that Christians have sometimes not emphasised the spiritual dimension of human existence as clearly as Hindus, Cave (1939: 113) argues: ‘That is an accusation hard to refute for . . . we of the West often appear as too engrossed in the seen to be at home in the unseen and the eternal. But if that be so, the lack lies in us, not in the Gospel we profess’. While from non-Christian perspectives these rejoinders might seem to be post hoc rationalizations, what is crucial for our purposes is that the same logical move has often been made in Hindu universes, as we will note in Chapter 4. In response to certain British Christian missionary claims that the structures of Hindu social existence are fundamentally deficient in morality, influential figures such as Rammohun Ray and Swami Vivekananda retorted that practices such as the self-immolation of widows, untouchability, and so on are latter-day historical ‘excrescences’ which do not follow from the conceptual core of Hindu thought and which therefore need to be carefully excised. For instance, in response to an article by the Scottish missionary J. N. Farquhar in 1908 where he expressed his belief that under the dual strain of the erosion of social conservatism and the efforts of Christian missionaries, the ‘defensive armour’ that had shielded Hinduism had finally been shattered, Lala Lajpat Rai wrote a vigorous reply claiming that Hinduism, springing from the ‘pure monotheism of the Vedic times’, was still vibrant and was responding by adapting to the changing times (Sharpe 1965: 244–6). Consequently, we need to move beyond the ‘comparative martyrdom’ of tabulating facts such as the number of ‘witches’ burnt in Christendom and the number of widows who ascended Hindu pyres to a detailed examination of the truth-claims that undergird the theological interpretations of why such violence took place. Fifth, as an extension of the fourth point, the forms of organised religious persecution that have characterised certain strands of European Christianity are by and large absent in Hindu universes where individuals sometimes move across denominational boundaries with an ease that might have intrigued Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Puritans, and Roman Catholics who often excommunicated, censured, and anathematised one another in post-Reformation Europe. For instance, notwithstanding intense sectarian rivalries between Vais.n.avites and Śaivites, the famous temple of Lingaraj–Mahaprabhu in Bhubaneswar attracts pilgrims from both groups (Lipner 1994: 238). I suggest that this trans-denominational mobility, and more generally attitudes of hospitality to ‘religious others’, should be explained in terms not of abstractions such as ‘Christianity causes violence’ and ‘Hinduism promotes peace’ but, at least partly, of the doctrine of karma and rebirth which often imparts to Hindu universes a somewhat relaxed attitude to the question of the ultimate destiny of the world. Consequently, the apocalyptic anxieties that have sometimes shaped Christian orthodoxy’s encounters with the ‘religious alien’ – based on the theological view that the eternal salvation of the individual depends on the finite stretch of one (earthly) lifetime – are usually absent in Hindu life-settings. For instance, Swami B. H. Bon Maharaj argues that:

Prologue 9 An individual must have developed through practises in various births a given degree of intellectual and moral maturity before he or she can aspire to understand, practise, follow and realise absolute knowledge . . . One has got to go through many births . . . in religions of partial or relative truths before one is born with the requisite intellectual and moral eligibility [adhikāra] to practise [Hinduism]. (Quoted in Young 1981: 148) That is, the individual self’s quest for the divine may require several lifetimes, and the law of karma allows the self, when one of its empirical existences is cut short, to pick up from where it had broken off and pursue the project once again (Radhakrishnan 1932: 288). Therefore, a specifically theological reason for the relative absence of the ‘crusading mentality’ in Hindu life-worlds is not that the essence of ‘Christianity’ is geared towards violence or that ‘Hinduism’ is intrinsically keyed into peace but that the view that human existence is a project that can be fulfilled across several lifetimes provides greater temporal leeway for spiritual progress (and error) than forms of Christianity which regard the present lifetime as the only chance that an individual has to move towards the divine. More picturesquely, if it is true that ‘not all who wander are lost’, then the Hindu life-worlds provide wider temporal vistas for creative meanderings through numerous vales of soul-making, even if these ‘experiments with truth’ are wayward from the standpoint of ultimate reality. I therefore offer the hypothesis (which sociologists of Christianity might wish to explore) that strands of Christianity which regard death as the irrevocable ‘cut-off’ point for spiritual re-formation into Christ might have a greater elective affinity with violence than those which allow the possibility of a post mortem ‘purgatorial’ purification. Be that as it may, it is crucial to emphasise that Hindu soteriological systems such as Advaita, Vais.n.avism, or Śaivism are not based on a doctrinal nihilism of anything goes, for the temporal leeway is usually structured by a clearly articulated (or implicitly presupposed) scheme of doctrinal truths. While the Hindu polemical literature on Christianity sometimes suggests that monotheism is an ‘Abrahamic invention’, the notion of single-minded devotion (bhakti) to a unitary supreme divinity is by no means unknown in Hindu life-settings. For instance, the Civañān.acittiyār, a fourteenth-century Śaiva Siddhānta text of Arul.ananti, presents a detailed outline series of doctrinal positions in order of decreasing error in the following manner: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

the materialists (Lokāyatas), the non-theistic schools such as the Buddhists and the Jains, the Mīmām.sa ritual theory, the Grammarian view that the ultimate reality (Brahman) is the Word, non-dualists such as Śam.kara, thinkers such as Bhāskara who see the world as real and not-real, dualists such as the Sām.khya thinkers, and the devotees of Nārāyan.a. (Clooney and Nicholson 2001: 114–15)

10

Prologue

Such hierarchical rankings were not merely theoretical devices to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity, for, on certain occasions, they had wide-ranging political ramifications. For instance, after Ram Singh II, the ruler of Jaipur, who was initially raised as a Vais.n.avite, declared himself as a Śaivite in 1862, a series of measures were taken against the Vais.n.ava lineages (sampradāyas). He set up a religious council (dharma-sabhā) to investigate their religious practices, made it obligatory for them to use the Śaivite triple horizontal mark on the forehead, and confiscated the temples of monastic authorities who refused to comply with his orders (Clementin-Ojha 2001). Turning the tables on Śaivism, Tamil Vais.n.avism and Vais.n.avisms in northern India instead declare that there is no refuge other than the supreme abode of Nārāyan.a (ananya-gatitva), a declaration that is also articulated by Nammālvār: ‘Oh Lord, what can I do and who shall be my protector? What indeed do you propose to do with me? I do not crave for means other than you’ (Chari 1997: 140). Therefore, sociological reports which state that religious Hindus believe that ‘God is one’ (Bhagvān ek hai) should be carefully interrogated on the crucial theological points, ‘Which ‘God’? Whose ‘liberation’?’ However, Vais.n.avites have sometimes encompassed ‘wayward’ Śaivites within . a wider theological fabric, and Saivites have sometimes returned the gesture to ‘wayward’ Vais.n.avites, not in the sense that they believe that their opponents are doctrinally correct about the nature of reality and of the human response to it, but in that their opponents can attain rebirth subsequently in their own doxastic community, and thus, properly qualified, the opponents can finally move towards the true goal (parama-gati) of liberation.

References Baird, R. D. (1987) ‘The Response of Swami Bhaktivedanta’, in Modern Indian Responses to Religious Pluralism, ed. H. G. Coward, New York: State University of New York Press, 105–27. Cavanaugh, W. T. (2009) The Myth of Religious Violence, New York: Oxford University Press. Cave, Sydney (1939) Hinduism or Christianity? London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. Chari, S. M. S. (1997) Philosophy and Theistic Mysticism of the Āivārs, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Clementin-Ojha, Catherine (2001) ‘A Mid-nineteenth-century Controversy over Religious Authority’, in Charisma and Canon, ed. V. Dalmia et al., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 181–201. Clooney, F. X. and H. Nicholson (2001) ‘Vedānta Deśika’s Īśvarapariccheda (“Definition of the Lord”) and the Hindu Argument about Ultimate Reality’, in Ultimate Realities, ed. R. C. Neville, New York, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 95–123. Evans, C. Stephen (1998) Faith Beyond Reason, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gellman, Jerome (2008) ‘In Defense of a Contented Religious Exclusivism’, in Readings in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Andrew Eshleman, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, pp. 374–82. Gupta, R. M. (2007) The Caitanya Vais.n.ava Vedānta of Jīva Gosvāmī, London: Routledge. Hedges, Paul (2001) Preparation and Fulfilment, Oxford: Peter Lang. Hinnells, J. R. and R. King (2007) Religion and Violence in South Asia, London: Routledge.

Prologue 11 Lipner, Julius (1994) Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, London: Routledge. Long, J. D. (2011) ‘Religion and Violence in Hindu Traditions’, in The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, ed. A. R. Murphy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 196–210. Miller, D. M. (1986) ‘Swami Sivananda and the Bhagavadgita’, in Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, ed. R. N. Minor, New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, pp. 173–99. Monius, A. E. (2004) ‘Love, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Disgust: Śaivas and Jains in Medieval South India’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, 32, 113–72. Moser, P. K. (2010) The Evidence for God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinch, W. R. (1996) Peasants and Monks in British India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1927) The Hindu View of Life, London: George Allen and Unwin. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1932) An Idealist View of Life, London: George Allen and Unwin. Rae, M. A. (2011) ‘Salvation and History’, in God of Salvation: Soteriology in Theological Perspective, ed. Ivor J. Davidson and Murray A. Rae, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 89–103. Sardella, Ferdinando (2013) Modern Hindu Personalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Sarma, Deepak (2005) Epistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Enquiry, London: Routledge Curzon. Schellenberg, John (2007) The Wisdom to Doubt, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Schwartz, R. M. (1997) The Curse of Cain, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sharma, Arvind (2011) Hinduism as a Missionary Religion, New York: SUNY. Sharpe, E. J. (1965) Not to Destroy but to Fulfil, Lund: Gleerup. Swami Nikhilananda (1963) ‘Inter-religious Respectfulness’, in Relations Among Religions Today, ed. Swami Nikhilananda et al., Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 126–30. Swami Prabhupada (1972) Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, London: Collier Books. Swinburne, Richard (1993) The Coherence of Theism, Oxford: Clarendon. Taliaferro, Charles (2011) ‘A Christian Perspective’, in Religious Diversity, ed. Chad Meister, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 381–92. Thiemann, R. F. (1985) Revelation and Theology, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. van Inwagen, Peter (2006) The Problem of Evil, Oxford: Clarendon Press. van der Veer, Peter (1994) Religious Nationalism, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wainwright, W. J. (1995) Reason and the Heart, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Yandell, Keith (1993) The Epistemology of Religious Experience, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Young, R. F. (1981), Resistant Hinduism, Vienna: De Nobili Research Library.

2

Locating the debates

In the third millennium of the common era, the question of Christian missionaries, their aims and their designs – the focus of intense triangular debates throughout the colonial period between missionary apologists, converts from the complex of socio-religious traditions of Hinduism, and members of the Hindu intelligentsia – continues to surface on the centre-stage of contemporary India. Roughly three generations of post-Independence Indian journalists, scientists, political activists, historians, economists, novelists, social workers and commentators on the global scene live and move at the dynamic, and often volatile, intersections of an array of social, economic, and political currents that have been circulating through the subcontinent since the dawn of the European encounters. They are increasingly beginning to cast a critical eye on the various assumptions and ideals that had motivated those who had been in the vanguard of these historical exchanges that were usually marked by asymmetrical relations of power and control – the colonial masters themselves and those who had followed in their wake, such as the British Christian missionaries. These reappraisals are being produced in an atmosphere where the perception that Indians under the dominant regimes of European thought had suffered a ‘loss of self’ is being articulated at various intellectual, political, and social levels, and attempts are afoot to propose and implement strategies for the recovery of indigenous ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Swarup 2000). Already in colonial India, debates between Hindus and Christians often reflected a sophisticated awareness of certain issues which have become flashpoints in more recent decades, such as the relation of Christianity to ‘imperialism’, the motivations underlying conversion, Christianity’s attitudes towards the multistranded and polyphonic entity called ‘Hinduism’, Christian engagement with caste, and so on. We meet practitioners avant la lettre of ‘inculturation’ in figures such as Sadhu Sundar Singh, Manilal C. Parekh, and Verrier Elwin (e.g. Guha 1999) who moved away from denunciations of Hindu ‘heathenism’ as a bundle of idolatrous superstitions to a more intimate dialogue with Hindus (and often Muslims) of their times. Sometimes the converts themselves, such as Krishna Mohan Banerjea (1813–85) and Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–1907), put forward arguments on the basis of their exegeses of Vedāntic texts that these contained traces of the gospel which had led them towards Christ. Various other Christians tried to emphasise the ‘Indianness’ of their Christianity which they argued was

Locating the debates 13 no mere foreign transplant for it could resonate with their deepest sentiments and inclinations (Young 2009). On the other hand, however, stalwarts associated with what came to be termed ‘neo-Hinduism’ such as Swami Vivekananda and S. Radhakrishnan developed penetrating critiques of certain aspects of Christian thought (as they read it) and, more crucially, of the allegedly imperialistic nature of the Christian missionary impulse.

The outlines of the contemporary debate While the arguments over conversion that are being aired today build on some of these themes articulated in yesteryears, they also emerge from a few relatively newer standpoints: namely, the academic study of ‘religion’, and specifically of the diverse forms of Christianities and the Hindu religious traditions, from various perspectives such as social anthropology, textual studies, and phenomenology; the ongoing debates among political theorists and proponents of Hindu religious nationalism (Hindutva) over whether ‘secularism’ is a meaningful concept which can be feasibly realised in the liberal-democratic institutional mechanisms of India; and the postcolonial task of interrogating the multiple ways in which the British empire, through its colonial bureaucracy and imperial ideology, constructed the subjectivities of the colonised Indians. First, contemporary Hindu–Christian encounters, at least in some circles, have moved away from the belligerent imageries of colonial India in which a Christian missionary front spoke of zealous assaults on the demoniac fortress of ‘Hinduism’ and a resistant ‘Hinduism’ claimed that its defensive armour could withstand such attacks (Sharpe 1977). Not only has much water flowed down the spiritual banks of the Ganges, the Yamuna and the Kaveri, once declared moribund by the Christian missionaries of an erstwhile era, but also immense structural and theological changes have taken place, especially during the second half of the last century, in Rome, London, and Edinburgh, three traditional epicentres of ‘evangelical’ waves to the mission-fields of Asia. Since then, the conceptual sluice-gates have been opened and both Hindu thinkers and Christian theologians alerted to a wide array of methodologies made accessible through the work of phenomenologists, historians of religion, social anthropologists, and cultural theorists (e.g. Fuller 1992). Thus, speaking specifically of the Roman Catholic Church, Peter Phan argues that it has to engage with the contemporary context characterised by ‘cultural diversity, economic globalization, and religious pluralism’ – more concretely, it has to purge itself of its Eurocentric aspects, preach the gospel of preferential love for the poor and undergo transformation through interreligious dialogue (Phan 2008: xix). Further, Christian missionary historiography was often written from the perspective of a ‘sending agency’ which tended to glorify the heroic achievements of the missionaries at the frontiers of intercultural encounters as individuals who, while facing numerous obstacles, learnt the languages of the natives and studied their literature. Consequently, the agency of the Indian converts was often minimised, and they were portrayed as illiterate, uncivilised, and spiritually immature. The message itself was often channelised through specifically Europeanised

14 Locating the debates cultural forms, and baptism was regarded as a mark of a social transfer to an European way of life, so that, according to J. Saldanha ‘[b]y impoverishing the Church’s genuine “Catholic” image, the colonial missions have left the young Churches of Asia, Africa, South and Central Americas with a heavy historical burden till the present’ (Quoted in Mattam 1996: 108). However, in the wake of the Vatican II Council in the Roman Catholic Church, and parallel movements in the Protestant churches, Indian Christian theologians have often emphasised the need to develop a comprehensive approach to the significance of ‘religion’ in Indian society that will incorporate disciplines such as Biblical theology, colonial historiography, social theory, cultural anthropology, and so on, in order to reexamine the meanings of ‘conversion’ in the Indian contexts. Against the background of the ongoing Christian re-conceptualisations of the relation of the gospel to the world of religious diversity, an ever-increasing number of Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have critiqued Orientalist constructions of a ‘mystical, acosmic, monistic’ Hinduism and immersed themselves in existential dialogues with Hindus of specific traditions such as Gaud. īya Vais.n.avism, north Indian . devotionalism, and Tamil Saivism (Amaladass 1995). Second, these ongoing attempts to ‘rethink Christianity’ in India have not been mere academic exercises, for they have often been forced on thinkers on both sides of Hindu–Christian encounters by various socio-political currents. The debates over ‘conversion’ are often conducted against the backdrop of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) whose proponents seek to recover their civilisational roots in an encompassing Hindu world whose panoply, they claim, had once stretched over the south Asian subcontinent (Jain 1994). They allege that these roots were cut off during the power-play of the British colonialist–Christian missionary nexus to produce the (much maligned) figure of the deracinated westernised Indian intellectual. The past has become an extremely volatile terrain, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government seeking to introduce in 2002 history textbooks valorising the ‘Hindu’ achievements of an ‘egalitarian’ community which has existed since time immemorial, and to ‘nationalise’ the education system by initiating the study of the Vedas and the Upanis.ads in schools. Advocates of Hindutva protest that in their attempts to forge a Hindu self-identity and re-establish on a firmer footing the comprehensive truths and the values of harmonious interpersonal existence that they associate with Hinduism, they are caricatured as ‘communalists’ by Christians, Muslims, and Communists who are alienated from the wellsprings of their cultural heritage. A primary allegation raised by the Hindu nationalist organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) with respect to these three groups – Christians, Muslims, and Communists – is that they subvert the nation’s integrity through their extra-territorial loyalties (to Rome, Mecca, and Moscow respectively). In their leaders, languages, holy places, symbols, music and so on, followers of Christianity and Islam, so runs the charge, owe their allegiance to cultures outside India, which reveals the crucial distinction between ‘Hinduism’ and these ‘Semitic’ faiths: ‘Hinduism Indianizes foreigners, Islam and Christianity foreignize or de-Indianize Indians’ (Talageri 1993: 47). In 1964, S. S. Apte,

Locating the debates 15 who had been appointed General Secretary of the VHP, portrayed the Hindutva anxiety in these terms – as Christians, Muslims, and Communists consider Hindu society to be ‘a very fine rich food on which to feast and fatten themselves’, it was necessary to organise Hindus to ward off the threat of these three ‘evil eyes’ (Quoted in Jaffrelot 2010: 66). The latter half of the 1990s particularly saw the rise of a vehement campaign against the ‘denationalisation’ activities of Christian missionaries orchestrated by the VHP and its various storm-trooper wings such as the Bajrang Dal. Various parts of the country have become flashpoints of anti-Christian violence, such as the Dangs district in Gujarat in 1998 and Kandhamal in Orissa in 2008, where there have been attacks on churches and prayer halls, and many Christians forced to seek shelter in refugee camps. A major charge that these radical Hindu groups level against Christian conversions is that they are based on material inducements to poor people, whether in the form of literacy campaigns or medical assistance. In response, these groups have often initiated programmes of mass ‘purification’ (śuddhi) to reclaim the converted to the folds of Hinduism (Shah 1999). Arguing that Hindu ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ face a grave threat as missionaries ‘exploit’ the social inequalities in Hindu society, they call for a total ban on conversions. In the wake of the violence in the Dangs, the then Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, partly in response to the demand for the removal of the BJP government in the state, called in early 1999 for a national debate on conversions. While Vajpayee’s call was criticised by Church leaders who believed that the focus had now been shifted from the perpetrators of the violence to Christian evangelists who were put on trial, Vajpayee himself noted that his decision was based on the advice of two local Gandhian leaders, and pointed out that Mahatma Gandhi had once suggested a ban of religious conversion. Indeed, around the turn of the century, antiChristian sentiment would seem to have replaced anti-Muslim propaganda in the ‘master narrative’ underlying the VHP’s attempt to consolidate the Hindu nation, as is evident in its General Secretary Giriraj Kishore’s statement: ‘Today [1998] the Christians constitute a greater threat than the collective threat from separatist Muslim elements’ (Quoted in Mosse 2010: 246). Third, in the wider and not specifically theological circles, Indian thinkers today are also drawing upon an increasingly available pool of critical resources ranging from postcolonial theory, feminism, and neo-Marxism, and honing the skills associated with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to unearth to what extent the missionary organisations were supposedly complicit with the hegemonic enterprise of British colonialism. In scholars from various academic streams who write in the wake of Edward Said’s criticism of the propagation of romanticised images of the Middle East by British and American Orientalists, Foucault’s excavations of the intimate relations between knowledge and power, and Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, the emphasis heavily falls on the ‘politics of difference’ which revolves around the subjectivities and the identities which had been consigned to the margins by the discourses of modernity. These elements of colonial discourse are sometimes picked up by Hindu critics of Christian missionaries to present their own critical interventions into the raging debate

16 Locating the debates over the alleged manner in which missionaries expropriated and dispossessed the consciousness of Hindus. They often depict Christianity as a European import which is fundamentally alien to the ethos of Hinduism and which played a crucial role in the invention of the Hindu Other as a depraved being in desperate need of ‘salvation’ from its European masters. For example, in his challenging ‘tract for the times’ written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI), Arun Shourie details the intersections between the missionaries’ calumniation of Hinduism’s ‘cacophony’, ‘intellectual flabbiness’, ‘morbid self-denial’, ‘unsettled mush’ and ‘chaos’; their alleged collusion with the British administrators who wished to create, in T. B. Macaulay’s now immortal words, a class of Indians with Anglicised subjectivities; and the global scale of mobilisation for Christian conversion running into billions of dollars. Summarising certain shifts in missionary attitudes to Hindu spirituality, Shourie argues that ‘[t]he viciousness of the distortions and misrepresentations of the missionaries, the virulence of their abuses, the length of time over which they kept up the barrage – we cannot imagine these today’ (Shourie 1994: 45–6). In place of such Christian imperialism which allegedly erased native subjectivities, postcolonial critics of Christian conversions have sought to recover voices which were once marginalised by being inserted into (and subsumed by) the one history of humanity narrated from the vantage point of Europe. In the last thirty years or so, the postcolonial rejection of universal narratives in favour of an emphasis on the local, the marginal, and the plural has decisively reconfigured the native not as a submissive recipient but often as an active interrogator of the numerous strands that went into the making of the socio-cultural and economic matrices of colonial India.

Introducing the debates Against this fine-grained background of the contemporary socio-political scene, the ongoing attempts to develop sympathetic understandings of the Hindu religious traditions, and the various re-readings of the nation’s pasts, we shall re-examine in this book the question of Christian missions and religious ‘conversion’. One of the lamentable legacies of the last three centuries of Hindu–Christian encounters is that Hindus and Christians who seek today to understand the diversities and the inner complexities of one another’s traditions, and in the process their respective notions of ‘conversion’ as these were played out on the socio-political domains, can find themselves overburdened with a history of polemic encounters where the sole attempt had often been to establish in a sweeping manner the ‘superiority’ or the ‘inferiority’ of one monolithic entity over the other, ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Christianity’. While there have been many recent works which have reviewed these contested matters, they are sometimes not pitched at the level of inter-disciplinarity which would bring together philosophical, theological, sociological, and legal perspectives to bear on these encounters. We need to highlight both the socio-economic and the political ‘structure’ of colonial India, and the ‘agential’ re-configurations by Hindus of core meanings, values, and orientations

Locating the debates 17 as they negotiated complex routes through this structural field. For instance, sociological and political analyses of colonial India have minutely – but somewhat one-sidedly – uncovered various dimensions of the power struggles relating to the enumeration, classification, and construction of modular representations of the natives. From this broadly Saidian perspective, the Christian missionary often turns out to be simply another agent in the civilising narrative, and in some ways a particularly sinister one who carried into the recesses of the soul the normalising imperatives that the secular empire exercised primarily over the body. On these ‘archaeologies’ at least, the two systems – empire and mission – are claimed to have been virtually co-extensive in unleashing forms of ‘epistemic violence’ on the natives, thereby fatally comprising the spread of the gospel under the ominous shadow of the imperialist Union Jack. Such analyses feed into the fairly widespread view about the ‘foreignness’ of Christianity in India, which is supposed to have entered the Hindu socio-religious orders as a European Trojan horse in order to subvert them from within. While undoubtedly missionaries were implicated, in different degrees, in the colonial apparatus under whose aegis they often operated, the possibility of a contrapuntal reading of the missionary as a ‘subaltern’ force vis-à-vis certain aspects of this machinery is consequently not explored. Our investigation into these matters will lead us to explore the following range of historical, theological, and legal issues in later chapters: 1 2 3

4

5

6 7

Christian missionaries and Hindu apologists in late colonial India often operated with somewhat divergent views of ‘conversion’; the missionaries were involved in various tussles with the colonial administrators over the conversion of the natives; the missionaries often had complicated and unstable locations within the ideologies of the raj – such as liberalism, utilitarianism, and racialism – that were predicated simultaneously on identity and difference between the coloniser and the colonised; in playing a crucial role in the evolution of ‘Hinduism’ into its current status as a world-religion, the missionaries were also engaged in pitched debates with their Hindu opponents whom they (sometimes) acknowledged to be redoubtable interrogators of Christianity; the reports of successive international missionary conferences such as Edinburgh (1910) and Tambaram (1938) reveal that Christian missionaries were constantly developing new conceptions not only of the nature of ‘conversion’ itself but also of the relation between the Christian Religion and the Indic religions; some of the conversion narratives of the native converts demonstrate an acute awareness of – and an anxiety to refute – the charge that their conversion had been instigated primarily by financial and anti–national motives; the missionaries grappled with the question of whether conversion involves only an inner spiritual transformation or also a more holistic elevation of physical well-being, these two conceptions corresponding to two alternative metaphysics of human personhood; and

18 Locating the debates 8

perhaps most momentously, whether religious truth is to be regarded as exclusively located in one religious scheme (by and large, with some important exceptions, the dominant Christian standpoint in colonial India) or as in some way dispersed across religious schemes (the evolving ‘neo-Hindu’ position in response to the former) was a debating point for various Christian missionaries and Hindu thinkers as they argued about the nature of conversion.

Our investigations, from Chapter 3 to Chapter 8, will seek to show that a standard charge against Christianity in contemporary India – that it is a predatory and denationalising imperialism which is rationally bankrupt and which targets the unsophisticated social margins because these are intellectually naïve enough to fall for the fraudulent incentives offered by evangelists – has continued to stick because of the insufficient attention that has been paid to the complex interconnections between questions (1) to (8). The first half of the charge is based on certain preconceptions about a civilisational clash between the ‘Abrahamic’ and the ‘Indic’ worldviews – it is assumed, on the one hand, that the espousal of any ‘Abrahamic’ creed grounded in a single focus cannot be but an irrational hangover from pre-modern times that necessarily leads to violence, and, on the other hand, that ‘Indic’ visions, which are allegedly not grounded in any metaphysical foci, necessarily sustain pluralistic polities. For an example of a Hindu complaint of this type against Christian evangelism, we may turn to S. R. Goel’s stinging criticism that the missionary mind has ‘always suffered from the hallucination that it has a monopoly on truth and that it has a divine command to strive for the salvation of every soul’ (Goel 1988: vii). As we shall note in Chapter 5, an assessment of such a charge takes us into dense metaphysical and epistemological debates over truth, the nature of religious language, and the human capacity to attain an objective conception of the reality. To settle the question of whether or not Christian truth-claims are based on a ‘hallucination’, one has to work one’s way carefully through these debates, and not assume, in a question-begging manner, that they have been decisively settled in favour of certain Hindu conceptions of the nature of reality. Further, the contemporary postulation of Hinduism as an intrinsically tolerant worldview – with ‘tolerant’ sometimes defined in analytic terms as ‘non-missionary’ – not only prohibits serious discussion of the inner logic that binds a certain ‘Abrahamic’ conception of divinity to missionary imperatives but also diverts attention from some Indic parallels to the Christian understanding of conversion, especially in Buddhism, movements among the ‘lower’ castes in Hindu society, transnational organisations such as the Hare Krishna, and so on. The second half of the charge brings us to an equally tangled skein from which a single strand has been pulled out – the one that runs through certain cases of ‘mass conversions’ from the ‘untouchables’ in colonial India. It is argued that Christianity thrives on the social peripheries because its inhabitants are incapable of sustained reflection on the message that is being delivered to them, and because they are easily lured by the promises of material welfare that are handed to them. This reading of Christian missionary strategies overlooks some issues that will engage our attention in Chapter 4 over whether ‘caste’ was a harmless

Locating the debates 19 sociological adjunct that could be retained or a pernicious religious perversion that had to be excised, whether salvation is to be understood as a matter of saving souls or of redeeming the whole human person, and whether the gospel should be carried to the ‘higher’ castes or to the ‘untouchables’. Equally importantly, several historical and sociological studies have revealed that in some cases at least the underprivileged groups, far from being the passive recipients of the missionary’s teachings, were in fact the active initiators of the encounters and played a crucial role in their self-transformation (Hudson 2000). In pointing to the complex overlaps between these themes – of the ‘toleration’ of the Hindu civilisational streams and the ‘fraudulent’ nature of the Christian conversions of the marginal groups – we shall seek to demonstrate that they often crucially shape current debates in Indian parliamentary and legal circles over ‘secularism’, the nature of ‘toleration’, and the right to conversion. For instance, in the ongoing controversies over ‘conversion’ in contemporary India – from Hinduism to Ambedkarite Buddhism or to Islam or to Christianity – and over the ‘freedom of religion’ bills, which in fact place severe restrictions on conversions, the converts often continue to be depicted as the hapless and unreflecting recepients of an epistemic violence. It is here that the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach is particularly significant: socio-political analyses tend to ignore the underlying philosophical–theological issues relating to religious pluralism, truth, agency, the nature of human personhood and so on, while Christian apologetic discourse – and Hindu responses to it – sometimes ignore the dense socio-political matrices within which these battle-lines were crystallised in colonial India. A fundamental argument of this book is that Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ often involve, on closer inspection, deep theological and philosophical disagreements over the structure of ultimate reality, the nature of human agency, the characterisation of the human predicament, and so on, and we shall try to show how meaningful attempts towards the resolution of these debates have to take into account the distinctive truth-claims that are raised in both life-worlds (Kim 2003). While these debates are often structured at the surface level by appeals to ‘toleration’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘religious harmony’ – and the Indic traditions are presented in a manner such that they usually receive full grades in contrast to the Abrahamic ones which barely manage to pass – a careful analysis reveals that both traditions have to mediate, in their somewhat different ways, the dialectic of universal claims and particular origins. Therefore, the challenging questions that need to be addressed are ‘which toleration? whose inclusivism? what grounds for religious harmony?’ A significant amount of scholarly data – from textual, anthropological, and legal angles – is available on these matters, and the attempt to create and sustain healthy dialogical spaces for Hindu–Christian encounters must be alive to and engage with this material.

Agency, truth and religion: a preliminary encounter Our survey of the conceptual terrain has already highlighted the point that debates over ‘conversion’ are centred around the issues of whether individuals who moved

20 Locating the debates from Hindu socio-religious backgrounds to Christian faith were unwitting victims of Christian missionary ‘imperialism’, whether such cross-religious movements are inherently ‘intolerant’ towards the Hindu religious streams, and whether it is meaningful to speak of Hinduism as a ‘religion’ in the first place. These are some of the recurring themes in this book, and in this section we shall take an initial look at their internal structures and mutual interconnections. Agency Though there is a flourishing literature on the themes of how the colonial administrators in British India represented the natives and constructed their subjectivities by seeking to erase indigenous histories and traditions, postcolonial theorists have seldom directly addressed the theme of the missionary enterprise. In fact, postcolonial scholarship tends to view religion as an epiphenomenon of sociopolitical currents relating to power and domination, and the causal role played by the religious beliefs of the individual actors involved in these processes tends to be ignored. These beliefs regarding the constitution of the self, its agential capacities, its relation to the divine, the proper ordering of the different parts of the social whole, and so on, remain hidden to the view of the historian who is sometimes primarily interested in large-scale structural formations. However, it is imperative that we acquire a deeper understanding of such metaphysical concepts because these have been the driving forces of several key figures in the Hindu– Christian encounters that we will discuss in this book. In the absence of any engagement with such issues, historical accounts of the Christian missions can move in the direction of subsuming them under the colonial enterprise or reducing them to a mere appendage of the latter, thereby neglecting to highlight the vigorous responses offered by Hindus, on specifically philosophical and theological grounds, to the claims of the missionaries. Consequently, the Hindu streams are sometimes depicted as static or frozen in time, and their members are not seen as dynamic interrogators who often critically reflected on the bases of their traditions and responded to these ‘incursions’. For instance, Ram Swarup makes some historically valid points about the ideologies of the British empire when he writes, ‘Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism . . . Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack’. However, he fails to draw attention to the embattled position of Christian missionaries as a result of the resistance that they faced from resilient traditional Hindu scholars already by the 1880s (the details are in Chapter 4) and though he repudiates the notion of ‘Hindu passivity’ he seems to accept something much like it when he laments: ‘They [the foreign rulers] began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes’ (Swarup 2000: 33). This line of argumentation is often taken forward to suggest that it is primarily people from the ‘lower’ castes and the aboriginal peoples (Adivasis) who are highly susceptible to the ‘ideological attack’ of Christian evangelists. A ‘subaltern studies’ history of missionary encounters, on the other hand, that we will present in Chapters 3,

Locating the debates 21 4, and 5, will reveal that the recipients of the gospel often played a crucial role in initiating the processes that led to their acceptance of Christianity, and will raise the vital issues of the subjectivity and the agency of the converts. In this context, Wendy Doniger (2002: xii) notes that while postcolonial scholars have viewed religion as a ‘thinly veiled arm’ of imperial power and pointed out the political processes through which religion was constructed, they have often consigned the colonised to the status of victims by overlooking their voices of resistance. Instead, she calls for a ‘postpostcolonial’ historiography which views the Indians that Christian missionaries encountered not simply as victims or resistors but as active agents who negotiated various types of responses to the claims put forward by the missionaries. It is somewhat curious, as we will note in Chapter 8, that the earlier British colonial charge that the natives were incapable of self-government because they had not yet attained the rational autonomy of their masters continues to appear in India’s postcolonial condition in the claim that the Dalits (the current self-designation used by peoples variously classified as ‘depressed classes’ or ‘untouchables’) and the Adivasis have to be carefully guarded from the ‘encroachments’ of Christian evangelists on the grounds that these subalterns lack the rational agency and the discriminative capacity to see through the latter’s ‘fraudulent’ designs. Truth, toleration, and inclusivism Christian respondents to Hindu narratives of the missionary centuries sometimes sidetrack certain vital questions by seeking to make a distinction between forced conversion (which, it is argued, is now a historical matter associated with European colonisation) and current activities in the fields of interreligious dialogue, healthcare, education and so on. What is sometimes overlooked in such Christian responses, however, is the perception, in the eyes of their Hindu critics, that all conversion (whether or not it is compelled) is fundamentally ‘intolerant’ and displays a lack of respect towards the religious Other. While various socio-political reasons have been put forward for the sudden escalation of anti-Christian violence in the late 1990s, it is important also to highlight that there is a specific religious component to the arguments that some Hindu groups use to denounce conversion per se as an aggressive act. Christian theologians who argue that they have today moved away from the wellworn early missionary condemnations of Hinduism as a nest of infernal powers sometimes ignore this issue which from the perspective of their Hindu critics is the heart of the matter – the latter argue that the fundamental ‘dogma’ that Jesus Christ is the only saviour of humanity has remained unchanged while the Christian churches have been engaged in developing various mission strategies and tactical manoeuvres in their approach to Hinduism. For instance, Goel claims that Christian missionaries, starting from the time of the Goan Jesuits, Franciscans, and Augustinians to that of the ashrams of Roman Catholic monks such as Dom Bede Griffiths, have shrewdly taken on a variety of guises with the sole aim of harvesting Hindu souls for Rome. He notes that the ‘theology of fulfilment’ discarded the earlier denunciation of Hinduism as a satanic perversion

22 Locating the debates and instead brought it within a cosmic revelation so that missionaries went about seeking the ‘hidden Christ’ in its social and religious structures. Close on the heels of fulfilment theology followed the ‘theology of indigenisation’ which claimed that Hindu philosophy, music, architecture, and literature, defective in themselves, could nevertheless become vehicles for communicating Christian truth. Some missionaries adopted this stance very earnestly and started ‘masquerading’ as Hindu sannyāsins, but they were, Goel argues, men of base motivations (Goel 1989: 327). In short, Christianity, alleges Goel, has ‘always been a predatory imperialism par excellence’ and consequently the encounter between Hinduism and Christianity ‘should be viewed as a battle between two totally opposed and mutually exclusive ways of thought and behaviour’ (Goel 1998: 2). In other words, the ongoing Christian attempts at ‘Indianising’ the gospel are often viewed by their Hindu critics simply as sophisticated deceptions aimed at conversion through other means. It is alleged that Christians have begun to live in the manner of Hindu swamis and picked up their rituals and symbols not out of respect for these aspects of the Hindu universes but to aid the conversion of Hindus by suggesting that Christianity is the ‘true goal’ of Hinduism. The argument here is that conversion is a violent assault on ‘tolerant’ systems of thought and practice such as Hinduism by ‘intolerant’ faiths such as Christianity which lack respect towards the former: ‘Can you imagine a greater act of disrespect than converting someone? Isn’t a missionary effectively saying, “Your faith is flawed, but mine is not”?’ (Shenoy 1999). Therefore, the mere attempt to establish discontinuities between current modes of Christian engagement with the socio-religious life-worlds of Hindus and the earlier triumphalism of missionary enterprises will cut no ice with such detractors. What needs to be carefully interrogated are the philosophical issues that are often obscured in such encounters – in this case, the question is whether practising ‘toleration’ towards the religious other and holding that her views are inadequate, incorrect, or incomplete are logically incompatible. As we will note in Chapter 6, the debate over the ‘intolerant’ nature of conversion calls for a conceptual investigation of precisely these linkages that are postulated between toleration, respect, and truth-claims. The cruciality of truthclaims to these debates can be appreciated by noting that a prominent modern Hindu response to conversions is that they are not only an ‘intolerant’ assault leading to sociological transfers to another community but also pointless since all the religious streams of humanity are ultimately rooted in the deep truths of Advaita Vedānta. As an early follower of Swami Vivekananda argued, ‘We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the [Advaitic] Infinite’ (1972: vol.1, x). As we will discuss in Chapters 5 and 6, a series of philosophical issues demand critical examination in this context, such as, ‘In what sense are all religions equally true or valuable?’, ‘Does “tolerating” a viewpoint entail that we hold it to be true?’, ‘Is the proclamation of a truth that purportedly has transcultural and transnational implications necessarily intolerant?’, ‘Is the notion of two life-forms that are totally disjoint – such that the possibilities of translation across their boundaries are non-existent – philosophically plausible?’ and so on.

Locating the debates 23 Perhaps most crucially, what needs to be highlighted is the philosophical– hermeneutical issue of whether the attempt made by the members of one religious tradition to approach another religious tradition through the prejudgments of the former is necessarily an act of interpretive violence. It is assumptions of this nature – for instance, the necessary connection that supposedly exists between ‘exclusivist’ truth-claims and ‘intoleration’ – guiding the patterns of argumentation that need to be underscored by Christian theologians who have otherwise been engaged in vigorous debates, in the aftermath of empire, over the ‘indigenisation’ of the gospel. To anticipate our discussion in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, whereas ‘universality’ and ‘particularity’ are sometimes regarded in Hindu–Christian polemical contexts as mutually opposed, a close examination of these terms shows that they are in fact dialectically entangled. Consider the following three statements, from the perspectives of metaphysical naturalism (MN), mainstream (non-Calvinist) Christian theology (CT), and classical Advaita (CA) respectively. MN: All human beings are ultimately bundles of biochemical processes, which can be exhaustively understood only in terms of the theoretical vocabulary of quantum physics. CT: All human beings can obtain the highest good of human existence – salvation from the conditions of sinfulness – but the way to this end is only through Christian discipleship. CA: All human beings can obtain the highest good of human existence – liberation (moks.a) from the ignorance relating to one’s essential identity with the ultimate – but the way to this end is only through Upanis.adic contemplation, initiation by a guru, and self-scrutiny guided by the scriptures. What the formal structures of MN, CT, and CA share in common are ‘universal’ claims that are grounded in ‘particular’ pivots, and each of these metaphysical pivots embodies a densely-knit network of truth-claims. An important methodological point should therefore be noted at this stage about the crucial notion of ‘truth’ that will figure prominently in the subsequent discussion. Some philosophers have proposed a deflationist or anti-realist understanding of truth according to which truth is not based on any representational relations between language and the world, but is to be understood in terms of the intersubjective communicative practices within which truth-claims are raised, examined, and settled. Their critics, on the other hand, seek to rehabilitate certain context-transcendent aspects of truth such as objectivity which they believe are lost in a deflationary account. They hold that truth is a property of propositions, and because propositions are viewed as mind-independent, whether or not a proposition is true is not connected with how many people know it, believe it or have justification for asserting it. In this vein, Peter Byrne (2003) argues that a realist understanding of truth does not conflate the categories of truth-bearers and truth-makers: while truth-bearers such as beliefs and statements are indeed dependent on our cognitive activity, truthmakers or states of affairs do not depend on us. We find a similar argument in the

24 Locating the debates classical Indian traditions such as the Nyāya, the Mīmām.sā, and some strands of the Vedānta traditions which share a realist view of the world, and seek minimally a non-contradiction between ordinary truth and religious truth, and maximally a convergence between the two. F. X. Clooney argues that these traditions are not ‘content to adhere to a merely private, communally circumscribed notion of truth, and each seeks to justify what it knows and believes by proving it to be true or, at least, by proving contradictory information not to be true’ (Clooney and Nicholson 2001a: 58–9). Therefore, without seeking to settle philosophical debates over the nature of truth, we simply emphasise that both the Christian and the Hindu religious traditions that we will investigate in this book have generally accepted a realist understanding of truth. It becomes clear from this survey of Hindu and Christian debates that the dialogue between the embattled camps is being thwarted partly by the downplaying of certain swathes of historical data (such as the highly creative and individual responses of several Hindus to their encounter with the Christian message), and partly by the overlooking of philosophical and theological presuppositions that are often not brought under the spotlight of careful scrutiny. Consequently, though the painstaking efforts of writers such as Goel have made us aware of the various dimensions of physical, intellectual, and spiritual violence that have been concurrent with the spread of Christianity, we need to avoid the impasse in which Hindu–Christian polemics can get stuck through a mere exchange of historical data (‘How many Hindus did the Roman Catholic missionaries massacre, persecute, and convert?’, ‘Have not many Hindus been educated and cared for in Christian schools, colleges, and hospitals?’ and so on). For though Hindu critics of Christian conversion often give the impression that it is only the Abrahamic faiths, and more precisely for our purposes, Christianity, that make ‘absolute’ truth-claims, as a matter of fact Hindu thought too is supported by a host of ‘doctrine-expressing sentences’ which often have ‘absolutist’ implications. As Paul J. Griffiths (1991: 2–3) reminds us: ‘Religious claims to truth are typically absolute claims . . . These tendencies to absoluteness, although they have certainly been typical of Christian doctrines, are not typical only of them; they are characteristic also of many of the most interesting claims made by the religious virtuosi of non-Christian traditions’. We shall take up this matter in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6, where we shall indicate how the ‘universalistic’ claims made in traditions such as classical Advaita Vedānta are rooted in highly specific metaphysical presuppositions. For the present, however, we give three contemporary examples from Ram Swarup: ‘Sanātana dharma . . . rejects the view which identifies man [sic] with his body alone or even with his mind’ (Swarup 2000: 18); ‘Hinduism is the only adequate religion of the Spirit. In contrast, Islam and Christianity are not religions; they are ideologies and, in their true essence, political creeds’ (Swarup 2000: 50); and the Hindu sages ‘rejected all such views of the world . . . which deny the hereafter, which deny sowing and reaping, which deny law of karma . . . ’ (Swarup 2000: 18). The second statement has an ‘absolute’ claim packed into it (‘only adequate religion’), whereas the third statement suggests that the acceptance of the truth of the theory of karma is a theological identity-marker for all Hindus. The point is

Locating the debates 25 not that Swarup should not put forward such ‘absolute’ truth-claims; in fact, given the importance of the notion of truth in Upanis.adic teaching and later Vedāntic theology, the doctrine-expressing statements of Hindu thought have been subject to rigorous examination down the centuries across the six ‘orthodox’ schools of classical Hindu philosophy and also their ‘heterodox’ critics such as the Buddhists and the Jains. Radhakrishnan presents another such ‘absolute’ truth-claim when he argues that if there is ‘one doctrine more than another which is characteristic of Hindu thought, it is the belief that there is an interior depth to the human soul, which, in its essence, is uncreated and deathless and absolutely real’, a claim that would be rejected, for instance, by the medieval Christian traditions which regarded the soul to be a finite creature (Radhakrishnan 1940: 83). Therefore, the question of whether the Hindu religious traditions are wholly incompatible with or have resonant parallels with Christianity must be approached through a careful study of the specific truth-claims in the agonistic context of a dialogical exchange, and not through any overarching judgements about either the ultimate convergence or the radical divergence between ‘Semitic faiths’ and ‘Eastern mysticism’. Religion A fundamental methodological issue must be raised at this point, and some indication provided of how we shall deal with it in this book. It is claimed in some postcolonial circles that the term ‘religion’ is a Christian theological category, with a specific cultural history of its own, which was imported to non-western locales and assimilated by its inhabitants. For instance, S. N. Balagangadhara (2005) argues that the notion that ‘religion’ is a cultural universal, such that all human beings exhibit some form of religiosity, is a theological claim made from within a Christian framework, which attributes ‘religion’ to pagans and heathens, and in the Asian context, to the indigenous peoples of India. More specifically, the category of ‘religion’ is laden with western presuppositions such as the Christian emphasis on creedal formulation, belief, faith, scriptural revelation, dogmatic orthodoxy and so on, and also the European Enlightenment separation of a ‘public’ domain from religious concerns which are located in a ‘private’ sphere of interiority (Bloch 2010). Since we shall frequently talk of conversions across ‘religious’ boundaries, it is important to point out that we follow in this matter Griffiths’ understanding of a ‘religious’ account as one which has three properties: comprehensiveness, unsurpassability, and centrality. First, it is comprehensive in that it leaves nothing out and subsumes any other account we may provide of ourselves and the world around us; it is unsurpassable in the sense that no other account can replace it (though this does not mean that it cannot be abandoned); and it is directly relevant to questions that are taken to be central to one’s existence (Griffiths 1999). While in the specifically Christian case, these elements are associated with canonical texts, doctrinal beliefs, and ecclesiastical organisations (and much else), they are also present in some of the life-worlds of Hindu civilisation which may or may not have these associations. For instance, according to Vedānta Deśika (1268–1370), who stands in the tradition of south Indian

26 Locating the debates Śrī Vais.n.avism, Nārāyan.a alone is the ultimate reality, and not other deities such as Brahmā and Śiva who are finite selves subject to the kārmic cycle (Clooney and Nicholson 2001b: 100). If one of the central tenets of Śrī Vais.n.avism is that of ananya-gatitvam, namely, that Vis.n.u alone can liberate the individual from the cycles of rebirth, the south Indian Śaivite poet-saints (nāyanmārs) were devoted to Śiva as the only liberator – thus Griffiths’ three aspects of a ‘religious’ account of the world have resonant parallels in some of the Indic civilisational streams. Further, while it is sometimes argued that the demaracation of a specific phenomenon or activity called ‘religion’ from the socio-political domains is a distinctively European preoccupation, classical Vedāntic thought did emphasise varying degrees of discontinuity between, on the one hand, the social realms of dharma (which includes one’s caste-duties and legitimises the pursuit of material prosperity or artha and pleasure or kāma) and, on the other, moks.a which signifies the transcendence of the empirical world (Perrett 1997). Therefore without entering into the complex debates over defining ‘religion’ – whether ‘substantive’ distinctions between two realms of the sacred/supraempirical and the profane/empirical with the former dwelt by superhuman entities, or ‘instrumentalist’ views which include all forms of beliefs and practices that promote social integration – we note that in place of such approaches which seek to draw clear boundaries, some scholars have argued that we should view religion as a class whose members possess intricate patterns of overlapping attributes, such that some of these are more prominent in one member than another or present in one and totally absent in another (Southwold 1978). We shall, therefore, use the term ‘religion’ as a polythetic concept, with certain prototypical elements such as notions of the transcendent, pilgrimage, ideas of the after-life, worship, and so on, and with criss-crossing similarities across their different variants. The view that Hinduism was an artificial, reified, and dehistoricised unity imposed by colonial administrators and passively accepted by the natives not only attributes too much power to colonialism in developing representations of Hinduism but also ignores the presence, as we have indicated above, of some ‘prototypical’ attributes that some of its strands share with the Abrahamic faiths. The British discovery of Hinduism was indeed guided by the specifically Christian concerns of accommodating Hindu history into a Mosaic chronology, the search for elements of Christian truth in the Hindu traditions, and the colonial project of classifying, enumerating and tabulating the natives into neatly demarcated religious groups. However, to argue that the British encounters produced ex nihilo and without native participation a completely new formation called ‘Hinduism’ would be to repeat earlier Orientalist tropes of Indian passivity (King 1999). Rather, we should see the colonial presence as providing the political backdrop against which diverse notions of Hindu identity were articulated by an assorted group of figures such as Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), Swami Vivekananda, and others, who saw Hinduism variously as pure monotheism, a unified front against colonialism and Christian missionaries, the essence of human spirituality and so on. Perhaps most importantly, as Brian Pennington has argued, the emerging notion of Hinduism had resonances with indigenous self-understandings, which

Locating the debates 27 is why there was no significant debate among Indians over whether the category ‘Hinduism’ itself was an appropriate one to use in the intercultural debates that followed. They did contest what elements would constitute the idea of ‘Hinduism’ but did not call the project itself in question. As Pennington (2005: 172) puts it, ‘The British did not mint this coin; they traded in it because Hindus handed it to them’. In short, Hinduism is a complex, multi-stranded, open-ended process that has developed by responding to various social, political, and economic conditions, some of which were provided by the circumstances of colonialism. Thus while around a hundred years ago Hinduism was often employed as a signifier of ‘Oriental depravity’, it has been revalorised in various circles as a sign of Indian cultural self-assertion against western imperialism. At the same time, the diversity that we see across forms of Hinduisms should not be over-emphasised, for such particularities and historically structured differences exist in most other religious traditions. While Christianity, for instance, is usually regarded as one religion structured by certain creedal statements about the person of Christ, an observer who is uninitiated into disputes over defining ‘religion’ might take Quakerism, Pentecostalism, and Roman Catholicism to be three distinct religions. Conversely, one should not overlook the elements of unity, coherence, and contextuality in the classical Indic traditions which have often been drawn upon by modern Hindus. For instance, the ways in which theologians of the Vais.n.ava and the Śaiva groups refer to one another, articulate their claims in response to one another, and so on, indicate their awareness of the presence of a wider field of doctrines, images, . and themes. Classical thinkers such as Kumārila, Śamkara, and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī sought to defend the unity of the tradition through an appeal to Vedic revelation, and this unity has been transformed, reinterpreted, and reconfigured in some modern understandings of Hinduism (Halbfass 1991: 15–16). Therefore, to claim that the ‘neo-Hinduism’ that emerged during the colonial encounters is simply a product of the ‘false consciousness’ of modern Hindus would be to reiterate a form of Orientalist discourse which suggests that the natives cannot re-present themselves, and must have their re-presentations checked for authenticity by the colonisers (Smith 2000). We shall therefore use terms such as ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ in this book as signifiers neither of an eternal, primordial unity nor of a disaggregated bundle of infinitely malleable configurations, but of a set of meanings, practices, and visions that have emerged over the last three hundred years or so through intersections between British colonial systems of classifications and native responses to colonial control over Vedic beliefs, practices, and institutions.

Debating ‘conversion’ Our discussion in the preceding sections has prepared us for the central connecting theme that runs through this book – the meanings, the motivations, and the modalities of ‘conversion’. Our primary focus is a ‘phenomenological’ attempt to analyse, with critical sympathy, the reasons offered by both sides either to defend the possibility, even the necessity, of these cross-border movements or to oppose

28 Locating the debates such movements, and to show how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds. Such reasons need to be carefully highlighted especially since they are often obscured in Hindu–Christian polemics over ‘conversion’, for as L. Rambo (1999: 260) points out: ‘A religion’s “insiders” assume that one converts to “their” religion because the religion is true, except when they are suspicious of fraud or deception. An “outsider” never asserts that someone converts to a religion that is different from his/her own because it is true’. As we will note throughout the chapters of the book, Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ are rooted not only in divergent analyses of the historical material on conversions but also in competing theological truth-claims about the nature of the ultimate reality and the human possibility of attaining this reality. Therefore, while we will draw upon, at various stages of our argument, the already existing body of ‘thick’ historical case-studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries, our primary focus will be on the philosophical-theological presuppositions structuring these engagements. At the risk of oversimplifying the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of ‘conversion’, we state three of these contested themes in the form of the following questions. 1 2 3

Who can properly ‘speak for the convert’ – the convert herself or an engaged observer, or both? How is ‘tolerating’ the religious other connected to an appraisal of the other’s viewpoints which may be held to be incorrect, inadequate, or incomplete? What is, in fact, the ‘true Religion’?

Further, we do not seek to add to the burgeoning literature on ‘theories of conversion’, where the phenomenon is approached from various theological, psychological, economic, political, and other perspectives, with another theory of our own. Drawing upon existing scholarship, we shall understand ‘conversion’ as a dynamic and processive religious transformation that is negotiated against a dense background of existential anxieties, spiritual searches, quests for meaning, constructions of identities, cultural currents, economic pressures, and so on, a transformation that can sometimes lead to reconstructions of an individual’s assessment of her place in the world and her relations with human and non-human reality. We shall unpack certain aspects of this understanding under the three subheadings of agency, truth, and religion. One of the most vexed issues in Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’, as we will note in Chapter 5, is whether converts are the conscious agents of their transformation or whether they are passively dragged along by socio-economic forces, material ‘inducements’, and so on. An exhaustive answer to this question will take us into the metaphysics of free will, where we would have to investigate whether human beings are ‘free’ and what ‘free agency’ means in this case. In this book, we shall assume a libertarian or (at least) a compatibilist understanding of free will, which states that human choices are not exhaustively determined by

Locating the debates 29 prior causal conditions so that human beings possess some measure of volitional capacity (Baillie 1967: 127–37). Our justification for this assumption is that the key players in the Hindu–Christian debates we shall consider in this book themselves rejected, implicitly or explicitly, a strong determinist position in the metaphysics of free will. While the Christian missionaries in India rejected a Calvinist view of theological determinism (which would undercut the missionary enterprise), Hindu apologists such as S. Radhakrishnan were insistent that the doctrine of karma should not be misunderstood as fatalism or predestination (Radhakrishnan 1932: 291). In our study of conversions across Hindu–Christian boundaries, we shall therefore seek to highlight both ‘structure’ and ‘agency: on the one hand, the various material and cultural processes through which Hindu beliefs, concepts, and values were reconfigured and images of the Hindus were produced, circulated and institutionalised in colonial India, and, on the other, the oppositions, alliances, and resistances offered by Hindu subjects to the establishment and propagation of missionary knowledge, authority, and control. The notion of ‘structuration’ indicated here will enable us to follow scholars such as Antony Copley in applying a push–pull model as a mechanism for analysing why certain Hindu converts moved away from their background and others did not. Copley argues that the reasons are to be located in a complex range of intertwined factors such as economic considerations, caste status, the highly personal psycho-biography of the individual, reforms movements within Hinduism, and so on (Copley 1994). More extensively, some of the ‘push’ factors include a Hindu’s intellectual and spiritual quest, psychological anxieties in city life, caste oppression, desire for social mobility, and so on, while some of the ‘pull’ factors are the understanding of Jesus Christ as the saviour who introduces people into a new community centred on love, interreligious marriage, friendships with Christian pastors, encounter with charismatic leaders, association with Christian institutions, and so on. Both these factors have their ‘blocks’ as well: for the former, they could be the diversity of Hinduism which can accommodate the quest, fear of social excommunication, the perception that the religious transition from Hinduism to Christianity would be too difficult, loss of economic benefits from the state on conversion, and so on; and for the latter, they could be the perceived exclusivity of Christianity, the association of the Christian way of life with ‘western’ practices of alcohol consumption, the alleged connection of Christianity with European colonialism, and so on (Wingate 1997). Because agency is negotiated in this manner against a dense structural background, several anthropologists of conversion movements have emphasised that conversion is rarely a dramatic, cataclysmic event which changes at a stroke an individual’s entire conceptual, ritual, and practical universe. In the anthropological study of conversion from African religions to Christianity, for instance, the emphasis often falls not on the conquest of one set of local beliefs by the Christian horizon but on how specific individuals develop transitional, overlapping forms of thought, feeling, and ritual, as they negotiate many ‘turns’ to Christianity through processes involving both continuity and change (Schreuder and Oddie 1989). From a more theological perspective as well, K. F. Morrison shows, through his

30 Locating the debates investigation of some twelfth-century European Christian texts, that conversion is an unstable process that involves a gradual growth impelled by divine grace, and is realised in different individuals in proportion to their unique abilities (Morrison 1992). According to these texts, the soul, God’s work of art, had become defaced by sin, and had to be re-formed to the original image through a way of life mingled with uncertainty, affliction, and love, a restoration that was accomplished not through a single act but through the ongoing imitation of Christ. Our study of some paradigmatic Hindu converts to Christianity in Chapter 5 as well as movements among the ‘lower’ castes will highlight precisely how converts sometimes develop hybrid identities across their fluid religious boundaries. If the topic of agency offers a theoretical minefield to the analyst of conversions, the question of truth presents even greater challenges as we move between emic and etic views of ‘conversion’. One of the reasons why conversion is such a contentious matter is because of the variety of ways in which the term has been understood – as an inner spiritual transformation, a change of religious affiliation, the culmination of a spiritual crisis, an ongoing process of adaptations between the old and the new, a response to external socio-economic changes, and so on. On the one hand, an ‘internal’ Christian perspective on conversion would be based on densely interwoven layers of truth-claims about the Triune God, fallen humanity, the grace of Christ, and the eschatological promises – conversion is the return, through divine grace, of an individual to God, which leads her to serve the Kingdom by building up contexts of fellowship, justice, and freedom. Central to the Christian understanding of an individual’s conversio is therefore the notion of faith which involves an assent to certain claims about the divine person of Christ, a trustful self-surrender to the saviour God, and an intention to live out one’s life in accordance with this divine revelation (Dulles 1994: 187). As an Indian Christian theologian puts it, in the course of a discussion regarding the relation between baptism into the Church and conversion to Christ: ‘Baptism understood as the expression and celebration of one’s conversion to Christ, of one’s acceptance of Christ and his ways, of one’s attitudinal changes to form a more inclusive community with the goal of a fuller humanity is still meaningful’ (Mattam 1996: 125). The notion of the convert as a truth-seeker, indicated in the above quotation, is highlighted in some anthropological theories, initially developed in African contexts, which see human beings as seekers of explanatory coherence and predictive control over their socio-cultural worlds. Therefore, they may adjust their cosmology when they are in contact with religious world-systems such as Islam and Christianity. On the other hand, ‘external’ sociological, psychological, and economic theories of ‘conversion’ do not necessarily deal with such questions of theological truth but instead investigate various psychodynamic, socio-political, and cultural implications of the process. From psychological perspectives, conversion is often understood in terms of the self’s attempt to construct a meaningful narrative encompassing the transition from one worldview to another, the search by individuals for identities that would provide them with some continuity during processes of transition, the attempted resolution of psychoanalytic tensions which could lead to new definitions of self, world and the divine, and so on. Sociological

Locating the debates 31 studies of conversion movements, for their part, often emphasise how these transformations started as the social protests of disprivileged groups who were in search of egalitarian contexts which would be free from oppression and would offer them the possibility of socio-economic elevation. The two approaches – ‘internal’ and ‘external’ – are, of course, not mutually opposed: a Christian theologian who ultimately adopts the confessional standpoint as she investigates a conversion movement could also utilise the tools of social anthropology to investigate why such movements occurred in a particular area and epoch. Agency and truth lead us to the third vertex of the analytical triangle through which we are seeking to understand conversion – religion itself, where lies some of the thorniest metaphysical and theological issues in debates over conversion. From some modern Hindu perspectives such as forms of Advaita Vedānta, conversion tends to be viewed in terms of a horizontal transformation and a vertical transformation – the former is the mere sociological change of affiliation across religious denominations and the latter is the true inward ascent to the eternal divine. Consequently, neo-Advaitins, whom we shall encounter in subsequent chapters, sometimes claim that conversion to Christianity is in fact superfluous, for the true Religion, which is beyond all religious affiliations, is the intuitive awareness of one’s essential non-duality with the transpersonal absolute. Because all human beings are essentially grounded in the transpersonal ultimate which is beyond all change, therefore, conversion, understood as a process that would bring about a real transformation through shifts across religious boundaries, is metaphysically impossible. Proponents of Hindutva adopt a more political reading of this metaphysical superfluity by arguing that converts to Christianity are, in fact, truly Hindus because as inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent (Bhāratavars.a), they have always been structured by their ancestral Hindu dharma. However, they have been ‘deceitfully’ incorporated into Christianity, and in order to retrieve the fragments lost to Christian missionary ‘encroachments’, the RSS speaks of the homecoming (parāvartan) of groups of ‘denationalized’ converts (McKean 1996: 107). Thus Balraj Madhok, once associated with the RSS, argued that India is not a mere assortment of castes and communities; rather, all Indians have a defining national characteristic, namely, their ‘Hinduness’, and ‘it is the Hinduness of a man [sic] that makes him a national of India’ (Quoted in Gold 1991: 551). In the RSS imagination, the Indian nation is viewed through the lens of Hindu texts, traditions, and metaphors, and is symbolised as the divine Mother who should be heroically worshipped and served selflessly. For instance, in an appropriation of classical themes, the autumn festival of Dashehra, which celebrates the victory of Lord Rāma over the demon king, is given a martial tone with the worship of weapons associated with the seventeenth-century Maratha ruler Shivaji. The revitalised Hindu nation will not be split within by the presence of religious ‘minorities’ such as Muslims and Christians, and will instead be driven by a vision of national integrity. The majoritarian implications of Hindutva are spelled out by a VHP official: ‘We feel that what we are doing is for the good of the country. After all, what is good for 82 percent of the country is good for the rest of the country, isn’t it?’ (Quoted in Gold 1991: 580).

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In contrast to these Hindu views that conversion is impossible – metaphysically or politically – the Christian understanding of conversion is based on what has been called the belief in the convertibility of all humanity to Christ. Kenneth Cragg (1977: 57) articulates this belief when he argues that the New Testament speaks of a ‘universally accessible salvation, where accident of birth, in the ethnic sense of Sinai, or in the cultural sense of Aristotle, would not determine life in Christ’. The fault-lines across these standpoints can therefore run very deep: according to mainstream Christian theology, individuals are not born as the members of any specific community, but have to undergo a conversion to the ‘eschatological community’ under the lordship of Christ, whereas some Hindu traditions argue that the birth of an individual as, say, a Christian is not an accident but is guided by her prior karma, and since all religions are internally regulated by their specific dharma she should work out her Christianity in greater depth to ultimately arrive at the ‘underlying truth’ that encompasses all religions. From Christian perspectives, in contrast, while the ‘vertical’ conversion to a greater participation in the divine life is of course vital, the ‘horizontal’ conversion through baptism to an affirmation of the lordship of Christ is usually seen not as opposed, but indeed as preparatory, to the former. On some theological understandings of baptism, it signifies an individual’s ‘mystical’ participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, and reception of the Holy Spirit that initiates her regeneration as she lives through the in-between times in the hope of an eschatological fulfilment. Therefore, Christian theologians would argue that an individual’s ‘horizontal’ incorporation to the Christian community, with its distinct sociological and institutional foci, is not a peripheral adjunct to, but an integral component of, her ‘vertical’ transformation to God through the Holy Spirit. However, they do not usually view the ‘horizontal’ transformation effected through baptism either as sufficient for salvation (which would negate the utter gratuity of salvation) or as necessary for salvation (which would imply that the Holy Spirit cannot be present outside eccesial boundaries). As Karl Barth points out: We must . . . be careful not to maintain that participation in the salvation of the world grounded in the Jesus Christ is bound absolutely to the mediation of the Church and therefore to its proclamation. We have to reckon with the hidden ways of God in which He may put into effect the power of the atonement made in Jesus Christ (Jn. 10:16) even extra ecclesiam, i.e. other than through its ministry in the world. (Quoted in Thompson 2011: 149) Interestingly enough, while Barth is usually regarded as an ‘exclusivist’ with regard to the question of whether Christian truths could be located in nonChristian domains, he viewed the final salvation of all human beings at least as a possibility which could not be categorically denied (Bauckham 1979: 53). While bearing in mind these caveats, most mainstream Christian theologians regard the ‘horizontal’ transformation as a concurrent expression of an individual’s ongoing ‘vertical’ transformation to discipleship of Christ.

Locating the debates 33 The spatial metaphors of ‘horizontal’ versus ‘vertical’ conversion also appear in versions of fulfilment theology, according to which human beings have certain innate religious yearnings, and these can be satisfied by a series of ‘lower’ religions which are progressively replaced by the ‘highest’ Religion into which they ‘evolve’. While modern forms of Advaita usually play down the importance of the ‘horizontal’ transformation to a doxastic community within which the correct forms of beliefs and practices can be nurtured, the notion of an initiation (dīks.ā), through which an individual is re-oriented towards the ultimate reality, is integral to some of the medieval Hindu traditions, such as Advaita itself, Śaiva Siddhānta, and various forms of Tantric rituals. For an example from medieval Advaita, we may turn to Sadānanda (c.1500) who says that a qualified pupil who is scorched by the fiery round of repeated rebirths should run, in the manner that an individual whose head is on fire rushes to a lake, to a guru who is learned in the Vedas and established in the ultimate reality. The guru, through his supreme compassion (parama-kr.payā) will lead the pupil along the path of Advaitic wisdom by instructions about how to attain the transpersonal eternal reality that underlies empirical diversity (Swami Nikhilananda 1949: 18–20). For Śaiva Siddhāntins, in contrast, the process of attaining liberation is activated through the grace of Śiva (anugraha-śakti-pāta) which descends when a guru initiates an individual through the imposition of mantras. While Śaiva Siddhāntins share with the other Hindu soteriological traditions such as Advaita a basic framework of gnoseological and ritualistic practices, they claim that the ‘ultimate state is achievable only through the religious disciplines of the Śaiva cults’ (Bartley 2011: 194). Therefore, the vital question in Hindu–Christian debates (and, as we can see from these examples, even in intra-Hindu debates) is, once again, which is, in fact, the highest Religion. From a Christian perspective, F. D. Maurice argued that the universe is filled with God’s presence, so that the non-Christian religions are not satanic perversions but locales where human beings are being awakened by the ‘Divine Spirit’ (Hedges 2001: 61). At the Anglican Missionary Conference of 1894, Bishop Westcott too developed the same argument: Each people has its own peculiar gift, which will, we believe, be brought in due time to Christ through the Church . . . There are great nations – China and India – inheritors of ancient and fruitful civilizations, endowed with intellectual and moral powers widely different from our own, which have some characteristic offering to render for the fuller interpretation of the Faith. (Quoted in Hedges 2001: 269) One of the most famous parallels to these Christian theological interpretations of religious diversity in Hindu circles is Swami Vivekananda’s claim that Hinduism, rooted in Advaita Vedānta, is the most inclusive religion: ‘Ours . . . is the universal religion. It is inclusive enough, it is broad enough to include all the ideals. All the ideals of religion that already exist in the world can be immediately included . . . in the infinite arms of the religion of the Vedānta’ (1972: vol. 3, 251–2).

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For Swami Vivekananda, the inclusivity of Hindu thought is grounded in the specific claims of Advaita Vedānta: therefore, strongly rejecting the thirteenthcentury Hindu theologian Madhva’s view that human beings can attain liberation only through the worship of Vis.n.u (1972: vol. 7, 37), he argued that forms of dualism that have not attained the lofty heights of Advaita are parts that are ‘struggling to attain to the whole’ (vol. 2, 141). In a similar fashion, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan argued that Hinduism is marked out by its ‘universal’ vision that accepts different ideas of the ultimate and recognises that human beings seek the transcendent reality through diverse routes: ‘By accepting the significance of the different intuitions of reality and the different scriptures of the peoples living in India . . . Hinduism has come to be a tapestry of the most variegated tissues and almost endless diversity of hues’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 20). Therefore, echoing in his own Hindu context the view of Westcott regarding the ‘harmony of religions’, Radhakrishnan claimed that the Hindu who chants the Vedas, the Chinese who reflects on the Analects, and the European who worships Christ as the mediator can all access the ultimate reality through these specific contextual routes. At the same time, however, Radhakrishnan argued that these religious traditions are valuable because they are pointers to the ultimate transpersonal reality intimated by Advaita which includes them as well as transcends them by standing at the pinnacle of the religious spectrum. In his famous words: The worshippers of the Absolute are the highest in rank; second to them are the worshippers of the personal God; then come the worshippers of the incarnations like Rāma, Kr.s.n.a, Buddha; below them are those who worship ancestors, deities and sages, and the lowest of all are the worshippers of the petty forces and spirits. (Radhakrishnan 1927: 32) The crucial implication of these neo-Hindu views, that conversions across religious boundaries are superfluous because all human beings are always already grounded in the transpersonal ultimate, was clearly articulated at the first General Convention of the Ramakrishna Mission in 1926 by the Chairman Swami Saradananda. Of his sevenfold summary of the realisations of Ramakrishna (1836–86), the following three are particularly relevant for our discussion: Every sincere devotee of any religion whatsoever will have to pass through the three stages of dualism, qualified monism and ultimately monism; That there need not be any quarrel between dualism, qualified monism and monism, for each comes in turn to every devotee in accordance with the growth and development of his spiritual life; and Stick to your own religion, and think that the followers of other religions are coming to the same goal [that is, the transpersonal ultimate intimated by Advaita] through different paths. (Williams 1981: 70)

Locating the debates 35 An American tourist who wished to become a Hindu received the same response from Chandrashekhara Bharati, the spiritual head (ācārya) of the Sringeri monastery (1912–54) which stands in the Advaitic tradition: ‘It is no freak that you . were born a Christian. God ordained it that way because, by the samskāra [latent impressions] acquired through your actions (karma) in previous births, your soul has taken a pattern which will find its richest fulfilment in the Christian way of life’ (Sharma 2011: 126). In other words, the neo-Hindu rejection of conversion, as the process is understood from most Christian standpoints, is based on substantive metaphysical views about the nature of reality and human personhood, which lead to certain hierarchical rankings of the religious traditions of the world. As the ‘ultimate’ transpersonal reality cannot be encapsulated through any images, descriptions, or creedal statements, conversion or proselytisation across religious boundaries, involving imagist devotions directed to the divine characterised in personal terms, are viewed as merely shifts at the ‘penultimate’ level of truth. Therefore, a common trope employed in such neo-Hindu critiques of conversion is that the transpersonal ultimate, which is always already present in all human beings, can be uncovered through the spiritual practices of numerous religious pathways, which, however, have only provisional validity till the realisation of one’s essential non-duality (advaita) with the ultimate. The conceptual structure of such rankings can be highlighted also by looking at the Jain doctrine of the many-sidedness of reality (anekānta-vāda), which is often put forward as the view that all religious statements should be accepted as partially valid, relative to specific standpoints. However, the classical Jain tradition itself was clear that this doctrine is rooted in the omniscience (kevala-jñāna) of the liberated Jinas, who are able to see ‘reality’ in its entirety from all perspectives and whose fullness of truth is contained in Jain teachings (Cort 2000). That is, from the vantage point of the omniscient Jinas, which is the absolutely true perspective not subject to relativisation, the other religious and philosophical traditions are ranked hierarchically as possessing partial fragments of their all-encompassing vision. As Paul Dundas notes; ‘[T]he many-pointed approach was claimed by the Jains to be immune from criticism since it did not present itself as a philosophical or dogmatic view’ (Dundas 1992: 199). Although this doctrine is usually classified as a component of ‘Jain’ worldviews, its pervasive influence can be seen in the well-known Indic parable of the blind men and the elephant which appears in texts that today would usually be classified as ‘Hindu’ and ‘Buddhist’. The parable depicts the men as characterising with partial descriptions the totality of the elephant which only the king can behold. The Advaitin Sureśvara (c. 700), . a disciple of Śamkara, uses this analogy to argue that just as blind people (such as Buddhists and various other thinkers who propose a real dualism between the empirical world and the divine) put forward a million partially correct guesses about the nature of the elephant, so too those of weak intellect (ku-buddhi) apprehend the non-dual ultimate in a million ways (Alston 1959: 20). The crucial question, therefore, is who the all-seeing king is – the omniscient Jinas or their ‘Hindu’ or ‘Buddhist’ doctrinal rivals. The applicability of this analogy is not

36 Locating the debates limited to Indic contexts, for it is possible to argue even from a Christian theological standpoint that while there are indeed many relative truths, these partial truths can be comprehended only from the perspective of the complete Christian truth. Thus Avery Dulles argues, in the somewhat different context of a discussion about the nature of Christian faith, that just as it is objectively true that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, it is also objectively true, in the judgement of Christians, that Christ is the incarnate God. Almost as if he were responding to the Jain doctrine, he adds that this judgement ‘correctly states the reality, if only from a certain limited perspective’ (Dulles 1994: 193). At this stage, we have therefore reached, as it were, the crux of the matter: the Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ are ultimately over the question of what is, in fact, the true Religion. For instance, Swami Vivekananda argued that to the Hindu ‘the whole world of religions is only a travelling . . . of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal’ (1972: vol. 1, 18). A Christian theologian such as St Augustine phrased his understanding of human history in similar terms, though he would, of course, have disagreed with Swami Vivekananda over what, in fact, is the ‘same goal’. To take one instance of the Christian position, when the Lambeth Conference declared in 1930: ‘We gladly acknowledge the truths contained and emphasised in the great religions; but . . . each of them is less than the Gospel of the unsearchable riches of Christ’, this is a theological reading of religious diversity as centred around Christ (Dewick 1953: 50). Structurally parallel to the neo-Hindu claim that Hinduism or Vedānta is truly ‘universal’ is the Christian view articulated, for instance, during the Mataparīks.ā controversy initiated by a Scotsman John Muir (1810–82): ‘Only Christianity is universal (sāmānya) . . . The whole human species has sinned. Christ came for its justification and deliverance. Westerners (Yavanas) and Indians, the cultured and barbaric, have all become coheirs . . . because of his grace’ (Quoted in Young 1981: 75). The question returns – is it possible to demonstrate through reasoned argumentation which view is cognitively superior to the others: the Christian understanding of the human predicament as sinners alienated from a personal creator or the neo-Advaitin conception of karma-laden finite selves ignorant of their deep identity with the transpersonal ultimate or the Vais.n.avite notion of finite selves who have not become devout worshippers of the personal Lord? While it would be rash to speak of a Christian consensus on this question, Dulles is representative of several strands of contemporary Christian theology when he argues that while reasoning can respond to various objections ‘purely rational arguments accommodated to all human minds do not by themselves bring about the full conviction required for faith. Unwavering assurance cannot be achieved unless the arguments are synthesised in the light of a gracegiven desire for, and heartfelt anticipation of, a redemptive revelation’ (Dulles 1994: 276). Therefore, a fundamental debate remains, as we will note in subsequent chapters, over what sort of ‘objective’ evidence can be supplied for establishing the cognitive superiority of Christianity over a specific form of Hinduism, or vice versa.

Locating the debates 37

Outline of the chapters We begin Chapter 3 with the question of Christian missionaries and their alleged connections with colonialism, and discuss how, for much of the nineteenth century, the Christian message arrived on Indian shores in British forms. The missionaries whom we will encounter in this and the next chapter are British Protestant missionaries; as we will see in Chapter 5, Roman Catholic missionaries had arrived in some parts of the land around two hundred years earlier. The former had sometimes imbibed the liberalism, racial stereotypes, utilitarianism, and belief in progress that underpinned much of the British colonial administration. Echoing the colonial view that ‘child-like’ Indians were not ready to handle the reins of government, Christian missionaries sometimes argued that Indians should not seek to throw off the British yoke but must cooperate with Britain’s civilising enterprise. Further, till around the beginning of the twentieth century, and sometimes even thereafter, they viewed the Indian socio-cultural streams through their Victorian–Edwardian prisms, and denounced the indigenous cultures as primitive, superstitious, and barbaric. At the same time, however, the relation between ‘colonialism’ and ‘Christian mission’ was not, as it is sometimes alleged in Hindu critiques, a symbiotic one, for there were powerful instabilities in this nexus, with the administrators taking a dim view of the missionary zeal, and the missionaries, on their part, complaining that the British officials were not fulfilling their duty to God of Christianising India. In spite of the sometimes deep immersion of the missionaries in the ideologies of empire, a crucial distinction must be drawn between the British colonial administrators and the missionaries – whereas the former’s enterprise was driven by a geographical division between the ‘civilised’ west and the ‘primitive’ east, the enterprise of the latter was structured by a soteriological divide between the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’ which, of course, cut across all national differences. Notwithstanding this crucial difference, we will note how some Christian missionaries did after all view the (soteriological) ‘saved–damned’ opposition through the lens of the (civilisational) ‘west–east’ dichotomy. In Chapter 4 we continue with the theme of Christian missions and colonialism by examining how in the crucible of Oriental scholarship, British colonial imperatives, and the criticisms levelled by Christian missionaries against ‘idolatry’, modern forms of Hinduism were gradually forged. In contrast to certain strands of postcolonial literature which do not sufficiently emphasise native agency, we underscore the embattled position of missionaries from the start as they had to face a Hindu backlash in the form of a ‘neo-Hinduism’ or ‘higher Hinduism’ which claimed to encompass the ‘lower’ truths of religions such as Christianity itself. Nevertheless, the ‘liberal’ note of missionary thinking that Indian converts were not capable of handling their own affairs, and had to be safeguarded from Hindu ‘contamination’, was instrumental in producing native churches which were significantly disconnected from their indigenous milieus. While this aspect of ‘denationalisation’ is often criticised from Hindu positions, we indicate how some of the converts themselves, even before India’s political independence,

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spoke of the missionary imperialism of the British Church organisations. In fact, Christian missionaries had to deal with a ‘liberal dilemma’: on the one hand, they sometimes championed the cause of self-rule for the natives with whom they shared the fundamental commonality of being, after all, ‘children of God’, but on the other hand, their perception that the natives were still immersed in the condition of infancy out of which European nations had ascended to the apex of human civilisation led them to challenge the possibilities of an autonomous Indian Church. The dilemma can be rephrased in these terms: on the one hand, the natives were different from the missionaries – but not utterly different because they were creatures of the same God – but, on the other hand, the natives were similar to the missionaries – but not completely similar because they were yet to be brought within the Christian fold. We move to the question of ‘caste and conversion’ in Chapter 5, where we explore certain differences of emphases between Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries on this question with respect to three topics: whether the gospel is to be centred on the salvation of the soul or the well-being of the embodied person, whether caste itself is to be regarded merely as a sociological classification or as a religious structure, and whether Christian mission should be directed to the ‘higher’ castes or the ‘lower’ castes of the Hindu social body. In the course of developing the account of conversion we have indicated in this chapter, as a dynamic transactional process through which newer goals, meanings, and identities are acquired, we will note how on some occasions the converts themselves, whether from the ‘higher’ or the ‘lower’ castes, took the initiative, and how they developed hybrid forms of Christianity which did not always coincide with the Europeanised messages that the missionaries had handed down to them. Indeed, one some occasions the converts sharply critiqued the missionaries for their connections with the imperial structure of the British government and their reluctance to discard the European trappings of their Christianity. In certain disputes over caste, the missionaries were drawn into protracted negotiations with their congregations, whose members made use of the spaces opened up to them by the churches as arenas for negotiating their social advancement if they were converts from the ‘lower’ castes, or for resisting these moves if they were ‘upper caste’ Christians. We will further note that underlying the criticism sometimes heard in Hindu circles that Christian conversions are ‘fraudulent’ because they promise material well-being to the converts is a fundamental dispute over the metaphysics of human personhood and the nature of ultimate reality – should ‘redemption’ be viewed as the liberation of a spiritual principle from its material encasement or as the holistic well-being of all dimensions of the embodied person? While forms of Hinduism such as classical Advaita tend to the former view, Christian missionaries in India themselves shifted their positions from the first to the second. We conclude this chapter with the question of who speaks for the convert, where we point out that the Hindutva criticism that converts, especially from the ‘lower’ castes, are dragged along by the ‘inducements’ of Christian evangelists not only erases their agential capacities but also repeats, ironically, the British colonial charge that the ‘child-like’ natives are incapable of rational choice.

Locating the debates 39 In Chapter 6, we move to the centre of the conceptual debates: the relation between toleration and the structure of truth-claims, whether from a Christian or a Hindu perspective. We argue that toleration, both in Christianity and in Hindu thought, should be equated not with indifferentism or strong relativism but with diverse forms of hierarchical encompassment in which, on the one hand, the religious other is respected for specific theologically grounded reasons and, on the other hand, the views of the religious other are held to be inadequate. The critical debate in Hindu–Christian encounters is, therefore, not whether toleration but why toleration, and we will note that forms of Christian theology and Hindu thought have negotiated in distinctive ways the dialectic of universalist message and particular presuppositions. Indeed, we will underscore the point that the real debate is over which is, in fact, the true Religion – Christianity or some form of Hinduism, such as Advaita, Vais.n.avism, Śaivism, and so on – and whether this cognitive, experiential, and spiritual superiority can be objectively demonstrated through an analysis of competing truth-claims. Therefore, while Hindutva critics tend to speak of Hinduism as universal, catholic, and pluralistic and Christianity as dogmatic, authoritarian, and aggressive by presenting a civilisational clash between two monolithic blocs, a careful examination of this dichotomy shows that both these religious traditions have developed distinctive interpretations of the significance of religious diversity, interpretations which have certain overlaps as well as disjunctions. In short, the conflicts at the conceptual heart of Hindu–Christian encounters over ‘conversion’ should be understood in terms not so much of a tolerant Hinduism being subjected to the missionary depredations of an intolerant Christianity but of the opposition between two somewhat divergent schemes, each of which claims to be the fullness of ‘the Religion’ which can encompass the partial truths of ‘the religions’. The philosophical points explored in Chapter 6 are carried over to a discussion in Chapter 7 of certain Christian theological issues relating to conversion and the Hindu responses to these. We discuss the changing views of ‘mission’ from the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 onwards, and the implications of these shifts for interreligious dialogue, the Christian understanding of the uniqueness of Christ, and inculturation. We will note that these transformations themselves are subject to varying interpretations – the emic Christian view, by and large, is that these transformations are part of a deepening understanding of the true meaning of missions, while from most etic Hindutva perspectives these are strategic manoeuvres through which the assault on Hindu life-worlds continues unabated, even if through more subtle means than in earlier decades. This is a conflict that will be highlighted on many occasions throughout this book – the Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ are not just over what the historical record is, but also over how to read this record, and such readings are ultimately informed by distinct theological perspectives. The crucial question therefore is not, ‘Which is inclusive – on the one hand, Christianity or, on the other hand, forms of Hinduism such as Advaita Vedānta, Vais.n.avism, Śaivism and so on?’, for both possess internal resources to accommodate religious diversity, but ‘What is the theological-philosophical basis

40 Locating the debates of inclusivity?’, and here, of course, the responses can sometimes be sharply opposed. For one, it is the personal reality of Christ who has been drawing the world towards a trans-historical fulfilment, while for, say, neo-Advaita it is the gradual evolution of human beings, through various penultimate and provisional religious forms, to the supreme ‘experience’ of non-duality. Each side often sees the other as transplanting truths from their localized contexts and re-orienting them around a central pivot, whether Christ or Advaita. However, to repeat, the basic point of dispute is not properly phrased in terms of religious imperialism or arrogance – it is rather over conflicting truth-claims, and the debate should be focussed on the possibility of establishing the inner consistency, if not the cognitive superiority, of the Advaitic schema over the Christian worldview, or vice versa. In Chapter 8, we move to the political aspects of toleration by discussing certain debates over secularism, with specific reference to the themes of the Supreme Court’s judgements about the nature of Hinduism, the location of the right to propagate one’s religion in a secular regime, Gandhi’s views on conversion, and the connection between conversion and multiculturalist politics. We sketch some of the contours of a contested political terrain over which alternative visions of Hinduism have been offered, ranging from Hinduism as the essence of spirituality in neo-Advaita, as the civilisational unity rooted in an unbroken tradition that has flowed from Vedic times in Hindutva, and so on. We emphasise the point that while striking a balance between the holistic, unifying, and integrative aspects of Hindu civilisation and its classical, medieval, and contemporary anti-systemic dimensions is a tricky endeavour, both of them need to be highlighted to resist the view that converts to Christianity are being extricated through missionary conspiracy from an ‘essential India’ of uncorrupted Vedic innocence. Chapter 9 summarises our conclusions.

Conclusion To conclude, we shall therefore seek first, to highlight the complex range of alliances as well as disjunctions between the British colonialists on the one hand and the Christian missionaries and the Indian converts on the other (in Chapters 3 and 4); second, to investigate the vital issue of ‘conversion’ itself – its significance in Christianity and its relation to toleration (in Chapters 5 and 6); and, third, to examine whether evangelisation understood as the propagation of the ‘good news’ can be located within the parameters of the Indian Constitution (in Chapters 7 and 8). We shall seek to demonstrate, by developing a cumulative argument through these chapters, that for an adequate understanding of the inner logic, structure, and content of the Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ we have to wrestle with these bulky questions that span the disciplines of historians, cultural critics, legal scholars, philosophers, and theologians, and that form a closely-knit web of mutually referring interconnections.

Locating the debates 41

References Alston, A. J. (1959) The Realization of the Absolute, London: Shanti Sadan. Amaladass, Anand (ed.) (1995) Christian Contribution to Indian Philosophy, Madras: CLS. Baillie, D. M. (1967) The Theology of the Sacraments, London: Faber and Faber. Balagangadhara, S. N. (2005)“The Heathen in His Blindness”: Asia, West and the Dynamic of Religion, Delhi: Manohar. Bartley, Chris (2011) An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, London: Continuum. Bauckham, R. J. (1979) ‘Universalism: a Historical Survey’, Themelios, 4, 48–54. Bloch, Esther, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde (ed.) (2010) Rethinking Religion in India, London: Routledge. Byrne, Peter (2003) God and Realism, Aldershot: Ashgate. Clooney, F. X. and H. Nicholson (2001a) ‘From Truth to Religious Truth in Hindu Philosophical Theology’, in Religious Truth, ed. R. C. Neville, New York, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 43–63. Clooney, F. X. and H. Nicholson (2001b) ‘Vedānta Deśika’s Īśvarapariccheda (“Definition of the Lord”) and the Hindu Argument about Ultimate Reality’, in Ultimate Realities, ed. R. C. Neville, New York, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 95–123. Copley, Anthony (1994) ‘The Conversion Experience of India’s Christian Elite in the MidNineteenth Century’, Journal of Religious History, 18, 52–74. Cort, J. E. (2000) ‘“Intellectual Ahim . sā” Revisited: Jain Tolerance and Intolerance of Others’, Philosophy East and West, 50, 324–47. Cragg, Kenneth (1977) The Christian and Other Religion, London and Oxford: Mowbrays. Dewick, E. C. (1953) The Christian Attitude to Other Religions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doniger, Wendy (2002) ‘Foreword’, in Popular Christianity in India, ed. S. J. Raj and C. G. Dempsey, New York: State University of New York Press, pp. xi–xix. Dulles, Avery (1994) The Assurance of Things Hoped For, New York: Oxford University Press. Dundas, Paul (1992) The Jains, London: Routledge. Fuller, C. J. (1992) The Camphor Flame, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Goel, S. R. (1988) Catholic Ashrams, New Delhi: Voice of India. Goel, S. R. (1989) History of Hindu–Christian encounters, New Delhi: Voice of India. Goel, S. R. (1998) Pseudo-Secularism, Christian Missions and Hindu Resistance, New Delhi: Voice of India. Gold, Daniel (1991) ‘Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation’, in Fundamentalisms Observed, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 531–93. Griffiths, P. J. (1991) An Apology for Apologetics, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Griffiths, P. J. (1999), Religious Reading, New York: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ramachandra (1999) Savaging the Civilized, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halbfass, Wilhelm (1991) Tradition and Reflection, New York: SUNY. Hedges, Paul (2001) Preparation and Fulfilment, Oxford: Peter Lang. Horton, Robin (1971) ‘African Conversion’, Africa, 41, 85–108. Hudson, D. D. (2000) Protestant Origins in India, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. Eerdmans. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2010) Religion, Caste and Politics in India, Delhi: Primus Books. Jain, Girilal (1994) The Hindu Phenomenon, New Delhi: UBSPD.

42 Locating the debates Kim, Sebastian (2003) In Search of Identity, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. King, Richard (1999) ‘Orientalism and the Modern Myth of “Hinduism”’, Numen, 46, 146–85. Mattam, Joseph (1996) ‘Indian Attempts Towards a Solution to the Problems of Conversion’, in Mission and Conversion: A Reappraisal, ed. Joseph Mattam and Sebastian Kim, Mumbai: St Paul’s, pp. 101–27. McKean, Lise (1996) Divine Enterprise, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Morrison, K. F. (1992) Understanding Conversion, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press. Mosse, David (2010) ‘The Catholic Church and Dalit Christian activism in contemporary Tamil Nadu’, in Margins of Faith, ed. R. Robinson and J. M. Kujur, New Delhi: Sage, pp. 234–62. Niebuhr, H. R. (1952) Christ and Culture, London: Faber and Faber. Oommen, George (1998) ‘Christians Among Malayarians In Kerala’, in Christianity in India, ed. F. Hrangkhuma, Delhi: ISPCK, pp. 138–54. Pennington, B. K. (2005) Was Hinduism Invented? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perrett, Roy (1997) ‘Religion and Politics in India: Some Philosophical Perspectives’, Religious Studies, 33, 1–14. Phan, P. C. (2008) Being Religious Interreligiously, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Radhakrishnan, S. (1927) The Hindu View of Life, London: George Allen and Unwin. Radhakrishnan, S. (1932) An Idealist View of Life, London: George Allen and Unwin. Radhakrishnan, S. (1940) Eastern Religions and Western Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rambo, L. R. (1999) ‘Theories of Conversion: Understanding and Interpreting Religious Change’, Social Compass, 46, 259–71. Schreuder, D. and G. Oddie (1989) ‘What is “Conversion”? History, Christianity and Religious Change in Colonial Africa and South Asia’, Journal of Religious History, 15, 496–518. Shah, Ghanashyam (1999) ‘Conversion, Reconversion and the State: Recent Events in the Dangs’, Economic and Political Weekly, 312–18. Sharma, Arvind (2011) Hinduism as a Missionary Religion, New York: SUNY. Sharpe, E. J. (1977) Faith meets Faith, London: SCM Press. Shenoy, T. V. R. (4 November 1999), ‘Respect Nurtures Respect’, Indian Express. Shourie, Arun (1994), Missionaries in India, New Delhi: ASA Publications. Smith, B. K. (2000) ‘Who Does, Can, and Should Speak for Hinduism?’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 68, 741–9. Southwold, M. (1978) ‘Buddhism and the Definition of Religion’, Man, 13, 362–79. Swami Nikhilananda (1949) Vedānta Sāra, Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama. Swami Vivekananda (1972) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Swarup, Ram (2000) On Hinduism, New Delhi: Voice of India. Talageri, Shrikant (1993) Aryan Invasion and Hindu Nationalism, New Delhi: Voice of India. Thompson, Geoff (2011) ‘Salvation Beyond the Church’s Ministry: Reflections on Barth and Rahner’, in God of Salvation, ed. I. J. Davidson and M. A. Rae, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 137–53. Williams, G. M. (1981) ‘The Ramakrishna Movement: A Study in Religious Change’, in Religion in Modern India, ed. R. D. Baird, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, pp. 55–79. Wingate, Anthony (1997) The Church and Conversion, Delhi: ISPCK. Young, R. F. (1981) Resistant Hinduism, Vienna: De Nobili Research Library. Young, R. F. (ed.) (2009) India and the Indianness of Christianity, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. Eerdmans.

3

The ideologies of empire Christian missionaries in a Victorian age

Contemporary Christian literature, especially from an apologetic point of view, seeks to distance the current Christian approach to the Indic religious streams from earlier more belligerent attitudes. It is argued that the earlier characterisation of Hinduism as a bastion of superstitions which had to be dismantled has been replaced by more dialogical approaches where the attempt instead is to discern the presence of Christian values in Hindu worlds. However, it is important to start with a closer examination of precisely what these attitudes were, and to contextualise them in the Darwinian–liberal optimism of the Victorian age, to analyse the degrees of affinity that the missionaries had with the colonising mission of the British empire. This is especially the case because contemporary debates over conversions to Christianity are often overshadowed by the question of its alleged colonial connections – so much so that conversions are often viewed as a national apostasy from indigenous subjectivities to a foreign transplant. Missionaries often believed that divine providence had entrusted India to Britain, and hoped that the secular body of the British administration, which was to be involved in ruling the natives, would also support the spiritual head of the churches in winning over Hindu souls for Christ. As we shall see, however, matters did not always run smoothly, and often the head was on a direct collision course with the body, which refused to allow the missionaries free rein to propagate the gospel, fearing a native backlash against colonial intervention in indigenous religious customs. Nevertheless, the liberal optimism of the empire infused many of the missionaries: India had been left behind on the scale of civilisation, and just as the utilitarian structure of rule of law, telegraph and posts, railways and electricity would propel it towards modernity, the Christianising enterprise would redeem it from the ‘savageries’ of the bastion of Hinduism. The enterprises of civilising the natives or redeeming the ‘heathen’ were, however, riddled with various dilemmas, and along with British administrators, Christian missionaries too often reflected the anxieties of having to negotiate a path through the affirmations of ‘identity’ and of ‘difference’. On the one hand, colonial administrators could not bestow on the colonised equal political rights with themselves for such a grant would be tantamount to accepting an identity between the two, but, on the other hand, neither could they regard the differences

44 The ideologies of empire that they believed separated the two as insurmountable for this admission would imply that the civilising project was doomed to fail from the start. The complex range of attitudes of the Victorians to Hindustan has been ably summarised by B. Parry in these terms: From the pedestal of a predominantly Protestant middle-class ethic, with its belief in work, restraint and order, the British looked down on the codes and habits of Indians as aberrations from a human norm which they defined in terms of their own standards . . . They saw in India vestiges of a primordial, dark and instinctual past which their own society had left behind in its evolution to civilization, as well as intimations of spiritual experiences more inclusive and transcendent than any known to the West, and which in their bewilderment they included as part of India’s mystery. (Parry 1998: 31) In actual practice, therefore, the colonisers seem to have alternated between a vision of eventual ‘sameness’ in the future and one of enduring ‘difference’ in the present (Metcalf 1994: 203–4). They either viewed the natives as mirrorimages of themselves, thereby marking the ‘other’ as a duplicate copy of ‘self’, or regarded them as languishing on a lower plane of existence which was inherently degrading and devoid of any value. Christian missionaries struggled in their own distinctive ways with this dialectic of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ which bore some similarities to the strategies of the administrators. For all their sharp divergences with the administrators at certain points, missionaries too developed complex patterns of this dialectic, sometimes assimilating the ‘heathen’, and at other times othering them. On the one hand, the ‘identity’ that they spoke of was couched not in racial, ethnic, or geographical but in theological terms – all human beings were children of the same God – but, on the other hand, their ‘difference’ from the natives was clearly marked – the latter had become thoroughly corrupted since they had not yet received the gospel. Further, until around the turn of the twentieth century, British missionaries often viewed the gospel through the spectacles of European civilisation, so that they ignored the crucial distinctions that later generations of missionary thinkers would draw between the gospel and the cultural traditions of their own European ‘Christendom’. Therefore they presented the gospel in specifically Victorian modes of expression, denominational divisions, and intellectual categories, which further accentuated the differences that they perceived in the natives whom they otherwise believed belonged to a common spiritual unity. Thus, for instance, at a meeting in 1898 of the Punjab Church Council, which was a forum of Indian Christians of the Church Missionary Society, the Reverend Wadhwa Mall commented: ‘Not only the Gospel but English ways and wealth have come with them into this country. Thus we have two Gospels here; that of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that of English customs . . . Which shall we choose?’ (Quoted in Cox 2002: 16). Given the close intermeshing between empire, Christianity, and European

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civilisation in some missionary circles, it is not surprising, as Jawaharlal Nehru (1941: 50–1) was later to put it, that in ‘the average Indian mind, the Christian missionary was almost indistinguishable from the alien official’.

Christian missionaries and colonialism By and large, conversions in India have operated not through the blatant exercise of coercion but through the modalities of dialogue, resistance, rejection, and indigenous reform. Instances such as the Spanish massacres and forced assimilation of the Latin American natives to Roman Catholicism do not have extensive parallels in the Indian context. Nevertheless, there are some instances of conversions on Indian terrain which perhaps all sides in contemporary Hindu–Christian encounters would accept as ‘forced’, such as the conversions by the Portuguese colonisers under the Goa Inquisition (1560–1812). The nexus between ‘Caesar and Christ’ was particularly intimate in the early part of the sixteenth century in Goa when the four great missionary orders of Roman Catholicism, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Jesuits, cost the state 42,000 cruzados (Pearson 1987: 120). The spread of Christianity took place through the interlocking relationships between Church and state: a number of laws were enacted against the socio-economically dominant ‘higher’ castes who were banished if they did not convert to Christianity; Hindu religious festivals were banned; and the activities of Hindu priests were prohibited (Robinson 2003:44). The early European Christian confrontations with the life-worlds of the Hindus, which they found bewilderingly diverse, rich, and seemingly impenetrable, were therefore characterised mainly by the attempt at the regularisation of whatever could not be neatly contained within the bounds of European and Christian conceptual frameworks and socio-religious practices. A recurring criticism of some Hindu writers is that this failure to affirm the ‘otherness’ of the colonised continues even today on the part of Christian evangelists with regard to the Hindu traditions, though their methods have become subtler and more refined. As we shall see, the hostility of many forms of Christianity towards native cultures can be traced to certain specifically theological standpoints on issues such as the possibility of religious truth outside the Church, the relation between ‘culture’ and the gospel, and so on. However, from some Hindu perspectives, it is often alleged that this hostility should, in fact, be explained by appealing to Christianity’s colonial connections with the British empire. To respond to this charge, we need to make a conceptual distinction between two questions which are sometimes conflated: (a) to what extent did the British colonial administrators actively support and promote the activities of the Christian missionaries? and (b) to what extent did the missionaries fail, operating in fields opened up to them by British imperialism, to attain an empathetic grasp of the Hindu traditions and instead sought to squeeze the latter into their own cultural paradigms? As we deal with these questions, in this and subsequent chapters, we shall note that, first, Christian missionaries had often imbibed many of the

46

The ideologies of empire

values of Victorian England which coloured their views of the natives as caught in perfidious forms of degradation, but, second, they often also entered into various kinds of confrontation with the British government both back at home and on Indian soil over the natives whom they regarded as their spiritually immature ‘children’. Though the administrators usually took a rather dim view of Christian missionaries, both groups did share certain assumptions and beliefs about the empire, its role in the colony, the status of European civilisation and so on. Consequently, both of them often failed to affirm the distinctiveness of the life-worlds that they encountered in colonial India. Therefore, it would be simplistic to write off the connections between the compulsions of British colonialism and the missionary movements as mere coincidence, and there is some bite in S. R. Goel’s complaint that ‘[t]he wrongs heaped on Hindu society, religion and culture by the Christian mission in alliance with Western imperialism, are being explained away as “aberrations” arising out of Christianity’s “accidental association with colonialism”’ (Goel 1988: xiii). On the other hand, however, the relationships between the Christian missionaries, the British administrators, and the Hindus cannot be reduced to a unidirectional imposition of the world-views of the former on the latter – rather they were characterised by various conflicts, contestations, dislocations, and tensions. Many Hindus (both those who remained rooted to their traditions and those who tried to offer creative interpretations of these in the light of their personal affirmation of the lordship of Christ) were actively engaged, under the shadow of empire, to vigorously resist the attempts of the European Christian missionaries to incorporate them within their systems of representation. The identities of the colonised Hindus were therefore constantly forged in a relational manner, and such native voices were not merely repeating the colonial master-discourse. As a matter of fact, however, it is the alliances – and not the disjunctions – between coloniser and missionary that have sometimes been underlined so that the missionary endeavour continues to be read as an appendage of the colonialist enterprise, either blatantly as its spiritual arm or in a somewhat more sinister manner as its covert mask. R. E. Frykenberg (2003: 7–8) complains that the term ‘colonial’ has become in several circles of south Asian scholarship the pejorative epithet applied rather indiscriminately for the demonisation of everything western and that missionaries themselves are often brought under this umbrella-term. He points out that the view that Christians in India are the products of an alien intrusion, more specifically, Christian ‘colonialism’, has led to a complacent attitude among several historians that the careful study of missionary organisations need not detain them too long, for the movements initiated by them are regarded as having exercised no significant influence on the contemporary strands of Indian history. Consequently, to challenge this conflation of colonisation and Christianisation, we need to examine the complex nature of the alliances, adaptations, and accommodations, as well as the challenges, oppositions, and rejections across the boundaries of the Christian missionaries, the British administrators, and the Hindus.

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The shape of the missionary world: the Christian message in a British form The dialectics of liberalism and orientalism One of the reasons why Christian missionaries are perceived in certain quarters to have been merely the spiritual extension of the colonial administrators is because on some occasions their stated goals would seem to converge, for both of them were influenced, to different degrees, by the ruling ideas of their times, especially liberalism, utilitarianism, and Darwinism, with a fair amount of racialism added to this heady dose. The guiding metaphor in the writings of both father and son, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, on Indian matters was that of a hierarchical ‘scale of civilisations’, which in the very moment of implicating the British and the Indian natives in the commonalities of an antiquarian origin also rigidly distantiated the former’s progressive culture from the latter’s stationary desuetude (Mill 1975: 192–3). Because of India’s ‘exceeding difference’, it was to be marked off from the present occupied by Britain, but it was not a complete aberration either, for it was located at the distant end of a scheme of civilisational progress occupied by groups such as the primitive Druids (Mehta 1999: 75). The younger Mill (1994: 198–234) elaborated the details of this civilisation ladder in which some societies, mostly the Europeans and the British dominions, had attained the state of maturity of faculties, whereas the non-European ones were in the condition of infancy and needed the help of foreign government to make them capable of a higher civilisation characterised by liberty and individuality. These two Millian themes – that countries such as India were stuck in the ‘infancy’ of humanity and that their codes and conventions were utterly distinct from European ones – often appear in the writings of other commentators on the colonial scene in India. A common notion was that the natives were disciples or patients, and so they should not regard British rule in any sense humiliating, for its aim was to make them enlightened and autonomous. For instance, John Morley, a champion of the views of John Stuart Mill, believed that the reason for the British intervention in India was to ‘implant – slowly, prudently, judiciously – those ideas of justice, law, humanity, which are the foundation of our own civilization’ (Quoted in Koss 1969: 128). At the same time, the British were exhorted to keep in mind the wide gulf that separated the parent from the child. The errors of judgement that they might have made were to be attributed to an unreflective faith that all British things could be replicated in a land that was so distinct from the homeland, for this was a faith that ‘paid too little heed to differences of tradition and of race, and to the stage of civilization which the recipients of such unquestionable benefits had reached’ (Marriott 1932: 196). Therefore, in the process of raising India to modern times, there was to be no doubt that it was the British who would remain at the commanding heights without any dilution of their superiority. Though Britain and India were said to have emerged from a common origin in the archaic past, this affirmation of similarity was ruptured by a sharp bifurcation between the ‘Aryan’ customs, beliefs, and practices of India which had fallen

48 The ideologies of empire into decrepitude and whose development had been arrested, and the civilising influence of British institutions which would direct the former towards progress (Maine 1875). In contrast, the ‘Orientalists’ were more sympathetic than those of a Millian temperament to native wisdom and were often guided by a humane desire to understand and respect the customs of the natives. However, drawing on the pervasive Victorian motif of ‘evolution’, they created their own set of differences through the postulated temporal alterity between the glorious past and the decadent present of Hindustan (Inden 1990: 41–3). While for the Millians, the east was a passive, non-autonomous object that inhabited an area of darkness governed by radically different principles, and required British intervention to raise it to selfautonomy in the future, in the Orientalist imagination the present condition of the country was thoroughly degenerate but its past contained treasures of ancient wisdom, frozen for all time. The ‘comparative method’ that scholars following Sir William Jones, the first President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, extended into areas such as philology, jurisprudence, religion, and society was an expression of the hankering for the ‘origins’ from which the linguistic and the sociocultural complexities of Europe, the Middle East, and India could be shown to have emerged. This search led to a series of images of the Orient’s timelessness, bizarreness, feminity, degeneracy, and passivity, and these were assimilated by the institutional apparatus of the empire and projected onto the Orient, so that they became established as factual and objective knowledge (Cohn 1996: 21). As the British gained stronger footholds in the land, this notion of an ‘essential India’ which was an object for careful scrutiny continued to operate through the indefatigable officials associated with census compilations, cartographical projects, antiquarian collections, archaeological findings, official commissions, and ethnographic surveys which amassed a wealth of information on the people through classificatory schemes and social categories such as caste, religion, place of birth, and occupation. The process of implanting this liberal modernism on Indian soil was, however, not a smooth one: if liberalism back at home possessed strong universalist implications, it had to be accommodated to the legitimisations of British rule as a civilising force that would extricate the Indians from their depths of depravity. The British construction of ‘Indian otherness’ was therefore ridden with inner tensions: on the one hand, by rigidly fixing the natives in their volatility, passivity, and backwardness, the British sought to justify their civilising commission, but this very ascription of primitive irrationality was also an expression of the British disquietude that the natives would continue to lurk at the peripheries of civilisation as an ever-present source of sinister forces. Therefore, the affirmation that the natives could be raised by the British to the status of civilisation went hand in hand with the denial that the differences between the two could be removed, for the abolition of such differences would signal in effect the termination of British rule (Metcalf 1994: x). The uneasy tension between fulfilling Indian aspirations and postulating a lasting difference between the modernising British and the natives often appears, with some distinctive twists, in missionary writing. In common with liberals and

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Orientalists, Christian missionaries too reported the Hindus to be morally and civilisationally ‘degraded’. However, since this representation of a depraved otherness jarred with the presumption that there was a fundamental unity running through humanity, various explanations were proffered to mitigate the perceived alienness. For British scholars and administrators, the basic reason was usually located in racial or environmental influences, or the temporal lag on the evolutionary scale; while Christian writers sometimes accepted these reasons, for them the radical alterity of the natives was to be explained primarily in terms of their ‘heathenish’ systems of thought and practice. Thus around the middle of the nineteenth century, William Clarkson, reflecting some liberal and Orientalist themes, wrote that ‘Indian civilization is original and independent because of its antiquity’ (Clarkson 1850: 24). Regarding the natives he believed that ‘their language is the voice of antiquity. Their dress, their manners, their religions, their institutions, their social habits, the produce of their soil . . . are but the exemplars of past ages’ (Clarskon 1850: 32–3). Further, he believed that ‘[m]odern European civilization is the result of a long continued process . . . It is the highest point of a scale, whose lowest degree is to be found in ages not long since remote’ (Clarkson 1850: 25). While missionaries usually agreed with the administrators that India had been stagnating in an age of ‘barbarism’, they couched their solution to this primitivism in terms not so much of the signifiers of modernity such as railways or the telegraph but of the gospel and salvation. Towards the mid-nineteenth century, a form of an ‘argument from progress’ was utilised by Christian writers such as Murray Mitchell who sought to link the truth of Christianity with the ‘objective’ fact that European nations, pervaded by a Christian ethos, had achieved greater social progress than lands steeped in Hinduism and Islam. Such writers believed that once the Hindu intelligentsia experienced the evidential force of this argument, they would also begin to accept the cognitive and fiduciary framework within which it was located, as well as specific doctrinal claims about the atoning death of Christ and the providential designs of God (O’Hanlon 1985: 56). Christian observers also often reflected the Orientalist motif of a passive, irrational, feminine east which needed the regenerative touch of a masculine, rational, dynamic west. Around the turn of the twentieth century, John Jones wrote that the native Indian Christians, like their Hindu neighbours, possessed the ‘feminine passive graces’ of meekness and patience, and western Christians, with their predominantly active virtues, should learn from their Christian brethren in India instead of hastily seeking to Occidentalise them. At the same time, he could sternly criticise the Bhagavad-gītā as a mess of mutually contradictory teachings, on the grounds that ‘the Oriental mind works on different lines from the Occidental, and is never hampered by logical inconsistency’ (Jones 1908: 159). Christianity at the peak of the evolutionary summit The commonalities between the British colonial administrators and the Christian missionaries in their perceptions of the antique land of Hindustan stem from another major influence on them in addition to liberalism and Orientalism,

50 The ideologies of empire namely, the idea of ‘evolution’ through which they tried to comprehend the religious diversity of the subcontinent. One can view liberals and Orientalists as two types of observers of the Indian scene branching out from a shared acceptance of evolution: if present-day forms of life have emerged from rudimentary stages, one can argue either that these elementary phases, which have been superseded by European forms, have to be rejected as vestigial remnants – thus the liberals – or that they contain pristine truths which have to be recuperated by breaking through the crust of latter-day accretions – which was the Orientalist view. We will see how Victorian Christian missionaries often adopted the liberal path – Hindu paganism was simply a bundle of outdated ‘heathenish’ superstitions which had to be uprooted – but increasingly around the beginning of the twentieth century also often walked down the Orientalist way – Hindu thought was now regarded as containing some primordial truths of humanity. While missionaries in their ‘evangelical’ moments could launch liberal-styled diatribes against the monstrosities of Hinduism, many missionaries such as Robert Caldwell were also Orientalists and many Orientalists such as Sir William Jones had Christian beliefs. Indeed, through the package of these three influences, missionaries tried to develop distinctive types of interweaving between identity and difference in relation to Christianity and the other religions. In subsequent sections in this and the next chapter, we will point out some of the parallels between the liberal-Orientalist attempt to normalise difference without conceding complete identity and the Christian negotiations of the same dialectic. Missionaries, picking up various threads from liberalism and Orientalism, viewed the natives alternatively as sunk in barbaric superstitions at a lower rung of the civilisational scale or as possessing some inchoate glimmerings of Christian truth, but in both cases they usually rejected the argument that the native converts, whom they regarded as their ‘children’, had sufficient autonomy to run their own churches without remaining under the tutelage of a foreign supervisor. Though the idea of ‘evolution’ is usually connected with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it had been articulated in somewhat different forms by other influential figures. As Paul Hedges has noted, Hegel had talked about a world-spirit and Herbert Spencer about the ‘progress’ of humanity. Hedges argues that ‘[i]t would probably not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the Victorians had a penchant for labelling everything into some order from higher to lower’ (Hedges 2008: 57). Religion itself now began to be viewed as a developing organism which had passed through several stages, so that under disciplines such as anthropology the growth of the religions of the world became a subject of proper study. Before the emergence of Darwin, there had been haphazard attempts to compile and tabulate reports about the distant ‘savage’ lands, but in the Darwinian perspective, the primitive races could be seen as human by European anthropologists, even if they were, on this hypothesis, the infantile survivals of a long drawn-out process through which their European students had emerged into maturity. Late nineteenth-century commentators on the Indian scene often claimed to have uncovered such survivals in the practices of the natives. Thus R. N. Cust

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wrote: ‘We are living in the midst of an idolatrous people . . . for some great and mysterious purpose of God [Graeco-Roman] Idolatry has been caught alive, and preserved until the nineteenth Century’ (Cust 1891: 304). Similarly, Alfred Lyall confessed that he was baffled by the ancient religion which he compared to ‘the entangled confusion of a primeval forest’, and believed that he could ‘catch a reflection of classic polytheism’ in the practices of the Hindus which had never progressed beyond the stage of the Biblical prophet Micah with his house of gods and images of silver (Lyall 1882: 293). Not all such figures, however, condemned the Hindus to the darkest ages of pre-Christian paganism; some at least claimed to discern within Hinduism a steady evolution from the most rudimentary beliefs to more sophisticated ones. Missionaries therefore adopted somewhat conflicting attitudes to this religious pageant: broadly speaking, until around 1900 they focused on the ‘crudest superstitions’ of Hinduism, which they vehemently denounced as diabolic perversions, while from sometime around the turn of the century, they gradually began to focus more on the ‘higher aspects’. The former group was vigorously iconoclastic and their condemnations of Hinduism were motivated by their repudiation of the idolatry which they claimed to see everywhere in the ‘heathenish’ practices. This is how William Clarkson, writing in 1850, expressed his indignant horror: ‘Indian idolatry is, in a pre-eminent degree, productive of disease, misery, and death. It brings in its train God’s heavy judgements’ (Clarkson 1850: 148). However, G. A. Grierson’s comment in 1906 on Indian religions as the seat of native wisdom which was a pointer towards Christianity is representative of a change, in some missionary quarters, in perceptions of Hinduism. Thus, Grierson believed that one should not talk of these religions ‘as blank heathenism to be conquered and beaten down by a victorious army marching under the banner of the Cross. Let us ever remember that in some, at least, of them there are many grains of truth – ay, of Christian truth . . . ’ (Grierson 1906: 157). The notion that there were higher elements in Hinduism which could be perfected by Christianity, which itself stood at the summit of the evolutionary development of religion, was incorporated by Christian figures into what came to be known as fulfilment theology. Theologies of fulfilment began to emphasise that the multiplicity of Hindu beliefs and practices reveals a complex of needs, which are fulfilled not within Hinduism itself but by the reality of Christ who alone can truly satisfy them. Exponents of this theology such as Max Mueller (1823–1900) and perhaps most famously J. N. Farquhar (1861–1929) claimed, in their somewhat different ways, that all religions flow into the Christian revelation which perfects and completes the former. Christianity could truly satisfy the aspirations of all human beings who are by nature Christians. As Hedges has shown, one of the crucial elements of fulfilment theologies was the belief that divine providence had been ‘educating’ human beings from lower to higher forms of religiosity which can be placed on a continuum, the highest point of which is Christianity (Hedges 2008). In an early version, Monier Monier-Williams (1887: 233) argued that missionaries must undertake a close study of the beliefs of Hindus and Muslims, and indeed study the Vedas and the Quran as closely as they would their own Bible for

52 The ideologies of empire these too contain sparks of the true light. Around the same time, T. E. Slater (1882: 112) argued that non-Christian religions, encompassed within divine providence, are incomplete unless they are fulfilled by Christianity which stands at the apex of the evolutionary scale of religions. Similarly, J. N. Farquhar quoted Matthew 5.17, ‘I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’, in defence of his claim that Christianity was the crown and the fullness of the truth of the partial revelations of God that were present in the religions of the world (Farquhar 1913). Therefore, it is clear that figures such as Monier-Williams (1819–99), Slater and Farquhar had to deal with a theological version of the dialectic that engaged liberals who spoke, on the one hand, of a common ‘scale of civilisations’ encompassing the Europeans and the natives but underlined, on the other, the immense temporal gap between the two. Similarly, if the ‘higher religions’ were to be placed on the continuous scale of development whose commanding heights were represented by Christianity, one nevertheless had to speak of a distinct break between them and Christianity. Monier-Williams, for instance, argued that there was no natural or automatic progression from the other religions to Christianity, for though the non-Christian scriptures have occasional sparks of lightning, they are ultimately erroneous. Indeed, he believed that between Christianity and other faiths lay ‘a bridgeless chasm which no theory of evolution can ever span’ (Quoted in Sharpe 1965: 53). The notion of fulfilment was nevertheless strongly criticised by some missionary figures because they believed that it closed the gap between Hinduism and Christianity, which would render unnecessary missionary preaching to the Hindus. These concerns were expressed, among others, by writers who were unhappy with Max Mueller’s talk of an ‘Aryan reunion’ which would imply that Indians were at par with the British and should therefore be granted political independence. For Mueller, the British connection with India was more than a mere imperialist encounter: through this intervention the ancient Aryan tribe, which had moved into Asia and Europe, was being spiritually reconstituted, with its two halves separated in the distant past now coming together as members of one great family. Samuel Laing, speaking after the revolt of 1857, echoed many of Mueller’s themes when he spoke of two long-separated groups which were coming together, but he emphasised that the British were in India on a sacred mission to help their weaker brothers who had fallen behind in the race. As Martin Maw points out, while such figures were willing to refer to the natives of Hindustan as their brethren they ‘refused to follow the notion to its logical conclusion: that consanguinity entitled contemporary India to a moral parity with Great Britain, and ultimately, to national independence’ (Maw 1990: 36). This simultaneous affirmation of a deep racial identity and a temporal gulf was expressed also by some Protestant Christian missionaries at the centenary conference in 1888. They claimed that while the Aryan families in the east had remained trapped in the past with only the ‘light of nature’, the Aryan families in the west had moved ahead, not least because they had received the light of the Christian revelation (Johnston 1888: vol. 1, 168). Therefore, just as colonial administrators, breathing the air of liberalism, racial imageries, and Oriental motifs, alternatively struggled to underline continuities

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between themselves and the natives and to emphasise their mutual differences, missionary figures too often, even when stressing the need for a sympathetic study of Hindu religious literature, maintained that the power of the gospel does not supplement but supplants the spiritual achievements of Hinduism. The Baptist Reverend Arthur Jewson regarded Farquhar’s thesis that the religious instincts of human beings could be satisfied, however imperfectly, in religions other than Christianity as a massive error, and argued that Farquhar’s statement was a defence of the ‘idolatry’ that dethrones God and degrades humanity (Sharpe 1965: 314–18). In fact, Farquhar believed that although Christianity was at the summit of the evolutionary scale, this did not imply that Hindus would be dragged along towards this goal through some sort of ‘natural’ evolution without any creative response of their part. Rather, they would have to turn consciously towards God with utter sincerity and enter into a personal fellowship with the divine, so that a necessary concomitant of this fulfilment was the rejection of their older beliefs and practices. Consequently, he believed that though Hinduism possessed many valuable truths, it too ‘must die in order to live. It must die into Christianity’ (Farquhar 1913: 51). In short, these missionary debates over fulfilment reveal a distinctively Christian version of a fundamental problem that many Victorian liberals faced in their Indian affairs: they and the natives were, at present, separated by a wide (racial or temporal) gulf, but, this gulf was not so impassable that all hopes of bridging it, sometime in the distant future, had to be given up from the start. Missionary waves and British Christian theology If the missionaries sometimes accepted the assumptions of liberalism, utilitarianism, and Darwin-inspired evolutionary schemes with racial flavourings, their specifically theological beliefs added a distinct colouration to this package which was undergirded by a Victorian faith in ‘progressivism’. This was the faith that Sir Richard Temple expressed when he calculated that ‘[i]f the ratio of progress in the generation between 1847 and 1881 shall, under Providence, be maintained during the coming and again in the succeeding generation, then an illimitable vista will open itself before the mind’ (Temple 1882: 16). Missionary figures often believed that the Christian faith was not only the culminating point on the scheme of religious evolution but also a marker of their advanced state of civilisation, and their zeal to Christianise the natives was usually at one with their zeal to Europeanise them as well. For some missionaries at least, Europe had progressed on the scale of civilisation specifically because of its Christian inheritance, and the degradations that they perceived in other cultural systems were attributed by them to satanic perversions. Missionary reports from this time – the ones that have given them a particularly bad press in contemporary literature – are therefore filled with the militant metaphors of the soldiers of Christ zealously dismantling the gigantic apparatus of ‘heathenism’. At the same time, it is crucial to note that although Christianity is usually classified as a missionary religion, missionary enthusiasm has not been a characteristic of all stages of Christendom. Indeed the British missionary waves to India

54 The ideologies of empire were a new historical development at the turn of the eighteenth century, and were propelled by specific theological formulations of providential sovereignty over history. As David Bebbington notes, one of the defining features of the different strands of Protestantism that spread through England from the 1730s was the strong emphasis given to mission for the ‘conversion of the nations’. In contrast, during the seventeenth century, English Protestants usually took the ‘great commission’ in Matthew’s gospel (28: 16–20) as a reference not to their times but to the era of the early Church. Indeed, latter activists for mission such as Cotton Mather were to complain that the Reformation churches had exhibited very little interest in missionary enterprises (Bebbington 1989: 40–1). Such interest was arguably stifled by a ‘hyper-Calvinism’ which holds that some people are saved and others condemned not because of any ‘merits’ of the former but entirely through the divine mercy. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century theologians such as the Baptist Andrew Fuller put forward a less stringent version of this Calvinism. He argued that the apparent inconsistency between divine grace and human response is a mark of our lack of understanding and that human beings remain fully responsible for their failure to turn towards God (Fuller 1801). In turn, Fuller inspired William Carey whose An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians in 1792 soon led to the formation of a number of missionary societies such as the London Missionary Society (1795) and the Glasgow Missionary Society (1796). From the beginning of the nineteenth century, a growing number of preachers and theologians began to express the view that the missionary vocation in foreign lands would breathe new life into the home churches, and by 1830 the primacy of the missionary enterprise had established itself in British churches. Thus the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff (1806–78) wrote in 1839 that ‘instead of going forth in a progress of outward extension . . . . the Church [after the European Reformation] seemed mainly intent on turning the whole of her energies inward on herself’ (Duff 1839: 21–2). As a matter of fact, however, he believed that ‘the chief end for which the Christian Church is constituted . . . is . . . unceasingly, to act the part of an evangelist to all the world’ (Duff 1839: 13). The complex of views that broadly tied together such missionary societies is often labelled as ‘Evangelicalism’. Though it should not be equated with any specific Christian denomination, Bebbington identifies four central themes which he argues lie at its heart. Firstly, there is the belief that the individual must undergo a decisive conversion, through divine grace, from sinfulness and guilt into Christian life, a change that often brings about a tremendous sense of relief and the ‘faith of assurance’ that the individual is now Christ’s; and secondly, that this transformation must manifest itself in an active life of preaching and spreading the gospel in foreign lands. Thirdly, Evangelicals constantly went back with fervent devotion to the word of the Bible whose divine inspiration was usually accepted; and fourthly, Evangelical theology was rooted in a certain understanding of the atonement in terms of the cross of Christ who had borne the penalty for the sins of the world by becoming our substitute (Bebbington 1989: 1–17). Consequently, the goals and assumptions that Christian missionary activity, based

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on Evangelical theology, shared with liberal and utilitarian thought became even clearer: both believed that human beings could become autonomous individuals by a long and often painful process of ‘education’ during which they would learn to dutifully follow certain laws. Victorian utilitarians were united in their desire to shake off the burden of the past which they associated with priestcraft and aristocracy, and in place of these they emphasised the virtues of self-reliance and self-determination, insisting that all human beings enjoy an equal footing in their capacity as autonomous rational beings. The vital difference between the missionaries and the utilitarians was that the former believed themselves to be governed ultimately by the Mosaic law which punished sinners and brought them to a fearful recognition of the divine judge, whereas the latter replaced human legal systems and their sanctions for the divine justice of the former (Stokes 1959: 54–5). Nevertheless, many of these early Christian missionaries, like their Victorian contemporaries, were ‘inner-directed’ men, whose gospel, as Duncan Forrester points out, ‘was highly tinged with individualism . . . Their theology put a premium on individual conversion, and social structures which demanded spiritual and intellectual conformity and forced the individual always to act and think in terms of the group were anathema to them’ (Forrester 1980: 25). Forrester’s observation is borne out by Stuart Piggin’s survey of 550 missionaries who served in India between 1789 and 1858. Piggin writes that there were a number of affinities between these men who came from a variety of occupational backgrounds such as teachers, lawyers, physicians, artisans, booksellers, and printers. Most of them had received a good education, with some acquainted with Greek and Latin, they were upwardly mobile with high social aspirations, and they were strongly independent individuals influenced by the notions of self-respectability and vocation (Piggin 1984: 28–47). In other words, although British missionaries, given their convictions of the sinfulness of all humanity, were less prone to the racialised flourishes of ‘evolutionary’ thinkers, they too sometimes felt the attraction of the latter’s views circulating in the intellectual atmosphere. In particular, some of the mission-churches of British India were the locales of the ‘scientific racism’ which was an aspect of the collective consciousness of many Europeans who accepted taxonomies of races with distinct physical and mental attributes. Such notions of racial superiority ordered the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the churches where Indian assistants were often placed in subordinate positions as catechists, and even after ordination did not gain equality with European clergymen (Chatterjee 2011: 173–80). In 1864, when John Thomas of the Church Missionary Society proposed that an Indian bishop be appointed, he was opposed by Robert Caldwell, who argued that the Indian congregations would rather remain under the protection of an European missionary; indeed, in his opinion, the time was about as ripe for an Indian bishop as an Indian governor. Later in 1913, V. S. Azariah was ordained as the first Indian bishop only after the Bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead, convinced the government that it would not have to pay for Azariah’s salary and further that Azariah would not exercise authority over European chaplains (Chatterjee 2011: 184–5).

56 The ideologies of empire Providence and the rise of empire Providing a Christian tinge to this complex mix of liberalism, racism, and belief in progress, missionaries often claimed that while the ‘heathenish’ societies had remained submerged in primitive ‘idolatry’, centuries of Christian influence on British life had been successful in countervailing the effects of sin in Protestant Britain (Stanley 1990: 161–2). Such readings were not based solely on the liberal and the Orientalist motifs of a ‘degenerate’ India, but were sometimes the product of viewing the various events that led to the gradual rise of the British empire in India through the theological perspective of a providential understanding of history. Nineteenth-century British Christians often discerned the ‘signs of the times’ as indicating that India had been placed under their trust and that it was now their solemn responsibility to enlighten its masses with the gospel. As Andrew Porter has noted, ‘Interpreters of providential design were inclined to view empire as a source of obligation. Possession entailed the duty to Christianise; failure to do so risked incurring divine displeasure and loss of the opportunity for atonement or national redemption’ (Porter 2004: 65). Given their understanding of a divine providence under whose guidance Christian civilisation had evolved into its current state of maturity, missionaries sometimes failed to distinguish between ‘Church’ and ‘state’, and distance themselves from the secular enterprises of the raj. J. C. Ingleby writes that while this was particularly true of missionaries of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, even nonconformist groups were usually pro-government in India, ‘perhaps because of the solidarity which they felt with their fellow countrymen in an alien environment’ (Ingleby 2000: 311–12). Therefore, even while missionaries argued that the true reason why an empire had been given to Britain was not so much to change the customs and usages of the natives but to produce a spiritual transformation in their hearts, they tended to view the ‘coincidence’ between imperial gains and opportunities for mission as providentially ordered. Claudius Buchanan minced no words when he declared: ‘No Christian nation ever possessed such an extensive field for the propagation of the Christian faith, as that afforded to us by our influence over the hundred million natives of Hindostan’ (Buchanan 1805: 39). Such themes were often articulated at the highest levels of the missionary apparatus. Several speakers at the centenary conference in 1888 expressed the view that God had given England great power in India and England should therefore support missions to it. For instance, the Reverend Phraner declared: ‘India is given to Britain. For what? That she may be taught the truth, which is unto life and eternal salvation. Here is Britain’s opportunity; here is Britain’s responsibility, for which she will have to answer in the sight of God . . . ’ (Johnston 1888: vol. 1, 201). Given their belief that the destinies of India and England had been providentially tied together, missionaries often opposed the view that the natives should try to put an end to the British empire. Rather they should recognise the ‘guardianship’ that Britain was exercising over India while introducing it to western principles and institutions and gradually enabling it to become capable of selfgovernment (Matthew 1988: 144–9). When speaking to the students of Madras

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University regarding the demand that examinations to the Indian Civil Service be held simultaneously in India and in England, the Reverend William Miller expressed the conviction in 1887 that the administration of the country would remain in British hands for ‘a long time to come, say a couple of generations at all events’ (Matthew 1988: 122–4). The belief in the providentially ordained union between the two countries was often expressed by missionaries throughout the early decades of the twentieth century as well. In the wake of the rise of nationalist politics, the Harvest Field declared in an editorial in January 1909 that the raj would be necessary for several more years to sustain peaceful progress, and the next year it added the specifically theological comment that Indian Christians were taught by the New Testament to affirm their allegiance to the powers that be, in this case the British government (Thomas 1979: 127).

Missions and empire: instabilities in the nexus While missionary views often converged with the official colonial policy of civilising the natives while postponing into the indefinite future the fulfilment of this process, the two did not always run parallel to each other. In fact, the Christian missionary view of the empire’s ‘spiritualising’ goal produced a series of dialectical interplays between them and the British colonialists, whatever be the latter’s degree of Christian commitment. The former often accepted British rule in India by incorporating it within the divine plan for the spread of the gospel, but precisely for this reason chastised the government for its lack of enthusiasm for the eradication of ‘heathenism’. Therefore, in recent decades scholars have begun to interrogate the ‘colonial paradigm’ through which some historians have viewed the missionary centuries in monolithic terms as the unilinear imposition of European domination on the native converts, and instead developed ‘thick’ narratives of the missionary as a concrete actor involved in specific historical situations which were criss-crossed by various relations of power. As we will see, missionaries sometimes ‘converted’ colonialism, sharply opposing versions which conflicted with their own goals and attempting to co-opt others which were compatible with the values of the gospel (Robert 1996: 4). An early advocate of Christian missions was Charles Grant who sought, in 1787, the patronage of the government for missionary activity in India on the grounds that the propagation of the gospel would rescue the natives from their state of ‘depravity’, as well as facilitate the growth of conditions for better administration by creating common principles between the British and the natives (Embree 1962: 118–19). While he noted that British attempts to help the natives would go in vain unless the British had first raised their moral state by making them acquainted with the Christian revelation, nothing much, however, came of his proposal. Grant was not the only missionary voice who charged the British administrators with not doing enough to impart knowledge of Christianity among the natives. A few years later, Buchanan was to complain bitterly: ‘Providence hath been pleased to grant to us this great empire . . . But what do we give in return? What acknowledgement

58 The ideologies of empire to Providence for its goodness has our [English] nation ever made?’ (Buchanan 1805: 38). Buchanan had correctly perceived the apathy of the officials of the East India Company towards the Christianisation of the natives with whose beliefs and practices they did not want to interfere. When in 1792 William Wilberforce appealed to the Directors of the Company for missionaries and schoolteachers to be sent to India, he received the reply that ‘the Hindus had as good a system of faith and morals as most people, and that it would be madness to attempt their conversion or to give them any more learning or any other description of learning than that which they already possessed’ (Quoted in Mayhew 1926: 10). Consequently, the interests of empire and mission often conflicted throughout the colonial period, with administrators at the helm of control viewing the missionaries with suspicion. In fact, until 1813 missionaries had a particularly uneasy relationship with the Company which required that they obtain licenses to remain within its territories. As Eric Stokes has pointed out, ‘[t]he Evangelical view stood in complete contrast to the East India Company’s traditional attitude. From motives of expediency the Company had always manifested the most scrupulous regard for Indian religions, laws, institutions, and customs’. Not only Governor General Warren Hastings (1774–85) with his ‘Orientalist’ predilections but even the more vigorously ‘Anglicising’ Lord Cornwallis (1786–93) maintained a largely noninterfering attitude, and the latter in fact ‘had no sympathy with Evangelical hopes for the conversion of the people, considering such hopes utterly visionary’ (Stokes 1959: 35–6). Even when in 1813 the Company’s charter was revised to include a clause stating that provisions should be made to help people wishing to go to India for ‘religious and moral improvement’, any explicit reference to ‘missionaries’ was avoided. However, this implicit move to legalise the entry of missionaries into India was greeted with hostility by administrators such as Thomas Grenville who declared, ‘We are conquerors in India, and I do not like to see a regiment of missionaries acting under and with the authority of unrestricted power’ (Quoted in Embree 1962: 271). The British Indian government’s official attitude to Christian missionaries was summarised by Sir W. M. Young who was the secretary to the Punjab government in the 1880s. While accepting the view that the Pax Britannica had ushered in a realm of peace and freedom in India, he tried to caution missionaries that they should not expect government officials to take too great an interest in their activities: ‘It is not lawful for us as officials to employ the organization of the State for influencing the consciences of those over whom for specific purposes we have received authority’ (Quoted in Cox 2002: 36). Closer to the ground, however, the relationships between the missionaries and the British authorities in some parts of India underwent various types of fluctuations, depending on social and political factors such as Hindu revivalism, the nationalist movement, and ‘lower’ caste assertion. One instance of these unstable relationships comes from the Travancore state in the south of the country: until the 1870s, the British government did not hesitate to intervene actively against various types of caste discrimination, and had a favourable attitude towards the missionaries who were also engaged in similar efforts. However, after the 1880s, the colonial administration began to take seriously the principle of ‘religious

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neutrality’ declared by Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, and did not wish to be associated with any intervention which might be regarded as supporting the missionaries. Meanwhile, the state of Travancore itself seems to have perceived in the missionaries a possible threat to the social structure and from the 1890s initiated certain anti-missionary policies as well as measures for the uplift of the ‘lower’ castes. However, in a further twist, the state enlisted the support of some missionaries in the 1910s and the 1920s to persuade their ‘lower’ caste converts to remain obedient to the prevailing socio-economic order, and the relationships between the state and the missionaries remained relatively favourable during these decades. In the 1930s, with the rise of the nationalist movement under Gandhi and the work of Christian missionaries among the ‘lower’ castes, the attitude of the state towards the missionaries again took a hostile turn – it adopted a series of anti-Christian policies such as prohibiting public worship in aided schools without the approval of the Education Department and banning Christian preaching in public (Kawashima 1998). In short, the relationship between the colonial government and the British missionaries was by no means a mutually symbiotic one, so that although ‘[t]he British colonial state . . . was popularly associated by its subjects with Christianity . . . the British period did not witness an unambiguous bond between religion and power. The association between missionary activity and British colonialism was complex and intricate’ (Robinson and Clarke 2003: 16). The colonial government’s antipathy to the missionaries is correctly picked out by Girilal Jain who writes that ‘the British did not come to India – and did not rule over India – as part of a proselytizing enterprise in the religious realm’ (Jain 1994: 7). As we have seen, though the missionaries were often associated with the institutions and the beliefs of the British imperialists, their shifting relationships with the latter were characterised by various strains and tensions. However, notwithstanding the efforts of various scholars directed at highlighting the fissures between missionaries and propagandists of empire, their occasional collusions, as Swami Abhishiktananda noted some forty years ago, led to ‘such a feeling of distrust that a long time must pass before it is eradicated’ (Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 12). Given that British Christianity was introduced in a context of imperial power, which set in process movements which raised issues of religious truth and social identity, it became involved with various cultural encounters and the role of the missionaries became ambiguous and threatening (Brown 2002: 3). To some extent, the continuing distrust in postcolonial times of Christianity as a foreign imposition in India can be traced to the observation that the missionaries were part of a movement of imperial expansion and often shared its sense of western superiority. In the perception of many Hindus, the missionaries were associated with the ruling class, not least because they often dressed as Europeans, earned an income higher than them, and lived not in their midst but with fellow-Europeans in enclosed compounds. However, the distrust continues even after the official dissolution of imperial connections for a more significant reason: it is often charged that nothing has essentially changed in the Christian attitude to Hinduism, which is still regarded as somehow incomplete or imperfect until its elements are redeemed

60 The ideologies of empire by the salvific light of Christ. For instance, Goel argues that over the last two hundred years or so, Christian theologians have adopted numerous approaches to Hinduism, sometimes denouncing it as a nest of satanic perversions, at other times instead viewing it as an appropriate vehicle for communicating Christian truth, and at yet other times focusing on its subalterns such as women and the ‘lower’ castes. Though this internal diversity of theological stratagems might give the impression that the Christian camp was riddled with inner dissensions, Goel puts in a strong word of caution: ‘The controllers of the missions, however, had everything under control . . . Different strategies could be employed simultaneously on different flanks of the missionary phalanx’ (Goel 1989: 328). In the long history of Hindu–Christian encounters over ‘conversion’, Goel was not the first polemicist to use such belligerent metaphors: as we shall note in the next chapter, the image of Hinduism as a monstrous edifice which Christians must systematically destabilise is one that was often invoked by the early missionaries. As for the missionaries, their shifting locations in the liberal–Orientalist– Darwinian ethos that we have outlined would decisively shape their responses to the questions, firstly, of whether Hinduism could be regarded as containing intimations, albeit imperfect, of Christian wisdom, and, secondly, whether a native Indian Church could be raised independently of British supervision.

References Bebbington, D. W. (1989) Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, London: Unwin Hyman. Brown, Judith (2002) ‘Introduction’, in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 1–8. Buchanan, Claudius (1805) Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Chatterjee, Nandini (2011) The Making of Indian Secularism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarkson, William (1850) India and the Gospel, London. Cohn, B. S. (1996) Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cox, Jeffrey (2002) Imperial Fault Lines, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cust, R. N. ([1891], 1988) Orientation of Early Christian Missionaries in Asia and Africa, Delhi: Daya Publishing House. Duff, Alexander (1839) Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church, Edinburgh: John Johnstone. Embree, A. T. (1962) Charles Grant and British Rule in India, London: George Allen and Unwin. Farquhar, J. N. (1913) The Crown of Hinduism, London: Oxford University Press. Forrester, D. B. (1980) Caste and Christianity, London: Curzon Press. Frykenberg, R. E. (2003) ‘Introduction: Dealing with Contested Definitions and Controversial Perspectives’, in Christians and Missionaries in India, ed. R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 1–32. Fuller, Andrew (1801) The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, New York. Goel, S. R. (1988) Catholic Ashrams, New Delhi: Voice of India. Goel, S. R. (1989) History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, New Delhi: Voice of India. Grierson, G. A. (1906) ‘Hinduism and Early Christianity’, The East and the West, 4, 135–57.

The ideologies of empire

61

Hedges, Paul (2008) ‘Postcolonialism, Orientalism and Understanding: Religious Studies and the Christian Missionary Imperative’, Journal of Religious History, 32, 55–75. Inden, Ronald (1990) Imagining India, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Ingleby, J. C. (2000) Missionaries, Education and India, Delhi: ISPCK. Jain, Girilal (1994) The Hindu Phenomenon, New Delhi: UBSPD. Johnston, James (ed.) (1888) Report of the Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World, London: James Nisbet. Jones, J. P. (1903) India’s Problem, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company. Jones, J. P. (1908) India: Its Life and Thought, New York: The Macmillan Company. Kawashima, K. (1998) Missionaries and a Hindu State Travancore 1858–1936, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Koss, S. E. (1969) John Morley at the India Office, New Haven: Yale University Press. Lyall, A. C. (1882) Asiatic Studies, London: John Murray. Maine, H. S. (1875) The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought, London: John Murray. Marriott, J. A. R. (1932) The English in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mathew, A. (1988) Christian Missions, Education and Nationalism, Delhi: Anamika Prakashan. Maw, Martin (1990) Visions of India, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. Mayhew, Arthur (1926) The Education of India, London: Faber and Gwyer. Mehta, U. S. (1999) Liberalism and Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metcalf, T. R. (1994) Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, James (1975) The History of British India, ed. William Thomas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mill, John Stuart (1994) Utilitarianism, ed. G. Williams, London: Dent. Monier-Williams, M. (1887) Modern India and the Indians, London. Nehru, Jawaharlal (1941) The Unity of India, London: Lindsay Drummond. O’Hanlon, Rosalind (1985) Caste, Conflict and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, Benita (1998) Delusions and Discoveries, London: Verso. Pearson, M. N. (1987) The Portuguese in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piggin, Stuart (1984) Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858, Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press. Porter, Andrew (2004) Religion versus Empire? Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Robert, D. L. (1996) Converting Colonialism, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Robinson, Rowena (2003) Christians of India, New Delhi: 2003. Robinson, R. and S. Clarke (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Religious Conversion in India, ed. R. Robinson and S. Clarke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–21. Sharpe, E. J. (1965) Not to Destroy but to Fulfil, Lund: Gleerup. Sharpe, E. J. (1975) Comparative Religion, London: Duckworth. Slater, T. E. (1882) The Philosophy of Missions, London. Stanley, Brian (1990) The Bible and the Flag, Leicester: Apollos. Stokes, Eric (1959) The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Swami Abhishiktananda (1971) The Church In India, Madras: CLS. Thomas, George (1979) Christian Indians and Indian Nationalism 1885–1950, Frankfurt a. M.: Lang. Temple, Richard (1882) Men and Events of My Time in India, London.

4

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ Christian missionaries and the edifice of ‘Hinduism’

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

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 63 Nevertheless, one of the outcomes of the early attempts at ‘rethinking Christianity’ in India during the late nineteenth century was that the mutual boundaries between the colonisers, the missionaries, and the colonised became clearer than before. The liberals and the Orientalists divided humanity between a ‘progressive’ west and a ‘retrograde’ east, whereas for missionaries the more significant divide was between the ‘saved’ and the ‘unsaved’. Consequently, from a soteriological point of view, all human beings were in a fundamental sense equal, and the missionary enterprise was predicated on the assumption that even the most ‘degraded’ natives were still capable of exercising reason and turning towards God. Again, the ‘dynamic’ west versus ‘primitive’ east gulf could no longer be mapped neatly onto the ‘saved’ versus ‘unsaved’ one when numerous scholars and administrators (some of whom had Christian commitments) began to translate and edit the ‘sacred texts of the east’, for it turned out that these scriptures were a venerable source of wisdom from whose fonts – in the opinion of some missionaries at least – Christians themselves had much to learn. After around a century of Christian diatribes, a new ‘religion’ called Hinduism began to emerge from an intricately-layered mass of polycentric traditions that British administrators, scholars, and missionaries had begun to investigate. A product of complex interplays between indigenous traditions, Orientalist translations, and missionary criticisms, Hinduism became an unstable product: at times a signifier of an ancient civilisation that had not only succeeded in sustaining itself but also could now provide succour to European humanity in search of a soul, and at other times a pointer to the country’s atavistic submersion in a superstitious past from which the administrators and the missionaries had to redeem it in their somewhat different ways.

Defining ‘Hinduism’ The various oppositions that missionaries had to encounter from the British administrators notwithstanding, their acceptance of the assortment of liberal, Orientalist, and Darwinian notions was to prove crucial by way of influencing their views on ‘Hinduism’. During the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the painstaking labour of several generations of British Orientalists and administrators played a significant role, partly through the study of Sanskrit-based texts and partly through their Brahmin interlocutors who interpreted them, in the emergence of certain understandings of Hinduism as a religious system centred around texts, doctrines, and priests. Therefore, scholars who point to the crystallisation of Hinduism at the confluence of complex textual, administrative, and legal currents often challenge the presentation of Hinduism as an ‘eternal religion’ (sanātana dharma), which has always existed fully formed through history, without any additions or emendations. Such scholars, who have been labelled ‘constructionists’, claim that British scholars and administrators ‘invented’ Hinduism sometime around 1800 as comprising of Sanskritic texts, and this invention was later internalised by the Indian elites. However, this claim has been contested by David Lorenzen who draws upon various late medieval texts to show that they already display a notion of Hindu unity which was centred in certain beliefs and practices, and sharpened

64 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ through rivalry with the Muslims (Lorenzen 2005: 52–80). In a new contribution to this debate, A. J. Nicholson criticises both these views of ‘Hinduism’ – as eternal religion and as modern invention – as oversimplifications of premodern history and argues that between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, some figures began to treat as a relatively unified whole a set of diverse texts such as the Upanis.ads, the Purān.as and the writings of the philosophical schools, and this shared understanding gradually led to the formation of a proto-‘Hindu’ identity (Nicholson 2011: 2–5). For our purposes, however, what is more important is not so much the precise dating of the emergence of this identity but the specific changes that were introduced into it by, on the one hand, the colonial officers and the missionaries, and, on the other, the creative agency of those who came to be known as the ‘neo-Hindus’. New forms of religious subjectivity emerged, as we shall see, through complex negotiations between the colonial state, the Christian missionaries, and the neo-Hindus. The British administrators and the Orientalists sought to uncover from the plurality of the socio-religious traditions that they encountered a coherent system of texts, doctrines, ecclesiastical organisations, and institutional practices that would reflect their understanding of ‘religion’ drawn from Judaeo-Christian sources (King 1999: 100–3). Figures such as Sir William Jones who were simultaneously scholars and officials believed that they had unearthed in texts such as the Dharmaśāstras, on the authority of Brahmin scribes and interpreters, a set of moral and juridical codes that had pan-Indian applicability. Such hermeneutical moves led them to assert that they were retrieving the ‘pristine Vedas’ that had been nearly obliterated in the course of the centuries, especially during the ‘Dark Ages’ of the Muslim rulers, and to claim legitimacy for their practical administration on the ground that it was based on authentically ‘Hindu’ norms and practices. This recovery of a ‘canonical Hinduism’ resulted not only in the conception of a community of the ‘Hindus’ whose authenticity was to be measured in terms of their fidelity to these texts, but also the consequent repudiation of the masses saturated by a ‘popular Hinduism’ whose retrogressive beliefs and stagnant customs were viewed as stalling their entry into modernity. Consequently, as C. A. Bayly points out, ‘Hindu and Muslim law as operated in British courts became more rigid, reflecting the norms of the high castes and the most orthodox interpretations rather than the pragmatic and fluid adjudications of the pandits and jurists of the past’ (Bayly 1988: 115). In this manner, the Orientalists reaffirmed the self-understanding of Brahmin elites as the upholders of spiritual and ritual orthodoxy by enlisting their help in the codification of Hindu law and the production of critical editions of Sanskritic Ur-texts. This distinction between ‘esoteric Hinduism’ and ‘exoteric Hinduism’ appears as early as 1810 in Edward Moor (1810:3): the first being the monotheism of ‘unadulterated’ truths enshrined in the texts of the Brahmins which spoke of the ‘infinite, incomprehensible, self-existent Spirit’ and the second the popular mythology of the masses who were immersed in idolatry and superstition. The missionary attitude to the emerging construct of Hinduism, and the significant role played by the missionaries in the process, has to be placed in this conjuncture of the views of the Orientalists and the British administrators on the

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 65 one hand, and the responses of the Hindus themselves on the other. G. Oddie (2003) has pointed to some of the complex interactions between Protestant Christian missionaries and the Hindus that were responsible for the emergence and the acceptance of the term ‘Hinduism’ as referring to a system of closely integrated beliefs and practices. While the term ‘Hindu’ was used in pre-British times by Persians and Muslims in a geographical/ethnic sense to refer to those who lived on the ‘other’ side of the Indus (sindhu in Sanskrit), early missionaries such as William Ward and William Carey, and administrators such as Charles Grant (himself an Evangelical) often made references to ‘Hindooism’ and ‘the Hindoo system’, taking these to be a set of creeds and philosophical arguments. These missionaries usually perceived Hindooism as an ‘other’ to their own Protestant Christianity (understood here primarily in its doctrinal aspects), and therefore projected the notion of a unified homogenous system of Hinduism into which local variants and divergences were submerged or assimilated. Numerous colonial and missionary voices from around this time outlined the character of Hinduism, though in somewhat contrary terms: some perceived a chaotic assemblage of cults and practices, and others highlighted the systemic aspects that they claimed to detect underneath the wild proliferation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Alfred Lyall found himself ‘looking down upon a tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions, upon ghosts and demons, demigods, and deified saints; upon household gods, tribal gods, local gods, universal gods; with their countless shrines and temples, and the din of their discordant rites . . . looking down upon such a religious chaos’ (Lyall 1882: 2). Other writers, however, presented Hinduism as a much more organised structure. Towards the close of the nineteenth century, James Johnston could write: ‘Hinduism defies the tooth of time and the tool of the engineer to disintegrate it . . . When Hinduism falls, it will fall as those grand old towers fall which have outlived the age and state of society for which they were constructed . . . ’ (Johnston 1880: 54–5). Certain voices at the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910 carried on this line of attack: the non-Christian religions were ‘[p]erfect specimens of absolute error and masterful pieces of hell’s inventions which Christianity was simply called upon to oppose, uproot and destroy’ (Sawyer 1978: 271). In the words of John Mott: ‘It is the decisive hour for the nonChristian nations . . . These nations are still plastic. Shall they set in Christian or in pagan moulds? . . . Shall our sufficient faith fill the void? (Mott 1910: 279–80). Consequently, documents of conferences such as Edinburgh are loaded with the military terms of ‘soldiers’, ‘army’ and ‘council of war’. As the Indian Christian theologian Samuel Rayan points out, the understanding of Christ’s ‘uniqueness’ has often led to an a priori denunciation of Hindu religious beliefs and practices: ‘Imperialist missions have projected Christ as a new, religious, Julius Caesar, out to conquer . . . We ask about the subterranean connection between the Western conception of Christ’s uniqueness and authority on the one hand and the Western project of world domination on the other’ (Rayan 1990: 133). The ‘subterranean connection’ between a confidence in the superiority of western civilisation and the triumphalist utilisation of the symbol of the cross for the conquest of the ‘heathen’ often structured the attitudes of the missionaries. For instance, raising the question

66 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ of the number of missionaries needed to evangelise India within the generation, Robert Stewart from the Punjab replied that the Madras Decennial Conference of 1902 had made scientific calculations to the effect that one missionary would be needed for every 25,000 natives (Gairdner 1910: 76).

The early missionary response to Hinduism Hinduism and the horrors of ‘idolatry’ The missionary construction of ‘Hinduism’ and the understanding of the significance of missionary activity formed two sides of the same coin: if ‘Hinduism’ consisted of systematised structures of superstition, then the mission to the Hindus could be conceived of as the attempt to demolish these structures. While the ‘iconoclastic’ aspects of the missionary centuries have been severely castigated in recent literature, the distinctively theological reasons underpinning such iconoclasm are usually not highlighted. An analysis of these early theologies of mission reveals that the missionary conception of Hinduism as a ‘demoniac’ edifice whose numerous deities were close analogues of Graeco-Roman ‘idols’, the missionary motivation to deliver fellow human beings from bondage to this edifice, and the emergence of a resistant Hinduism in response to such assaults are three closely intertwined moments on the socio-cultural landscape of late colonial India. The two steering theological beliefs of the missionary societies that emerged from the crucible of the Evangelical revival at the turn of the eighteenth century were the ‘depravity of Man’ and the ‘sovereignty of God’. Steeped as they were in the Old Testament’s derivation of humanity from a common root and its denunciations of the figure of ‘idolatry’ as a convenient summary of all human perversion, the missionaries were aghast at the colourful panoply of the ‘heathenish’ customs that greeted them in the distant lands (Wardlaw 1818: 8). Not only did the profusion of ‘idolatrous’ deities amount to a high affront to the divine sovereignty but also its consequence, that the ‘heathen’, unless they turned away from such transgressions by accepting Christ’s lordship, would eternally perish in the fires of damnation, both agonised the missionaries and charged them with a zeal to urgently propagate the gospel. Consequently, most missionaries from around this time, when explaining their motives in undertaking journeys to faraway countries to spread the gospel, speak in terms of the evocative images of the teeming masses of ‘idolaters’ perishing in the lake of fire and brimstone. As Eric Stokes has pointed out: The ‘notes’ of the Evangelic mind were a consuming earnestness and conviction, born of a transfiguring religious experience . . . The experience of being saved was one of a sudden illumination coming after the consciousness and repentance of sin, and its fruit was the gift of true self-government . . . It made the path of duty plain. That path lay, firstly, in the preservation of the soul in its state of grace through prayer and work, and secondly, in the mission to evangelize. (Stokes 1959: 29–30)

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 67 A somewhat dramatic instance of this mentalite can be found in Duff, who wrote: And when we think of the unappreciable value of an immortal soul . . . of the grandeur of that heaven to which by grace, it may be privileged to rise: – when we strive to realize the appalling fact, that there are millions of such souls now wandering, sunless and starless, in the waste howling wilderness . . . shall we remain mute and unconcerned spectators? Impossible! (Duff 1839: 43–4) In short, for some missionaries at least, one of the primary motivations was simply the common humanity that they shared with the natives who would, without the gospel, perish in damnation. Another motive that guided some British missionaries, more particularly those of the London Missionary Society (LMS), as they set out towards India, was their conviction that they had received forgiveness for their sins and the promise of redemption through the gospel and their compelling wish to bring to other human beings the blessings that they believed they had received from Christ. A significant number of them emphasised that they were responding to Christ’s commandment to spread the gospel. For instance, J. Knox wrote: ‘In obedience to that command, I entered College and in obedience to it I now offer myself to you in foreign service’ (Quoted in Oddie 1974: 66–7). Most of them were imbued with a vivid sense of the realm of sinister darkness that they believed the people of the ‘heathenish’ lands were steeped in, which generated in them the desire to work, with divine aid, for the amelioration of their spiritual conditions. Some missionaries were convinced that they were constrained by the love that Christ had for them in turning them around from their sinfulness, and they wanted to reciprocate this love by becoming his human instruments in carrying the good news to the ‘heathen’ (Oddie 1974). Some applicants to the missionary societies also seem to have been drawn by the perception that the status of a missionary was highly respectable and carried with it a certain element of social prestige. While many others stated that they were aware of no other motive than to glorify God through seeking the salvation of the ‘heathen’, the missionary societies and the missionaries themselves were often concerned that these motives might not be as ‘pure’ as they would want them to be. A committee of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) noted in August 1829 that the consideration that on becoming a missionary an individual would receive certain material benefits and conveniences, an elevation in social status, certain provisions should he become disabled by sickness, and the surety that his widow and children would be taken care of on his death might instil into the candidate motives that were ‘less pure than they ought to be in aspiring to the Missionary office’ (Piggin 1984: 126). Therefore, missionary societies such as the LMS, the CMS and others often asked the candidates a number of questions concerning their motivations for seeking employment in these organisations. The preamble to these questions in the LMS application solemnly reminded the candidates that they would be held accountable on the ‘Day of Judgement’ before the God who searches the hearts of everyone. On the other hand, though it is possible that some missionaries were

68 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ indeed attracted by the promise of pecuniary advantages, especially since the organisations began to pay a regular salary, there are instances when individuals became missionaries well aware that this move would result in a reduction of their annual income (Piggin 1984: 129). Missionaries in the contact zone The embattled position in which the missionaries found themselves – on the one hand, driven by their faith to spread the gospel, and on the other hand, resisted or even opposed by the colonial administrators and, as we shall see, by the natives – highlights two significant points for our discussion in this and the next section. First, the natives often appropriated some aspects of European intellectual and cultural systems and used them against the colonial administrators and the missionaries. Second, the natives were partly instrumental in the construction of Hinduism, whose texts they put forward as the repositories of ancient wisdom, so that Hinduism could no longer be castigated as merely a primitive collection of falsities. Consequently, the charge sometimes raised against Christian missionaries that they ‘colonised’ the subjectivities of the Hindus they encountered is somewhat exaggerated – Hindus themselves were soon stridently responding to missionary invectives by offering, on occasion, sophisticated theological responses to key elements of the Christian message. To begin with the first, scholars who accept the Saidian argument that the British epistemological strategies for acquiring knowledge of India were in fact impelled by a colonial thirst for domination over the country have also stressed the ‘dialogic’ nature of the processes through which colonial knowledge was created. Against the notion of a ‘disinterested knowledge’ Edward Said demonstrated that the processes through which knowledge is produced are enmeshed in a complex matrix of technologies of power and that the study of these configurations is vital to understanding how ideas and values are propagated and perpetuated. However, his critics have argued that he failed to sufficiently stress the specificities of the historical processes through which Orientalist discourse was produced in the face of active contestation. Consequently he would seem to have unwittingly promoted the notion of the ‘passive Orientals’ by overlooking their oppositional stances to the master narratives of imperialism (Porter 1993). As a matter of fact, colonial representations, without which the mundane tasks of administration would have been impossible, were grounded to a significant extent in local forms of knowledge that were interpreted to the administators by indigenous figures. On the other side of the divide, the colonised often responded to western influences by appropriating its idioms in some highly creative ways, as Tapan Raychaudhuri notes in his study of members of the Bengali intelligentsia such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94) and Swami Vivekananda. Their perceptions of the west and their selective appropriations of certain elements of European thought and culture were shaped by a number of contingent factors such as the precise ways in which the exclusivities built into the colonial apparatus impinged on their lives, their contacts with Europeans, their own personalities, their locations within the

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 69 indigenous contexts, and so on (Raychaudhuri 1988: 5). Consequently, in place of conceptualisations of the intellectual and the cultural exchanges between India and England during the colonial era in terms either of active masters causing their passive subjects to flower into a ‘Bengal Renaissance’ or of confrontations devoid of any mutual influences, it would be more accurate to regard these encounters as long drawn-out dialogic and interactive processes which involved complex relations of negotiation, accommodation, and exchange. As Bayly has noted, Indians soon began to increasingly produce ‘their own knowledge from reworked fragments of their own tradition melded with western ideas and conveyed through western artifacts. Orientalism in Said’s sense became reactive and embattled before it had taken on any kind of shape at all’ (Bayly 1996: 371–2). Therefore, it is important to emphasise that rather than remaining passive onlookers to a ‘Hindu-isation project’, Hindus sometimes challenged, subverted, and co-opted the classificatory frameworks of the colonial bureaucratic machinery as well as the religious idioms of the Christian missionaries. An ‘Oriental passivity’ of this type is suggested by the view that western scholars and Christian missionaries imposed on the natives a reified conceptual unity called Hinduism, and that their ‘imagination’ of Hinduism as structured by belief cores and forms of worship shaped Indological discourses which appropriated ‘the power of Indians . . . to act for themselves’ (Inden 1986: 403). However, in response to the view that colonial projects tried to systematise various aspects of Indic culture through classificatory systems such as the census, thereby producing essentialist constructions of Hinduism, Michael Haan has argued that the census reports show that the British officials were in fact unable to arrive at any modular definitions of ‘Hinduism’ and were themselves clear that their ‘Hinduism’ was merely a pragmatic classificatory tool. J. T. Marten, the 1921 Census Commissioner, for instance, stated that ‘Hindu is an unsatisfactory category in the classification of religion, but one that would remain. In the first place, Hinduism is not only or essentially a religion. The term also implies country, race and a social organization’ (Haan 2005: 25). The census officials used numerous tests such as reception of instruction from a Brahmin priest, acceptance of the Vedic texts, worship of specific gods, caste affiliation, and so on, none of which were found to be sufficiently discriminatory (Haan 2005). In other words, systematised pan-Indian Hindu structures gradually appeared through complex negotiations between precolonial idioms and European categories, and these processes were steered by Hindu figures who often interrogated, appropriated, and contested the latter. For instance, the members of the Arya Samaj, formed in 1875, began to claim in 1890 that they should be classified not as ‘Hindu’ but as ‘Aryan’, and around a decade later, voices could be heard from Muslim sections arguing that if groups such as the ‘Animists’ were removed from the category of ‘Hindus’, the proportion of the ‘Muhammadans’ to the ‘Hindu majority’ would be significantly increased (Haan 2005: 23). A close analysis of missionary reports shows that missionaries too, for all their attempts to be in a commanding position from which they could assault the monstrous structures of Hinduism, had to admit that the Hindu fortresses seemed to be going quite strong. Andrew Leslie, who joined the Protestant mission at Monghyr,

70 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ Bengal, in 1823, was soon to experience despair at the lack of response to the gospel on the part of the natives, and in April 1836 felt driven to write: ‘Nothing can possibly be so disheartening as missionary work in this country’ (Quoted in Copley 1997: 98). Another missionary connected with the same station, John Lawrence, wrote in 1839 that whereas at certain times he would regard himself as a worthless servant for carrying out the divine purpose, at others he would believe that though the Lord’s time for converting the Hindus and the Muslims had not yet arrived, it was his duty nevertheless to stick patiently to his spiritual labours (Copley 1997: 98–9). While some missionaries might have comforted themselves with such millenarian hopes, by and large the missionary mood was one of dejection at the paucity of conversions. C. E. Driberg, who came to Barripur, Bengal, in 1845 as a missionary with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, realised that in spite of visiting the native population three times a week, missionaries were rarely successful in bringing about genuine conversions that would go beyond a mere intellectual assent to the truths of Christianity (Copley 1997: 80–1). If anything, missionary reports from around this time reveal that some of the Hindus themselves had gone into an adversarial mode, flatly denying certain crucial assumptions of the Christian message. For instance, in a letter in 1849, John Lawrence recounts that a Brahmin pandit told him that the sacrifices made by the Hindu ascetics were equivalent in their spiritual power to that of Christ’s self-sacrifice (Copley 1997: 100). Not surprisingly, therefore, the Baptist missionary to Muttra (modern day Mathura) T. Phillips declared his intention in 1853 that he would never allow himself to lose an argument with the Hindus, and particularly their ascetics who had to be ‘convinced as well as silenced’ (Quoted in Copley 1997: 121). Missionaries and the Hindu backlash During the 1870s and the 1880s, the Hindu opposition reinforced itself for a more frontal assault on Christianity, and it became increasingly difficult for the missionaries to counter it. Some ‘orthodox’ Hindus adopted a militant stance against the missionaries so that the bazaars and the streets, once the favourite haunt of itinerant preachers, became inhospitable for them. The religious scene in the Punjab in the 1880s was marked by a stiff competition between the Christian missionaries and the Arya Samaj that was conducted through reports of conversions and reconversions, debates, pamphlet wars, street preaching, and so on. At a fair near Pind Dadan Khan, Jhelum district in the Punjab, Aryans had gathered from several places to combat Christian proselytisers: They formed themselves into different parties and vigorously preached the Vedic faith throughout the fair. The Christian missionaries could not give the ‘joyful tidings’, to the benighted heathen to their hearts’ content, for no sooner would any minister of the Gospel commence his discourse in a loud key, than a party of Aryan preachers would come into view, determined to contest the ground with him. (Jones 1976: 142)

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 71 What was particularly distressing for the Christian missionaries was that those who were at the helm of this opposition were often the highly educated Indians, precisely the group they had believed would turn to Christianity and then disseminate it among those below them in the social strata. As a matter of fact, however, currents of rationalism and free thinking circulated among the western-educated Hindu intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century, and the writings of figures such as Tom Paine, August Comte, and John Mill were plundered by them for intellectual resources to develop oppositional stances against both the indigenous traditions and the Christian missionaries. They drew upon these radical deist and nonconformist views circulating in Europe to forge distinctive strategies for eradicating what they perceived to be the excrescences of Hinduism and for criticising Christianity, a ‘revealed’ religion, as a sinister ruse through which the clergy deluded the masses. One such radical figure in Bengal, Akshaykumar Datta, argued that the Vaiśes.ika system of classical Indian philosophy was superior to the others for it postulated no creator God but explained all natural phenomena through the interactions between atoms. Such naturalistic views, however, were in the course of time embroidered with fanciful beliefs, and to remove the falsities that had clustered around them, Datta argued that Indians ‘were in want of someone to lead them. They were in need of one Bacon, one Bacon, one Bacon’ (Quoted in Raychaudhuri 1999: 56). Such godless Indians, the missionaries complained, had rejected not only Hinduism but all religions as systems of priestcraft invented to enslave the masses, and had thereby descended into a ‘universal scepticism’. Figures such as Datta would have been anathema also to those missionaries who had believed that the study of English literature, imbued with a Christian ethos, would lead to a moral regeneration of the Indians, remove some of their prejudices on the path of conversion, and draw them towards Christianity. However, as Gauri Viswanathan has noted, there was a tension in the Evangelicalism of Christians such as Charles Grant between their belief that a consistent pursuit of western empiricism would debunk Hindu metaphysics and mythology, and their attempt to safeguard the revealed tenets of their Christian faith from science and history. This tension ‘did not go unnoticed by colonial subjects . . . If Christianity were truly a religion based on reason, evidence and history as projected, many asked, why did confirmation in that religion depend entirely on accepting two central doctrines [of revelation and grace] that demanded faith rather than the exercise of reason?’ (Viswanathan 1989: 99). Thus Rajnarain Bose, a member of the Brahmo Samaj formed in 1828, attacked the claim that Christianity was the most advanced stage of religious evolution by arguing that it was in fact full of superstition, mystery, and miracles such as the ‘absurd notion of a triune Godhead’, the ‘revolting doctrine of the eternal punishment’, and so on, which the ‘rational Hindu’ could not believe (Kopf 1979: 174). Missionaries were equally shocked by natives who did accept substantial aspects of the Christian message, but configured it with indigenous themes. A study of the conversion narratives of individuals such as Pandita Ramabai and Brahmabandhab Upadhyay reveals, on the one hand, that they had actively searched for Christian life-worlds that they believed to be more liberating than

72 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ the ones they had been born into, but, on the other, that they were not unreflective recipients of the Christian messages that their supervisors had handed out to them. The conversions of such individuals to Christianity, and in some cases their subsequent movements away from it, were mediated by complex interactions with the missionaries, and should not be viewed as a unilinear imposition on them of either some colonial ideology or missionary teaching. For instance, R. F. Young (2002: 37–60) shows how the interactions of three nineteenth-century Hindu pandits with missionaries produced three distinct responses: while the Christian message challenged all three and plunged them into varying degrees of spiritual crises, the consequences were different. The first, Krishna Shastri, remained confirmed in his opposition to the gospel and to the missionaries whom he believed to be arrogant and insolent. The second, Arumuka Pillai, educated by the British Wesleyans in Jaffna, had various doubts about the claims of the Bible, and rediscovered the Śaivism of his family. Only the third, Nilakantha Goreh, converted to Christianity after having expended much energy in refuting its claims, and became well known as Nehemiah Goreh. Such creative syntheses were not restricted to these paradigmatic figures – as historians have noted, lesser-known individuals often entered into various sorts of oppositions and alliances with the missionaries as they responded to their preaching. Even before certain areas of southern Tamil Nadu began to respond to Christian missionaries in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the hinterland had witnessed several itinerant ‘seekers’ who developed distinctive interweavings of their traditional Hindu beliefs and practices with some of the teachings that they had received from foreign missionaries. Jesuit reports from the early eighteenth century throw some light on such wandering ascetics who, while identifying themselves as Christian, were involved in their own spiritual quests which led them to adopt lifestyles usually associated with Hindu bhakti or Muslim sufi practices (Bayly 1989: 385–7). Nearby in the Malabar, some Indian converts of the Plymouth Brethren who preached a radical form of Christian egalitarianism, anti-clericalism, and a deeply ‘personal’ response to the authority of Christ, began to exercise a galvanic effect on some of the Thomas Christians. One of these was Justus Joseph, who had become a pastor of a CMS church, but who, to the utter dismay of his spiritual supervisors, declared in 1874 that he had received a commission by God to prepare humanity for the return of Christ on 2 October 1881. Breaking away from the Anglican Church, he formed an independent sect which numbered as many as 12,000 followers as the movement reached its height, and changed his name to Yuyoralison, combining the words Jehovah, Joseph, Rama, Ali, and Wilson. In their emphasis on an egalitarian association of believers, vegetarianism, and teetotalism, members of Yuyoralison’s group were drawing upon certain motifs common to south Indian bhakti sects, and they attracted large numbers of both Hindu and Christians. What this movement demonstrates, according to Susan Bayly, is ‘how readily they [the Thomas Christians] could adapt mainline missionary teachings to suit their quest for a radical new creed which might solve their chronic problems of authority and spiritual leadership’ (Bayly 1989: 310–11). For another example of such trans-creation of Christian motifs, we may

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 73 turn to the case of the Mundas in eastern India who, after the failure of a series of violent uprisings against the British, turned towards the ‘apocalyptic’ intervention of Birsa from around 1895. Victoria Luker argues that this millenarian prophecy was forged out of the symbolic resources of traditional Munda beliefs, Hinduism, and Christianity, thereby giving rise to a vision of the restoration of the ‘golden age’ into which his followers would enter. The presence of traditional themes is highlighted by the fact that Birsa was viewed by his followers as an ‘incarnation’ of Singbonga, the Munda deity; drawing on the Hindu mythic cycles of time, the Mundas believed that they were living through the evil age; and finally, Christian missionary preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven probably fuelled such millenarian expectations (Luker 1998). The rise of ‘neo-Hinduism’ In a manner parallel to the colonial administrators, whose attempts to transplant European values and institutions on a colonial landscape fissured by the identitydifference dialectic led to complex relations of collaboration with and opposition to the natives, missionaries too soon realised that, their rhetorical flourishes about the soldiers of Christ notwithstanding, their vigorous preaching had often been rejected by the natives with whose life-worlds they had to enter into more sympathetic relations. Indeed, the acrimonious attacks that the early nineteeth-century missionaries often levelled at Indian ‘primitivism’ gave rise to a counter-blast from the east. The difference between a pure deist form of religion and its later polytheistic accretions which, as we noted earlier, had been articulated by the Orientalists, was soon appropriated by various Hindu thinkers and nationalist leaders who believed that through a recovery of these primal elements they could effect a spiritual and cultural renaissance of Hinduism. A host of ‘reformers’ such as Rammohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, and Swami Dayananda (1824–83) accepted, in their distinctive ways, the argument that the Hindu religious and social systems had suffered a degeneration from a ‘golden age’ centred around the Vedas (e.g. Ghose 1885–87: vol. 1, 40). The consolidation of a corporate Hindu identity consequently became an undertaking that had as its intended end the establishment of an overarching framework within which a unified nation would confront, and ultimately shake off, the colonial power. H. von Stietencron points out that western scholars, because of their preconceived notion that what they were dealing with on the subcontinent was a unified religious system ‘saw Hinduism as a unity. The Indians had no reason to contradict this; to them the religious and cultural unity discovered by western scholars was highly welcome in their search for national identity in the period of struggle for national union’ (von Stietencron 1991: 15). Nationalist historians occupied an ambivalent position with regard to the constructions of a ‘spiritual’ India by the Orientalists: on the one hand, they largely carried over the disjunction between India and Europe as two large homogenous entities, but on the other, they released the former from its assigned role of ‘passivity’ and ascribed to it the resurgent status of ‘activity’. Such historians often hearkened back to the glorious

74 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ ages of the Vedic past where art, culture, and spirituality had flourished, the people had prospered economically and were bound by a perception of a national unity. As we shall note in Chapter 8, in these constructions of Hindu nationalism, the glorification of an archaic Hindu past was based on a comparison between ‘the vitalism, dynamism and resilience of the ancient Hindus and what was perceived as the degeneration and stagnancy of contemporary Hindu society’ (Bhatt 2001: 12). This conception of a religious system that could somehow weld the diverse cultural elements of the land into an integrated whole was often employed by members of the educated upper classes in their attempts to put up a united front when many Hindus began to migrate to Christianity (Frykenberg 1976). The ‘pure’ message of Hinduism was now claimed, by proponents of what has come to be termed ‘neo-Hinduism’, to be the spiritual essence of the different religions of humanity. Missionaries were quite puzzled by this movement, for though these educated Hindus, such as the members of the Brahmo Samaj, had rejected the ‘crudities’ and the ‘superstitions’ of the traditional Hindus and were even deeply interested in the figure of Christ, they almost unanimously rejected the orthodox Christian claims about his divinity. Further, missionaries were often particularly irked by the claim that while Europe had become immersed in gross materialism and had lost its soul, the wisdom of Hinduism, as pristine as ever, shone forth as the one hope for the world’s spiritual malaise. As Swami Vivekananda claimed: Let others talk of politics, of the glory of acquisition of immense wealth poured in by trade, of the power and spread of commercialism . . . these the Hindu mind does not understand . . . Touch him [sic] on spirituality, on religion, on God, on the soul, on the Infinite, on spiritual freedom, and I assure you, the lowest peasant in India is better informed on these subjects than many a so-called philosopher in other lands. I have said . . . that we have yet something to teach to the world. (1972: vol. 3,148) One important aspect of this response to Christianity was the attempt to include its ‘lower’ truths in the ‘higher’ message of neo-Advaita, which can be seen as a form of fulfilment theology, with the crucial difference, of course, that it is not the gospel but certain reformulated versions of the Advaita of Śan.kara (788–820 CE) which are placed at the apex of the evolutionary development of the religions of the world. In neo-Advaitins such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Swami Vivekananda, and others, it was not Christianity’s ‘penultimate’ truths about saviours and salvation but Advaita’s transcendental ‘experience’ of an intuitive awareness of non-duality between the self and the absolute that constituted the summit. In a lecture delivered to the Brooklyn Ethical Association on 27 February 1895, Swami Vivekananda claimed that the Buddha had foreshadowed the coming of Christ; algebra, geometry, and astronomy could be traced back to ancient India; and Sanskrit was the font of European languages which are but ‘jargonized Sanskrit’ (1972: vol. 2, 510–12). Consequently, Hindu responses to Christian

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 75 criticisms now received a new impetus, for it was claimed that in opposition to ‘Semitic’ creeds which are imperialistic, native Hindu wisdom breathes the air of ‘inclusivity’.

Missionaries and the native Church Around this time of the emergence of a ‘militant Hinduism’, provoked to some extent by the vituperative denunciations of Indian culture by colonial administrators and missionaries, the missionary attitude to Hinduism underwent a gradual, but decisive, shift. According to the newer missionary conception of Hinduism, provided the blemishes in Hindu thought and practice were carefully weeded out, Hinduism would flow into Christianity which was its true culmination. If Hinduism had been placed in this manner on a continuum with Christianity, the missionary organisations often argued that the native churches too were on a continuum with the European churches which had founded them. However, Christian missionaries till the eve of Indian political independence often held the view that the foundation of a native Indian Church had to be postponed into the indefinite future. In short, both colonial administrators and missionaries were often unwilling to push their ‘liberalism’ to its logical conclusion: the grant of full-fledged autonomy to Indians, whether in the form of citizenship or self-governing local churches. The fundamental problem was highlighted by Evan Maconochie: ‘[w]hile human nature is the same everywhere and throughout the ages, environment and opportunity are different. Hitherto we have been able to help India because of the differences and, when that ceases to be so, the chief justification for our presence there will have gone’ (Maconochie 1926: 257). Along these lines, after declaring that the ‘[t]he essential point is that British rule should be openly confessed and authoritatively proclaimed to be a means, not an end’, William Archer postpones the question of whether this end, a self-governing state, should be within or outside the British empire: ‘Many a long year will have to pass before India is ripe for self-government . . . ’ (Archer 1917: 19–20). Given that British administrators saw the natives as ‘children’ whom they were slowly raising to the autonomy of adulthood, they often argued that they could not leave Indian shores until they had ‘honourably discharged’ the responsibilities that they had undertaken. Similar sentiments were often echoed by the missionaries, with regard both to the empire and to the foundation of a native Church. Though British missionaries often expressed the opinion that Indian Christians would play a decisive role in the spread of Christianity in the country, they were not willing to accept the proposition that the latter would be able to provide able leadership for the local churches, and were particularly appalled at the prospect of a British missionary serving under an Indian bishop. Thus, around the middle of the nineteenth century, an Indian convert, Lal Behari Day, who had expected that after conversion he would receive the status of spiritual equality with his western friends, was soon to be disappointed for some of the missionaries associated with the Scottish Mission Council were, according to him, concerned more with the management

76 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ of funds from home than with admitting native converts into its membership. In an address ‘Searchings of Heart’ delivered in 1857, he lamented the lack of fellowship between the missionaries and their Indian converts and asked them to examine themselves in the light of the gospel: ‘Do I look upon my converts as my sons in the faith – as brethren in Christ, not as subordinates and servants?’(Quoted in Neill 1985: 403). The absence of communion is highlighted by the fact that the missionaries who selected Indian Christians to be their personal assistants in the role of evangelists or catechists often did not regard them as being at par with themselves or place them in a status of independent authority. Indeed, they emphasised their distinctive locations in a racially ordered social space through a variety of ways such as by living in the missionary bungalow while the Indian pastor would be allocated a place in the servants’ quarters (Hollis 1962: 51–4). Numerous voices from this period reveal the ‘paternalistic’ attitude of the missionaries towards the native Christians, particularly regarding their alleged incapacity to manage their own affairs. At the General Missionary Conference at Allahabad in December 1872, Robert Clark raised the issue of the local churches whose independence, he believed, was the ultimate end of the endeavours of the missionaries. Nevertheless, this independence was a distant goal: ‘For the present, the Native Church of India can no more dream of such independence than a child at school can think he can live independently of his father’s care’ (Quoted in Copley 1997: 21). Indian Christians sometimes regarded the missionaries as arrogant individuals who had little interest in their welfare and who undertook little effort to overcome the barriers of language, culture, and education that separated the two groups. The Indian convert Reverend Goloknath even depicted the financially well-off missionaries as ‘paid agents of a Religious Company’ who were more interested in garnering converts than in becoming involved with the Indians whom they had received into their fold (Copley 1997: 20). As late as 1931, J. C. Winslow lamented that ‘it remains true . . . that, in the vast majority of cases, the Indian Christian regards his fellow English Christian as one separated from him by a subtle consciousness of superiority – one whom he may respect as a good man but not love as a brother’ (Winslow and Elwin 1931: 186). At the same time, however, a significant number of missionary, as well as native, figures began to affirm the importance of setting up a Church which would be distinctively Indian. Preaching to a group in Dacca (Dhaka) in 1818, the missionary Owen Leonard even declared he wished them to become ‘Christian Hindoos’, that is, they would renounce the worship of ‘idols’, turn away from sin, and seek to become holy, but would otherwise remain rooted in their social contexts (Potts 1967: 225). The taunt that the natives who had accepted Christianity had become one of the foreigners began to be levelled at the converts from around this time, and the latter sometimes reacted strongly to it. For instance, the Reverend ‘Abd al-Masih (born in Delhi in the 1760s and baptised in 1811) protested in these terms: ‘I was born in Hindoostan: my colour is black, my dress different from that of the Sahibs, and I have a beard like yourselves: how then can you call me a Feringee [foreigner]? If you call me a Christian you will call me right’ (Quoted in Powell 1997: 51). By the middle of the century, however, missionaries began

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 77 to strike a greater note of urgency in ‘indigenising’ the gospel into Indian cultural forms. As early as 1855, the CMS issued the following statement as a part of its policy directives to its missionaries: ‘The ultimate object of missions, viewed in their ecclesiastical aspect, is the settlement of Native Church, with Native Pastors, upon a self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending system’ (Quoted in Cox 2002: 42). As we will see in Chapter 8, from the first half of the twentieth century, the distinction between the gospel of Christ and Europeanised forms of Christianity began to be drawn more clearly than earlier, with the acknowledgement that the ‘younger churches’ had been modelled on Europeanised prototypes.

The arrival of indigenised Christianity In short, as Christian missionaries agonised over the question of whether, and to what extent, the Christian message could be ‘inculturated’ into Indian forms, their usual response for much of the nineteenth century was that Christianity should be kept as ‘uncontaminated’ as possible from the influences of Hindu thought and practice. An early complaint comes from P. C. Mozoomdar, a member of the Brahmo Samaj: When I express my ardent love for Christ and Christianity, they [‘the Christian leaders’] are kindly in sympathy; but the moment I say that Christ and his religion will have to be interpreted in India through Indian antecedents and the Indian medium of thought, I am suspected of trying to blend Christianity to heathenism. (Quoted in Chatterjee 1984: 176) For most of the nineteenth century, Indian Christians were made to adopt Europeanised forms of Christianity in all ways possible, and S. C. Chatterji argued that because of this imitative process, Christianity had become, during the time of the growth of a national consciousness, an object of suspicion and contempt. Long before postcolonial theorists began to point out Europe’s projections of ‘ethnocentric’ universalisms, Chatterji already claimed that it was ‘perhaps a peculiar weakness of the English race, which has always seemed to think that what is best for England must be so for the entire world’ (Chatterji 1914: 212). Around this time, another Indian Christian, K. T. Paul, complained that by plucking Indians out of their socio-cultural contexts, missionaries had produced ‘denationalised’ Indians who were largely unaware of their rich traditions of folklore, art, and music. The initial group of Protestant missionaries had, in the attempt to prevent any ‘contamination’ of the Christian message, instilled into their converts a horror of the indigenous traditions, and this had softened over time, Paul believed, only to emerge as an attitude of deep suspicion towards them (Paul 1919). Some Indian Christians who opposed this ‘denationalisation’ of Indians after their entry into the churches attempted to ‘inculturate’ the gospel in Indian contexts by forming organisations to press the demand for the relegation of powers to them. At the Second Decennial Missionary Conference at Calcutta in 1882, an Indian Christian, P. M. Mukerji, declared that the ‘time has come when the

78 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ Native Church may be safely left alone to a certain extent at least’ (Quoted in Thomas 1979: 68). A few years later, K. C. Banerji founded the Christo Samaj in 1887 with the aim of the propagation of Christian truth and the welfare of Indian Christians, and the organisation became a meeting point for the early pioneers of the National Church Movement who were seeking the establishment of a Church that would be regulated by the natives. At the Bombay Missionary Conference in 1892/93, Banerji distinguished between ‘substantive Christianity’, that is, the set of its foundational principles and the doctrines based on them which must remain invariant in all environments, and ‘adjectival Christianity’, that is, the specific forms of ecclesiastical organisation or creedal confession with which the former are clothed. Towards the beginning of the next century, the National Missionary Society was formed in 1905 in Serampore by sixteen Indian Christians who sought to initiate an all-India movement for independence from western missionary societies that would be based on the three foundational principles of ‘Indian leadership’, ‘Indigenous methods’, and ‘Indian money’ (Thomas 1979: 148–9). In addition to challenging the liberal-styled view of the missionaries that the Indian Christians were their ‘spiritual children’ who were not responsible enough to handle the affairs of their churches, Indian Christians also began to contest the assumption that ‘Church’ and ‘empire’ had been brought together providentially. Indian Christians adopted varying stances towards British imperialism, sometimes regarding it as their duty to submit their allegiance to the powers of the day, and at other times arguing that they must oppose the empire along with the nationalist movements of their time. These variations can be traced ultimately to a long tradition of Christian reflection on the relation between Church and state, with a prominent, though not uncontested, line holding that Christians must submit to legitimate government (Romans 13: 1–7). This understanding was reflected by Bishop Azariah of Dornakal when, during the Quit India Movement, he appealed to the Christians of his diocese not to participate in civil disobedience, arguing that the scriptures had commanded Christians to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’. Though Christians did support the cause of freedom, they must not, according to Azariah, seek to wrest power from their rulers, the ministers appointed by God. Soon thereafter, however, other Christians such as V. Chakkarai pointed out that civil disobedience towards a government that did not serve the interests of the people and was not recognised by them was justified (Thomas 1979: 225–8). In the years leading up to political independence, a greater number of Indian Christians began to challenge this assumption that their religious views had no bearing on the wider issues of race and empire. After the passing of the Quit India resolution in 1942, several Indian Christians, including the students of the United Theological College at Bangalore, declared that Christians in India could not distance themselves from the nationalists who were struggling against the repressive regime of the British and had to express their solidarity with the movement for the grant of immediate self-government. Towards the close of the Second World War, some Indian Christians began to point out certain similarities between British imperialism and missionary ‘imperialism’, and claimed that while the non-Christian Indians were under one imperialistic control, the Indian

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 79 Christians were under two, that of the empire and of the missionaries. Some of them argued that there was a parallel between the manner in which the British government tried to delay the grant of self-government, in spite of making protestations to the contrary, and the practice of the missionary societies to shrink back from devolving responsibility upon the Indian Christians despite their declared intentions. In an article published in 1945, M. C. Chakravarty (Thomas 1979: 235) declared that as long as the leadership of the Churches remained vested primarily in foreign hands, Muslims and Hindus would continue to believe that they were merely instruments for the perpetuation of British imperialism.

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

80 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ Those in the second group work with the assumption, which is usually allowed to remain unquestioned, that the missionaries and the colonisers were hand in glove with one another. Our discussion in this chapter has highlighted the point that missionaries on the field often experienced bouts of anxiety and despair, and that, though they shared some of the ‘civilising’ assumptions of the colonisers, the relations between these two groups were far from being mutually supportive. Christian missionaries in British India should therefore be viewed not as imperialist agents but as concrete actors in specific historical settings in which they entered into various negotiations with indigenous figures. Postcolonial theorists, finally, usually ignore the Christian missionary aspects of modern Indian history entirely, and even when some bring up this topic for a brief discussion, the tendency, so argues Singh, remains to paint the missionaries as instruments who helped the imperialists to promote their hegemonic mastery over ‘colonised’ minds. In response to this last group, Singh writes that one must distinguish in this connection between the ‘textual’ hegemonists and the missionaries. While the former, through their various translations and editions of the local texts ‘essentialised’ them by smoothing out the various fissures and contradictions within them, the latter, while they too were involved in a similar hegemonic process of seeking the assent of the local population, were engaged in daily interactions with the latter who often disputed, challenged, and confounded the arguments produced by them (Singh 1999: 151–4). Indeed, as we shall note in the next chapter, the British missionary attempts to ‘fix’ the Indian Christians into definite stereotypes, for instance, as replicators of the messages handed down to them by their superiors, quite often produced polymorphous identities characterised by ‘hybridity’ and ‘ambivalence’. The missionary ‘imperialism’ which sought to forge stable and unitary identities of both the missionaries and the converts was undercut by various contradictory processes and the cracks, indeterminacies, and slippages that opened up provided the spaces for highly creative transformations of the gospel, both by the converts themselves and by the Hindu opponents of Christian conversion. These long-drawn processes need to be highlighted to emphasise that the natives, far from emerging with colonised subjectivities from the missionary encounters, responded in a variety of ways to the Christian message, ranging from strident rejection to creative assimilation of some of its aspects. As we have noted, the shift from the denunciations of Hindu ‘idolatry’ as a mass of superstitions to the notion of the fulfilment of Hinduism in Christianity was concurrent with the emergence of neo-Hinduism which placed certain types of Advaita Vedānta at the pinnacle of humanity’s religious development. From the standpoint of Advaita, which began to be referred to as the ‘higher Hinduism’, it seemed that not much had changed in Christian approaches to Hinduism, for they remained focussed on the pivot of the ‘uniqueness’ of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the extent of the ‘inclusivity’ of the models that Christian theologians and missionaries were developing became a moot point, leading to a delicate question: who is more inclusive, the Christians or the neo-Advaitin Hindus? The more or less received wisdom in some Hindu circles is that Hinduism, especially in the form of neo-Advaita, is genuinely inclusive. Unfortunately, insufficient attention is paid to two crucial questions: first, precisely who is included,

The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ 81 and, second, what are the theological–philosophical grounds of this inclusion? These questions were forced upon Christians and some ‘higher’ caste Hindus by one of the most volatile issues in colonial and contemporary India: conversions from the ‘lower’ castes to Christianity.

References Archer, William (1917) India and the Future, London: Hutchinson and Co. Bayly, C. A. (1988) Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayly, C. A. (1996) Empire and Information, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayly, Susan (1989) Saints, Goddesses and Kings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhatt, Chetan (2001) Hindu Nationalism, Oxford: Berg. Chakravarty, M. C. (March 29, 1945) ‘Leadership in the Church of India’, The Guardian. Chatterjee, Margaret (1984) The Religious Spectrum, New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private Limited. Chatterji, S. C. (1914) ‘Indian Christians and National Ideas’, East and West, 12, 209–15. Copley, Anthony (1997) Religions in Conflict, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cox, Jeffrey (2002) Imperial Fault Lines, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dewick, E. C. (1953) The Christian Attitude to Other Religions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duff, Alexander (1839) Missions the Chief End of the Christian Church, Edinburgh. Frykenberg, R. E. (1976) ‘The Impact of Conversion and Social Reform upon Society in South India During the Late Company Period: Questions Concerning Hindu-Christian Encounters, with Special Reference to Tinnevelly’, in Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization c. 1830–1850, ed. C. H. Phillips and M. D. Wainwright, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, pp. 187–243. Gairdner, W. H. T. (1910) “Edinburgh 1910”: An Account and Interpretation of the World Missionary Conference, London: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier. Ghose, J. C. (ed.) (1885–87) The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, Calcutta: Bhowanipore Oriental Press. Haan, Michael (2005) ‘Numbers in Nirvana: How the 1872–1921 Indian Censuses Helped Operationalise “Hinduism”’, Religion, 35, 13–30. Hollis, Michael (1962) Paternalism and the Church, London: Oxford University Press. Inden, Ronald (1986) ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, 20, 410–46. Johnston, James (1880) Our Educational Policy in India, Edinburgh: MacLaren. Jones, K. W. (1976) Arya Dharm, Berkeley: University of California Press. King, Richard (1999) Orientalism and Religion, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kopf, David (1979) The Brahmo Samaj and the Making of the Modern Indian Mind, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laird, M. A. (1972) Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lorenzen, David (2005) ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, in Defining Hinduism: A Reader, ed. J. E. Llewellyn, New York: Routledge, pp. 52–80. Luker, Victoria (1998) ‘Millenarianism in India: The Movement of Birsa Munda’, in Religious traditions in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 51–64. Lyall, A. C. (1882) Asiatic Studies, London: John Murray. Maconochie, Evan (1926) Life in the Indian Civil Service, London: Chapman and Hall.

82 The ‘heathens’ and their ‘idols’ Moor, Edward ([1810], 1968) The Hindu pantheon, Varanasi: Indological Book House. Mott, J. R. (1910) The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions, London: Student Volunteer Missionary Union. Neill, Stephen (1985) A History of Christianity in India 1707–1858, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicholson, A. J. (2011) Unifying Hinduism, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Oddie, G. A. (1974) ‘India and Missionary Motives, c. 1850–1900’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 25, 61–74. Oddie, G. A. (1999) Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-nationalism, Richmond: Curzon. Oddie, G. A. (2003) ‘Constructing “Hinduism”: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding’, in Christians and Missionaries in India, ed. R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge/Curzon, pp. 154–82. Paul, K. T. (1919) ‘How Missions Denationalize Indians’, International Review of Missions, 8, 510–21. Piggin, Stuart (1984) Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858, Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press. Porter, Dennis (1993) ‘Orientalism and its Problems’, in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Williams and L. Chrisman, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 150–61. 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. Rayan, Samuel (1990) ‘Religions, Salvation, Mission’, in Christian Mission and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. P. Mojzes and L. Swidler, Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 126–39. Raychaudhuri, Tapan (1988) Europe Reconsidered, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Raychaudhuri, Tapan (1999) Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sawyer, Henry (1978) ‘The First World Missionary Conference: Edinburgh 1910’, International Review of Missions, 67, 255–72. Singh, Brijraj (1999) The First Protestant Missionary to India, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stokes, Eric (1959) The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Swami Vivekananda (1972) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Thomas, George (1979) Christian Indians and Indian Nationalism 1885–1950, Frankfurt a. M.: Lang. Viswanathan, Gauri (1989) Masks of Conquest, Faber and Faber. von Stietencron, H. (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. 11–28. Wardlaw, Ralph (1818) The Contemplation of Heathen Idolatry an Excitement to Missionary Zeal, London. Winslow, J. C. and V. Elwin (1931) The Dawn of Indian Freedom, London: George Allen and Unwin. Young, R. F. (2002) ‘Some Hindu Perspectives on Christian Missionaries in the Indic World of the Mid Nineteenth Century’, in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 37–60.

5

Preaching the kingdom ‘Caste’ and ‘conversion’

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

84 Preaching the kingdom 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 varn.a and jāti. The former is usually traced to a hymn in the R.g Veda X, 90 which speaks of the four varn.as of the brāhman.a or the priests, the rājanya (later referred to as the ks.atriya) or the rulers, the vais.ya 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 varn.as: the brāhman.a varn.a itself encompasses a great number of jātis, and for many jātis, their location in a particular varn.a 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

Preaching the kingdom 85 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 childmarriage, 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).

86

Preaching the kingdom

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

Preaching the kingdom 87 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,

88 Preaching the kingdom 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).

Preaching the kingdom 89 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.

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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 patronclient 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

Preaching the kingdom 91 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,

92 Preaching the kingdom 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

Preaching the kingdom 93 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

94 Preaching the kingdom 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

Preaching the kingdom 95 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).

96 Preaching the kingdom 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, multilayered, 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). Similarly, a combination of political and theological reasons can be noted in Brahmabandhab’s move to the Catholic Church in September 1891, after he had been baptised by an Anglican in February that year. Given his nationalist views he would probably not have wanted to be associated with the denomination of the established Church of England, and it is noteworthy that his uncle, the Christian lawyer K. C. Banerjee, was a staunch opponent of the ‘denationalising’ effects that Christian missionaries had brought about in their converts. Around 1882, he

Preaching the kingdom 97 was attracted towards Keshub Chunder Sen’s New Dispensation and particularly his attempts at establishing a universal religion through the ‘harmonising’ of various religious symbols and teachings, and he would have found appealing Rome’s claim to be the centre of the ‘catholic’ Church. In December 1894, he declared his intention to become a mendicant, and that from his baptismal name of ‘Theophilus’ he would henceforth be called Upadhyay Brahmabandhu (or ‘friend of God’). Brahmabandhab’s move towards Catholicism, however, was not simply an unreflective acceptance of the beliefs and assumptions of his Catholic superiors; indeed, he strongly contested the conflation of Christianity and ‘Europeanism’ that he believed they were guilty of. He wrote in the weekly journal that he edited, the Sophia, in August 1898: 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. A similar set of alliances with and oppositions to Christianity can be detected in H. A. Krishna Pillai’s conversion narrative written in Tamil in 1893. At the urging of a friend who had converted to Christianity, Dhanuskoti Raju, Pillai read through some Tamil Pietist works and the Tamil New Testament, and though the theological vocabulary of avatāra (‘incarnation’) and raks.an.ā (‘salvation’) resonated with him he was unable to relate them. Expressing his bafflement at that time, he wrote: ‘While I clearly understood doctrines such as the Saviour’s sacred incarnation, I was greatly perplexed and bewildered, not comprehending how his act of expiation imparts salvation to men’ (Quoted in Hudson 1972: 196). It was Raju who came to Pillai’s help, trying to link Christ’s incarnation and the salvific efficacy of his atoning death. According to Raju, by becoming the mediator between sinful humanity and the holy God, Christ performed an act of merit through his voluntary self-oblation, and all those who surrendered themselves wholeheartedly to Christ would be saved by the power of this merit. Dennis Hudson writes that several key motifs in Pietist thought had significant parallels in

98 Preaching the kingdom the Vais.n.avite life-world of Pillai such as the emphasis, within their distinctive contexts, on the utter unworthiness of the ephemeral world and the ineffable joy of the eternal, the corruption undergone by humanity through its turning away from the divine, and the development of the attitude of relying absolutely on the divine with sincere repentance. There were some other themes which may have helped Pillai in stepping into Christianity: the Christian theological view of the role of the indwelling Holy Spirit in guiding the individual towards God was analogous to the Vais.n.avite understanding of the divine as the inner ruler (antaryāmin) of the embodied self, and the emphasis on the mediation of Christ may have struck a chord in Pillai through the parallel it evoked concerning the propitiating activity of the Goddess Śrī Laks.mī (Hudson 1972). 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 Purān.as, 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

Preaching the kingdom 99 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

100 Preaching the kingdom 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 Vis.n.u 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 Similar observations have been made by social historians of the mass movements of large numbers of certain ‘lower’ castes towards Christianity (Pickett 1933). Those who were located at the very bottom of the caste continuum and were often semi-nomadic found themselves in the situation of having much to gain by mixing with Christians; consequently, the numbers of their converts were usually higher than those from castes towards the higher end who were more subject to social constraints. In 1936, Bishop Azariah and some fifty Christians published ‘An Open Letter to our countrymen who are classified as Belonging to the Depressed Classes’ seeking to answer the basic question of what sort of transformations

Preaching the kingdom 101 Christianity had brought about in their lives. Among the responses were that it had elevated their social status, and through its preaching of a fellowship of individuals united under God, each of whom is valuable, had helped them to develop self-respect; it had set them on the path towards overcoming certain ingrained habits and customs such as alcoholism; and it had given them the joy of the realisation that they had become children of God in Christ who was the active agent of their continuing moral and spiritual regeneration (Webster 1992: 199–200). Consequently, the perceived gains were often much greater for the ‘lower’ castes, and it is noteworthy that it is they who often took an active role in initiating their movement towards Christianity. Indeed, as J. C. B. Webster points out, it was often the Dalits ‘who took the initiative in launching the mass movements and in doing so, challenged some of the assumptions upon which missionaries had been labouring for decades’ (Webster 1992: 37). Therefore, while one must of course not pluck Dalits out of their specific contexts of oppression and romanticise their condition as one of perennial rebelliousness, one should see them not as ‘passive victims’ but as agents who often played a crucial role in their own liberation through the help of the missionaries. Through such movements, the ‘lower’ castes, while retaining some aspects of the cultural patterns of their past, utilised the structural instabilities in the social systems of hierarchy and subordination. For instance, in a study of the changing social relationships between the land-owning Goundars and the ‘lower’ caste Madhari labourers in the context of economic changes brought about by industrialisation, G. Cederlof describes how the Church of Sweden Mission and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society were drawn into the local power relations and caste structures of rural Coimbatore in south India. Around 1913, groups of the ‘lower’ caste Paraiyars who had Christian relatives came to the Methodists seeking conversion, and when, from the 1930s, large numbers from the Madhari community began to respond to the missionaries, the Methodists had to face the hostility of the Goundars who feared that the Madhari’s affiliation to the missions would upset the traditional hierarchies of power and authority. Regarding such group-movements in which the ‘lower’ castes sought to construct new identities, Cederlof writes: ‘Characteristic of this kind of mobilization for conversion was that the presumptive converts initially took the most active part, not the mission workers. The converting communities acted consciously and collectively. Thus, the untouchable castes “encompassed” the mission’ (Cederlof 1997: 163–4). 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

102 Preaching the kingdom 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

Preaching the kingdom 103 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 varn.āśramadharma 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

104 Preaching the kingdom 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

Preaching the kingdom 105 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 (pun.yabhūmi) of the indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent (Bhāratavars.a). 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

106 Preaching the kingdom 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 VedicBrahminical culture to the patterns of existence centred around the teachings of . the Jain leaders (tīrthankaras), 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

Preaching the kingdom 107 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

108 Preaching the kingdom the enhancement of social status, it has been argued that peasants had been sporadically making claims to the status of the ‘higher’ ks.atriya 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

Preaching the kingdom 109 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,

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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 Vais.n.avism 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 Vis.n.u 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

Preaching the kingdom 111 different means. Further, if missionaries preach a ‘spiritualised’ gospel that proclaims the redemption of the soul, they have to counter objections from a neoAdvaitin 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.

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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. Kr.s.n.a Pil.l.ai 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.

Preaching the kingdom 113 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 (Vais.n.avas) 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.

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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.

6

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality ‘Particularity’ versus ‘universalism’?

We have been tracing some of the outlines of the historical and the political contexts within which debates over ‘conversion’ have been situated: the missionary locations at the interstices of the colonial administrators and the natives, the emergence of certain Hinduisms as oppositional forms to Christianity, and the mobilisations of the ‘lower’ castes in a Christian direction are only a few strands in a complex tapestry structured by claims and counter-claims over the nature, significance, and motivation of conversion. Such debates often run close to the crux of the matter, namely, the centrality of Christ in mainline Christian theology which holds that the final and true end of human existence – salvation – can be attained only through a response in faith to the lordship of Jesus Christ. For many Hindu critics of this standpoint, the ‘scandal of particularity’ produces a dogmatic ‘intoleration’ while Hinduism is, in a manner of speaking, a rainbow of many faiths which can accommodate diverse practices and beliefs. This criticism was forcefully put forward by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who, in the light of his appeals for a ‘harmony of religions’, argued that theistic religions such as Christianity, based on a dualism between the self and the supreme reality, promote aggression towards the members of other religions. In contrast to religions such as Christianity and Islam that were often associated with fanaticism and autocracy, the Hindu, according to Radhakrishnan, regards religion in terms of entering into the depths of the spirit that is beyond the bounds of time and space, and the persecution of others for their views or doctrines is largely unheard of in Hinduism (Radhakrishnan 1927: 35–8). Radhakrishnan’s charge that Christianity, along with other Abrahamic religions, is a form of religious ‘imperialism’ appears in two broad forms in contemporary criticisms of Christian evangelisation. First, it is often claimed that Christians should accommodate themselves to the ‘Hindu’ view that there are many valid ways to the ultimate, and not seek to put forward their path as the sole avenue to the divine. The belief in a plurality of paths to the transcendent, which is often put forward as the basis of Hindu ‘toleration’, was expressed clearly by Swami Vivekananda: We believe there is a germ of truth in all religions, and the Hindu bows down to them all; for in this world, truth is to be found not in subtraction but in addition. We would offer God a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers of all the diverse faiths. (1972: vol. 4, 191)

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A more recent presentation of this view comes from N. S. Rajaram: ‘If there is one belief above all others that defines Hinduism it is pluralism: there is no one chosen path and no one chosen people . . . All paths of spiritual exploration are equally valid, and there is no such thing as heresy. This is what makes Hinduism pluralistic’ (Rajaram 1998: 10–11). In the view of some Hindu critics of Christian evangelisation such as Ram Swarup, the difference between Hindu ‘pluralism’ and Christian ‘exclusivism’ translates into a dichotomous opposition between ‘Eastern’ religions which are mystical and ‘Semitic’ religions which are revelatory (Swarup 1995: 27). Swarup writes that unlike mystics who seek the truth for themselves and partly become that truth, adherents of the revelatory religions follow the self-revelation of God to a favoured intermediary. The implication is that the former are ‘universal’ in that the deepest truth lies within all individuals and can be appropriated by all, whereas the latter are ‘particularist’ for the truth that they declare is historically grounded and can be attained only through a path that admits a few who are specially chosen. This line of criticism repeats a widely articulated view that the ‘Hindu attitude’ to religion is ultimately a quest for the realisation of the timeless spirit, so that accessory elements such as symbols, creeds, or dogmas – the paraphernalia of the Abrahamic religions which, it is claimed, are devoid of any mystical interiority – are regarded as having only an instrumental value to the extent that they help the aspirant in this personal search (Radhakrishnan 1940: 316–17). Second, it is argued that because Christianity, with its foundation in a specific point in history and subsequent elaboration in a set of canonical texts, claims to monopolise religious truth, it cannot but breed forms of fanaticism and violence towards religions which do not move around its pivot. As Arun Shourie puts it, every ‘revelatory, millennialist religion’, whether it is Christianity, Islam, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, is grounded in the notion of ‘one Truth’, revealed to ‘one Man’, enshrined in ‘one Text’, and guarded over by ‘one Agency’ (Shourie 1994: 12–13). Thus, while millenarian faiths produce collective identities centred around specific foci which lead to the demonisation of the other, Hinduism is the all-encompassing horizon that fosters the conversation of humanity, a horizon often characterised by the metaphors of many rivers merging into one ocean, many tones welded into one symphony, and many roads culminating in one summit. S. R. Goel even argues that because every individual has a right to seek ‘truth and salvation’ in their own way, Christian missionaries, who might otherwise invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of India, should know that ‘they are riding roughshod over the most fundamental human right, that is, to know God directly, without the aid of officious intermediaries most of whom are no better, if not worse, than those whom they choose to evangelize’ (Goel 1989: v). To examine these charges of ‘intoleration’ and ‘religious imperialism’ against Christian evangelisation, we have to address three basic issues that are often sidelined in these polemic contexts: 1 the classical and the modern responses of Hinduism to intra-traditional and interreligious diversity;

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 117 2 the relation between toleration and truth-claims; and 3 the significance of Christian theological ‘uniqueness’ which is the basis of the claim that the understanding of the human predicament as mired in sinfulness is somehow ‘objectively’ true for all human beings. Christian thinking in these matters has often taken as its springboard the three-fold typology of ‘exclusivism’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’. In contrast to the ‘exclusivism’ of most orthodox streams of Christianity – which holds that the revelation of God in Christ is the normative yardstick with respect to which all other human conceptions of the divine reality are shown to be inadequate – and some of its ‘inclusivist’ traditions – which while maintaining the normative character of the Christian theological claims sees certain pre-figurations of Christian truth outside the Church – ‘pluralism’ is often put forward as a ‘universalist’ vision in which diverging religious conceptions and practices are regarded as valid responses to the ultimate reality. According to the pluralist hypothesis developed by John Hick and other critics of the ‘myth of Christian uniqueness’, the major world religious traditions are regarded as legitimate in their distinctive ways, for they are said to foster life-worlds associated with a turn towards the Real, engagement with socio-political realities, and so on. However, in Hick’s ‘pluralist’ view, historical religions such as Christianity and Islam are located within a neo-Kantian schema, and their truth-claims are reduced to the homogeneity of ‘mythological’ assertions, a reduction that could be severely contested by the adherents of these religions (D’Costa 2000). Be that as it may, this three-fold typology has been recently defended by Paul Hedges (2010) who develops a theology of religions around a reworked version. Our primary objective in this chapter, however, is not to develop a typology of religious diversity from either a Hindu or a Christian theological perspective. Rather, we will argue that both the Hindu and the Christian traditions have developed distinctive modes of comprehending religious diversity which are grounded in ‘particular’ metaphysical and epistemological criteria that structure their views on the nature of the divine reality, human personhood, and the human capacity to know the ultimate. One of the most common characterisations of various forms of modern Hinduism is their toleration, which is associated with a universality, catholicity, and pluralism that can accommodate not only the various socio-religious streams indigenous to the Indian subcontinent but also the diverse religious traditions of the world. A number of influential Hindu figures from around the turn of the twentieth century began to emphasise that Hinduism is not, in fact, a ‘religion’ but a way of life that embodied the deepest levels of spirituality in which people with diverse inclinations and temperaments can participate in harmony and concord. However, statements about the ‘tolerant’ nature of Hindu thought and spirituality often do not address the key question – what is ‘toleration’? As we will note, this lacuna can be partly explained by the fact that toleration itself is a rather slippery notion bordering on others such as scepticism, relativism, indifference, and so on. Thus, in the literature on Hindu approaches to religious diversity, its claimed ‘toleration’ is usually connected to its ability to engender peaceful co-existence with

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other religions, but the crucial question that is usually not addressed is whether religious ‘toleration’ requires that all religions are viewed as equally correct. In fact, as we will note shortly, the Hindu life-worlds have sometimes been declared to be ‘intolerant’ of religious diversity on the grounds that they locate the ultimate truth in one specific transcendental focus, whether this is Vis.n.u, Śiva, or transtheistic Advaita. The relation between truth-claims and toleration therefore needs to be carefully articulated. With such a conceptual clarification in mind, we shall address three main issues centred around the structure of Hindu toleration. First, we shall connect recent scholarship in political theory on the theme of toleration with some classical and contemporary Hindu approaches to the religious other. Second, we shall argue that Hindu conceptual toleration, both classical and contemporary, is underpinned by a metaphysical framework relating to the empirical world of rebirths structured by karma and liberation from it (moks.a). In other words, Hindu toleration should not be characterised as a form of doctrinal nihilism or strong relativism in which anything goes, for it is grounded in a specific set of views relating to the nature of ultimate reality, the structure of the human response to the divine, and the possibility of moral progress across life-times. Third, we will review Paul Hacker’s influential claim that the Hindu approach to religious diversity is based on a form of ‘hierarchical inclusivism’ which, according to him, is distinct from ‘toleration’ – we will argue pace Hacker that ‘toleration’ is not opposed to such ‘inclusivism’ but, in fact, requires the latter as its conceptual underpinning.

‘Hinduism’ and the ‘harmony of religions’ A dominant theme in several representations of Hinduism by Hindu writers over the last hundred years or so is its ‘synthetic’ quality, that is, its ability to weave together the diverse religious experiences of humanity into a harmonious whole. In influential figures of neo-Hinduism such as Swami Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan we find the Hegelian view that ‘the truth is the whole’, and that Hinduism provides the overarching unity for the truths that people seek through their own religious traditions. They creatively grappled with the Advaitic tradition . initiated by Śamkara (eighth century CE), which emphasised world-renunciation to realise the essential identity of the finite self with the transpersonal absolute (nirgun.a Brahman). Their neo-Advaita universalised Advaitic wisdom as realisable across cultural, national, or ethnic boundaries, and was characterised by an emphasis on social activism, and, more importantly for our purposes, a ‘catholic’ acceptance of religious diversity. Swami Vivekananda strikes this note when he urges us to gather nectar from many flowers in the manner of bees which are not restricted to only one; therefore, he expressed a wish for ‘twenty million more’ sects which would provide individuals a wider field for choice in the religious domain (1972: vol. 1, 325). In his words at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, Swami Vivekananda stated that he was ‘proud to belong to a religion that has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance . . . [and] proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and refugees of all

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 119 religions and all nations of the earth’ (1972: vol. 1, 3). In a similar vein, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan argued that the distinct religious traditions of the world are a product of an individual’s temperament, location in a finite cultural environment, and daily experiences. Therefore, Radhakrishnan emphasised that the different religions, with their specific impulses and values, should approach one another in relationships of friendship so that they are regarded as complementaries on their journey towards the Advaitic ultimate (Radhakrishnan 1927: 46).

Classical Hindu approaches to religious diversity The toleration of Hinduism, as these remarks indicate, is often associated with its synthesising ability to harmonise the truths in multiple religious paths which are regarded as valid responses to the ultimate reality. As early as 1823, Rammohun Ray declared: ‘It is well known to the whole world, that no people on earth are more tolerant than the Hindoos, who believe all men [sic] to be equally within the reach of Divine beneficence . . . ’ (Ghose 1885–87: vol. 1, 168). In this section and the next, however, we shall examine in greater detail the views of some historical and contemporary Hindu figures regarding intra-traditional and interreligious diversity, and indicate that the claim that the Hindu traditions hold all religious views to be ‘equally valid’ should be carefully qualified. We will note that while the religious streams of Hinduism hold that their rivals possess some measure of validity, this assessment is located in a dense network of metaphysical, ethical, and soteriological views. While Christian-style ‘exclusivism’ has received much bad press in Hindu circles, as we noted above, certain analogues of such themes often appear in the Hindu traditions as well. For Dayananda Saraswati the Vedas are the supreme authority in the ascertainment of true religion and indeed are ‘an authority unto themselves’; therefore, they do not ‘stand in need of any other book to uphold their authority’ (Quoted in Richards 1989: 124). It may be countered that Dayananda, who wrote his Satyarth Prakash in 1875, was himself a product of the Orientalist discourse within whose spaces Hindus had begun to construct their ‘religion’ along Christianised lines in colonial India. However, ‘exclusivist’ rejections of philosophical beliefs and cultic practices are not unknown in the precolonial Hindu traditions. In taking the Vedas as the normative standard for assessing religious truth, Saraswati was echoing a view common to the classical . . Pūrva Mīmāmsā and the Uttara Mīmāmsā that the Vedas are the sole means of knowledge in matters of ultimate reality. By grounding himself on the criterion of the Vedic revelation, Kumārila Bhat.t.a (650–700 CE) denied the status of ortho. doxy not only to the Buddhists, but also to the Sāmkhya and the Yoga systems, and the theistic Śaiva Pāśupata (Clooney 2003). Kumārila argues that the texts of the Buddhists must be rejected because they were compiled by people whose practices were opposed to Vedic injunctions and were taught to the ‘lower’ castes who were outside Vedic orthodoxy. Further, since the Buddha himself, while born as a member of the ‘higher’ ks.atriya caste, taught and received gifts, which are practices reserved for the brāhman.as, ‘how can we believe that true Dharma or

120 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality duty would be taught by one who has transgressed his own Dharma?’ (Jha 1924: vol. 1, 167). Medhātithi too in his commentary on the Manusmr.ti rules out the beliefs of the Buddhists, the Vais.n.ava Pāñcarātras, the Śaivite Pāśupatas and others as erroneous because they are based on gifted personalities and specific deities which do not have a Vedic basis (Jha 1920: vol. 1, 173–4). The insistence on doctrinal correctness rooted in Vedic authority is also a . recurrent theme in the works of classical Vedāntic theologians such as Śamkara . . and Rāmānuja. Śamkara regards the Sāmkhya school as heterodox (nāstika) for its teaching of a primordial, insentient matrix of pradhāna which is the ‘material’ substrate of the empirical world. Such traditions are to be rejected because they do not accept the Vedas as the only reliable source of knowledge regarding dharma and ultimate reality, for without such guidance human reasoning (tarka) or experience (anubhava) are insufficient for this task. Further, in his Brahma-sūtra-bhās.ya (II.2.32) he argued that the Buddhist way should be totally renounced by those . who seek the highest good. In turn, Śamkara’s views on the nature of ultimate reality were subjected to criticism by his arch-rival Rāmānuja (1017–1137) who argued that they had been: Devised by men who are destitute of those particular qualities which cause individuals to be chosen by the Supreme Person [Vis.n.u–Nārāyan.a] revealed in the Upanishads; whose intellects are darkened by the impression of beginningless evil; and who thus have no insight into the nature of words and sentences, into the real purport conveyed by them, and into the procedure of sound argumentation. . . . (Thibaut 1904: 39) The numerous Purān.as, some of which are written from distinctively Vais.n.avite and Śaivite perspectives, launch sharp invectives at their doctrinal rivals. For instance, the Vis.n.u Purān.a includes exhortations to avoid any form of contact with the Buddhists who have transgressed the norms of Vedic life, and the Padma . Purān.a declares that the teachings of the Vaiśes.ika, Nyāya, Sāmkhya, and Advaita Vedānta systems lead to hellish suffering (Wilson 1961: 271–3). From a Śaivite standpoint, the late eleventh-century theologian Somaśambhu turns the tables on the Vais.n.avites by claiming that the worshippers of Vis.n.u will be reborn in hell unless they undergo a ritual transformation to Śaivism (Nicholson 2010:3). Another strategy historically employed by the Hindu religious traditions vis-àvis their doctrinal rivals was to re-centre philosophical and cultic diversity around their central concept or deity. In the Bhagavad-gītā, Kr. s.n.a tells Arjuna that it is he who is the ultimate recipient of the sacrifices made to the lower gods. In this vein, Vais.n.avas have often argued that the blessings bestowed on the worshippers of Śiva have their ultimate origin not in Śiva himself but in Vis.n.u, while Śaivites have inverted this order by claiming that Vis.n.u is, in fact, a manifestation of Śiva. A standard Vais.n.ava way of dealing with Buddhism was to argue that Vis.n.u became ‘incarnate’ as the Buddha in order to instruct the demons not to follow the Vedic path and thereby lead them astray (Long 2013). In this way,

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 121 figures in the tradition of south Indian Vais.n.avism have sometimes argued that the reason why there are so many gods in the world is because the supreme Lord Vis.n.u–Nārāyan.a produced these lesser deities, so that individuals who seek lesser goals may turn to them till they reach the highest goal, the Lord himself. Pil.l.an, a twelfth-century disciple of Rāmānuja, raises the question as to why the supreme Lord Vis.n.u–Nārāyan.a leads some individuals to take refuge in the lesser gods, and answers it in the following way: If everyone were to get liberated, then this earth, where people who do good or evil deeds can experience the fruits of their karma, would cease to function. To ensure the continuation of the world, the omnipotent supreme Lord himself graciously brought it about that you who have done evil deeds . . . will, as a result of your demerit, resort to other gods and go through births and deaths. (Carman and Narayanan 1989: 208) In a religious culture that was not antipathetic to ‘polytheism’ – even if the different gods were regarded as manifestations of the ultimate reality – such ‘hierarchical encompassment’ was therefore the mode through which religious diversity was both affirmed at a penultimate level and negated at the ultimate level. Medieval doxographers such as Mādhava and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī too utilised these motifs to syncretise a wide range of philosophical views by assigning them different ranks in a hierarchical scheme, at whose pinnacle they placed Advaita Vedānta. For instance Mādhava placed a series of philosophical– theological systems in such a manner that the truth of each succeeding item on the list negated and corrected, that is to say ‘sublated’, the deficiencies of the former. The hedonists (Cārvākas) are defeated by the Buddhists, who are overturned by the Jains, who are refuted by the various devotional systems of Vais.n.avism and Śaivism, till one arrives at the penultimate stage of Yoga, whose truth is most fully realised in Advaita Vedānta (Nicholson 2010: 160).

Modern Hindu approaches to religious diversity More recently, in the neo-Hinduism of figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan, we can see an extension of this ‘hierarchical encompassment’ not only to the internal variety of the Hindu traditions but also to the external diversity of world religions, so that the latter are often regarded as being ultimately oriented – whether or not their adherents are aware of this deep truth – to the neo-Advaitic transpersonal ultimate. Radhakrishnan argues that just as the author of the Brahma-sūtra (c. 400 CE) tried to harmonise the divergent doctrines of his time, Hindus today have to perform the same harmonising (samanvaya) in the ‘present state’ of knowledge (Radhakrishnan 1960: 249). Hinduism is now unmoored from its classical connections with specific codes or injunctions (dharma) relative to an individual’s caste-location and presented as the ‘eternal religion’ (sanātana-dharma) of universalised values such as compassion, non-violence, and toleration, which sublates the ‘historical’ religions

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such as Christianity and Islam. That is, the ‘pluralism’ of neo-Advaita is based on the criterion of the Advaitic realisation of non-dual awareness as the conceptual lens through which human existence is to be interpreted. Thus, when Swami Vivekananda argues that the religions of the world ‘are not contradictory; they are supplementary’, it turns out that these religions are ‘supplementary’ to the higher-order truth of Advaita Vedānta, which, because it lies at the apex of human religious expressions, is able to encompass the lower truths. Thus, reading the proclamation of Christ ‘I and my Father are one’ through a specifically Advaitin lens, Swami Vivekananda argued: To the masses who could not conceive of anything higher than a Personal God, he said, ‘Pray to your Father in heaven’. To others who could grasp a higher idea, he said, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches’, but to his disciples to whom he revealed himself more fully, he proclaimed the highest truth, ‘I and my Father are One’. (1972: vol. 2, 143) Swami Vivekananda therefore believed that what separates Christ from us is not that he is God and we are not (for all are essentially identical with the transpersonal ultimate) but that he has realised his inner divinity to the highest level of perfection. All individuals have the potentiality of becoming perfect manifestations of the ‘eternal Christ’, and the historical individual called Jesus of Nazareth was only one token of this type. This is how Swami Vivekananda puts it: ‘The Atman is pure intelligence . . . But the intelligence we see around us is always imperfect. When intelligence is perfect, we get the Incarnation – the Christ’ (1972: vol. 6, 128). As a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahangsa (1836–86) who experimented with theistic, non-theistic, personal as well as transpersonal forms of mysticism as alternative approaches to the supreme reality, Swami Vivekananda too sometimes speaks of the harmony that his master achieved between the teachings of the fol. lowers of Śamkara, on the one hand, and of theists such as Rāmānuja on the other hand. Ramakrishna used various homely metaphors such as the water being called by different names by different people, an ascent to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a staircase or a rope, a mother who nurses her sick children with different kinds of food, and so on to emphasise the point that different religions have been produced by the divine to suit different aspirants, times, and countries (Smith 1991: 74–5). Chiding human beings for fighting over religious affiliations, Ramakrishna argued: I see people who talk about religion constantly quarrelling with one another. Hindus, Mussalmāns, Brāhmos, Śāktas, Vaishnavas, Śaivas, all quarrelling with one another. They haven’t the intelligence to understand that He who is called Krishna is also Śiva and the Primal Śakti, and that it is He, again, who is called Jesus and Āllah. (Swami Nikhilananda 2007: 423)

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 123 Ramakrishna does not suggest that the approach of the Advaitin ‘sage’ (jñānī) is superior to that of the theistic devotee (bhakti): the state that both may arrive at is that of the seer (vijñānī) who knows ‘that the Reality which is nirgun.a, without attributes, is also sagun.a, with attributes’ (Swami Nikhilananda 2007: 104). Swami Vivekanada, in contrast, seems to have placed Advaitic wisdom at a higher standing with respect to the devotionalism of the theistic ‘masses’, at least in passages such as these: ‘Devotion as taught by Narada, he used to preach to the masses, those who were incapable of any higher training. He used generally to teach dualism. As a rule, he never taught Advaitism. But he taught it to me. I had been a dualist before’ (1972: vol. 7, 414). For Swami Vivekananda (1972: vol. 2, 241), in fact, ‘ninety per cent’ of the world’s religious population were dualists, for the ‘ordinary man’ is unable to approach the formless ultimate without relying on concrete images. Therefore, while the neo-Advaitin view that the different religious paths of the world are valid and that these are suitable for the psychological dispositions of different individuals might sound relativistic, they are backed by the fully realist claim that the goal of these endeavours – the transpersonal ultimate – is the timeless non-dual self which is independent of all human beliefs and linguistic constructions. Some forms of relativism claim that each conceptual scheme delimits a possible ‘world’ which is not compatible with another ‘world’ delimited by other schemes, and further that a statement such as ‘it is true that p’ should be read as elliptical for ‘it is true, within conceptual scheme C, that p’ (Baghramian 2004: 4). Radhakrishnan’s rejection of this form of strong relativism is clear in his statement that Hinduism does not mistake tolerance for indifference. It affirms that while all revelations refer to reality, they are not equally true to it . . . While the lesser forms are tolerated in the interests of those who cannot suddenly transcend them, there is all through an insistence on the larger idea and purer worship. Hinduism does not believe in forcing up the pace of development. (Radhakrishnan 1927: 49) Therefore, his views that India ‘realized from the cloudy heights of contemplation that the spiritual landscape at the hill-top is the same, though the pathways from the valley are different’ (Radhakrishnan 1979: 98) should not be read along relativist lines. To ensure that the different religious traditions are oriented towards the same goal, Radhakrishnan needs a vantage-point above the welter of particular traditions; for him, this is the Advaitic ‘realisation’ of the identity of the finite human self with the transpersonal ultimate. A key doctrinal underpinning of neoAdvaita is the view that, underlying the empirical ego and its manifold experiences, there is an inner core that is deathless, non-created, and absolutely real, which is the unconditioned spirit completely untouched by the imperfections of the finite universe that is existentially dependent upon it. Therefore, while the text from the R.g Veda ‘Truth is one, the wise call it by several names’ (1.164.46) is often used as the basis for projecting Hinduism as the most universalistic of

124 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality religious philosophies, a closer analysis of such claims reveals not only that the ‘underlying Truth’ and the ‘same Goal’ are understood in specifically Advaitin ways as the ineffable absolute but also that the theistic religious traditions of the world are graded as ‘inferior’ to the ‘highest’ truth of Advaita. In the famous words of Radhakrishnan, ‘The [Advaita] Vedānta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 23). The spiritual ‘experience’ intimated by Advaita, of the realisation of one’s nonduality with the transcendent reality, lies at the core of all the religious traditions of the world, across the phenomenal bounds of culture, nation, and history. The hierarchical positioning of the penultimate truths of the religious traditions with respect to the higher-order truth of Advaita appears prominently also in the writings of various figures from the Ramakrishna Mission. As W. G. Neevel points out: It has been the characteristic view of the Ramakrishna Mission that theistic religion does find and must find its consummation and final satisfaction in the trance of nirvikalpa samādhi in which all personality, human or divine, vanishes. In this light, those Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu traditions that are based upon the conception of a personal Deity are seen as being of positive but preparatory value. (Neevel 1976: 96) Further, while modern-day Vais.n.avites have not commented extensively on ‘religious pluralism’, a Vais.n.ava reponse to the issue of religious diversity too would seem to move along ‘hierarchical inclusivist’ lines, because not only is Vis.n.u himself the ‘all-including one’ but also Vais.n.avism itself has evolved by assimilating various deities to the name of the one Lord. For a contemporary extension of this logic to the world religions, we may turn to Swami Prabhupada, according to whom Jesus is not only an authentic representative of God, but is, in fact, the son of Kr.s.n.a, so that Christians, even when they do not have explicit knowledge of Kr.s.n.a, are by spiritual nature eternal servants of Kr.s.n.a (Gelberg 1993: 152). To appreciate what is at stake in these doctrinal tussles over the relative positioning between Advaita and Vais.n.avite doctrines, we may turn to a Christian response to Hick’s argument that all religions are authentic responses to the noumenal Real, so that while the content of these responses are provided by the phenomenal forms, regarding the noumena we can only say that it is but not what it is. The implication here is that the phenomenal personal and impersonal characteristics attributed in Christianity, Vais.n.avism, and Advaita Vedānta to the ultimate reality do not apply to the Real in itself (Hick 1989: 246). However, against Hick who holds that the manifold personae and impersonae of the religious traditions are views or concepts in the human consciousness, and do not quite fit the Real in itself, Christian theologians have maintained that some assertions concerning the Real, conceived of as the personal source of being and goodness, are (at least) analogically true. For instance, Jacques Dupuis argues that the Christian representation of God as Triune is not simply a persona of the ultimate reality but is the Real in itself. He adds

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 125 immediately that this is not to claim that Christians possess an intimate and perspicaciously clear knowledge of the intra-divine relationships, but ‘it does mean that the mystery of the Triune God – Father, Son, Spirit – corresponds objectively to the inner reality of God, even though analogically’ (Dupuis 1997: 259). In contrast to Hick’s position, Hindu ‘pluralism’ too, which views the different religions as manifold paths oriented towards the ultimate reality, is grounded in specific views about the nature of this reality – whether the transpersonal absolute of Advaita, Vis.n.u, Śiva, and so on. Therefore, the claim, often heard in neo-Hindu circles, that every individual is at liberty to choose the way that suits her or his dispositions and temperament must not be equated with an indifference to questions of truth, for it is based on a richly articulated system of doctrinal statements. Some of these doctrinal presuppositions are clear in the presentation of the Hindu ‘pluralistic’ acceptance of different paths to the divine by V. Raghavan: According to one’s stage of evolution and background, one can choose one’s deity and continue the worship until, rising rung by rung, one reaches the highest where all forms dissolve into the one formless. Because of this free choice of approach, Hinduism has developed a philosophy of co-existence with other religions and has always been tolerant and hospitable to other faiths like Islam and Christianity. (Singer 1972: 83) The ‘toleration’ implied in these comments is based on some distinct metaphysical beliefs relating to time – as repeated over several cosmological cycles – and the ultimate aim of existence – the identification with the transpersonal ultimate which can be realised over these cycles. As Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati, the spiritual head (ācārya) of Kanci in the tradition of Advaita, notes: ‘The frail mind must go from the concrete to the abstract, from the forms of God in images to God without form’ (Sarasvati 1988: 59–60). Therefore he argues that ‘[w]hen it is realised that all paths in religion lead to the same goal [the Advaitic absolute], there will be no need to change the path one is already following’ (Sarasvati 1988: 46). Thus, the saved/unsaved distinction, which is sometimes starkly elaborated within the Abrahamic faiths, is by and large non-existent in Advaitic and theistic Hinduism because of the belief that the ultimate end of life can be attained over more than one life; hence, ‘the cruciality of taking a stand here and now in this life is much less’ (Chatterjee 1984: 59–60). Consequently, the reason why Hinduism has traditionally not been a ‘missionary’ faith is because according to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, the birth of an individual as a Christian, a Hindu or a Muslim is not an accident but a consequence of prior choices in previous births; they must therefore work out their liberation within their specific religious life-worlds.

Introducing ‘toleration’ Hindu toleration, in other words, is grounded in a set of specific criteria for ordering the religious experiences of humanity, and for viewing religious diversity as

126 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality encompassed by the divine. In short, it is vital not to confuse Hindu toleration with an indifference to competing truth-claims or the relativistic claim that ‘reality’ is what is relative to a particular conceptual scheme. These themes have also been emphasised by recent scholarship on the question of ‘toleration’, understood both as a personal virtue and as a political practice in the socio-political domain. One of the reasons why toleration seems to be, as a collection of essays puts it, an ‘elusive virtue’, is because the borderline between toleration and indifference is a continuously shifting one, so that while, for instance, a hundred years ago it may have been meaningful to speak of Anglicans ‘tolerating’ Roman Catholics, in present-day England people are sometimes indifferent to their neighbour’s religious affiliation (Heyd 1996). Notwithstanding the open-ended nature of toleration, some scholars have argued that it involves minimally an individual’s exercising restraint from intervening, obstructing, or regulating a view or activity that is believed to be incorrect or immoral, by appealing to second-order reasons such as the value of autonomy, respect for persons, the overall value of the worldview which has the belief or action, and so on. Thus the classic argument from John Stuart Mill for toleration speaks of its instrumental or prudential value in leading to the convergence of views in the distant future, or its enabling the flourishing of individuality with human tastes, proclivities, and capacities in innumerable directions. From a neo-Kantian standpoint, persons are regarded as autonomous beings who are worthy of respect; therefore, by respecting the autonomy of the other to pursue values that are necessary for its development, an individual is said to exercise toleration, that is, to restrain the desire to harm or harass the other. The neo-Kantian view is often connected to the vocabulary of ‘rights’ to claim that we may tolerate certain acts deliberately chosen by an individual, even if we happen to disapprove of them, if such choices do not result in an infringement of anyone’s rights (Mendus 1988). More precisely, an individual is said to tolerate X by exercising self-restraint towards X which is otherwise believed to be deviant, by providing higher-order justifications for this restraint of power. It might seem that there is a contradiction between believing an idea to be false and accepting it, in the minimal sense of not seeking to root it out. As Susan Mendus notes: Normally we count toleration as a virtue in individuals and a duty in societies. However, when toleration is based on moral disapproval, it implies that the thing tolerated is wrong and ought not to exist. The question which then arises is why . . . it should be thought good to tolerate. (Mendus 1989: 18–19) The air of contradiction can be removed, however, by noting that the virtue of tolerance should be located within a system of ranked priorities: though we may object to X because we believe it to be false, we may nevertheless accept it on the grounds that we have a yet greater objection to eradicating X. For instance, one might strongly dislike a child’s choice of music, and yet accept the harsh sounds that emanate from her room, because one has a stronger opposition to

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 127 the imposition of one’s personal musical preferences on other people. That is, a ‘tolerant’ person does not indiscriminately accept all opinions, views, or actions as correct but is willing to accept some of the above when she believes that this acceptance can be justified in terms of her ‘higher-order’ ethical or religious ideals. The point that ‘toleration’ is not incompatible with, but indeed requires, the judgement that alternative views can be untruthful, misleading, or incorrect is also affirmed by P. Schmidt-Leukel who notes that even a ‘Christ pluralist theology of religions’ would have to practise ‘toleration’ towards views which are held to be false or deficient. He notes that there ‘are important lessons to be learnt from some features of contemporary Indian politics where at times pluralist ideas are used to justify intolerant means against the presumed absolutist religions of Islam and Christianity’ (Schmidt–Leukel 2008: 100). Or to take a more European example, when a Jew or an atheist exercises ‘toleration’ towards the proposition p, the ultimate reality is the Triune God of the Christian faith, the correct way to describe this act is not to say that it is p itself that she is tolerating (for she claims that p is false) but that she is adopting a certain stance, namely, that of accepting the Christian’s believing of p. Since Jews and Christian heretics have sometimes been prepared to undergo extreme forms of persecution for their rejection of p, it cannot be the case that the truth or the falsity of p was a matter of indifference to them (Newman 1982: 9).

The grounds of Hindu ‘toleration’ In the light of our discussion so far, we can see that the statement that the Hindu traditions are tolerant because they are based on a ‘pluralistic’ accommodation of internal and external religious diversity should not be confused with the view that they hold all conceptualisations of the divine as equally valid. Classically, Vaiśn.avites and Śaivites, as we have noted, sharply debated each other’s relative positioning of their central deities. Thus, according to Vedānta Deśīka, Nārāyan.a alone is the ultimate reality, and not other deities such as Brahmā and Śiva who can be seen, according to him, from the Upanis.adic texts to be finite selves who are subject to the kārmic cycle (Clooney and Nicholson 2001). In response, a standard Śaivite critique of Vais.n.avism is the latter’s belief in the avatāras of the Lord, for such descents are supposed to immerse the Lord in empirical defects. Even the neo-Hindu position regarding religious plurality should be properly understood as allowing the possibility of questioning the relative validity of the different religious traditions; because we are speaking here of degrees of validity, toleration must not be wrongly identified with a blanket approval of all religions, but it ‘does mean, however, that the validity of the right of the other person to his or her persuasion is accepted, even while one is debating its value’ (Sharma 1979: 67). Historically, this somewhat relaxed attitude towards the ‘salvation of the neighbour’ has been enabled by the absence in the Hindu traditions of the highly centralised forms of ecclesiastical organisations and creedal confessions which have marked some forms of Christianity, and also the persecution of dissent which has often gone along with the latter. The conglomerate of socio-cultural traditions

128 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality called ‘Hinduisms’ have accepted a significant diversity of metaphysical and theological views, and because of the absence of centralised ecclesiastical structures there has been no rigorous enforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy in the Christian sense. Therefore, neo-Advaitins could ‘tolerate’ individuals who follow the way of personal theism (whether in the Abrahamic faiths or the streams of devotional Hinduism) on the grounds that they are burdened with kārmic defects which obscure their mental and spiritual horizons, and when these barriers are removed, either in this life-time or in subsequent ones, they too would be set on the path towards the unitary awareness of the transpersonal absolute. As Radhakrishnan argues, regarding a Christian who approaches a Hindu teacher for spiritual guidance, the latter ‘would not ask his Christian pupil to discard his allegiance to Christ but would tell him that his idea of Christ was not adequate, and would lead him to a knowledge of the real Christ, the incorporate Supreme’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 46). However, Radhakrishnan was forced to admit that a significant proportion of Hindus do not orient their beliefs and practices in accordance with the scale in which non-dualistic conceptions of the ultimate reality are superior to theistic conceptions. He wrote: ‘The cultivated tolerate popular notions as inadequate signs and shadows of the incomprehensible, but the people at large believe them to be justified and authorized . . . In the name of toleration we have carefully protected superstitious rites and customs’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 33). In other words, neo-Advaitic ‘toleration’ is based not on a vague relativism but on a hierarchical universalism: Advaitic truth stands at the pinnacle of the religious experiences of humanity, and by reconciling the ‘penultimate’ truths of devotional Hinduism and Christianity it carries them to their ‘ultimate’ summit of a non-dual realisation. As a recent interpreter of Advaita puts it, the personal God is worshipped by people in different forms and names; however, ‘since form, name, qualities, and relations can only belong in the realm of appearances (phenomena), Saguna Brahman (God) is only an appearance, although the highest among appearances, and not reality’ (Puligandla 2002: 89). Therefore, all religions are valid responses to the ultimate, but only because they are always-already ‘encompassed’ by Advaita Vedānta, ‘the Religion’ which is the essence of all ‘the religions’. In short, for many Hindus, their toleration has been underpinned by the complex of views that individuals can choose their favoured deity (is.t.adevatā), that the divine can be approached through various forms of religosity, that human existence is a project that can be fulfilled over several lifetimes, and so on. At this stage, we can review Paul Hacker’s influential view that the Hindu approach to religious diversity is a distinctively Indic form of ‘inclusivism’ which, according to him, is opposed to toleration (Halbfass 1995: 12). For Hacker, the Upanis.adic doctrine ‘thou art that’ (tat tvam asi) represents the Vedic attempt to ground all empirical phenomena in the doctrine of reality (sat), and also provides a scriptural precedent for Hindu ‘inclusivisms’, whether that of Tulsi Das in medieval India who depicts Śiva as a disciple of Rāma or of Hindus in the British empire who postulate Advaitic non-dualism as the essence of all spirituality. Thus regarding Radhakrishnan’s view that the essence of all religions is Advaita Vedānta, Hacker writes: ‘This is the most comprehensive application which the principle

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 129 of inclusivism has ever found. Incidentally, it would perhaps be more accurate to speak of inclusivism in many cases where we are inclined to see Hindu tolerance’ (Halbfass 1990: 405). However, while Hacker viewed the forms of Hindu ‘inclusivism’ that we have noted in the case of Vais.n.avism, Śaivism, and modern Vedānta as opposed to toleration, our discussion has shown that any toleration which is distinct from scepticism, conceptual relativism, or indifferentism is, in fact, of an ‘inclusivist’ nature. The varieties of Hindu toleration that we have surveyed are based on the selection, categorisation, and hierarchisation of the doctrinal statements of the religious others (Hatcher 1999). Further, while Hacker believed that ‘inclusivism’, which involved identifying elements of the home tradition with certain aspects of the alien traditions and placing the latter in a subordinate position, was a distinctive Indian way of thinking, such ‘hierarchical inclusivism’ appears also in European thinkers such as R. Otto, E. Troeltsch and J. N. Farquhar.

Toleration and the ‘true religion’ Our survey of some classical and modern Hindu modes of apprehending religious diversity reveals a wide range of stances from a rejection of doctrines and ways of life not grounded in Vedic revelation, to a hierarchical encompassment of the inter-traditional others by orientating them to a central deity such as Vis.n.u or Śiva, to a positing of the theistic traditions at the ‘penultimate’ level of interreligious cooperation which is to be sublated by the realisation of the ‘ultimate’ neoAdvaitic absolute. This variety should caution us not to take statements such as ‘all religions are true’ or ‘God can be attained through all paths’ as the Hindu perspective on religious diversity. Each of these modes is structured by certain metaphysical presuppositions which provide reasons why the religious others are to be tolerated. The toleration that we have noted in the Hindu theistic and the transtheistic traditions is not based on the view that all pathways to the ultimate are correct as they stand – rather, they are hierarchically relativised by being placed at various stages of the home tradition’s path that is held to contain the final truth. The wider point for our discussion is that the statement often made that the Hindu traditions are ‘tolerant’ because they are based on a ‘pluralistic’ accommodation of the different religions – and that, conversely, Christian evangelism is based on an ‘intolerant’ attitude towards non-Christian religions – needs to be carefully qualified. The ‘toleration’ in question is not primarily political toleration – which relates to the ‘privatisation’ of theological beliefs and the associated freedom of conscience that will be discussed in Chapter 8 – but ideational toleration, or the acceptance of views one disagrees with or believes to be incorrect. Given the absence of rigid forms of institutionalisation or creedal complexes, Hindus are relatively free from the ‘Either/Or’ compulsion, and also often display what Margaret Chatterjee (1984: 68) calls ‘multiple allegiance’ to different deities and forms of devotion. However, from a logical point of view, there is no connection between the belief that one has grasped, however fallibly, some elements of the truth revealed through a specific focal point and the belief that one

130 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality must persecute those who refuse to accept it. While it is historically true that the Christian tradition has often been associated with ‘triumphalist’ proclamations of its superiority over other religions, there is no logical connection between holding that non-Christian individuals are mistaken in some ways and mistreating them. Christians may reflect on the fact of ‘epistemic peer conflict’ among individuals from different religions, and even though they could view this religious diversity as a product of human sinfulness, they may also be led to assess their own beliefs and enter into a careful study of other religions (Basinger 2002). Therefore, it is possible to combine the belief that one has attained elements of truth in one’s religious tradition with a belief in the freedom of conscience of the individual, which as a corollary implies the freedom to err. For instance, the international missionary council at Tambaram (1939: vol. 1, 188) declared that God wishes that human beings, made in the imago Dei, will seek a fellowship both with their creator and with their brothers and sisters on earth, but in the ‘mystery of freedom’ God has allowed human beings to seek other paths when they reject the way that leads to God. More recently, the document Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World which was issued in 2011 after consultations organised by the World Council of Churches, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and the World Evangelic Alliance argued that: While everyone has the right to invite others to an understanding of their faith, it should not be exercised by violating others’ rights and religious sensibilities. Freedom of religion enjoins upon all of us the equally non-negotiable responsibility to respect faiths other than our own, and never to denigrate, vilify or misrepresent them for the purpose of affirming the superiority of our faith. The document urged Christians to ‘acknowledge that changing one’s religion is a decisive step that must be accompanied by sufficient time for adequate reflection and preparation, through a process ensuring full personal freedom’ (Quoted in Wingate 2013: 190–91). A theistic Hindu, say Vais.n.avite, parallel to these statements could be that while Śaivites, Advaitins, and Christians have erred by going astray from the true object of devotion, namely, Vis.n.u, such choices are still somehow undergirded by the Lord through the divine supervision of the kārmic order. Even neo-Advaitin ‘pluralism’, as we noted in the case of Radhakrishnan, is not boundless but is a version of hierarchical inclusivism which is based on specific criteria. The real debate is therefore not over ‘toleration’ itself but over whether it is Christianity or, say, Advaita which provides an ‘objectively’ correct account of the human condition.

The objectivity of religious claims We shall approach the question of the ‘objectivity’ of Christian or Hindu truthclaims in the form of a dilemma: either Christianity and Advaitic, Vais.n.avite or Śaivite Hinduisms are tightly-knit universes, each offering its distinctive view of

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 131 reality that is only intra-systematically significant for its adherents or it is possible to offer third-person evidence to establish the ‘objective’ truth of the claims of the Christian faith or a Hindu standpoint, one of which is that salvation or moks.a respectively is the supreme good for all human beings. The first horn of the dilemma would seem to be accepted by a standpoint called ‘particularism’ which rejects the understanding of the religions of the world in terms of species of a primordial essence or genus called ‘Religion’, and claims that talk of common elements across them is mistaken. Defending this stance, George Lindbeck argues that: It is just as hard to think of religions as it is to think of cultures or languages as having a single generic or universal experiential essence of which particular religions – or cultures or languages – are varied manifestations or modifications. One can in this outlook no more be religious in general than one can speak language in general. (Lindbeck 1984: 23) Several other contemporary Christian theologians have pointed out that the soteriological goals of the religions are embedded in comprehensive patterns of living, and we should therefore not seek to extract fragments from them and somehow show that they aim at Christian salvation (DiNoia 1992: 61). They have emphasised the ‘thick’ connections between the aims of human existence that the religions project for their adherents, the doctrinal truths that they articulate about the metaphysical conceptions of reality and the patterns of life that must be emulated in order to reach the correct goal. This thesis of the integral relation between conceptions of the ‘human predicament’, the ultimate goals that are projected, and the means proposed in order that individuals may arrive there is highlighted by Alister McGrath specifically in the case of Christianity: Christianity is the only religion to offer salvation in the Christian sense of that term. This verbally clumsy, yet theologically precise, sentence acknowledges the point, stressed by Wittgenstein, that there is a vital need to make clear associations of a term, and the particular sense in which it is being used. (McGrath 1996: 236) Two Hindu parallels to McGrath’s statement would be ‘Advaita Vedānta is the only soteriological system to offer moks.a in the Advaita sense of that term – the realisation of one’s essential identity with the transpersonal ultimate’ and ‘Vais.n.ava Vedānta is the only soteriological system to offer moks.a in the Vais.n.avite sense of that term – the realisation of one’s ontological dependence on the personal Lord Vis.n.u’. Consequently statements such as ‘All those who may receive the beatific vision are individuals who have responded to Christ with faith as the Saviour’, ‘Only Buddhists can attain nirvān.a’, and ‘A life of devotional worship of Vis.n.u is the sole path to the attainment of moks.a for Vais.n.avites’ are to be viewed as analytically true, for it is only within the specific socio-religious bounds of these

132 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality traditions that the specific needs, namely, for salvation, nirvān.a, and moks.a, can be evoked, nurtured, and perhaps fulfilled. The ‘particularist’ view that the religions are distinctive wholes, each providing its own specific goals and ultimate aims, is articulated by S. R. Goel who claims that Hindus do not object to Christians seeking salvation through Jesus. However, ‘when the Christian missionary apparatus tries doggedly to impose these dogmas on other people that Hindu thinkers are forced to register a protest and have a close look at the Jesus of history’ (Goel 1989: ii). Goel prescribes that the religions of the world co-exist in a condition of benign indifference: ‘Let Catholics tend their own flock as they wish. All the Hindu asks is to be left alone to follow his dharma . . . He [sic] has never imposed himself in Rome; and he doesn’t want Rome to impose itself in Madras’ (Goel 1988: 21). The view that the religions of the world are distinct self-enclosed wholes – with specific aims and goals unique to them – would satisfy the demand for recognising the ‘alterity’ of each of these religions. Such a demand is also reflected in the rejoinder offered by a Hindu law student to a Christian priest who had suggested that Christianity might provide the true teaching he was searching for: ‘No, Father, do not think, for all that, we shall call on Christians to solve our religious problems. We have in our tradition everything necessary for it’ (Quoted in Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 70). In other words, by accepting the first horn of the dilemma, we can argue that human beings through their distinctive histories, cultures, and languages ‘constitute’ different divinities, and since these conceptions of the divine are legitimate for their socio-cultural contexts, the question of adjudicating truth-claims across religious boundaries does not arise. Given that the different religions do not conceptualise the ‘human predicament’ in precisely the same way – the Christian understanding is ‘sin’ while the Advaitin is ‘ignorance’ – Christianity, or any other religion, would not claim that it has the solution to all human problems. However, the view that the ‘religions’ are hermetically sealed units presents a difficult challenge to Christian theology as well as to Hindu thought, because both seek to affirm that their claims are, in a strong realist sense, ‘objectively’ true not just for their adherents but for all individuals. That is, Christian theologians have traditionally accepted the second horn of the dilemma, and argued that the Christian understanding of ‘conversion’ – as an invitation to others to respond to the gospel with faith – is based on the view that all human beings, even those who have not yet heard the gospel, are ‘objectively’ encompassed by the Christian God. Neo-Advaitins such as Radhakrishnan make a parallel move: all individuals who are currently mired in ignorance about the transpersonal ultimate, and mistakenly devoted to the personalistic images of the divine, are ‘objectively’ included within this deep reality. The reason why Christian theologians as well as Advaitin figures have traditionally not viewed their respective truth-claims as possessing only intra-communitarian validity can be seen by considering the following pairs of statements. C1: Christ is the eschatological fullness of salvation for all human beings. Preeschatologically, however, the distinctiveness of the religious traditions

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 133 could be affirmed, even fostered, because some aspects of this diversity is mysteriously included in the providential economy centred around Christ. C2: Christ is the eschatological fullness of salvation only for Christians. Others may attain equally valid ends on the eschatological horizons which are characterised by multiple ultimate realities. A1: The transpersonal absolute is the ultimate reality for all human beings. The value of the various theistic religious traditions which are on the way to this ultimate, however, could be affirmed, even fostered, because this diversity is encompassed by the absolute. A2: The transpersonal absolute is the ultimate reality only for Advaitins. Others may attain equally valid ends on the ontological horizon characterised by multiple ultimate realties such as Vis.n.u, Śiva, Christ, and so on. If the Christian message is merely internally coherent for participants in the Christian life-world (C2), the views of religious outsiders such as Hindu Advaitins or Vais.n.avites cannot be regarded as false or partially correct. Similarly, the contention that questions of truth must be sharply relativised to world-views would have drastic consequences for Advaitin thinkers (A2) as well – they cannot plausibly argue that Christians who are devoted to a personal God are objectively in the wrong by being subject to a deep metaphysical, cognitive, and experiential error. The difficult questions, therefore, are these: which standpoint – Christian faith (C1) or say Advaita (A1) – is objectively true, how may we argue in its defence, and is it even possible to supply non-circular arguments to demonstrate the cognitive superiority of one of these over its rivals?

Negotiating ‘universality’ To see more clearly what is stake between these pairs of statements, let us look at a few specific instances of how Christian theologians have positioned Christian faith vis-à-vis the religious worlds of Hinduism. On the one hand, J. N. Farquhar (1913: 26) took the ‘universalist’ position that ‘the human heart and mind are the same everywhere’, and that we can identify a common set of needs and aspirations which cry out for fulfilment everywhere. The fulfilment theology of Farquhar operates with the model of the religions standing on a continuum leading to Christianity, with the implication that all human beings are seeking for salvation, though it is to be perfectly found only in Christianity. Therefore, Farquhar argued that Christianity alone could satisfy those aspirations of human beings which had found ‘imperfect’ expression in the Hindu religious schools of the Vedānta. This view was widely articulated around the beginning of the last century by missionary figures. For instance, J. G. F. Day argued that Christianity must give up its Anglican trappings and ‘go to India to learn as well as to teach . . . [H]er wonderful Vedic philosophy is not anti-Christian, nor non-Christian, but . . . it finds its completion and fulfilment in Christ Jesus our Lord . . . [T]he Cambridge Mission has always recognized these things’ (Quoted in Maw 1990: 251). While the view that all human beings share a ‘religious sensibility’ can promote sympathetic attitudes

134 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality to religions such as Hinduism which are regarded as containing presentiments of Christian truth, the underlying claim that these religions are also marred by defects which only Christianity can perfect is often picked out by Hindu thinkers as unduly paternalistic. For instance, referring to the books in the series The Religious Quest of India, centred around the fulfilment theme, Radhakrishnan writes that ‘there is, right through, the imperialistic note that Christianity is the highest manifestation of the religious spirit . . . ’ (Radhakrishnan 1933: 24). On the other hand, A. G. Hogg, incidentally one of Radhakrishnan’s teachers at Madras Christian College, doubted that it was possible to draw lines of continuity that led from the fragmentary truths of Hinduism to their complete fulfilment in Christianity, for Christianity, he believed, not only replaces certain aspects of the former but also fills in much that was never present in it. He believed that Hindus would come to Christ only when they consciously feel that Christ fulfils their spiritual hunger, and it is only when this hunger is awakened in them that they can receive Christ (Hogg 1914). Human beings become conscious of a need for Christ only through their contact with the gospel, which therefore simultaneously produces it and can satisfy it. Hogg was therefore critical of those theological strands which posited Hinduism as involved in a certain ‘searching’ and projected Christianity as the ‘culmination’ of this quest, pointing out that Hinduism had its intrinsic notions of what the individual is trying to look for as well as its conceptions of the ultimate goal of this journey (Hogg 1947: 30). This criticism finds an even stronger expression in the views of Hendrik Kraemer for whom the Christian ‘Revelation’ of God in Christ is totally different from the ‘religions’. The correct way to understand the relation of the gospel to the religions such as Hinduism was not by placing them as points on a straight line in the manner of Farquhar, but by referring to Christ as the ‘proper criterion’ or axiom. Therefore, Kraemer wrote: When we try to define the relation of the Christian message . . . to the spiritual world manifest in the whole range of religious experience and religious striving of [hu]mankind, we cannot account for it by an unqualified conception of “fulfilment” or continuity. We must, out of respect for the proper character of the Christian Faith and other religions, begin by pronouncing emphatically the word “discontinuity” – Totaliter aliter, with emphasis on both words. (Kraemer 1956: 224) Kraemer believed that a careful investigation into the distinctive individualities of the religions would demonstrate that they were worlds unto themselves, so that it was not possible to unearth a common denominator or a fundamental core. As Kraemer pointed out in connection with the Christian approach to individuals in Africa: ‘Not the consciousness of sin brings men [sic] to Christ, but the continued contact with Christ brings them to consciousness of sin’ (Kraemer 1938: 345). In other words, it is not the case that human beings universally have a deep awareness of their ‘sinfulness’ from which they seek to be liberated; rather, it is usually after their contact with the word of the Bible that they become conscious of this need.

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 135

Religious particularity and the question of exclusivity Let us highlight the Hogg–Kraemerian standpoint by noting the following implication of its rejection of fulfilment theology. Faith in the Christian God, the conviction of sin, the operation of the Holy Spirit which produces in an individual the need for salvation and the willing response of the individual to Christ as the Saviour – and to use a Hindu example, the awareness mediated through Vedic scriptures of oneself as a devotee of the Lord Vis.n.u–Nārāyan.a and the response of loving worship (bhakti) of the Lord – are integrally connected within the Christian and the Vaisnavite life-worlds respecively. This was the point already made by a Christian missionary in India, T. E. Slater, more than a hundred years ago: ‘The view we take of sin follows, of [logical] necessity, from the view we take of God’ (Slater 1903: 194–5). Consequently, while the claims ‘Salvation is only for Christians’ and ‘moks.a is only for Vais.n.avites’ could have ‘exclusivist’ connotations, they should simply be read as the ‘grammatical statements’ that it is only within a Christian perspective that the need for salvation, and only within a Vais.n.avite perspective that the need for moks.a, can be experienced. We return through a different route to the problem noted earlier about the ‘particularist’ approach to religious diversity – it seems to push Christian faith and Hindu standpoints towards the subjectivist position that these are ‘true’ only with the bounds of their socio-cultural and doxastic horizons. The conception of Christ as the criterion of the truest good of human existence and the only saviour raises the difficult question of whether the acceptance of this criterion is an arbitrary choice or whether it can be grounded on bases that will be rationally accessible to those outside the circle of Christian faith. Certain types of ‘unapologetic’ theology hold that it is not possible to offer a defence of Christianity that would be acceptable to all rational human beings; rather, conversation takes place in a specific context and we should therefore begin with the rules and the assumptions of the Christian faith (Placher 1989). Instead of subscribing to universal epistemic principles that would control the rational assent of all human beings, the Church will rather accept a statement such as ‘the Bible is the criterion of belief-worthiness’ as an epistemological rule for ordering its beliefs. For instance, David Kelsey argues that the judgement that the Bible is the authority for Christian communal and ecclesial existence should be understood not as a contingent claim but an analytic statement from within the circle of Christian faith. However, one may raise the question as to why an individual should take the Biblical texts (and not others) as authoritative in this manner. Kelsey argues that given the complexity and the diversity of the reasons for which individuals join a specific Christian community, already modeled on its distinctive understanding of ‘Church’, ‘scripture’, and its ‘authority’, it is not possible to identify the precise reasons: ‘The reasons for adopting just these writings as “authority” are as complex, unsystematic, and idiosyncratic as are the reasons individual persons have for becoming Christians’ (Kelsey 1975: 164). In other words, there are no indubitable foundations that can serve as the common ground from which to convince the sceptic or the adherent of non-Christian religions. In these strands of ‘non-foundational’ theologies we may

136 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality still speak of epistemic justification, though not to establish the reasonableness of Christianity according to some putative universal norms but to highlight the structure of the Christian discourse. Therefore, we should regard the ontological, cosmological and design ‘proofs’ for the existence of God not as universally persuasive for all rational agents, but as arguments that explicate the grammar of the Christian language-game for those who have already accepted it. However, the crucial question is whether, and to what extent, the implication that the Christian faith ‘becomes true’ only for those who are reformed by divine grace can be reconciled with the claim that the Christ-event brought about a decisive change in the world, a claim that is usually regarded as having ‘objective’ validity not simply for those who share the Christian faith-stance but also for others. Most Christian theologians would reject the claim that the Christian God exists only within the Christian conceptual scheme, and that questions about the existence of God and the nature of God’s interaction with human history cannot be meaningfully raised outside the Christian language-game. That is, Christian thinkers have usually rejected the anti-realist position which holds that religious statements are not to be read as fact-assertive claims about reality but are rather woven in a specific religious language-game of finding ways of coping with the human condition (Alston 1995). Therefore, while one may accept the Biblical narrative as foundational for Christian living, if one wishes to argue that it is more than ‘just another story’, one will have to move into the sphere of rational argumentation, which, as Gary Comstock has noted, involves ‘making a claim, explaining its grounds and warrants, and allowing it to be critically scrutinized’ (Comstock 1986: 130). If the narrative is regarded as self-referential in that it refers to its own world and its meaning is accessible only to believers, this perspectivism does free the Christian theologian from the need to ‘apologetically’ offer reasons for Christian belief, for she can now claim that the believer and the unbeliever, or the Christian and, say, the Advaitin Hindu, see the world as two different configurations. However, this Wittgenstein-inspired move implies that the Christian form of life cannot be put forward as more ‘true’ than its competitors, so that when Christians affirm to one another, ‘Christ is risen’, this statement would be unintelligible to non-believers, and it would, in fact, be impossible for the two groups to disagree about the resurrection (Tilley 1989). In contrast to these antirealist theological views, it has often been argued that the Christ-event is constitutive of a salvation which reaches out to every point in space and time, even if many human beings remain unaware of God’s reconciling act in Christ. As O. V. Jathanna notes, ‘For Christianity salvation is not merely an epistemological issue, but has to do with reality itself. It has a strong extra nos character . . . The human response of faith is first made possible by what God has wrought “ob-jectively” in, through, and around Jesus Christ’ (Jathanna 1981: 448). To be sure, ‘religious truth’ must be regarded in terms not of static properties of statements but of personal relationships among human beings and their attempts to existentially appropriate and actualise in their own lives what is said to be true, but Christianity can be said to become true in this personal sense only because it is true in another, more realist sense (Hick 1974). The claim that all humanity is immersed in a state

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 137 of sinfulness and is therefore in need of salvation implies that the gospel is not merely existentially meaningful for those who respond to Christ with faith but in some sense ‘objectively’ true also for those who have not yet heard of Christ. Our aim here is not to settle the metaphysical and epistemological debates over whether a rational defence can be presented of the Christian worldview, but to point out, by examining the neo-Advaita of Radhakrishnan, that an analogous version of this question appears in Hindu thought. Radhakrishnan argued that religions that are based on the theistic conception of the absolute as a personal God who is the creator and the sustainer of the universe emerge from minds that are not perfectly enlightened. Consequently, Radhakrishnan affirmed that there is a graduated scale of interpreting the religious experiences of humanity with the theistic notions of religions such as Christianity at a lower level than the transpersonal: ‘The assumption of a personal God as the ground of being and creator of the universe is the first stage of the obscuring and restriction of the vision which immediately perceives the great illumination of Reality’ (Radhakrishnan 1967: 122). However, given that Radhakrishnan accepted the sovereignty of the self-existent ineffable spirit, which is beyond all human formulations, it has been argued that it is at least logically possible that the real is essentially personal rather than transpersonal, so that personalist conceptions of the real are, in fact, closer to the truth than transpersonalist ones. This possibility has been articulated by Michael Stoeber (1994) who argues that there is an experiential core underlying the different religious traditions of the world and this centre is structured by a ‘theo-monistic’ hierarchy. According to this hierarchy, the mystic is required to undergo, in order to become capable of the higher theistic experiences, an initial stage of ‘monistic’ experiences which involve a radical abandonment of the self in the divine. However, within the teleological framework of this hierarchy, this initial self-surrender and union with the divine at the basic level is followed by the experiences of the real as ultimately personal. Therefore, if the transpersonal ultimate could be regarded as an aspect of the personal ultimate – and not the personal as a falsifying distortion of the transpersonal, as Advaita holds – this hypothesis, according to Julius Lipner, shows ‘that there seem to be plausible alternatives to Radhakrishnan’s explanation of what passes for experience of the Real and to emphasise that at the end of the day, his own stance remains a faith-response, a sustained attempt to interpret the evidence. It is none the worse for that; rival points of view are in the same boat’ (Lipner 1989: 149). Therefore if Radhakrishnan’s reconstruction of Advaita is seen as an attempt, in part, to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity, he too would seem to have a problem similar to the one we sketched above for Christian theology. If we accept the first horn of the dilemma, we would not be able to regard the foundational claims of Advaita Vedānta as ‘objectively’ true for all individuals. However, the attempt to establish the ‘objective’ truth of these claims will have to carefully negotiate a path through the fields of metaphysics and religious epistemology, and respond to the various criticisms that have been levelled at the project of neo-Advaita. First, it has been argued that Radhakrishnan’s claim that there is ultimately one kind of religious experience is dubious, given the differences in

138 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality phenomenological content across its different types. Some experiences classified as religious have a subject/consciousness/object structure, whereas others do not seem to be experiences of anything existing independently of the experiencing subject, and all these experiences have their specific doctrinal settings. Therefore Radhakrishnan’s formulation of the ultimate end of life as the Advaitic intuitive experience of non-duality with the ultimate can be questioned on the ground of the possibility of such a ‘pure consciousness’ which he believed was trans-contextually accessible (Radhakrishnan 1933: 51). Further, while Radhakrishnan’s view that the spiritual ‘experience’ intimated by Advaita lies at the core of all the religious traditions of the world seems to be a ‘catholic’ one, it has been argued that he inflicted interpretive violence on them by focusing specifically on those strands that seem to fit into his vision of a non-dualistic realisation as the vital core of religion (Yandell 1993: 18–21). Third, though Radhakrishnan suggests that all human beings can have access, unmediated by their cultural backgrounds, to the liberating experience of Advaita, classical figures such as Śan.kara located the possibility of liberating knowledge within a specific culture that was constituted by scripture, reliable authorities, performance of one’s caste-duties, and so on. It is this interwoven texture of teacher, tradition, and text that provides the ‘external circuitry’ for mental cultivation which is a necessary antecedent to enlightenment. Modern Advaitins sometimes invert this order of priority by suggesting that there is a pre-linguistic ‘religious experience’ which is universally accessible to all individuals and is not inflected by any cultural moorings (Forsthoefel 2002). More generally, figures of modern Hinduism have often employed criteria such as intuitive knowledge, purity of heart, morality and so on to accept or reject certain aspects of the Vedic revelation, and viewed the sacred scriptures as a record of the ‘experiments’ carried out by the ancient seers which had to be re-actualised by spiritual aspirants. Fourth, Radhakrishnan’s selective appropriation of texts in which he discerns glimmerings of Advaitic thought has also been critiqued from the neo-Kantianism of Stephen Katz, which is based on the epistemological principle that all experience is conditioned by cultural and mental patterns so that the process of differentiating patterns of experience into their various symbolic and institutional forms takes place not after but during the experience itself (King 1988). However, in spite of Katz’s intention of being faithful to the experiential data in question, it has been argued that his primary assumption that there can be no nonconceptual ‘pure experience’ denies the particularity of the truth-claims of a number of Indic traditions such as Hindu yoga and Buddhism. Without trying to settle this debate, it is important to note in this context that while Radhakrishnan in one sense does accept the Kantian dichotomy between the ineffable noumenal reality and its phenomenal manifestations, the difference between Radhakrishnan and Kant emerges when he goes on to affirm that the ‘prepossessions’ that lead certain individuals to interpret this experience through theistic categories are ultimately distortive of the nature of noumenal reality, which, unlike Kant, he held to be accessible to the enlightened seers of humanity (Radhakrishnan 1932: 169). In short, Radhakrishnan’s claim that spiritual ‘experience’ can establish the ‘objective’ truth of Advaita

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 139 Vedānta – which is sometimes repeated, as we will note, in Hindu criticisms of Christianity as based on ‘blind faith’ – is grounded in some debatable hermeneutical moves and contested philosophical presuppositions.

The rational justification of religious truths Once again, our aim is not to settle the question of the validity of Advaita’s presuppositions but to highlight certain parallels between Christian theology and neoAdvaita so far as the attempts to establish the ‘objectivity’ of their truth-claims is concerned. If reason is capable of demonstrating this ‘objectivity’ – either for Christian theism or for a Hindu standpoint such as Advaita or Śaivism – such a demonstration would, in effect, signal the end of all Hindu-Christian debates over ‘conversion’, for the truth will be perspicaciously clear to all parties to these debates. However, even if reason is incapable of supplying such ‘neutral’ evidence, it might still attempt to exhibit the internal coherence, consistency, and adequacy of the ‘particular’ horizons within which it operates. In other words, reason and ‘faith’ would be dialectically interconnected in a hermeneutic circle where reason would be empowered by revelation to discern reality truly, correctly, and adequately. Reason can work in this manner within revelational boundaries in the type of ‘committed pluralism’ that has been developed by Trevor Hart in his discussion of Karl Barth’s approach to the world religions (Hart 1997). This shares with other forms of pluralism the conviction that human beings view the world from within a multiplicity of contexts and that there are no trans-contextual criteria that can be applied to demonstrate conclusively that one of these is cognitively superior to the others. However, it also affirms that reality makes itself known more clearly or focally in one definite location than in another – whether Christianity, Advaita Vedānta, Vais.n.avism or Śaivism – and it invites others to accept this commitment without arguing that its truth-claims are universally demonstrable in a logically coercive manner. Therefore, a Christian theologian who is a ‘committed pluralist’ can argue that salvation, that is, communion with the triune God, is the deepest need for all human beings, but these truth-claims cannot be rationally demonstrated to the ‘neutral’ bystander, for only those who have been graciously drawn into the sphere of the Christian revelation can experience this need and seek its fulfilment as they learn to ‘see’ the world through Biblical spectacles. Similarly, a ‘committed pluralist’ Vais.n.ava theologian could claim that liberation, that is, communion with Vis.n.u, is the deepest need for all embodied selves, but this is not a truth that can be demonstrated by a ‘universal reason’ – rather, our rational capacities must be purified through means such as scriptural reading, contacts with fellow-devotees, journeys to pilgrimage centres, and so on before the ‘heart’ warms up to this need and seeks its fulfilment. From the former perspective, one may argue, in this line, that Christ brings forth from human beings certain aspirations which they have not yet consciously experienced. For instance, in response to the argument that missionaries should not carry the gospel to people who did not wish to hear it and believed that their own faiths were sufficient for their purposes, the missionary John Jones

140 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality replied that missionaries should consider the spiritual need and not the desire of a people (Jones 1903: 219). Therefore, Christ as the ‘inner teacher’ could be seen as calling individuals, through their everyday lives, to revise self-understandings which conflict with the Christian view of the human as a creature called to loving worship of God. As Hogg put it: ‘God can make a positive revelation of himself only to him [sic] who asks questions that are pertinent . . . So, if God is to be the Self-revealer, He has also to be the Teacher whose constant aim it is to evoke in the human soul the right kind of seeking’ (Hogg 1939: 120). On such an understanding of how an individual begins to indwell the Christian world, Christ’s grace removes the ‘blindness’ to the way things are, and orders the dispositions, needs, and inclinations of the heart so that she learns to assess the evidence in the proper way and apprehend that it points towards Christ himself (Wainwright 1995a). One example of how such a movement towards Christ might proceed comes from a letter that M. C. Ghose wrote to Alexander Duff where he stated that he was proceeding ‘step by step’ towards Christianity, and that with every progressive move the ‘evidence’ of Christianity was becoming more overpowering. After his baptism in 1832, he wrote: ‘And to last my heart was opposed. In spite of myself I became a Christian . . . Surely this must be what the Bible calls “grace”, free grace, sovereign grace, and if ever there was an election of grace, surely I am one’ (Quoted in Neill 1985: 310). From Advaitin Hindu perspectives, these statements might seem highly presumptuous, but it is crucial to note that claims about the true need of human beings are not free-floating subjectivist opinions but are enmeshed in networks of metaphysical views about the nature of reality, human personhood, and human agency. An Advaitin Hindu who argues as a ‘committed pluralist’ could claim, on the one hand, that the true need of human beings is not to worship a personal Lord, for this need is ultimately based on an delusory view of the nature of ultimate reality, and, on the other, that the need that all human beings should have, namely, to realise their non-duality with the transpersonal ultimate, can be evoked only in specific circumstances through the study with a guru of the Upanis.ads. Therefore, we may make a case for reading Radhakrishnan as a ‘committed pluralist’ in the sense that, while at one level he affirms the provisional value of the theistic religious traditions, this affirmation is rooted at the ultimate level to his commitment to Advaitic thought. The form of ‘committed pluralism’ that we have outlined also helps us to see why the mere fact of religious diversity does not undercut the rationality of one’s religious tradition. Alvin Plantinga argues that belief in the Christian God does not need evidential inferential support from other beliefs, for Christian belief is ‘properly basic’ and therefore a Christian can be epistemically entitled to it. Plantinga is aware that many atheists and agnostics – and, we could add, Advaitin Hindus – do not count belief in the Christian God as a properly basic belief, and he seeks to respond to this objection with his notion of a ‘warranted belief’, that is, a belief produced by God-given epistemic faculties when they are functioning according to the way God had designed them to. Therefore, the crucial debate in this context is a metaphysical one, because what is regarded as ‘rational’ is ultimately connected to one’s metaphysics: ‘[T]he dispute as to whether

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 141 theistic belief is rational (or warranted) can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is at bottom not merely an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute’ (Plantinga 2000: 190). Consequently, a Christian, as a ‘committed pluralist’, can claim that that the views of an atheist who rejects the existence of any supra-sensible entity or a Buddhist who accepts the metaphysics of impermanence or an Advaitin Hindu who holds that the personal God is ultimately an illusion are not at epistemic par with a Christian, for she has received the instigation of the Holy Spirit who protects her from error in ontological matters. However, just as Plantinga argues that God’s grace activates a sensus divinitatis in sinful human beings and enables them to ‘perceive’ God in the world, Advaitins too, as ‘committed pluralists’, could argue that mundane reality is rooted in the transpersonal ultimate, and meditational praxis guided by scriptural teachings would train the initiate to realise the non-duality between the empirical and the transcendent.

Conversion and the objectivity of religious claims Our discussion so far helps us to appreciate the logical structure of Hindu– Christian debates over ‘conversion’ – they are rooted ultimately in deep metaphysical controversies about the nature of human rationality, the structure of human personhood, the shape of ultimate reality and so on. Consequently, the presence of deep-seated conflicts of truth-claims across such religious systems, each with its specific background beliefs and internal resources to ‘defeat’ the claims put forward by others, cannot be whittled away if one takes these truth-claims in a realist manner. As David Fergusson has pointed out, while we may have to participate in specific liturgical contexts to learn the meaning of the Biblical statement ‘God is our refuge and strength’, its truth or falsity is ultimately dependent not on how it is used but on how things are independently of the speaker. Therefore, on this understanding of the doctrine-expressing statements of religious traditions as having cognitive content, so that they are capable of being true or false and conveying information about extra-linguistic entities, we need something like the principle of the ‘necessity of interreligious apologetics’ which has been proposed by Paul Griffiths. According to this principle, when the doctrinal statements of one religious tradition are incompatible with those of another, its representative intellectuals should engage in both negative and positive apologetics with those representing the other. That is, they should try to show, negatively, the failure of a critique of its central truth-claims about the nature of things or the value of certain courses of action, and, positively, the cognitive superiority of its set of doctrinal statements to that of other traditions (Griffiths 1991: 15). While ‘Christian philosophers’ often acknowledge, along the lines of a ‘committed pluralism’, that the truths of the Christian faith cannot be demonstrated in some logically coercive manner by starting from universally accepted self-evident axioms but are explicated within the circle of faith, they usually also emphasise that this circle is not entirely quarantined from rational scrutiny, for it is underpinned by a set of metaphysical conceptions about reality which can be assessed on the grounds

142 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality of consistency, plausibility, and so on (Yandell 2007). Similarly, the Advaitic statement of foundational being (Brahman) as the sole reality can be analysed for its consistency, adequacy, and plausibility, as it was throughout medieval India by the theistic critics of Advaita. To begin with Radhakrishnan, he argued that spiritual experience does not look towards any external standards for justification, for it is self-evidential . (svasamvedya), self-established (svatassiddha), and self-luminous (svayamprakāśa) (Radhakrishnan 1932: 92). The important point here is that the Advaitic unitary ‘experience’ is based on a set of metaphysical conceptions of the nature of the absolute, the human self, and the empirical world. First, there is the doctrine that underlying the empirical ego and its manifold experiences is an inner core that is deathless, timeless, and absolutely real (Radhakrishnan 1940: 83). Second, the conceptualisation of ultimate reality as formless explains why creedal formulations and systems of beliefs are provisional and have only instrumental value. Third, the process of moral perfection and growth towards the realisation of one’s non-duality with the spirit is guided by the law of karma and rebirth (Radhakrishnan 1932: 288). Radhakrishnan’s appeal to a trans-empirical ‘experience’ is therefore undergirded by a particular set of truth-claims on the basis of which he could assert that when theists such as Christians, Vais.n.avites, and others speak of the supreme reality as a personal Lord, these are at best interpretations from the human perspective which do not properly intimate the transpersonal ultimate. Second, a Christian theologian can claim that the views of an Advaitin Hindu who holds that the personal God is ultimately an illusion are not at epistemic par with Christian belief, for the Hindu’s epistemic vision, clouded because of original sin, is unregenerated by grace. Once again, such a response presupposes a number of truth-claims about a nonphysical mode of reality, the existence of a personal God, the status of finite reality as imperfect and yet enveloped by a divine purpose, and so on. Though the relation between Christian theology and ‘metaphysics’ has been intensely debated over the last century, Christian theologians have often grappled with issues such as the relation between God and the world, the human knowledge of God, and so on with metaphysical categories. They have tried to develop a cumulative case for Christian theism, not because they suppose that Christian faith is based on arguments but because they seek to reflect, in light of this faith, on different areas of human experience and argue that their truest fulfilment lies in the Christian God (Hebblethwaite 1988). There is, therefore, a strong element of metaphysical thinking in these cumulative appeals, first, to human experience and the general features of the world and, second, to specific strands in human history, in order to develop a Christian worldview that will both illuminate the value of the dimensions of art, morality, consciousness, and freedom, and point out their true orientation towards the Christian God (Swinburne 1977). Therefore the claim made by a Hindu critic that ‘Christianity is based on a theology which does not appeal to reason . . . Christianity, unlike Hinduism, is not founded on argument’ (Indian Bibliographic Centre 1999: 97) is somewhat misplaced, for both Christianity and (Advaitic and other forms of) Hinduism employ

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 143 rich patterns of reasoning in support of their claims, though such reasons may not always be accessible to the ‘dispassionate’ observer. In the red heat of antimissionary diatribe, provoked partly by the belligerent terms of the missionary offensive itself, Hindu figures have sometimes claimed that the rational superiority of Hindu thought can be readily demonstrated. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, Krishna Shastri claimed that he had forty reasons for not believing in Christianity, while the missionaries had only eighteen arguments against Hinduism. A common argument that was used by Hindu critics of the missionaries was that the Hindu religion was true because of its antiquity, whereas Christianity was a recent upstart which was founded on the shifting sands of time (Young 2002: 45). However, figures who had a greater acquaintance with the Vedāntic conception of the relation between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ knew that the traditional view on such a ‘natural theology’ was far more complex. One of the crucial issues in the Mataparīks.ā (‘Test of doctrines’) controversy, centred around a treatise of this name written by a Scotsman, John Muir (1810–82), was whether reason could act as an impartial judge by providing certain criteria which could adjudicate truth-claims across religions or whether scripture was self-validating and reason was but a tool for understanding it. Muir claimed that the true Religion had three criteria – the ability of its founder to work miracles attested by good witnesses, the greater holiness of its scriptures, and its universal reach, and proceeded to demonstrate that Christianity passed the test and that Hinduism was false. In one Hindu response to Muir, Nilakantha Goreh claimed that the existence and the nature of the divine cannot be demonstrated through reason but has to be based on scriptural, that is, Vedic authority. Indeed, in stark opposition to Muir’s view that the mark of a true religion is its conformability to reason, Goreh retorted that this is a mark of its falsity. In fact, he saw in Muir’s subordination of faith to reason an extension of the tactics of the Buddhists, materialists, and other classical adversaries of the Vedas, and denounced Christianity as a religion of delusion. As another respondent Haracandra argued in his Mataparīks.ottara: ‘If there is to be faith in a book, let it be in the Vedas since it has prevailed on earth from the time of creation onward!’ (Young 1981: 149). Therefore, the claim that ‘Genesis, the concept of sin, crucifixion, resurrection etc., do not convince any rational human being. An Indian . . . may be illiterate but he [sic] is not a fool’ (Indian Bibliographic Centre 1999: 75) inaccurately projects a diametrical opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ as the Christian standpoint on the relation between the two. To be sure, there are Christian ‘fideist’ standpoints which hold that the very ‘absurdity’ of the Christian message is a mark of its truth, but the bland statement of the irrationality of Christian theism ignores the long tradition of credo ut intelligam associated with figures such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (Zagzebski 1993). In the light of our discussion, it would be more accurate to say that the Christian and the Hindu traditions have both developed distinctive patterns of argumentation, where reason is subject to different forms of revelational control, even when reason tries to argue its case against its competitors across religious boundaries. However, given that a Christian and say an Advaitin Hindu start from different scriptural, doxastic, and existential standpoints, which are not always amenable to reasoned

144 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality disputation, it remains a moot point whether either group can demonstrate in a rationally persuasive manner the coherence, plausibility, and adequacy of its own position to the other. That is, the vital philosophical–theological debate that we leave unsettled in this book is what kinds of evidential bases can be supplied for demonstrating the cognitive superiority of the Christian account over, say, the neo-Advaita one, or vice versa (Basinger 2002).

Relativism, toleration, and conversion To sum up the discussion in this chapter, a crucial point in Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ is whether, and for what reasons, members of these traditions are willing to accept the propagation of views which they hold to be partially correct or sometimes even false. For instance, from a Christian perspective, Stephen Neill writes that for the ‘human sickness’ there is only one remedy, namely, the gospel, which is why, according to him, it must be proclaimed to the ends of the earth (Neill 1961: 17). Therefore, he argues that the missionary will attempt to enable the Hindu to see that the answers that the latter has given to the basic questions of life are unsatisfactory, and point these questions to Christ who can provide a sufficient answer to them (Neill 1961: 98). To be sure, an Advaitin would contest this theological interpretation of the existential facts, but it would be misleading to view the Christian reading of the situation as intolerant, for the deep disagreement is not over toleration but over who is, in fact, in touch with reality, and to what extent this disagreement can be settled through rational argumentation. The Christian argues that the truth of the matter is that human beings are sinful, having broken away from their personal creator, while the Advaitin holds that they are essentially rooted in the ultimate reality which is transpersonal, so that it is in fact Christians who need to be properly attuned to reality. The vital question here is why Advaitins, and in general Hindus from other standpoints, do not usually exhibit ‘evangelical’ zeal in bringing Christians around to what they think is the correct view of the nature of ultimate reality. This absence, as we have noted, should be explained in terms of the neo-Hindu view, undergirded by specific metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions, that individuals in other religious streams too, over several lifetimes, can find their way to the ultimate destination of the transpersonal absolute. Our discussion also shows that the toleration of the Hindu traditions should not be confused with relativism, understood as the doctrine that there are no universal standards, whether in rationality, morality and so on. Now one reason for the contemporary appeal, in some circles, of the relativist claim that ethical norms or rational standards are intertwined with the metaphysical assumptions of specific world-views is because earlier generations of European observers of Indian cultural formations, whether British administrators or Christian missionaries, often ethnocentrically labelled them as irrational and immoral. From a strong relativist perspective, these norms and standards, however irrational or objectionable they may appear to be from within ‘our’ ethical systems, are rational and consistent within ‘their’ systems (Matilal 1989: 339–40). However, used as an argument

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 145 for the toleration of other world-views, strong relativism is not without its own dilemmas. First, a consistent relativist would have no reasons to offer to other people who support intoleration and no justifiable grounds on which to oppose institutionalised forms of the same (Wainwright 1995b: 78–9). Second, as we noted in Chapter 3, a form of relativism that was popular among ‘liberal’ British colonialists was that each culture possesses its own localised standards of moral adjudication so that no external criticism of its practices is possible. This often led to the claim that these indigenous cultures must be left undisturbed and their moral values not subjected to any critique, and though this stance might appear as a plea for toleration, it disguised the perception of the colonialists that the natives were fundamentally different from themselves. Such relativism, B. K. Matilal (1991: 158) points out, can become a potent tool in the hands of those colonialists who might, on the basis of the argument that the other cultures must be left in their irreducible and static ‘otherness’, resist forces within the latter which might challenge the dominant voices therein. Therefore, while the shift from ‘identity’ to ‘conceptual irreducibility’ is a welcome move to the extent that it alerts us to the excesses of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, it can, however, also lead to an alterist emphasis on pure otherness which can, in the manner of some colonial narratives, relegate what is different to the category of the exotic. Instead, Matilal (1989: 359) describes his position on the question of whether ethical norms apply across cultures as one which accepts that local norms are culture-relative and that moral conflicts often cannot be resolved entirely through rational means, but rejects the notion that any ideal of human flourishing is as good as the others. Matilal’s position is similar to the weak cultural relativism defended by Jack Donnelly in the area of human rights which steers through the extremes of ‘radical relativism’ and ‘radical universalism’: the former holds that moral norms are completely internal to each distinct cultural formation, and the latter argues that there is a clearly defined set of moral values that apply universally without cultural variations (Donnelly 1984). Therefore, even while we reject the ‘ethnocentric’ universalisms that have sometimes been proposed from specifically European visions of human nature, we should not deny the presence of some common human denominators across cross-cultural boundaries by overlooking the themes, concepts, and practices that recur across them (Hedges 2008). Rather, given that cultural norms, expectations, preferences, and modes of evaluation often play a vital role in encouraging or prohibiting the expression of specific patterns of behaviour and personality types, we should view such variations, operating within psychobiological limits, as leading to the development of a human nature which is both a ‘natural’ and a ‘cultural’ product. The key debate between a Hindu and a Christian position, then, is how to ‘read’ these human needs, experiences, and problems underlying the dense specificities of diverse cultural patterns. While religions, acting as conceptual frameworks organise a wide variety of intellectual, emotional, and moral experiences, it would be incorrect to view them as carving out incommensurable ‘worlds’ whose inhabitants stare at one another with mutual incomprehension. An important line of argumentation against radical conceptual relativism has pointed out

146 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality that disagreement becomes possible only against a background of shared truths. Our very ability to identify an ‘alien’ belief presupposes areas of wider agreement within which we can place it with reference to other true beliefs (Godlove 1984). To take just one example, a question such as ‘what is the remedy for the restlessness of the human heart?’ is one that both an Advaitin Hindu and a Roman Catholic can make sense of in terms of an anxiety that individuals across religious schemes share – even if the answers they provide are divergent in some respects. As we have noted, a Christian theologian such as Kraemer and an a neo-Advaitin such as Radhakrishnan can be regarded, in this manner, as offering two different forms of ‘committed pluralism’ which propose two interpretations of the human condition centred on two distinct ‘foundational’ pivots. They affirm the multiplicity of human perspectives that are significantly shaped by our social and historical locations but deny that they are restricted to these margins. Further, both reject the epistemic parity of all religious traditions and hold that their core beliefs have better epistemic support than those of the alternative schemes (Ward 1994). If Christian theologians such as Kraemer took Christ as the criterion for evaluating the category of ‘religion’ as mixed with human self-assertion against the creator God, Radhakrishnan’s approach was based on the criterion of Advaita Vedānta as the essence and the goal of all religious traditions. However, there is a crucial difference between their ‘committed pluralisms’ regarding the question of whether and how their specific visions of reality can be communicated to others: Radhakrishnan’s neo-Advaita claims that human beings across different socio-cultural traditions can have spiritual ‘experiences’ of non-duality with the transpersonal ultimate, whereas Kraemer believed that the judgement that Christ is the saviour is possible only from within the circle of Christian faith. This divergence leads to certain strains on their individual positions: in the case of Radhakrishnan, the major issue remains whether the concept of a ‘mystical core’ across the world religions is coherent, while Kraemer’s position has to deal with the critical question of how the Christian message can be communicated to those who are not within the horizons of Christian faith. As we shall note in the next chapter, the dialectic of the ‘particularity’ of the Christian origins and the ‘universality’ of the Christian message remains a major concern for Christian theologians.

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Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 147 Comstock, Gary (1986) ‘Truth or Meaning: Ricoeur versus Frei on Biblical Narrative’, The Journal of Religion, 66, 117–40. D’Costa, Gavin (2000) The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. DiNoia, J. A. (1992) The Diversity of Religions, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Donnelly, Jack (1984) ‘Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, 6, 400–19. Dupuis, Jacques (1997) Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Farquhar, J. N. (1913) The Crown of Hinduism, London: Oxford University Press. Fergusson, David (1990) ‘Meaning, Truth, and Realism in Bultmann and Lindbeck’, Religious Studies, 26, 183–98. Forsthoefel, T. A. (2002) Knowing Beyond Knowledge, Aldershot: Ashgate. Gelberg, S. J. (1989) ‘Krishna and Christ: ISKCON’s Encounter with Christianity in America’, in Hindu–Christian Dialogue, ed. H. G. Coward, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp. 138–61. Ghose, J. C. (ed.) (1885–87) The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, Calcutta: Bhowanipore Oriental Press. Godlove, Terry (1984) ‘In What Sense Are Religions Conceptual Frameworks?’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 52, 289–305. Goel, S. R. (1988) Catholic Ashrams, New Delhi: Voice of India. Goel, S. R. (1989) History of Hindu–Christian Encounters, New Delhi: Voice of India. Griffiths, P. J. (1991) An Apology for Apologetics, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Halbfass, Wilhelm (1990) India and Europe, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Halbfass, Wilhelm (ed.) (1995) Philology and Confrontation, New York: SUNY. Hart, Trevor (1997) ‘Karl Barth, the Trinity, and Pluralism’, in The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, ed. K. J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, pp.124–42. Hatcher, B. A. (1999) Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hebblethwaite, Brian (1988) The Ocean of Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedges, Paul (2008) ‘Particularities: Tradition-Specific Post-modern Perspectives’ in Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, ed. P. Hedges and A. Race, London: SCM Press, pp. 112–35. Hedges, Paul (2010) Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and the Theology of Religions, London: SCM. Heyd, David (1996) Toleration, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hick, John (1974) ‘The Outcome: Dialogue into Truth’, in Truth and Dialogue, ed. J. Hick, London: Sheldon Press, ppp. 140–55. Hick, John (1989) An Interpretation of Religion, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hogg, A. G. (1914) ‘Review of Books’, The International Review of Missions, 9, 171–4. Hogg, A. G. (1939) ‘The Christian Attitude to Non-Christian Faith’, in International Missionary Council Meeting at Tambaram, London: Humphrey Milford, pp. 102–25. Hogg, A. G. (1947) The Christian Message to the Hindu, London: SCM. Indian Bibliographic Centre (Research Wing) (1999) Christianity and Conversion in India, Varanasi: Rishi Publications. International Missionary Council Meeting At Tambaram (1939), London: Humphrey Milford. Jathanna, O. V. (1981) The Decisiveness of the Christ–Event and the Universality of Christianity in a World of Religious Plurality, Berne: Peter Lang.

148 Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality Jha, G. (trans.) (1922) Manu-smr.ti: the Laws of Manu with the Bhās.ya of Medhātithi, Calcutta. Jha, G. (trans.) (1924) Tantravārttika, Calcutta. Jones, J. P. (1903) India’s Problem, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company. Kelsey, D. H. (1975) The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology, London: SCM. Kraemer, Hendrik (1938) The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, London: The Edinburgh House Press. Kraemer, Hendrik (1956) Religion and the Christian Faith, London: Lutterworth Press. Lindbeck, George (1984) The Nature of Doctrine, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Lipner, J. J. (1989) ‘Religion and Religions’, in Radhakrishnan, ed. G. Parthasarathi and D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–52. Long, J. D. (2013) ‘Hinduism and the Religious Other’, in Understanding Interreligious Relations, ed. David Cheetham, Douglas Pratt and David Thomas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 37–63. Matilal, B. K. (1989) ‘Ethical Relativism and Confrontation of Cultures’, in Relativism, ed. Michael Krausz, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 339–62. Matilal, B. K. (1991) ‘Pluralism, Relativism, and Interaction Between Cultures’, in Culture and Modernity, ed. E. Deutsch, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 141–60. Maw, Martin (1990) Visions of India, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. McGrath, A. E. (1996) A Passion for Truth, Leicester: Apollos. Mendus, Susan (ed.) (1988) Justifying Toleration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendus, Susan (1989) Toleration and the Limits. of Liberalism, London: Macmillan. Neevel, W. G. (1976) ‘The Transformation of Srī Rāmakrishna’, in Hinduism, ed. B. L. Smith, Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp. 53–97. Neill, Stephen (1961) Christian Faith and Other Faiths, London: Oxford University Press. Neill, Stephen (1985) A History of Christianity in India 1707–1858, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newman, Jay (1982) Foundations of Religious Tolerance, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nicholson, A. J. (2010) Unifying Hinduism, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Placher, W. C. (1989) Unapologetic Theology, Kentucky: John Knox Press. Plantinga, Alvin (2000) Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Puligandla, R. (2002) That Thou Art: Wisdom of the Upanis.ads, California: Asian Humanities Press. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1927) The Hindu View of Life, London: Unwin Paperbacks. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1932) An Idealist View of Life, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1933) East and West in Religion, London: George Allen and Unwin. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1940) Eastern Religions and Western Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1960) The Brahma Sutra, London: George Allen and Unwin. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1967) Religion in a Changing World, London: George Allen and Unwin. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (1979) Indian Religions, New Delhi: Orient. Rajaram, N. S. (1998) A Hindu View of the World, New Delhi: Voice of India. Richards, Glyn (1989) Towards a Theology of Religions, London and New York: Routledge.

Christian orthodoxy and Hindu spirituality 149 Sarasvati, Chandrasekharendra (1988) Aspects of Our Religion, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2008) ‘Pluralisms: How to Appreciate Religious Diversity Theologically’, in Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, ed. P. Hedges and A. Race, London: SCM Press, pp. 85–110. Sharma, Arvind (1979) ‘All Religions Are – Equal? One? True? Same?: A Critical Examination of Some Formulations of the Neo-Hindu Position’, Philosophy East and West, 29, 59–72. Shourie, Arun (1994) Missionaries in India, Delhi: ASA. Singer, Milton (1972) When a Great Tradition Modernizes, London: Pall Mall Press. Slater, T. E. (1903) The Higher Hinduism in Relation to Christianity, London: Elliot Stock. Smith, Huston (1991) The World’s Religions, San Franciso: Harper. Stoeber, Michael (1994) Theo-monistic Mysticism, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Swami Abhishiktananda (1971) The Church In India, Madras: CLS. Swami Nikhilananda (2007) The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, New York: RamakrishnaVivekananda Center. Swami Prabhupada (1972) Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, London: Collier Books. Swami Vivekananda (1972) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Swarup, Ram (1995) Pope John Paul II on Eastern Religions and Yoga, New Delhi: Voice of India. Swinburne, Richard (1977) The Coherence of Theism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thibaut, George (1904) The Vedanta-Sutras of Ramanuja, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tilley, T. W. (1989) ‘Incommensurability, Intratextuality and Fideism’, Modern Theology, 5, 87–111. Wainwright, W. J. (1995a) Reason and the Heart, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wainwright, W. J. (1995b) ‘Doctrinal Schemes, Metaphysics and Propositional Truth’, in Religious Pluralism and Truth, ed. T. Dean, Albany: SUNY, pp. 73–85. Ward, Keith (1994) Religion and Revelation, New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, H. H. (trans.) (1961) Vis.n.u Purān.a, Calcutta: Punthi Pustak. Wingate, Andrew (2013) ‘Interreligious Conversion’, in Understanding Interreligious Relations, ed. David Cheetham, Douglas Pratt and David Thomas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–92. Yandell, K. E. (1993) The Epistemology of Religious Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yandell, K. E. (2007) ‘Religious Traditions and Rational Assessments’, in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Religion, ed. C. Meister and P. Copan, Oxford: Routledge, pp. 204–15. Young, R. F. (1981) Resistant Hinduism, Vienna: De Nobili Research Library. Young, R. F. (2002) ‘Some Hindu Perspectives on Christian Missionaries in the Indic World of the Mid Nineteenth Century’, in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. J. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg, London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 37–60. Zagzebski, Linda (ed.) (1993) Rational Faith, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

7

Donning the saffron robe The many meanings of ‘mission’

From a Christian theological point of view, the last five decades or so have been marked by intense reflections, both in India and elsewhere, on the theme of ‘inculturating’ the Christian message into indigenous contexts, and this rethinking has also been associated with re-conceptualisations of the very significance of ‘mission’. It is precisely over the point whether the Christian attitudes to the Hindu traditions have undergone a genuine change or whether they have, as it were, merely donned sheep’s clothing to disguise their vulpine nature that controversy continues to rage. For instance, concerning the early ‘indigenising’ endeavours of the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Robert de Nobili, S. R. Goel writes: ‘A truly ethical criterion would dismiss him as a plain and simple crook’ (Goel 1989: 14). Goel argues that the Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the only saviour of humanity has remained unchanged while the Christian churches have developed various mission strategies in their approach to Hinduism, such as the theology of fulfilment and the theology of indigenisation which claim that elements of Hindu life can indicate, even if partially, the way to Christian truth (Goel 1989: 327). For Hindu critics, these moves are, in effect, strategic devices through which the churches seek to present their message through the more palatable idioms of inclusivism and indigenisation, while their true end, that of converting Hindus, remains unchanged. As Ram Swarup notes, regarding changes in missiological paradigms: In good old days, not long ago, Christianity had no qualms in sending to hell the best of the people belonging to other religions and cultures . . . But now things have changed, the faith of the faithful has changed and hearing such things is jarring to many ears. Therefore the Church has to present its dogmas in a less offensive way. (Swarup 1995: 53) However, a Christian assessment of the transformations that the Christian traditions, for instance, Roman Catholicism, have undergone in the last half a century or so with respect to their attitudes to other religions, often points in a different direction. Gavin D’Costa acknowledges that the positive appreciation of Hinduism that Christianity has developed has been possible only recently and still remains a matter of intense debate. However, he adds that ‘[n]one of the above

Donning the saffron robe 151 mitigates either the sense that this is an authentic development of the tradition, nor does it mitigate the significance of mission . . . ’ (D’Costa 2000: 134). We have here a classic example of an insider–outsider debate over the significance of a transformation undergone by a tradition: both an ‘external’ Hindu critic and an ‘internal’ Christian theologian do not regard the transformation as a radical departure, but draw opposed conclusions from this observation. For the former, Christianity remains, as ever, a predatory ‘imperialism’ that has now donned saffron robes to undermine Hinduism from within, whereas for the latter this indigenisation is a consequence of a deeper understanding of the spiritual riches of other traditions which are encompassed by God’s salvific will. According to the latter, therefore, these changes are part of the Church’s ongoing attempts to develop newer visions of the relation of the gospel to the world. For instance, a ‘background paper’ produced by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India in 1994 noted the need for a new ecclesiology suited to the complex Indian contexts of religious diversity, socio-economic exploitation, and poverty, and stated: ‘This search is a sign of the growing maturity of the church and its determination to become a truly local Church’ (Narchison 1996: 216). From an ‘external’ perspective, however, the newly developed sensitivity to and appreciation for other religious streams do not sound sincere enough, and the Church’s involvement in contextualisation, interculturation, and dialogue seem to be desperate moves on its part for survival. Indeed referring to the conciliar document Nostra Aetate from Vatican II Goel notes with heavy irony that it has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to realise that there is indeed in Hinduism and Buddhism a ‘ray of that truth that enlightens all men’ (Goel 1989: iv). An individual who carried out such indigenisation, Bede Griffiths (1906–93), a Benedictine monk, was sharply criticised by Swami Devananda Saraswati who believed that Griffiths was ‘masquerading’ as a Hindu sannyāsin in a Christian ashram, and argued that the very phrase ‘Christian sannyāsin’ was a contradiction in terms. Christianity, he wrote in one reply to Griffiths, has always followed a principle of ‘subvert and conquer’ in its relations with other religions, and Griffiths was engaged in a similar ‘imperial’ activity: ‘By trying to justify your position as it is now, you impugn Hinduism, slur sannyasa, rout reason, ruin meaning, mutilate categories . . . and generally present an argument that is oxymoronic’ (Quoted in Goel 1989: 357). One line of response to Saraswati – and other critics of Christian ashrams – would be to question the assumption that Hinduism is a monolithic block, with no internal strands that could resonate with elements of other traditions and no spaces for creative engagement with them. The first attempt to set up a Christian ashram was not by a ‘foreign’ priest but by Brahmabandhab Upadhyay at Jabalpur at the turn of the last century, followed by N. V. Tilak at Satara in 1917, and others (Fernando and Gispert-Sauch 2004: 316). However, in mobilisations of Hindu identity, Hinduism is put forward as a syndicated structure with specific doctrinal beliefs, canonical texts, and styles of worship or meditation, and such ‘inventions of tradition’ amount to nativisms that occlude the exploitative nature of traditional cultural forms (Appiah 1991). The political constructions of Hindutva seek to impart a timeless quality to the Hindu nation by claiming its unbroken

152 Donning the saffron robe cultural continuity from the Vedic past to the modern times, during which its standard-holders are said to have heroically fought and resisted the onslaughts of the Muslim, and later the British, invaders. In fact, though the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh claims that it is rooted in the traditional ethos of Hinduism, the notion of Hindutva, which implies that there is an essence called ‘Hinduness’ or ‘the beingness of a Hindu’ is of fairly recent origin, popularised in the 1890s and then given a canonical form by V. D. Savarkar (Bhatt 2001: 77). These ‘panIndian’ notions of Hindu identity are often the result of an over-emphasis on the centralising, Sanskritising forces at work in the Indian subcontinent, and a failure to sufficiently highlight the numerous de-Sanskritising elements operating, for instance, in Tamil Vais.n.avism which extols the Tamil Veda as the revelation for those beyond the norms of the Sanskrit Veda, movements in both medieval and contemporary India which are based on vernacular literatures, and so on (Hardy 1995). Consequently, a nostalgia for lost Hindu origins which seeks to recover realms of pristine experience or layers of uncorrupted tradition overlooks the vital fact that such dimensions have already been criss-crossed by the manifold strands of precolonial and colonial power. In contrast to such ‘essentialist’ readings of Hindu unity, social anthropological studies have often noted how individuals have developed their localised definitions of ‘Hinduisms’ in multiple contextualised locations against a wider background that is structured by perceptions of religious otherness. They have emphasised that religious boundaries sometimes intersect or overlap, and when individuals or groups seek to cross them, the dynamics of such interactions can involve various types of encounter such as conflict, polemic, appropriation, assimilation, cooperation, dialogue, and so on. For instance, in a study of Sindhi Hindu communities in Lucknow, Steven Ramey notes that they worshipped ‘Hindu’ deities such as Lakshmi and revered the Vedas, and also venerated Guru Nanak and several Sufi saints, which the ‘dominant definition’ of Sikhism and Islam places outside the official boundaries of Hinduism (Ramey 2007: 10). Because a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib had been installed in the Hindu temple, it looked more like a Sikh gurdwara, and the community faced pressure from the surrounding environment to define more sharply the contours of its ‘Hindu’ identity. In response, the management committee changed the name of the temple to Hari Om Mandir and added a copy of the Bhagavad-gītā to the Guru Granth Sahib. At the same time, as we noted in Chapter 4, the vocabulary of ‘subversion and conquest’ was often utilised also by missionary groups at least till the end of the nineteenth century, when a missionary’s primary task was regarded as bringing, through the proclamation of the gospel to non-European lands, greater numbers into the Church. For instance, in the Catholic traditions during the pre-Vatican II days, conversion was often regarded as a numerical affair, and the numbers of baptisms, confessions, and communions were the indices of evangelisation. Missionaries were the ‘shock troops’ who received their orders from the European centres where mission theology and priorities were decided (Shorter 1972: 21). Not only did this lead to the notions of the ‘Church’ as a heavily organised and institutional structure set over and against the ‘world’, and as a sacred enclave of

Donning the saffron robe 153 spirituality marked off from a profane neighbourhood, but also the expansion of the ‘Church’ was largely viewed in numerical terms as the ingathering of greater numbers through the communication of doctrinal truths which demanded intellectual assent. As a consequence, missionary activity often appeared to those to whom the message of Christ was proclaimed as ‘an act of spiritual aggression by an outside agent, a forced imposition of something unwanted, or at best . . . an act of paternalism and condescension on the part of those who “have” towards the “have-nots”’ (Amalorpavadass 1973: 35). In the following sections, we shall discuss some of the changing trends in ‘mission’ in the Indian context that were shaped by ongoing theological reflections on three specific themes: the relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’, Christian attitudes to the religions of the world, and the purpose of Christian ‘mission’.

The changing view of mission Theologians of mission have sometimes been divided into the two groups of the ‘evangelicals’ and the ‘ecumenicals’. The evangelicals believe that the primary, and often the sole, purpose of missionary activity is evangelisation, and are critical of the attempt to bring engagements with social and political institutions under the umbrella of ‘mission’. For them, mission springs from Christ’s commandment (Matthew 28: 19–20) to reach out to those ‘lost’ individuals who, mired in their sinfulness, live under the sway of the ‘prince of this world’ (John 16: 11), and shall perish in hell unless they receive the message of Christ, respond to it, and are gradually weaned away from the ‘world’. Though they are often, as a matter of fact, actively involved in educational and medical enterprises, they believe that social reformation takes place after the individual’s return to Christ. The ecumenicals, on the other hand, claim that the primary focus of God’s concern is not the individual (whether or not she is Christian) but the entirety of the world, so that the Church’s mission lies in the ‘humanisation’ of society through the creation of ‘authentic’ humanity. The Church therefore views the world not as an alien zone to be invaded but as the worldwide field where it becomes God’s co-worker in various types of socio-political movements. These intra-Christian debates over the nature and significance of ‘mission’ recurred throughout the international missionary conferences from Edinburgh 1910 through Jerusalem 1928 to Willingen 1952, and beyond. The Edinburgh conference of 1910 under the guidance of John Mott believed that the ‘Christian world’ was standing in the fullness of time and had received its mandate, through various providential ‘signs of the times’ such as the rapid communications between the countries of the world, an increasing involvement with missions in the European nations, and the birth of the younger churches in Asia and Africa, to move into the ‘non-Christian world’ and incorporate it within the progressive unfolding of the Kingdom of God. Referring to the profusion of military terminology in its documents, David Bosch writes that Edinburgh conceived of the relationship between the Christian and the non-Christian nations as one of apostolic imperialism: ‘the “Christian” world had to subdue the “non-Christian”’ (Bosch 1980: 160). The confidence in the superiority of western

154 Donning the saffron robe civilisation over others was shaken by the experiences of the first world war and the Russian revolution, and this led the delegates at Jerusalem in 1928 to move away from Edinburgh’s utilisation of the symbol of the cross in the Constantinian terms of conquest, and instead view it as a symbol of service to Christ. The ‘younger churches’ were now seen as active participants with the ‘older European churches’, and the former were to be the centres from which missionary enterprise would be be directed. Indeed, at the council in Tambaram (1939: vol. 3, 412), the term ‘foreign mission’ was regarded as outdated, and evangelism was declared to be a task that the entire Church would conduct for the whole world. By the time of the council at Willingen in 1952, two important themes, especially related to ‘mission’, had emerged. First, it was the triune God who was the source of the ‘great commission’ (Matthew 28: 16–20) to proclaim the message of redemption through Christ (Goodall 1953: 190). Second, the council declared that as the Church carries out its mission in witness to God’s action in the world, it cannot stand detached from it, for Christ identified himself wholly with humanity. Therefore, rejecting any geographical-historical distinctions between ‘the Christian west’ and the ‘non-Christian east’, Willingen called upon all Christians to be ‘God’s ambassadors’ to their neighbours and to participate in the universal task of proclaiming the lordship of Christ. As the Indian Christian theologian P. D. Devanandan put it around this time: ‘the missionary programme . . . is of God’s initiative and planning, and those who believe in this great news [of salvation in Christ] cannot refrain from sharing this knowledge with others who do not know of it and of its significance for man [sic]’ (Devanandan 1952: 179). The centrality of witnessing to Christ as the purpose of ‘mission’ which is now directed to all individuals was reaffirmed by the International Missionary Council (1962: 85–6) at New Delhi in 1961. The report of the ‘Section on Witness’ declared: ‘It is not we who take Christ to men [and women], but Christ himself who gives us to them as the agents of his own work amongst them’. We shall discuss two primary modes of engaging with the religious others, namely, interreligious dialogue and inculturation, that Christian figures in India have developed in line with these understandings of ‘mission’ as a movement propelled by God to share the gospel.

Mission and interreligious dialogue Interreligious dialogue has emerged as a distinctive enterprise within several Christian denominations. In 1983, the World Council of Churches stated that dialogue was not a denial of Christian witness but rather ‘a mutual venture [among people] to bear witness to each other and the world, in relation to different perceptions of ultimate reality’ (Gill 1983: 40). Such dialogue, of course, is marked by a tension because a dialogical approach to the members of other religious traditions requires that one cultivate an attitude of respect towards them even while one affirms the truth of one’s own view. In an ‘ideal dialogic condition’, not marked by any radical power asymmetries, conversations that ensue will be freeended, and identities will be forged and reformulated (Visvanathan 1998: 11). Such dialogical encounters can simultaneously bridge the distance between the

Donning the saffron robe 155 participants and also reveal their otherness to one another, so that in the mutual search for understanding the participants move dialectically across their standpoints, trying to see both the similarities and the differences (Olson 2002: 5). As Paul Mojzes puts it, dialogue is: A way by which persons or groups of different persuasions respectfully and responsibly relate to one another in order to bring about mutual enrichment without removing essential differences between them. Dialogue is both a verbal and an attitudinal mutual approach which includes listening, sharing ideas, and working together despite the continued existence of real differences and tensions. (Quoted in Race 2008: 156) To some extent, the dialogical situation can benefit from the phenomenological attitude which seeks, as far as possible, not to judge the phenomena under observation through any preconceived notions, and rejects both the ‘naturalist’ view that religion is an epiphenomenon of socio-psychological causes and the ‘exclusivist’ claim that truth is associated with only one religion. The phenomenological approach is centred around the notion that the exercise of a suspension (epoché) or bracketing out of (value) judgements would enable its student to grasp the essence (Wesen) of the phenomena under investigation (Kristensen 1960). However, it has been argued that the extension of the phenomenological epoché to interreligious dialogue is, in fact, not appropriate, for dialogue does not require the participants to ‘bracket out’ their ultimate convictions. Indeed, as Raimundo Panikkar notes, regarding an individual who claims she can meet her dialogical partners without spelling out her commitments, ‘Does this not betray an almost pathological attachment to my “faith”, such a fear of losing it that I dare not risk it, but prefer instead to preserve it under lock and key?’ (Panikkar 1978: 49–50). Therefore, in order to enter into dialogue with, say, Hindus or Buddhists, a Christian does not need to abandon her Christology, just as she does not demand Hindus to become Christians or Buddhists to become theists as a prior requirement (Lochhead 1988: 93). Whatever may be the limitations of a phenomenological approach in the field of interreligious dialogue, it correctly notes that a basic prerequisite for dialogue is that the participants have ‘situated’ themselves in each other’s religious traditions (Coward 1996: 108). For instance, Swami Abhishiktananda reports that a Hindu resident in an ashram in south India was surprised to learn that some Christian priests practise meditation, and even more so that Jesuits devote a few hours every day to mental prayer (Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 17). On the other hand, a nun who had been in India for more than fifty years was surprised on learning that Hindu gurus try to bring their pupils towards the spiritual disciplines of meditating on the divine presence within, and exclaimed, ‘But these are things that we nuns are expected to do only after a long life of penance and meditation!’. Her interlocutor replied, ‘If that is so, Mother, I am sorry to say that Hindus begin just where you Christian nuns end!’ (Quoted in Swami Abhishiktananda 1971: 42).

156 Donning the saffron robe Such dialogues between Christian and Hindu have been characterised, specifically from a Christian perspective, as forms of spiritual discernment which demand a willingness to listen to the other, not to launch a new assault on the other’s position but to recognise the voice of Christ speaking through the other. The dialogical partner is seen primarily as an individual who is created in the image of God and already in some relationship to God – though, to be sure, this characterisation may not be accepted by the partner herself – and only secondarily as a member of a ‘religion’ or an inhabitant of a ‘culture’ (Wright 1984: 5). In other words, interreligious dialogue in depth, in the view of G. Gispert-Sauch, is not merely a human exchange about religion or religious experiences, but an opening up to the illumining and transforming word of God who is also a dialogical partner in what is, in truth, a triangular conversation (Gispert-Sauch 1973). Nevertheless, the open-endedness of the dialogical process can often get stifled by disputes over the ‘scandal of particularity’, namely, the view that Christ stands as the focus of the history of salvation. Our understanding, developed in Chapter 6, of the analytical connection between the diagnosis of the human condition (as sin) and the ultimate destiny of humanity (as salvation through God in Christ) seems to lead to the doctrine of hell, which implies that a huge proportion of human beings are condemned to perdition. As John Hick notes, if human beings can attain salvation only through a response of faith to Christ, ‘[i]t would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men [and women] has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?’ (Hick 1977: 180). While certain streams of Christian thought have indeed accepted this implication, current rethinking of the doctrine of hell in terms of everlasting punishment has emphasised that there is no necessary connection between the failure to respond to Christ – whether through ignorance, wilfulness, and so on – and eternal damnation. Indeed, one of the most debated questions in Christian theology has been the destiny of human beings who were born, in a chronological sense, before the Christ-event or who have died after the Christ-event but without an opportunity to come into a direct contact with the gospel. Some influential versions of ‘universalism’ have been developed, which hold that when in post mortem existence the delusions about the Christian God are removed, all human beings will freely choose to respond to the God of love, and accept the offer of salvation (Talbott 2001). An Augustinian–Calvinist position would affirm that a significant number of human beings will not receive such a gracious offer, but many contemporary theologians reject the doctrine of predestination, which is only one possible conception of divine providence (Hasker 1989). Even on an Augustinian–Calvinist understanding of predestination, however, individuals on earth do not know whether they belong to the company of the elect or the damned, so that even such a theological determinism does not imply that salvation in the Christian understanding is ‘automatic’ in the sense that Ram Swarup believes it is: ‘[t]here is a ready-made God, and a ready-made saviour, a ready-made deputy of him on the earth, and a Church to take care of all your spiritual concerns. You believe and obey and

Donning the saffron robe 157 the rest is automatic’ (Swarup 1995: 26–7). In fact, the Christian traditions have been shaped by themes such as the agonised soul-searching of Martin Luther for whom the God revealed on and through the cross is also the hidden God (Deus absconditus) (McGrath 1990); the ‘dark night’ of the soul experienced by many of the Roman Catholic mystics (Turner 1995); and the ‘sickness unto death’ and the ‘fear and trembling’ of the brooding Dane, Soren Kierkegaard. Therefore, Lesslie Newbigin criticises the view that Christians can have access to the divine judgement: ‘I confess that I am astounded at the arrogance of theologians who seem to think that we are authorized, in our capacity as Christians, to inform the rest of the world about who is to be vindicated and who is to be condemned at the last judgment . . . ’ (Newbigin 1989: 177).

Christian particularity and mission The debates over ‘universalism’ indicate that the question of how to work out the connection between Jewish particularity – the origins of the Christian faith in a small group of people with a sense of divine election – and the mandate to preach the good news to all human beings, remains one of the most intensely debated matters in Christian theology. Indian Christian theologians have been particularly concerned to develop a Christology that avoids the implication that Christ is a ‘tribal god’ for the Christians who stands over and against the ‘gods’ of the other nations. In the place of such ‘triumphalism’, they have sought to develop theologies for interreligious dialogues which will be marked by a genuine openness towards the vitality of religious experiences within communities that are characterised by distinctive truth-claims (Samartha 1981: 29). Such a Christian dialogical approach to the other religions would steer clear of the twin errors of an ‘uncritical assimilation’ which obliterates their otherness as well as an ‘uncritical imperialism’ which consigns them to the realm of the demoniac. For instance, Gavin D’Costa has tried to utilise certain internal resources of the Christian tradition, especially relating to the doctrine of the Trinity, to hold together in a creative tension two fundamental axioms of mainline Christianity: first, that salvation is God’s gift to humanity through Christ alone, and, second, that the salvific will of God is universal (D’Costa 1986: 136). The doctrine of the Trinity, as D’Costa expounds it, affirms that the transcendent God who seeks the salvation of all humanity has become incarnate in the individual Jesus of Nazareth in a specific historical context, and, moreover, is actively present as the Holy Spirit in the contingencies of the world, sanctifying it on its pilgrimage towards God. Therefore, though Christ’s revelation is definitive in the sense that it is through Christ alone that Christians approach God, the sovereign freedom of the transcendent God that they worship cannot be ‘domesticated’ into their ecclesiastical organisations or doctrinal formulations. Because the Spirit blows where it wills, God is actively present in the entirety of history, searching out human hearts for their responses, and this in turn implies that the Christian discourse must contain hospitable spaces where members of the other religions are actively welcomed and their narratives heard with attentiveness. This implies that interreligious

158 Donning the saffron robe dialogue is not the specialised concern of missionaries or those with specialised training in languages; rather, all Christians are called to loving dialogue with their neighbours (D’Costa 1990: 20). D’Costa seeks to distinguish his position from the view that the elements of truth and goodness in other religions are absorbed into a fully-formed Christianity; instead, he argues that ‘[t]he logic of my argument requires that it is unambiguously acknowledged that . . . the church itself is fulfilled in its meeting with other religions . . . It is fulfilled through the process of repentance and purification which may follow the hearing of God’s word from other religions’ (D’Costa 1994: 178). For an instance of how D’Costa’s argument was lived out in the last century in the contexts of Hindu–Christian dialogue, we may turn to two French Benedictines, Jules Monchanin (1895–1957) and Swami Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) (1910–73) who sought to ‘integrate’ the streams of Advaitic wisdom with Christian spirituality. While Monchanin held the view that D’Costa rejects – that Advaita would be fulfilled by Christianity – Swami Abhishiktananda, according to Catherine Cornille, viewed ‘the values and truths present in the tradition of Advaita Vedānta not merely as partial and provisional, but as prophetic, and ready to transform Christianity’ (Cornille 1991: 79). Consequently, dialogue and mission, understood as sharing the good news of what God has, according to the Christian account, ‘objectively’ wrought in Christ, need not be seen as mutually opposed. Indeed, from a Christian standpoint, the knowledge that life is graced by the love that God has for humanity is the source of happiness, and ‘to communicate this happiness is to evangelize . . . What is received freely, should be given freely, as the Gospel says’ (Gutierrez 1999: 32). The material content of these claims might be contested or rejected by Hindus, which again highlights the point that one of the central issues in Hindu–Christian dialogical encounters is the conflict over basic presuppositions over ‘what there is’, and the status and the significance of human existence within this deep reality (Newbigin 1977: 265).

Debating interculturation If the comparatively recent emphasis on dialogue with ‘people of other faiths’, itself associated with the newer understandings of ‘mission’ outlined above, has led to a rethinking of the status of the other religions in God’s providential economy, the concurrent debates over ‘inculturation’ have produced an enormous literature on the relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’. Inculturation is understood as the process by which the Christian faith which is enclothed in the conceptual elements and the symbolic patterns distinctive to one culture enters into a dynamic dialogue with those of another, so that the Christian message brings about a creative transformation within the latter and itself undergoes a transformation (Shorter 1988: 10–12). As the Vatican document, Gaudium et Spes, declared: In his self-revelation to his people culminating in the fullness of manifestation in his incarnate Son, God spoke according to the culture proper to each age . . . Nevertheless, the Church has been sent to all ages and nations and,

Donning the saffron robe 159 therefore, is not tied exclusively and indissolubly to any race or nation . . . The Church is faithful to its tradition and is at the same time conscious of its universal mission; it can, then, enter into communion with different forms of culture, thereby enriching both itself and the cultures themselves. (quoted in Shorter 1988: 202) The crucial term here, of course, is ‘culture’, which Clifford Geertz defines as a ‘system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men [and women] communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life’ (Geertz 1975: 89). As we noted in Chapter 4, many early missionaries failed to distinguish properly between the Christian gospel and the European ‘inherited conceptions’, so that the Christianisation and the Europeanisation of the natives were practically indistinguishable for them (Boyd 1974: 59–72). However, it would be mistaken to suppose that by freeing Christianity from its European robes we can have immediate access to a ‘pure Christianity’, if what this means is a Christianity that exists prior to culture or history. This is because the gospel has been communicated through the channels of human interpretation and evaluation, and embedded in diverse cultural forms (Wiles 1992: 30). Jaroslav Pelikan has demonstrated that Christ has been viewed through a number of images down the centuries that have varied with the socio-cultural contexts from within which human beings have sought to approach him. With the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine, Christ was worshipped as the ‘King of Kings’, the widespread use of icons in the Byzantine Church spurred an interest in the theology of Christ as the ‘true image of God’, and during the great monastic centuries of the medieval world Christ was the ‘ideal monk who rules the world’. The Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus saw in Christ the ‘Universal Man’ in whom the thought of the classical Platonists had reached a fulfilment, Enlightenment influenced figures such as Thomas Jefferson viewed Christ as the ‘Teacher of common sense’ who had purified the superstitious religion of his times, and the lives of twentieth century figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were significantly shaped by their perceptions of ‘Christ as the Liberator’ of human beings from oppression (Pelikan 1985: 206–19). To ‘inculturate’ the gospel in an Indian context, therefore, would mean that just as Christ has been viewed and appropriated through numerous European perspectives, so too can Christ be presented through the indigenous resources of the Indian traditions. Over the last century, Christ has been viewed through such resources as an avatāra, a yogi, a sādhu, and so on (Boyd 1975). An early attempt can be observed in Keshab Chunder Sen’s remark that Jesus Christ and his disciples were in fact ‘Asiatics’, a call was later picked up by Indian Christians. His contemporary K. M. Banerjea famously argued that the Vedic notion of a ‘saving sacrifice’, in which the sacrificer is both the priest and the victim (prajāpati), was a presentiment of the Christian doctrine of the atonement. Referring to Christ as the ‘true Prajāpati’, he asked: ‘On what grounds can a Hindu advocate demand the ostracism of those who, by accepting Christianity, are only accepting a Vedic

160 Donning the saffron robe doctrine in its legitimately developed form?’ (Philip 1982: 200). Another early example is that of Samuel Stokes who arrived in India in 1904 and was initially engaged in educational work in the foothills of the Himalayas, before a vision in 1906 of Christ trudging barefoot on an Indian road led him to imitate, in the style of St Francis, the humanity of Christ. He began to live as a Franciscan friar, as a ‘brother of his fellow-men’, with the conviction that his task was to aspire towards the Franciscan ideals of poverty and service to those suffering from cholera, leprosy, and smallpox. After negotiations with the Church Missionary Society, Stokes was accepted as a missionary in 1908, and in 1910, his Franciscan brotherhood within the Anglican communion was inaugurated in Lahore with five brothers, including Sundar Singh who lived as a Christian sādhu. Nevertheless, in August 1911, he announced that he would leave the brotherhood, marry an Indian woman, and if he had children bring them up ‘absolutely as Indians in their manner of life, language, dress and education’ (Emilsen 1998: 104). The reasons he gave for this decision were, firstly, that the brotherhood’s work could perpetuate the mistaken understanding that true religious existence required the rejection of familial and social connections; secondly, since Christianity was the religion of the God who became incarnate in humanity, Christians are urged to find the divine in and through their humanity; and, thirdly, not only did he take his own marriage as symbolic of his repudiation of racism but also he believed that other Christian missionaries should be open to intermarriages with Indians which would be a sign of their condemnation of both caste and racism. With James Long, we see a similar set of themes centred around inculturation: an emphasis on dissolving the British hauteur of being ‘the dominant race’ and the view that Christianity had to be preached not merely through doctrinal formulations but also through deeds. In 1860, he provoked a storm of protest with the publication of an address where he made some scathing criticisms of the European indigo planters in Bengal. The editor of the Bengal Hurkaru in particular was dismayed that Long had praised ‘every writer not English’, had declared the Bible to be an Oriental book and Akbar to have been more enlightened than most sovereigns of Britain, and had repeated the native opinion that 200 million people were being ruled not for their welfare but for the benefit of a handful of Europeans (Oddie 1999: 96). In his response in the Calcutta Christian Intelligencer in August 1860, Long tried to refute the charge that he had lost sight of his specifically Christian task of spreading the gospel. He claimed that through his engagement in secular activities, he was trying to foster relationships of friendship between the missionaries and the Hindus, and it was only after the prejudices that the latter might harbour against the former were removed that they would become responsive to the Christian message. The oppositional stances that Long developed to the dominant missionary orthodoxy in these early attempts at inculturation can also be seen in Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, who declared that though in matters concerning social manners, customs, modes of perception and practices he was a genuine Hindu, he had become a Roman Catholic through baptism, and that in the sphere of his universal Christian faith, which embraced all nations, races, and truths, he was neither

Donning the saffron robe 161 Hindu, nor Chinese, nor European. He believed that Roman Catholicism should discard its European clothes and should put on garments more acceptable to the Hindus of his time. To bring about this transformation groups of Indian missionaries should preach the Christian faith in Vedāntic language and live a life of holy poverty along the lines of Hindu asceticism: ‘In short, we are Hindus so far as our physical and mental constitution is concerned, but in regard to our immortal souls we are Catholic. We are Hindu Catholic’ (Lipner and GispertSauch 1991–2002: vol. 1, 24–5). Therefore, while the emphasis on inculturation has received official approval at the highest reaches of the Roman Catholic Church only fairly recently, the moves to indigenise the gospel have significant Indian antecedents that date back to the late nineteenth century. The word ‘inculturation’, however, seems to imply a one-directional flow of Christianity from one cultural form to another, and for this reason some theologians prefer to use the term ‘interculturation’ to emphasise the mutuality through which the inhabitants of the two cultures seek to develop local cultural expressions of the Christian faith (Shorter 1988: 13–15). However, the specific details of how this interculturation is to be carried out will, of course, remain a matter of intense contestation, given that Christian theologians have sharply disagreed over the question of whether nature has been so thoroughly effaced by the effects of sin that there is no ‘point of contact’ between God and humanity outside the sphere of the Christian revelation, or whether unregenerated nature nevertheless has some minimal capacities to respond to divine grace. By and large, the Protestant traditions, on the basis of the Reformed doctrine of sola gratia, tend to reject the notion of a general revelation in terms of divine redemptive action in the human heart as long as it is not graced by Christ. In contrast, Roman Catholic theologians have often argued that the realm of nature, though it contains varying degrees of error because of original sin, encompasses certain grace-filled elements (Cairns 1973). As a representative of the former, we can consider H. Netland who writes that though we may find elements of goodness, beauty, and truth in other religions, a Christian position cannot regard the latter as a part of God’s providence because this diversity is, in fact, an effect of the fall and sin (Netland 2001: 345–6). For a representative of the second group, we may turn to Karl Rahner who argues that we should dissolve the either/or dilemma that a Christian must view the non-Christian religions either as absolutely corresponding in all its elements to God’s saving will or as nothing but a construction of human perversity. According to Rahner, these religions should be regarded as legitimate to the extent that they help to bring their members into a correct relationship with God within the providential plan of salvation (Rahner 1966: 125). As for the British missionaries in India, though in their self-understanding they were ‘Protestants’, they sometimes veered towards views with a ‘Catholic’ tinge. B. F. Westcott was deeply influenced by the Johannine strand of Christianity, which emphasised that the transcendent God was at the same time immanently present in the innermost core of all beings, enlivening and sanctifying the material realm. Westcott, whose vision was later translated into the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, believed that there were traces of the divine word throughout the creation,

162 Donning the saffron robe and as Christianity would move eastwards it would discover more of these signs and add new elements to help Christians to arrive at a more complete apprehension of divine truth (Maw 1990: 177).

Mission and the products of interculturation The internal diversity of Christian positions on the theological significance of religious plurality – whether the non-Christian religions are merely natural constructs or whether they have some grace-filled elements – is integrally connected to the diversity of Christian views on the precise relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’. Indeed, as Reinhold Niebuhr notes, various types of associations, polarisations, oppositions, affirmations, and denials are possible as Christians seek to relate themselves to the world of ‘culture’. He outlines five fundamental responses to this problem that have played a crucial role in the history of Christianity: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture (Niebuhr 1952: 190–229). This diversity of views partly explains why an ‘official’ answer to the question of whether the religions of the world, with the different cultural formations within which they are located, are salvifically efficacious has been avoided. Arun Shourie reads Vatican II as acknowledging the possibility that non-Christians may attain salvation through their religions, and asks: ‘if salvation is possible in each religion, what is the ground for conversion?’ (Shourie 1994: 213). However, in his reading of some Vatican II documents such as Nostra Aetate, D’Costa concludes that they are silent on the question as to whether the non-Christian religions per se are channels for supernatural revelation. He argues that this silence is intentionally maintained to avoid any a priori pronouncements on these religions. On the one hand, Nostra Aetate declared that the truths (vera) in the non-Christian religions are ‘a ray of that truth (Veritas) which enlightens all men [and women]’, but, on the other, it states that the fullness of life is to be found in the truth which is Christ himself (Flannery 1975: 739). The silence has been construed by theologians in two divergent ways depending on their presuppositions concerning the relationship between nature and grace: those who emphasise a close relationship between the two are usually of the opinion that the documents affirm the possibility that nonChristian religions could be salvific structures, while those who envisage a sharper distinction between the two reject the former opinion (D’Costa 2000: 102). Given the interstitial position of the churches, engaged in the difficult task of negotiating the relation between ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’, it is not surprising that a number of social anthropological studies of Christian communities in India have brought out both the continuities with the non-Christian environments that linger on in the lives of the converts as well as the discontinuities that emerge gradually in their new practices through the appropriation of Christian religious symbols. The processes of interculturation, where the terms of the ‘alien’ language are translated into those of the receiving language, are fraught with the possibilities of distortion and miscommunication since both the terms are embedded in distinct systems of meanings. Therefore, interculturation is an ongoing

Donning the saffron robe 163 and never-completed process where the terms are expanded, altered, and put to new uses. For instance, in a sociological study of ‘lived Christianity’ carried out among a number of Roman Catholic households in a village in southern Goa, Rowena Robinson has highlighted a series of creative ‘Christianisations’ of the life-cycle rituals of birth, marriage, and death, and argued that Roman Catholicism exists in relationships of accommodation of as well as resistance to the indigenous locale in matters such as kinship patterns, festal calendars, caste taboos, and social stratification (Robinson 1998: 181). Similarly, in a study carried out among Christians from the Wadiaram Pastorate of the Medak diocese in the Church of South India, it was discovered that many Christians had a Hindu and a (baptismal) Christian name, kept images of household goddesses, enacted stories from the Purān.as, often had spouses from a Hindu background, and participated in a variety of Hindu and Muslim religious festivals (Luke and Carman 1968: 165–89). Such studies highlight the point that Indian Christianity is spread over a ‘messy terrain’ where religious identities and borders are not always sharply defined but are subject to negotiation. Indian Christians in different parts of the country have adopted and assimilated rituals that are usually labelled ‘Hindu’, struggled with class and caste inequalities, and blended their local Christianities with the ‘orthodox’ doctrines of the churches. For instance, both Hindu and Christian pilgrims to the shrine of the Portuguese missionary John de Britto (d. 1696) refer to the saint as their family deity, and the hair-shaving rituals and the goat sacrifices at the shrine are similar to the practices at some Hindu temples (Raj 2002). Similarly, in the village of Avur in Tamil Nadu, an image of the risen Christ is carried on a wooden chariot along the streets in a procession similar to Hindu chariot festivals. However, while the Avur chariot is virtually identical to its Hindu counterpart, and its construction draws upon layers of shared Hindu–Christian symbolism, the differences between the Christian festival and the Hindu procession are marked subtly – the colours for the cloth and the paint are ‘Christian’ colours, the images are draped with roses and marigolds but not the ‘Hindu’ lotus, and the top of the chariot carries a cross (Waghorne 2002). To reiterate a theme that we discussed in Chapter 5, conversions are dynamic transactions between older identities and newer reconfigurations, and conversions to Indian Christianities too are not usually marked by a ‘total break’. Rather they involve various processes located on a continuum between oscillation between the new and the old identities, consolidation of the new faith, and even retroversion to some elements of the past. In the case of some Dalit Christians in Bihar, on the one hand, propitiations of spirits and ghosts have been replaced by prayers to the Christian God, and marriage customs which conflicted with Christian beliefs have been discarded, and, on the other, certain traditions such as playing the drum, dancing, and performance of the Chhat puja have been partially retained. Likewise among the Dalit Christians in Jharkhand, ‘religious’ practices opposed to the Christian faith have been rejected while ‘cultural’ forms which do not conflict with Christian understandings have been retained. Sometimes non-Christian Sarna beliefs have been partially replaced by Christian analogues, and in some cases there have been re-evaluations of previously eliminated beliefs which have

164 Donning the saffron robe been re-adopted. One such case of retroversion is the use of (‘Hindu’) vermillion which was earlier rejected as being associated with Sarna religiosity, but has now been revived as it is not held to be in conflict with Christianity (Kalapura 2010).

Mission and Hindu inclusivism Once again, an ‘external’ versus an ‘internal’ perspective on these sociological findings will tend to diverge. From some Christian standpoints, they reflect the dangers of interculturation as the Church, while seeking to remain faithful to its traditions, enters into different forms of culture. From a Hindu perspective, however, which does not accept the Christian claim that Christ is the central axis around which salvation history revolves, the ‘Vatican II–shift’ might still seem to retain vestiges of a religious imperialism. In his comments on Hans Küng’s Freedom Today (1966) Bibhuti Yadav notes the shift from the earlier condemnations of non-Christian religions as expressions of human self-seeking to the affirmation that they too are located within a supernatural order so that they possess elements of the truth. However, Yadav detects in such talk about a ‘special revelation’ or a ‘special covenant’ not only a projection of a community’s collective wish to assert its uniqueness, but also the ‘naively ridiculous’ conception of a God who has established, on the one hand, the equality of all human beings, but who has, on the other, revealed Godself more conclusively to the dwellers of Bethlehem than to those of, say, Benares. Yadav believes that the imperious claims that Küng announces concerning uniqueness, speciality, and so forth can be traced to Christianity’s ‘redemptive universalism’, that is, its conviction that all human beings are involved in a quest for redemption (Yadav 1990). In terms of our discussion in Chapter 6, we can see that Yadav touches on a ‘raw nerve’ of the Christian message – how to make sense of the supposed special revelation of the God with a universal purpose for all humanity. Already in 1844, an article in the Tattvabodhini Patrika, published by the Brahmo Samaj, referred to Christians who ‘profess to believe that they alone are the select and beloved children of our common Almighty Father’, and commented: We thank the great Architect of the universe that such are not our own doctrines, – that it is, on the contrary, our chiefest source of comfort and happiness, firmly to believe, and zealously to inculcate, that all [hu]mankind are morally and spiritually equal in the eye of a beneficent, an impartial, and an eternal Deity. (Hatcher 2008: 95) More recently, this ‘particularity’ has been read by Arun Shourie as a demonstration of the ‘self-obsession’ of the Christian God which is passed on to the Son and the Church (Shourie 2000: 360–70). However, as we have pointed out in Chapter 6, the crucial debate here is not so much over religious imperialism – all major world religions, Hindu or otherwise, are based on certain truth-claims which can have ‘exclusivist’ implications – as over whether the version of ‘committed

Donning the saffron robe 165 pluralism’ which is rooted in the Christ-event is compatible with a recognition that the other religious traditions represent valid, even if partially so, responses to the self-disclosure of the ultimate reality. For instance, while arguing that the term ‘absoluteness’ must be dropped in connection with Christianity for it applies only to the ultimate reality, Jacques Dupuis emphasises at the same time that in order to be faithful to the New Testament witness, the ‘constitutive uniqueness’ of Christ must rest on his personal identity as the Son of God. Therefore, the simultaneity of ‘universality’ and ‘particularity’ must be maintained, according to him, by affirming that Christ continues to be actively present in the ‘saving figures’ of other religions, enlightening and inspiring them, so that they may become ‘pointers to salvation for their followers, in accordance with God’s overall design for humankind’ (Dupuis 1997: 298). Yadav would probably object that Dupuis has universalised his perception of the human predicament in such a manner that only the Church can resolve it, and has subtly incorporated the ‘saving figures’ from elsewhere into the Christian scheme. From a non-Christian perspective which does not view the religious world as revolving around the axis of Christ, Yadav’s criticism would indeed be to the point. However, this perception – of all human beings as entangled in ‘sinfulness’ and of all instances of ‘saving power’ in other religions as somehow mediated through the focus of Christ – is not, so to speak, a subjectivist projection of Dupuis but is rooted in the foundational claim of Christianity, namely, the central event of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the fundamental debate between Yadav and Kung is not over spiritual arrogance but the ‘objectivity’ of the Christian claim that at the centre of ‘salvation history’ stands the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The vital question now is what sort of objective ‘evidence’ one might offer for establishing such a claim, failing which the assertion that the religious experiences of humanity revolve around Christ would indeed seem to be a species of spiritual imperialism sanctified by Shourie’s ‘self-obsessed’ God. However, it is precisely at this point, as we have noted in Chapter 6, that Christian theologians sharply diverge – some adopt the ‘unapologetic’ stance of defending the internal coherence of the Christian position without appealing to any ‘external’ reasons, while others attempt to identify positive reasons for holding their Christian standpoint to be cognitively superior to that of others. Notwithstanding this crucial difference, they usually agree that the centrality of Christ in salvation history cannot be perceived by the untrained eye; indeed, it is only with the ‘eye of faith’ that a believer is able to see the history of Israel as leading up to God’s revelation in Christ and the redemption of the whole world (Cullmann 1952). Once again, therefore, we have an insider–outsider debate, this time over the precise significance of the centrality of Christ in the Christian understanding of history. A neo-Hindu standpoint which does not accept this centrality often regards Christian claims emanating from it as ‘imperialistic’ or ‘paternalistic’, and promoting violence towards other religions. Historically speaking, of course, the claim of ‘Christ at the centre’ has often led to religious violence in the form of numerous inquisitions, wars, and crusades perpetrated on heretics, dissenters, pagans, and infidels. Christian theologians, especially after the Holocaust, have sought to excise these ‘triumphalistic’ elements from the ways in which the

166 Donning the saffron robe Christian message has been presented. The crucial theological challenge, therefore, is to explain how on the one hand, the Christian message revolves around certain events connected with the historical individual called Jesus of Nazareth, but on the other hand, this Jesus the Christ is also the trans-historical centre and the saviour of all humanity (Lowith 1949: 182). From a Hindu perspective such as neo-Advaita, of course, the ‘trans-historical centre’ is not Christ but the intuitive awareness of one’s identity with the transpersonal ultimate, and Dupuis’s claims may be criticised as an ‘imperialistic’ re-construction of the other religions as oriented towards an eschatological fulfilment in Christ. Such a criticism, however, would ignore the vital point that neo-Advaita too is based on its own distinctive reconstruction of these religions – it is able to celebrate their multiplicity only because they are believed to be encompassed by the one transpersonal reality. For instance, Swami Vivekananda believed that Advaita Vedānta was the ‘universal religion’ because ‘it teaches principles and not persons. No religion built upon a person can be taken up as a type by all the races of [hu]mankind’ (1972: vol. 3, 250). Swami Vivekananda’s claim is rooted in the Advaitic metaphysical scheme, and its ‘universality’ too is therefore grounded in a ‘particular’ focus, namely, the Advaitic principle of the transpersonal ultimate.

Mission and intercultural dialogue The ongoing debates over processes of interculturation lead us to one of the central questions in Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’: whether any evaluation of the norms and practices embedded in one cultural context is possible which is not perceived by those who inhabit this milieu as an external imposition of alien values. For instance, India is often characterised as a land permeated by an ‘essentially’ mystical ethos, so that the introduction of technology and scientific values is perceived to be a frontal assault on ‘traditional’ Indian values. However, as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum point out, such presentations ignore or marginalise the presence of a multiplicity of not specifically spiritual strands in the Indian traditions. Not only the vigorous arguments between Hindu and Buddhist philosophers over the issues of scepticism and realism, but also the contributions of the classical Indians to mathematics, grammar, medicine, and political analysis, the presence of ‘practical’ concerns in various streams of epic poetry such as the Mahābhārata, the Buddha’s agnostic stance towards metaphysical speculation, and the atheism of the classical Lokāyatas need to be highlighted in greater detail to counter the popular perception of India as a land of ‘unrelieved spirituality’ (Nussbaum and Sen 1989: 305). Even the claim that the Indian philosophical traditions are ‘spiritual’, in the sense that they hold the spiritual dimension alone to be ultimately real, should be properly qualified, for the Jains, the Vaiśes.ikas, the . Śāmkhyas, and also the followers of the Rāmānuja and the Mādhva schools of Vedānta affirm the ontological reality of the material world (Krishna 1991: 3–15). Therefore, given that civilisations such as the Indian are multi-stranded, when they encounter civilisational values from another context, the engagements should be seen as creating both points of contact and locales of contestation. During such

Donning the saffron robe 167 engagements, some members belonging to the first may conclude that the latter does succeed in describing reality more adequately and comprehensively. Such a judgement from an ‘internal’ perspective may be made especially when a tradition arrives at a stage when, by its own standards of rational justification, it fails to make progress in overcoming an ever-increasing number of anomalies and undergoes an epistemological crisis (MacIntyre 1988: 355–64). From within such hermeneutical spaces we can speak of a method of critical evaluation which will be internal because it utilises the resources present within that culture for the purpose of criticism; it is developed through an experienced immersion in the values, perceptions, and practices of that culture; and it is also a genuinely critical stance, subjecting the above to a critical examination (Nussbaum and Sen 1989: 308). Since the indigenisation of the gospel is not a mere conformity to local patterns or structures, but an attempt to bring about a ‘critical evaluation’ of indigenous forms of life, the claim of the churches to effect such modifications in ‘autochthonous’ forms of religiosity has been strongly contested. More specifically, missionaries, because they point to the possibility of another identity grounded in an alternative vision, can often arouse strong opposition from people whom they challenge to undergo a metanoia from native socio-religious practices and beliefs which they suggest are not immutable. Whether rudely or gently, missionaries stand in the way, and through a relationship of tension with indigenous forms of life, they can variously stir and awaken or exasperate and vex those whom they encounter (Burridge 1991). If ‘culture’, which encompasses various aspects of social and individual existence, is a somewhat nebulous term, ‘religion’ is perhaps even more so, so that sifting the ‘religious’ aspects of Hinduism – which are to be transformed – from the ‘cultural’ ones – which may or may not be retained – becomes a disputed matter between the missionaries themselves and their possible converts. According to G. Larson, while religion is closely interrelated with the social and the cultural aspects of existence, it is to be understood also in terms of the development of comprehensive interpretive frameworks that make human life significant and practically workable. More specifically, ‘religionisation’ is the process through which human beings acquire cultural norms and signs which are handed down the generations (enculturation), are socialised into various types of communities (socialisation) and develop some degree of reflexive awareness of the systems of meaning or sacred universes that are provided by one’s culture and social group (Larson 1997: 165–70). Consequently, while conversion is usually associated with a re-orientation of the individual, the question of whether the ‘interculturated’ life the convert enters into involves a ‘religious’ transformation or only a ‘cultural’ change becomes a disputed one. Since the transformations associated with conversion and interculturation concern changes in values, beliefs, and identities towards newer ones, it is precisely the non-indigeneity of the latter that often becomes the point of attack for the critics of these processes. However, as we have noted earlier in our criticisms of nativism, cultures are marked simultaneously by deep continuities over the longe durée and by intensely contested vortices within the wider stream, so that the rejection of an ‘alien’ product merely on grounds of its foreign origin would

168 Donning the saffron robe be too hasty without noting how its alienity has been appropriated. For instance, though the specific vocabulary of ‘human rights’ is new not only to non-European traditions but also to the (post-Reformation) western world itself, the values that it seeks to enshrine, such as life, prohibition of degrading treatment, and equitable sharing of resources, have important cross-cultural resonances. Again, while it is currently fashionable in some academic circles to argue that the nation-state was an alien transplant onto Indian soil, this view sidelines the manifold ways in which figures from the ‘lower’ castes such as Jyotirao Phule creatively appropriated certain elements of post-Enlightenment rationalism in order to mobilise their identities against oppression (Sarkar 2005: 292–93). On their part, Asian Christian theologians have become sensitised to the need to develop modes of reading the Bible which would be responsive to the vocabulary of rights and identities within the south Asian context where millions of decolonised people continue to grapple with manifold complexities, solidarities, and ambiguities. For instance, R. S. Sugirtharajah argues for a mode of biblical interpretation that will go beyond the customary accusations that missionaries have colluded with imperial powers, but will also search out the presence of colonial codes and imperialist assumptions in the very text of the Bible (Sugirtharajah 1999: 4–20). A postcolonial exegesis of this sort will be oriented towards developing strategic solidarities which, though fractured along the lines of language, faith, ethnicity, race, and class, are able to acknowledge these heterogeneities while restraining them from moving towards a pure otherness. Therefore, the vital challenge is to negotiate a path between, on the one hand, rejecting the ethnocentric universalisms propagated by Europe that fail to highlight how people in the ‘third world’ contexts possess multiple identities structured by class, ethnicity, and so on, and, on the other hand, accepting certain forms of nativism that elide the traditional patterns of oppression. As some feminist scholars have pointed out, the proposals of postmodernist figures such as J.-F. Lyotard, that we must wage war against universal reason and instead engage in localised social criticism, are not of much help to those who seek to understand the globalised structures of exploitation. Groups, races, or classes who have been dominated in the past need to know why they have been marginalised and what sorts of systematic transformations are called for if such domination is to be opposed and ultimately overcome (Hartsock 1990: 159–60). Echoing this ‘universalist’ note, most traditions of Christian theology have emphasised that the eschatological community, which will not be split along linguistic, ethnic, or national boundaries, is slowly being built up with the ingathering of people in the Church. In this sense, one may speak of a ‘collective self’ of ecclesial existence, especially given that the biblical narrative of God’s people seeking liberation from bondage is shot through with questions of identity and ethnicity. For instance, in their struggles for identity, Dalit Christian theologians have often spoken of the ‘Dalitness’ of Israel’s condition and the Holy Spirit as the life-giver who empowers the Dalits for their historical struggles (Nirmal 1998: 229). On the other hand, given that this ‘collective self’ looks forward to a supra-historical destiny where these oppressive structures dividing humanity will be broken down, Indian Christian

Donning the saffron robe 169 theologians have also proposed visions and enacted modes of engagement whose ultimate goal is not only to free subjugated groups but also to be a pointer towards the fullness of salvation (Walls 1996). However, these questions about ‘identity’ lead us, in the final chapter, to the contested topic of the location of Christianity in ‘secular’ India. The secular Indian nation-state has been attacked not only by proponents of Hindutva, who argue for a civilisational unity which is circumscribed by certain markers of Hindu identity and is antagonistic to ‘foreign’ religions such as Islam and Christianity, but also sometimes by non–Hindutva intellectuals who have alleged that secularism is a European construct foisted upon the masses by a group of deracinated Anglicised elites. Any Christian intervention into these debates is bound to be complex, given that, on the one hand, Indian Christianity has by now shed its European trappings and become significantly Indianised, but, on the other hand, Indian Christianity (or any other historical form of Christianity) cannot pledge its ultimate allegiance to the nation–state, for such obedience, according to Christian faith, is due to God alone. The Christian commitment to conversion, understood as the spreading of the gospel and building up of the Kingdom, can be seen as rooted in this theological priority of allegiance to the divine over the temporal. The crucial question, therefore, is whether such a priority can be accommodated within the bounds of political secularism, and it will be argued, partly by drawing on the work of certain theorists of multiculturalism, that there is no inherent conflict between the two.

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170 Donning the saffron robe Dupuis, Jacques (1997) Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Emilsen, William (1998) ‘“The Great Gulf Fixed”: Samuel Stokes and the Brotherhood of the Imitation of Jesus’, in Religious Traditions in South Asia, ed. G. A. Oddie, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, pp. 91–106. Fernando, L. and G. Gispert-Sauch (2004) Christianity in India, New Delhi: Viking. Flannery, Austin (ed.) (1975) Vatican Council II, Dublin: Dominican Publications. Gill, David (ed.) (1983) Gathered for Life, Geneva: WCC. Gispert-Sauch, G. (1973) ‘Reflections for a Theology of Evangelization and Dialogue’, in Service and Salvation, ed. J. Pathrapankal, Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, pp. 315–30. Goel, S. R. (1989) History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, New Delhi: Voice of India. Goodall, Norman (ed.) (1953) Missions under the Cross, London: Edinburgh House Press. Gutierrez, Gustavo (1999) ‘The Task and Content of Liberation Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, ed. C. Rowland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–38. Hardy, F. (1995) ‘A Radical Reassessment of the Vedic Heritage – The Ācāryahr.dayam and Its Wider Implications’, in Representing Hinduism, ed. V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 35–41. Hartsock, Nancy (1990) ‘Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’, in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. L. J. Nicholson, Routledge: London, pp. 157–75. Hasker, William (1989) God, Time and Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hatcher, B. A. (2008) Bourgeois Hinduism, or the Faith of the Modern Vedantists, New York: Oxford University Press. Hick, John (1977) ‘Jesus and the World Religions’ in The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick, London: SCM, 167–85. International Missionary Council Meeting At Tambaram (1939), London: Humphrey Milford. Kalapura, Jose (2010) ‘Margins of Faith: Dalits and Tribal Christians in eastern India’, in Margins of Faith, ed. R. Robinson and J. M. Kujur, New Delhi: Sage, pp. 75–96. Krishna, Daya (1991) Indian Philosophy, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kristensen, W. B. (1960) The Meaning of Religion, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoof. Küng, Hans (1966) Freedom Today, New York: Sheed and Ward. 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. Lochhead, David (1988) The Dialogical Imperative, London: SCM. Luke, P. Y. and J. Carman (1968) Village Christians and Hindu Culture, London: Lutterworth Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. Maw, Martin (1990) Visions of India, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. McGrath, Alister (1990) Luther’s Theology of the Cross, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Narchison, J. R. (1996) ‘Missionaries in India: An Appraisal of Arun Shourie’s Book’, in Mission and Conversion, ed. J. Mattam and S. Kim, Mumbai: St Paul’s, pp. 185–219. Netland, Harold (2001) Encountering Religious Pluralism, Leicester: Apollos. Newbigin, Lesslie (1977) ‘The Basis, Purpose and Manner of Inter-Faith Dialogue’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 30, 253–70. Newbigin, Leslie (1989) The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, London: SPCK. The New Delhi Report (1962) London: SCM. Niebuhr, H. R. (1952) Christ and Culture, London: Faber and Faber. Nirmal, A. P. (1998) ‘Towards a Christian Dalit Theology’ in Indigenous People, ed. J. Massey, Delhi: ISPCK, pp. 214–30.

Donning the saffron robe 171 Nussbaum M. C. and A. Sen (1989) ‘Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions’, in Relativism, ed. M. Krausz, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 299–325. Oddie, G. A. (1999) Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-nationalism, Richmond: Curzon. Olson, Carl (2002) Indian Philosophers and Postmodern Thinkers, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Panikkar, Raimundo (1978) The Intrareligious Dialogue, New York: Paulist Press. Pelikan, Jaroslav (1985) Jesus Through the Centuries, New Haven: Yale University Press. Philip, T. V. (1982) Krishna Mohan Banerjea, Madras: CLS. Race, Alan (2008) ‘Interfaith Dialogue: Religious Accountability between Strangeness and Resonance’, in Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, ed. Paul Hedges and Alan Race, London: SCM Press, pp. 155–72. Rahner, Karl (1966) ‘Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions’, in Theological Investigations Volume 5, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, pp. 115–34. Raj, S. J. (2002) ‘Transgressing Boundaries, Transcending Turner: The Pilgrimage Tradition at the Shrine of St. John de Britto’, in Popular Christianity in India, ed. S. J. Raj and C. G. Dempsey, New York: SUNY, pp. 85–111. Ramey, S. W. (2007) ‘Challenging Definitions: Human Agency, Diverse Religious Practices and the Problems of Boundaries’, Numen, 54, 1–27. Robinson, Rowena (1998) Conversion, Continuity and Change, London: Sage Publications. Samartha, S. J. (1981) ‘The Lordship of Jesus Christ and Religious Pluralism’, in Christ’s Lordship and Religious Pluralism, ed. H. H. Anderson and T. F. Stransky, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, pp. 19–36. Sarkar, Sumit (2005) ‘Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva’, in Making India Hindu, ed. D. Ludden, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 270–93. Shorter, Aylward (1972) Theology of Mission, Notre Dame: Fides Publishers. Shorter, Aylward (1988) Toward a Theology of Inculturation, London: Geoffrey Chapman. Shourie, Arun (1994) Missionaries in India, Delhi: ASA. Shourie, Arun (2000) Harvesting Our Souls, New Delhi: ASA Publications. Sugirtharajah, R.S. (1999) Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Swami Abhishiktananda (1971) The Church In India, Madras: CLS. Swami Vivekananda (1972) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Swarup, Ram (1995) Pope John Paul II on Eastern Religions and Yoga, New Delhi: Voice of India. Talbott, Thomas (2001) ‘Freedom, Damnation, and the Power to Sin with Impunity’, Religious Studies, 37, 417–34. Turner, Denys (1995) The Darkness of God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Visvanathan, Susan (1998) An Ethnography of Mysticism, Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Waghorne, J. P. (2002) ‘Chariots of the Gods: Riding the Line Between Hindu and Christian’, in Popular Christianity in India, ed. S. J. Raj and C. G. Dempsey, New York: SUNY, pp. 11–37. Walls, Andrew (1996) The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis. Wiles, Maurice (1992) Christian Theology and Inter-Religious Dialogue, London: SCM. Wright, C. J. H. (1984) ‘The Christian and Other Religions: The Biblical Evidence’, Themelios, 9, 4–15. Yadav, B. S. (1990) ‘Vaishnavism on Hans Kung: A Hindu Theology of Religious Pluralism’, in Christianity through Non-Christian Eyes, ed. P. J. Griffiths, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, pp. 234–46.

8

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ Hindus and Christians in ‘secular’ India

Our discussion so far has revealed that the term ‘toleration’ is a particularly slippery one to be used in debates over ‘conversion’, and that the rough edges of the question ‘Which is more tolerant, Hinduism and Christianity?’ should be smoothed so that it instead reads as ‘What are the grounds of toleration in specific strands of Hindu spirituality and Christian theology?’. In contrast to the somewhat belligerent tones of the first question, the second invites reflection into the truthclaims that undergird all demands to tolerate the other. Therefore, the second question can make possible a deeper engagement with the traditional Christian claim that Christ is not an optional extra to be left out of the matrix of Christian engagement with the world for it is the very source of the momentum that drives such engagement. It can be argued that the widespread view that neo-Advaita is the essence of Hinduism – indeed, of the religions of the world – is one that emerged in postcolonial conditions partly as a weapon to beat the masters at their own game: Hinduism was now put forward not only as the preserver of all the spiritual resources of Christianity, but also as a more universal vision purged of the latter’s alleged dogmatism and authoritarianism. Various reconstructions of classical Advaita Vedānta were crystallised through a series of dialectical interactions between, on the one hand, Orientalist scholars who often portrayed Hinduism as a single ‘world religion’ that was centred in a ‘mystical’ orientation and opposed to ritual and cultic practices, and, on the other, figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who believed that their re-readings of Advaita were not only compatible with worldly activism but also could counter centuries of Christian polemic (King 1999: 136). We have suggested that a comparative study of Advaitic alongside Christian truth-claims can lead to a fine-grained analysis of the bases of toleration, and show that both these traditions employ specific criteria to demarcate the boundaries between the ‘tolerable’ and the ‘intolerable’. In turn, a better acquaintance with the Christian truth-claims would reveal why the ‘right to propagate’ remains central to the self-understanding of many Christian denominations. This right, understood as an entitlement to share the gospel and invite others to accept it, has been heavily circumscribed in many Indian states through the so-called freedom of religion bills. An analysis of these bills shows that their terminology is often vague and relies on somewhat controversial definitions of terms such as ‘conversion’, ‘allurement’, and ‘fraud’. For instance,

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 173 the definition of ‘force’, which includes the ‘threat of divine displeasure’, is implicitly intended to rule out Christian, and also Islamic, preaching about sin and the need for repentance. These complexities over conversion, therefore, also lead us to the question of Christianity’s position in contemporary secular India. Legal scholars have pointed out that the Supreme Court, and some prominent judges in their rulings, have often acted, as it were, as the high priests of modernity, forging an entity called Hinduism for the purposes of state intervention, and laying down strictures on what counts as ‘religion’ and ‘conversion’. An analysis of these judgements reveals that they have sometimes fallen back on neo-Advaitic understandings of these crucial terms. For instance, they have understood conversions from Hinduism either as attempts to wrench unreflective individuals from their traditional cultures or as pointless turnings since all paths ultimately lead to the same ultimate reality (Sen 2009). Consequently, the Indian courts have sometimes taken the unprecedented step in the legal traditions of modernity of preaching to one religious tradition, namely, Hinduism what the core teachings of ‘religion’ are, namely, some form of neo-Advaita, and, by implication, to another, namely, Christianity, what it should drop from its set of beliefs, namely, evangelism as a divine imperative to spread the message of salvation in Christ.

Debating ‘secularism’ The term ‘secularism’ has specific Christian associations, though many European liberal-democratic states have appropriated it in different ways. The European notions of secularism, which emerged out of the crucible of the ‘wars of religion’, sought to establish a trans-confessional space structured by norms that would be acceptable to Christians across their denominations. In the Indian context, however, it is associated, in a classic description by Donald Smith, with three interconnected sets of relationships between the individual, religion, and the state. These are, firstly, religion and the individual, secondly, the individual and the state, and, thirdly, the state and religion. Concerning the first, the individual enjoys freedom of religion which guarantees her right to choose a particular religion or no religion at all without any coercion on the part of the state. The individual is defined in relation to the state in terms of democratic citizenship and not as a member of a religious group, so that citizens who profess a specific religion or none at all do not suffer any discrimination on the basis of this allegiance or lack of it. Finally, the state does not support any ‘official religion’, nor involve itself in ecclesiastical or religious questions, and religious organisations regulate their internal affairs without interference from the state (Smith 1998: 177–83). However, in recent decades serious doubts have been raised regarding the translatability of European secularism to Indian contexts. For instance, T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy claim that the self-understanding of a substantial fraction of the populations of south Asia is characterised by their religious allegiance, whereas secularism is the grandiloquent claim of a westernised elitist minority that the majority, whom it seeks to shape into its own image, should privatise their religious options. Such criticisms often play into the hands of the proponents of Hindutva who claim that

174 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ Nehruvian secularism is an alien European transplant which, in trying to produce a public space free from religious values, has become corrosive of the rich spiritual traditions of the land. A genuine ‘secularism’, and not the ‘pseudo-secularism’ practised by some central governments that ‘pander’ to the minorities such as Christians and Muslims, they claim, will remove from the domains of law and public life traces of religious or ethnic particularisms and provide the basis for a unified national culture. It is crucial to note that Madan and Nandy themselves are not simply advocating a return to Hindu origins but instead pressing the case for contextualised adaptations of secularism. By rejecting the assumption that the cultural atmosphere would soon be freed of religious themes, which, Madan argues, is partly responsible for the rise of religious fanaticism as a reaction, we need a secularism which is grounded in interreligious understanding and which gives due importance to both religion and secularism without snubbing the former as obscurantist (Madan 1998: 314). Similarly, Nandy argues that the ways of life of religious communities who have lived with one another in the past possess internal theological resources for toleration and it is these that must be further explored and developed (Nandy 1998: 338). In contrast to the claims of Nandy and Madan that secularism is associated with the violence of the ‘internal colonialism’ of the state whose elites view religious communities as entrapped in antiquated systems, we need to note that alternative models of secularism have been proposed which are not insensitive to the importance of religious issues to the lives of many Indians. While on a maximalist reading secularism is part of the complex of science, progress, and technocratic bureaucracy that has shaped the public sphere in post-independence India, a more minimalist notion of secularism would see it as an attempt, in a land fissured by ethnic and religious diversity, to deal with the potential conflicts that can be engendered by the plurality of religious life-schemes by removing these differences from a public sphere and locating them in a non-political private realm. However, this ‘privatisation’ move need not imply that the truths that we may hold in the private domain should be regarded as merely provisional and not deeply and integrally related to our self-understanding. The neutrality of the public sphere that the secular state seeks to maintain is based not on the requirement that individuals cannot hold any views with certainty but on the admission, in the face of diversity regarding ultimate religious frameworks, that there is room for reasonable disagreement regarding which beliefs and views can be rationally justified. Further, it was an awareness of the hold that religious symbols have over millions as well as the perception that these resources were ineffective in promoting toleration that led to the introduction of secularist themes. Rajeev Bhargava notes that one of the models on which the notion of secularism is based is the ‘religious strife model’ which traces the institution of the principles of liberty and equality to the aftermath of long periods of religious strife. These principles seek to secure a public space where all individuals can enjoy citizenship rights irrespective of their religious denominations. Bhargava argues that we may seek to develop adequately contextualised versions of this model which has strong resonances in the Asian subcontinent with its history of religious discord.

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 175 More specifically, the adherents of different religions can live together with one another and also with atheists within the horizons of a state that adopts a ‘political secularism’ which is primarily geared towards a minimalist set of guarantees that can provide citizens with a decent living within the context of conflicting ultimate ideals. Futher, such a secularism lays down that the state’s intervention or nonintervention in religious issues will be guided solely by considerations of what promotes a life of equal dignity (Bhargava 1998: 515). Notwithstanding the various strains that secularism has undergone in recent decades – attacked both by critics of the nation-state such as Madan and by Hindutva figures for encompassing special rights for the religious ‘minorities’ such as Indian Christians and Indian Muslims – the Indian state has by and large sought to promote a type of ‘political secularism’ which does not privilege any specific religious conception of the good. Indian Christians, against the backdrop of their status as ‘minorities’ and frequent upsurges of violence against them in Gujarat in the late 1990s and later in Orissa in 2008, have usually supported this conception of secularism which requires the state to maintain a principled distance from all conceptions of the ultimate good (Dworkin 1986: 191). However, though this secularism is based on the principles of liberty which grants citizens the right to practise their religion, and of state-neutrality towards all religions, their application to specific cases has given rise to certain complications which are particularly significant in the context of Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’, especially of the ‘lower’ castes. The Indian state has often found it necessary, through its administrative and legal apparatus, to define what aspects of Hinduism are ‘essentially’ religious in initiating the reform of Hindu personal law, and has been drawn into conflicts with institutions which favour their own interpretations of Hindu social practice (Chatterjee 1998: 358–65). The Madras Animal and Bird Sacrifices Abolition Act 1950 which prevented sacrifices as a part of the ritual, numerous Acts which opened Hindu temples to the ‘untouchables’, the involvement of the state in the management of temple affairs, and so on have been instances where reformist legislation has been passed by the state specifically in the case of Hinduism (Chatterjee 1995). Further, in enacting the Hindu Code Bill in 1955, the state tried to systematise Hindu law by removing sectarian and regional variants that had emerged from the colonial courts, and by laying down a uniform personal code for all Hindus which legalised divorce, gave the same rights of inheritance to daughters as well as sons, and so on. In thereby establishing itself as the agent of reform, the state had to expound the Sanskrit scriptures and offer interpretations of what was ‘true’ Hinduism, interventions which provoked the criticism that the state had violated the principle of separation of state and religion. Since the Constitution prevents the state from discriminating against citizens on the basis of religion or caste, except when it makes special provisions for the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes, the specifically Hindu directed reforms were viewed as discriminatory by some Hindu groups, and the intervention of the legislative and the administrative apparatus of the state in only Hindu beliefs and customs seemed to have challenged the notion of equal citizenship. That is, the Indian

176 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ form of secularism is not quite the American type with its ‘wall of separation’ between the state and the Church, but an intermediate one where no one religion is accorded an official status but the separation between religion and politics is not strict since the state has often engaged with the internal matters of religious communities (Needham and Rajan 2007). Therefore, though Indian secularism is usually understood in terms of the labels of sarvadharma sama-bhāva (equal respect to all religions) and dharma nirapeks.atā (religious neutrality), its reformist element, which involves the regulation of religious institutions and practices, makes it difficult to draw precisely the boundary lines of this separation. Notwithstanding the fuzziness of these boundaries, what is equally noteworthy is that the Supreme Court has sometimes presented Hinduism as encapsulating the essential elements of ‘true religion’, and through a series of landmark judgements legitimised a ‘rationalistic’ form of Hinduism and delegitimised the ‘religionism’ of popular practices, rituals, and customs as superstitious (Sen 2009: 61–4). In its rulings in certain crucial cases such as Yagnapurushdasji v. Muldas (1966) the Supreme Court defined ‘Hinduism’ as a ‘way of life’ which is tolerant, universal, and based on a fundamental unity of all creeds and beliefs. In its judgement in the above case, the Court emphasised the ‘inclusive’ nature of Hinduism which, it stated, was based on the belief that truth is many-sided so that Hinduism has breathed an air of toleration and been able to assimilate elements of truth from various standpoints (Sen 2009: 18–22). However, these modular constructions of Hinduism, which relegate its cultic and ritual strands to the domain of superstition, are not new emergents on the Indian socio-cultural scene. As we have noted in earlier chapters, the notion of a ‘higher Hinduism’, which in contrast to the ‘Semitic’ traditions is said to be inclusive and tolerant, was a complex product of various crisscrossing intercultural currents between the Orientalists, the Christian missionaries, and the neo-Advaitins such as Swami Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan. To add a contemporary twist to these ongoing reformulations of Hinduism as based not in dogmatic creeds but in forms of practice, certain figures associated with Hindutva have picked up the metaphor of Hinduism as a ‘way of life’ and often move from statements about the ‘catholicity’ of Hinduism to the claim that Hindutva is inclusive and integrative. For instance, after taking over as the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 2009, Mohan Bhagwat claimed that all inhabitants of Hindustan are ‘Hindus by virtue of their culture and way of life’, while Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President L. K. Advani remarked the same year that Hindutva was an ‘inclusive, tolerant philosophy’ (Sen 2009: 29). The point here is not that the Supreme Court itself has become implicated in the Hindutva constructions of national identity, but that its presentations of the ‘inclusivity’ of Hinduism have crucial implications for the ongoing debates about conversions from the ‘inclusive’ Hindu social body to the ‘alien’ religions such as Islam and Christianity.

‘Secularism’ and conversions among the ‘lower’ castes These observations bring us to our second theme relating to secularism and conversion: the state’s legal constructions of religious identity and its definition of

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 177 backwardness have often been based on the assumption that ‘caste discrimination’ is a specific feature of Hindu society. According to the President’s Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, nobody who does not profess the ‘Hindu religion’ can be included in the category of the Scheduled Castes. Consequently, Dalits who are Muslims or Christians are not entitled to receive the benefits of educational and affirmative action programmes that Hindu Dalits do, such as reservations in the Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies, reservation of jobs in government services and so on (Massey 1997: 22–8). In September 1985 the Supreme Court gave its judgement on two petitions concerning the President’s Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, one involving the denial of a certain facility to a ‘lower caste’ Christian cobbler and the other challenging a Tamil Nadu Government order that Dalit Christians who would gain reserved seats in government employment if they became Hindus would lose these seats if they changed their religion again. The Supreme Court maintained that in order to establish that the above Order discriminates against ‘lower caste’ Christians: It is not sufficient to show that the same caste continues after conversion. It is necessary to establish further that the disabilities and handicaps suffered from such caste membership in the social order of its origin – Hinduism – continue in their oppressive severity in the new environment of a different religious community. (Quoted in Webster 1992: 131) That is, the converts to Christianity need to show that they are more disadvantaged than their ‘higher caste’ co-religionists and that their social disabilities are comparable to those of the Hindu Dalits. While some political parties such as the BJP concur with the Court’s judgement that reservations cannot be extended to Christian and Muslim Dalits, their hostility seems to stem from another source – the fear of conversions to these ‘foreign’ religions. They argue that those who had converted to the ‘non-indigenous’ religions on the basis of their egalitarian claims have forfeited their rights to special benefits and they cannot enjoy these since they fall outside the caste system. Given that significant numbers of Dalits have moved towards Christianity and Islam to overcome caste oppression within Hinduism, the opposition to the category of ‘Christian Dalits’ would seem also to be rooted in the anxiety that to recognise Christian Dalits as Scheduled Castes would act as an incentive to greater numbers of Dalits to convert to Christianity (Hasan 2009: 208). The centrality of the question of ‘indigenous’ origins in this debate can be further highlighted by noting that reservations have been extended to converts from Hinduism to Sikhism and Buddhism. Since they are egalitarian faiths which do not accept the caste system, converts to Christianity and Islam too which do not recognise caste, in principle, should be entitled to political reservations. It would therefore seem that this extension is based on the notion that they are of ‘indigenous’ origin while Christians and Muslims are not ‘natural’ Indians. A fundamental criticism of the Court’s stand is that the political reservations for Dalit Hindus on the basis of their religion is unconstitutional, for caste is a

178 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ social feature of many other south Asian religious communities. Therefore, to pick out Hindu Dalits specifically for affirmative action is discriminatory under Articles 14, 15 and 16 of the Constitution which require an equal treatment of all religions on the part of the state (Galanter 1984). While the courts have often asked for objective evidence that converts to Christianity and Islam continue to live in poor social conditions which are comparable to those of the Hindu Dalits, several social science reports have, in fact, indicated that converts to Christianity and Islam continue to suffer from extreme socio-economic deprivation. A study undertaken by the National Council of Minorities of deprivation suffered by Christian and Muslim Dalits compared to that of Dalits from other communities shows that Muslim Dalits are worse off than Dalits in other communities, and that Christian Dalits suffer from greater deprivation than their non-Dalit co-religionists (Hasan 2009: 219–20). Further, several sociological studies have revealed that religious affiliation often reinforces the already existing rules of caste endogamy, so that the central principle of social organisation in the village communities is not religion but caste (Caplan 1980). As long as the ‘upper’ caste Hindus continue to be the ‘significant others’ on whom the ‘lower’ castes are economically dependent, change in religious affiliation has not significantly altered their identity since they continue to be treated as ‘untouchables’. Therefore, while Hindu critics often argue that the very term ‘Christian Dalit’ is an oxymoron, for Christianity does not recognise caste distinctions, given that Dalits are not isolated from their wider socio-cultural contexts which continue to remain structured by discrimination practiced on all Dalits, Dalit Christians do not automatically enter into a quarantined zone merely by virtue of their Christian denomination (Kumar and Robinson 2010). The characterisation of backwardness exclusively in terms of ‘untouchability’ – which works to the detriment of Christian and Muslim Dalits – stems, as Zoya Hasan has explained, from a trade-off between cultural rights and affirmative action that emerged through the Constituent Assembly debates. On the one hand, the religious ‘minorities’ such as the Christians were given political and cultural rights relating to equality before the law, freedom of conscience and propagation of religion, freedom to manage religious affairs, and the right to establish and administer educational institutions. On the other hand, regarding affirmative action, forms of material and social deprivation – which would have classified non-Hindu communities such as Christians and Muslims too as ‘backward’ – were not considered for deciding which groups were disadvantaged. In other words, since the criterion for assessing ‘disadvantage’ was membership of the Hindu fold, these religious ‘minorities’ were removed – by definition – from the discourse of disadvantage and social justice. In recent decades, however, this primary criterion for inclusion in the list of the Scheduled Castes has been intensely contested, and demands have often been made to introduce socio-economic indicators such as per capita income and literacy rate. Indeed, the Ranganathan Commission established in 2005 by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government at the Centre argued that affirmative action based on religious affiliation was unconstitutional, and recommended that the Scheduled Caste category be delinked

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 179 from religion and it be made ‘religion-neutral’ like that of the Scheduled Tribes (Hasan 2009: 212–13). In short, while intense debates rage over issues such as whether group-based policies have only reinforced rather than eroded boundaries across communities, and whether the increasing demand of more communities to be classified as ‘backward’ so as to be beneficiaries of state action will aggravate social tensions, it is clear that these identity-based conflicts will continue to shape Hindu–Christian debates over ‘conversion’ in the coming decades (Jenkins 2001).

Conversion and state legislation An underlying theme in these debates over inclusivity and backwardness is that only people whose religious faith has an indigenous origin can be considered as true members of the nation, and not those converts to Islam and Christianity who, even though they belong to a common land and share elements of a common culture, are said to set their holy land – Arabia or Palestine – above their land of birth. Hindu nationalism regards India not merely as a landmass with administrative boundaries but as a sacred geography (bhūmi) crisscrossed by holy mountains, lakes and centres of pilgrimage, and views the minorities such as Christians and Muslims as fifth-columnists who do not accept these markers of cultural identity and are instead centrifugal forces that threaten to splinter it (Jaffrelot 2010: 35). Hindutva is therefore a complex mix of certain ‘inclusivist’ elements – monotheists, atheists, Jains, Buddhists, Arya Samajists and so on are all good ‘Hindus’ for they have all originated in the motherland of the Indian subcontinent (Bhāratavars.a) – as well as some ‘exclusivist’ motifs – individuals who do not owe their fundamental allegiance to the Indian nation and its ‘Hindu’ culture and religion are not entitled to citizenship. For V. D. Savarkar, therefore, the term ‘Hindu’ has a specific territorial component – the most essential qualification of Hindus is that for them the land from the Indus to the Indian Ocean is not only a fatherland (pitr.bhūmi) but also a holy land (pun.yabhūmi) (Savarkar 1969: 111). In this territorial and racialised conception of Hindutva, the three essential elements are a common nation (rās.t.ra), a common race (jāti) and a common civilisation (sam.skr.ti), and Muslims and Christians, because of their alleged extra-territorial origins and loyalties, cannot be a part of national life. As M. S. Golwalkar, a prominent spokesman of the RSS, put it later, the ‘non-Hindu’ people had a stark choice: either accept the Hindu culture and language, respect the Hindu religion, and glorify the Hindu race, that is, cease to be ‘foreigners’, or remain in the country subordinated to the Hindu nation without claiming even citizen’s rights (Golwalkar 1939: 105). The Hindus are the ‘natural’ inhabitants of Hindustan: ‘Undoubtedly . . . we – Hindus – have been in undisputed and undisturbed possession of this land for over 8 or even 10 thousand years before the land was invaded by any foreign race’ (Golwalkar 1939: 42). Further, the unity of this Hindu nation has been preserved down the millennia through the heroic struggles of numerous groups such as the Rajputs, the Marathas and the Sikhs, and down to the present times of Hindu figures such as Lokmanya Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal and so on.

180 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ For many Hindu nationalists, conversions to these ‘foreign’ religions such as Christianity and Islam pose a threat the nation’s autonomy and sovereignty, for they are viewed as attempts to ‘denationalise’ Indians and transfer their loyalty from ‘Mother India’ to foreign sources which fund them. For instance, in the state legislative assembly elections in Chhatisgarh in 2003, an organisation called the Hindu Raksha Manch (the Hindu Protection Platform) ran a cartoon which depicted the local Catholic bishop Reverend Joseph Augustine standing next to a hoodlum with a stick over a man who was being forced to become a Christian. The cartoon’s caption read: ‘Agent of the Pope . . . Changing religion (dharmāntaran.) means changing nationality’ (Quoted in Bauman 2008: 1–2). During the race to the elections, Dilip Singh Judev of the Bharatiya Janata Party launched ‘Operation Homecoming’ for the ‘reconversion’ of Christians to the Hindu fold, and the state president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad stated that his organisation would not tolerate the suppression of Hindus by Christians with the financial backing of foreign sources. There are at least three basic issues in these perceptions of Christian conversion as fundamentally opposed to national integrity and the cultural ethos of the land. First, as we have indicated in several places in Chapters 3 and 4, the charge that Christianity ‘denationalises’ Indians was already levelled in colonial times not only by the Hindu intelligentsia but also by some Indian Christian leaders themselves, who initiated various movements against the ‘religious imperialism’ of the European missionaries. For instance, at the Round Table Conference in 1930, leaders of the Protestant Indian Christian community such as K. T. Paul and S. K. Datta affirmed that they did not seek separate electorates for their community or any exclusive ‘communal’ privileges (Thomas 1979: 207). Further, Paul developed a notion of ‘Christian citizenship’ centred around service to the nation, and in his obituaries by figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, he was praised for not having allowed his Christian faith to dilute his nationalism (Chatterjee 2011: 153–4). The demand for separate electorates for Christians was also opposed by Bishop Azariah on the grounds that it would project the Church as a sect that was narrowly concerned with its own survival when millions of Indians were involving themselves in struggles in the socio-political fields, and it would paint Christian evangelism in a negative light as the act of transferring individuals from the Hindu group to the Indian Christian group (Webster 1992: 202). Along these lines, George Thomas has even argued that Christians who live in India should be called not ‘Indian Christians’ (the usual term for them) but ‘Christian Indians’, with the word ‘Christian’ as an adjective that qualifies the noun ‘Indian’, to emphasise that they belong to the Indian nation (Thomas 1979: 11–12). Second, the rather widespread perception in some circles that the acceptance of Christianity is tantamount to the denationalisation of the converts is tied to various legal tangles over the right to convert within the secular parameters of the Constitution. Though, according to Article 25 of the Constitution, all individuals are given the right to ‘profess, practice and propagate’ religion, during the debates of the Constituent Assembly there was some strong opposition to the insertion of ‘propagation’ of religion as a fundamental right (Kim 2003: 51–5). For instance, Lokanath Misra claimed that it was the ‘propagation of religion’

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 181 that had led to the partition of British India into two countries and also raised the alarm that this right would lead to the annihilation of the Hindu way of life. On the other hand, T. T. Krishnamachari noted that this right applied not only to Christians and Muslims but also the Hindus and the Arya Samajists who could carry out their śuddhi programmes. The final consensus or compromise that emerged during these debates was that the term ‘propagate’ would be retained because it need not have any of the dangerous implications that some of the members had pointed out. It was noted that the Christian community insisted on the term because they regarded propagation as fundamental to their faith. Since in a secular country there were no political advantages to be derived from the membership of a specific religious community, there was no harm in allowing religious views to be propagated through exposition and persuasion. Though the right to propagate one’s religion is now well-entrenched in the legal vocabulary, it remains a much more controversial matter whether individuals also have a ‘right to convert’. The locus classicus of this debate is the Stanislaus judgement of 1977, in which the Supreme Court adopted a certain understanding of conversion which, in effect, opposed conversion. The Court permitted the exposition of the tenets of one’s religion to others, but declared that there was no fundamental right to convert on the grounds that it impinged on the freedom of conscience (Sen 2009: 114–15). The Stanislaus judgement has often been criticised as ‘confused’ and ‘anti-liberal’ – to propagate one’s religion is not merely to impart one’s knowledge about it but also to produce conviction to adopt it, so that conversion does not restrict freedom of conscience but is a fulfilment of it. As Sumit Sarkar points out: Propagation makes no sense at all without the possibility of convincing others of the validity of one’s religious beliefs and rituals. Freedom of choice, in religion or for that matter in politics or anything else, and therefore freedom to change one’s beliefs, is surely in any case integral to any conception of democracy. (Sarkar 1999: 1692) In short, conversion, understood in terms of seeking out a new universe of meanings and values through interaction with its proponents, far from curbing the freedom of conscience, rather presupposes it and requires its proper exercise, for in the absence of such freedom there can be no personal decision to move towards another religious affiliation. As a matter of fact, however, after independence, a number of Indian states have passed laws relating to conversions from one community to another, somewhat intriguingly called the ‘Freedom of Religion’ laws. Orissa passed the ‘Freedom of Religion Act’ in 1967, followed by Madhya Pradesh (1968), Arunachal Pradesh (1978), Tamil Nadu (2002), Gujarat (2003), Chhatisgarh (2006) and Himachal Pradesh (2007). Defining ‘conversion’ as the renunciation of one religion and the adoption of another, these laws prohibit conversions carried out through ‘force, fraud, inducement or allurement’, and a few of them require that the parties involved in the conversion notify the local authorities in advance.

182 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ While the supporters of these laws often claim that they are directed only against the ‘fraudulent’ conversions backed with the financial power of a ‘foreign hand’, Christians have pointed out that the opponents of conversions to Christianity have utilised them – by capitalising on the vague definitions of ‘force’, ‘fraud’ and ‘inducement’ – to make false accusations against potential converts. For instance, ‘promising’ to converts a future life in heaven as the culmination of Christian existence or ‘warning’ them that an earthly life lived away from God may lead them to lose the possibility of heaven can invite criminal prosecution leading to imprisonment, including substantial fines. The Tamil Nadu Prevention of Forcible Conversion of Religion Bill (2002), repealed two years later, imposed prison sentences of 3–4 years on those who attempt to convert through force, allurement or fraudulent means. The term ‘force’ particularly was couched in ambiguous language: it included threat of any kind including ‘divine displeasure or social excommunication’ (Mosse 2010: 247). However, the claim that the Christian way of life leads to life eternal is, to say the least, entangled with various metaphysical and epistemological issues, some of which we have discussed in Chapter 6, and it cannot be written off as a false promise or a fraudulent inducement without carefully examining these issues. To put it bluntly, dense metaphysical debates cannot be settled merely through legal definitions. Further, these anti-conversion laws, which require prior permission from government officials, seem to make the ultimate judge of whether conversion involves the free decision of the convert not the converts themselves but an agent representing the state (Fernando and GispertSauch 2004: 195). While other transactions between individuals in the social and political spheres, for instance business dealings, do not require such mediation from the state, the demand for governmental intervention in conversions seems to be based on the somewhat paternalistic view that individuals cannot be trusted to make their own correct choices when it comes to religious matters. Third, while Hindu nationalists often express the quasi-apocalyptic anxieties of a Christian takeover of Mother India (Bhārat Mātā) through the inflows of foreign funds, such claims of massive conversions of Hindus to Christianity are clearly exaggerated. The rate of growth of Christians between 1981 and 1991 was 16.89 per cent while the overall rate of growth of the population of the country was 23.79 per cent (22.78 per cent for Hindus) (Fernando and GispertSauch 2004: xiii). The 2001 census records show the percentage of Indian Christians to be 2.3, and, crucially, with the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, none of the states which have passed anti-conversion laws have a Christian population of more than 3 percent. Interestingly enough, some of these Acts, such as the Arunachal Pradesh and the Chhatisgarh legislations, exclude from the definition of ‘conversion’ the return to the ‘religion of one’s forefathers’: what is claimed to be a protective measure against Christianity and Islam poaching upon unsuspecting individuals turns out to be a move to protect and reinforce the boundaries of the ‘indigenous religion’, namely, Hinduism. Such anxieties were reflected also in the conclusion of the Niyogi Commission report (1957) set up to examine the activities of missionaries in Madhya Pradesh: ‘Evangelization in India appears to be a part of the uniform world policy to revive

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 183 Christendom for re-establishing Western supremacy and is not prompted by spiritual motives’ (Quoted in Jaffrelot 2010: 157). However, the association between western colonisers and missionaries, as we noted in Chapters 3 and 4, is far more complex than a mutually beneficial alliance between the two. Therefore, the claim of the RSS, in the context of the Pope’s visit to India in 1999, that Christian evangelism is an ‘imperialist conspiracy’ which through the ‘proselytising machinations’ of the Church is directed towards the ‘soft targets’ of the Hindus not only oversimplifies the historical connections between imperialism and Christianity but also, somewhat inadvertently, feeds into the Orientalist motif of ‘Hindu passivity’ (Narayanan 2002: 259–60). Further, as we discussed in Chapter 5, whether or not evangelisation that speaks in terms of material well-being is ‘unspiritual’ depends on metaphysical debates over what, in fact, the domain of ‘spirituality’ encompasses. Because of the wide variety of motives that sometimes draw converts to Christianity, whether one can meaningfully sort out the ‘spiritual’ from the ‘material’ incentives remains a complicated question. While probably all sides would agree that physical intimidation or the promise of a large financial grant would count as cases of fraud or inducement, matters become more delicate when considering cases such as these: a Dalit who finds a Christian atmosphere more hospitable than a caste-Hindu one because it provides her with some measure of security and material welfare, or an ill person who becomes more responsive to the Christian message after receiving medical treatment at a Christian hospital. For a more concrete instance of how ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ goals are often interwoven in a complex mixture in conversion, we may turn to a study by Bengt G. Karlsson of the Rabhas, an Adivasi community in West Bengal. Karlsson shows that for them conversion is a cultural strategy through which they can construct a modern selfhood and seek ways of survival in the forest. One of the reasons given by the Rabhas for their conversion is that traditional rituals, which involve chicken and rice beer, are costly, whereas Christian worship is simpler and less time-consuming. Further, Christian Rabhas point out sharp changes in their lives such as higher levels of education, better employment and practice of modern medicine, and claim that for the Rabhas the way to survival is by becoming aware of the rights and facilities that are provided by the government (Karlsson 2002). Therefore, the basic point of dispute is not properly expressed in terms of a European conspiracy to gain control over the Orient through a Christian guise (which was not attempted even in the high noon of British imperialism) or in terms of proselytisation, understood as a means of gaining converts through bribery, undue pressure, intimidation or exploitation of people’s poverty (which has been condemned by both the Geneva-based World Council of Churches and the Vatican) (Frykenberg 2008: 480–1). The key issue is, in fact, the sort of instabilities that can be produced by a religious system which is able to transcend ethnic and cultural barriers, so that while it is not grounded in any specific linguistic or territorial characteristics it can be embodied in the dense particularities of more than one life-world. In its traditional conceptions, Hindu life revolves around the fulfilment of caste-specific dharmas, and the Hindu elites were willing to

184 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ accommodate and include members of other ethnic groups provided that the latter abided by the orthopraxy of the Brahmanical ritual and social order (Jaffrelot 2010: 135). In traditional Hindu life-worlds dharma is the principle of cosmic harmony which pervades everything, and this transcendent dharma is expressed at the human level in specific forms of ritual action. Consequently, adherence to dharma is primarily not the acceptance of any specific belief but the performance of certain duties which are laid down for one’s caste (Flood 1996: 53). The phrase ‘freedom of religion’, according to this understanding, does not include the right to convert people from other orders of dharma into one’s own. The idea that members of a religious group such as Christians would try to convince Hindus to move over to their own, sometimes by forming specific missionary organisations devoted to this task, is often regarded as particularly repugnant. Further, as we noted in Chapter 6, given the belief in karma and rebirth, the birth of an individual into a specific environment, such as a religious community, is regarded not as a mere contingent fact but as influenced by karma. Since these other communities are believed to be structured by their domestic dharma, through the fulfilment of which they can work their ways to the ultimate goal of liberation, the question of converting people across the boundaries of communities does not usually arise. Christian conversion, on the other hand, is grounded in a different set of metaphysical underpinnings: given the traditional rejection of the notion of reincarnation, the birth of an individual into a certain social order is not usually regarded as ‘pre-ordained’, and an individual’s personal volitional acceptance of the lordship of Christ during the course of a single lifetime on earth is of critical salvific importance. Therefore, while religious Hindus, whether or not of specifically Hindutva persuasions, sometimes view their existence as governed by the specific dharma of their caste, so that violating this birth-given dharma and accepting another one, and a ‘foreign’ one at that, is perceived to be ‘irreligious’, Christianity, almost from its origins, has been trans-cultural and transethnic. This ‘translatibility’ of Christianity across cultural-ethnic boundaries is perceived by its Hindu critics as its ‘predatory imperialism’. This is not to suggest that the ‘translations’ of Christianity are not without their own dilemmas – we noted some of the intra-Christian debates over ‘interculturation’ in Chapter 8 – but that from a Christian perspective human beings are not viewed as born into a religious affiliation or a system of dharma, once and for life – rather such affiliation is located in the arena of personal choice. Indeed, one might argue that one is not born as, but becomes, a Christian – even traditions, such as the Roman Catholic, which accept the practice of infant baptism emphasise the renewal of baptismal vows, implying that Christian life is based on a personal voluntary acceptance of the faith. Therefore, many Indian Christians today argue that while manipulations or deceptive promises are unacceptable, conversion from one religious affiliation to another is an individual’s right which follows not only from the freedom and the dignity of the individual as understood by the Christian faith but also from the guarantees of the Indian Constitution (Fernando and GispertSauch 2004).

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 185

Conversion and Hindu nationalism We return through a different route to a point we have tried to emphasise throughout this book: at the base of many historical and legal controversies over ‘conversion’ lie deep conflicts over truth-claims concerning the nature of the ultimate reality and its relation to the human world. From some Hindu perspectives – which are grounded in the acceptance of karma and rebirth and the notion that all religious experiences are somehow oriented to the same ultimate goal – conversion across religions is usually regarded as a misguided activity induced by ‘unspiritual’ incentives. Most Christian standpoints, however, reject these notions of reincarnation and the ultimate convergence of all religious traditions in the Advaitic transpersonal ultimate, so that conversion to the personal appropriation of the Christian message is regarded as literally a matter of life and death. The crucial debates, therefore, would seem to turn also on this point – whether individuals regard themselves as so strongly ‘determined’ by their cultural contexts that they cannot abandon beliefs and values, whether Hindu or Christian, that they were socialised into, or whether they hold that they have an epistemic obligation to ask whether their beliefs are as reasonable as those of their competitors (Newman 1982: 55). However, when we move away from the issue of conflicting truth-claims to the wider political arena in which religious identities are postulated, formed, and interrogated, such crucial matters are usually sidelined, and what comes to the fore are concerns over the mobilisations of Hindu identity against the perceived threat of conversions to ‘alien’ Christianity. The cries of alarm are related not primarily to religious demography – there have been very ‘mass conversions’ to Christianity after political independence – but often to the perception that Christianity has been successful in garnering the support of the Dalits and the aboriginal peoples (Adivasis). In Chapter 5, we discussed the triangular competition over the ‘lower’ castes between the Christian missionaries, the Hindu ‘reformers’, and (sometimes) the colonial state. In recent decades the contest has only intensified with Hindu nationalists launching new movements for ‘reclaiming’ groups captured by the ‘foreign’ religions. However, the apprehension of the RSS that the nation will be internally fragmented by ‘anti-Indian’ Christians and Muslims and the Hindus themselves will become a minority, stems not so much from a careful study of demographic figures but from the perception that Hindus, because they are divided into numerous castes, have become weak and disorganised in the face of the well-knit ‘organic’ communities of the Muslim and the Christians. By the turn of the twentieth century, large numbers of ‘lower’ castes and ‘untouchables’ were being ‘purified’ at mass ceremonies in the Punjab, Kashmir, and the United Provinces. Such attempts at the vertical restructuring of Hinduism were a ‘preemptive strike against the threat of Christian missionary conversions of low caste groups’ (Zavos 2000: 91). The anxieties over conversion were further fuelled by the publication, in 1909, of Lt Colonel U. N. Mukerji’s pamphlet Hindus – A Dying Race, in which, on the basis of the results of the 1901 Census, he made the dramatic claim that Hindus would disappear within another 400 years because of

186 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ the relative rise in the Christian and the Muslim populations. As preparations for a Hindu Conference in the Punjab in October 1909 gained momentum, the organisers received the writings of Mukerji about the disintegration of the Hindu community, and these were circulated in the Punjabee. The Muslims had multiplied by 33 per cent between 1872 and 1901 while the Hindus by around 17 per cent; so that the Hindu population of Bengal would soon be reduced to a minority status. The speedy multiplication was attributed to the Muslim aspiration for solidarity, material welfare, and strength, and the decline of the Hindus to their lack of political organisation. The delegates at the Conference spoke of the need to strengthen the feelings of Hindu nationality and Hindu unity by popularising Hindu scriptures, celebrating Hindu festivals, producing a distinctive Hindu history, and so on (Jones 1976: 289). Thus, during 1907–10 the Arya Samaj launched śuddhi programmes directed at the Rajputs who had converted to Islam in the United Provinces, Baroda, and Central Provinces. The Rajput Shuddhi Sabha, which was joined by Punjabi Aryas, claimed to have reconverted 1,052 Rajputs by 1910. The Sialkot Arya Samaj was particularly successful with the ‘lower’ caste Meghs among whom they carried on their campaign with the help of itinerant preachers and local Arya volunteers, and thereafter dug wells, constructed a hospital, and provided basic education to the ‘reclaimed’ in a new colony (Jones 1976: 307–8). Around a decade later in 1924, Swami Shraddhanand of the Arya Samaj responded to these concerns with his Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the dying race which proposed as the solution to the numerical decline the systematic organisa. tion (sangathan) of Hindu society, through which Hindus would return to the ancient civilisation of Āryavarta founded on a non-hereditary and merit-based system called varn.āśramadharma. According to him, the degeneration of the varn.a system into proliferating castes (jāti) not only led to the socio-economic tyranny unleashed by the ‘higher’ castes upon the ‘untouchables’, but also later provided the context for the machinations of the Christian missionaries who resorted to ‘fraudulent’ means to pull them out from the body of Hinduism (Bhatt 2001: 62–8). From the 1920s onwards, therefore, Swami Shraddhanand began to promote śuddhi campaigns directed at the ‘neo-Christians’ and the ‘neo-Muslims’, as well as programmes to reclaim, uplift, and return to the Hindu fold the ‘untouchables’ and the Adivasis. The śuddhi movements were usually opposed by the ‘orthodox’ Hindu Mahasabha which met in February 1924 to discuss a resolution which, on the one hand, stated that the ‘untouchables’ should be given access to schools, temples, and public wells, and, on the other, noted that it was against the classical Hindu scriptures to give them the sacred thread, teach them the Vedas, or dine with them. The Mahasabha members encountered the opposition from the Arya Samajists over the latter clause which was finally amended to read: ‘As the giving of “Yajyopavit” to untouchables, interdining with them and teaching them Veda was opposed to the Scriptures according to a very large body of Hindus, i.e. the Sanatanists, these activities should not be carried on in the name of the Mahasabha’ (Jordens 1981: 142). In a dramatic confrontation at Hoshiarpur, when the Aryas directed śuddhi campaigns at the Kabirpanthis who were sweepers by caste, the Sanatan Dharm Sabha proceeded in 1909 to

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 187 excommunicate the Aryas for a while (Jones 1976: 308). The Arya Samaj itself was divided on the question of anti-caste radicalism: the Jat Pat Todak Mandal (the circle to destroy caste differences), which was set up in 1922 under the aegis of the Arya Samaj, promoted inter-caste marriage and even denied the idealised system of varn.āśramadharma (Gold 1991: 553). They distributed pamphlets and tracts in Hindi and Urdu against caste, and their militant stance brought them into conflict with the Arya Samaj from which they eventually broke away. Though the orthodox were therefore never comfortable with the full induction of the ‘lower’ castes into their social circle, the śuddhi campaigns did provide a platform where the Arya Samajists and the orthodox could put up some semblance of a united stand against the ‘encroachments’ of the Christian missionaries on the ‘soft targets’ of the ‘lower’ castes (Coward 1987: 55–8). Such efforts have been further intensified after independence: in 1952, the RSS set up the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), which aimed to counter the activities of the Christian missionaries among the Adivasis and to reclaim the newly converted to Hindu society. Later when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was established one of its aims and objectives was ‘to establish an order of missionaries, both lay and initiate, for the purpose of propagating dynamic Hinduism representing the fundamental values of life . . . and to open, manage or assist seminaries or centres for training such missionaries’ (Jaffrelot 2010: 160). In short, the vehemence of Hindutva’s anti-Christian rhetoric is an integral aspect of its moves to unify the nation against groups who are cast in the role of foreigners with extra-territorial loyalties. The markers of this political unity are figures, themes, and metaphors drawn from the Hindu religious sources such as Lord Rama, Lord Krishna, the various manifestations of the Goddess, the unification of Hinduism supposed to be brought about by Maratha militarism, and so on (McKean 1996: 155). However, while its proponents often claim that their notion of the ‘nation’ is rooted in indigenous sources, Hindu nationalism emerged in colonial India through dialogical interactions with certain European evolutionary conceptions of the nation such as Aryanism and British Orientalism. These conceptions were assimilated in various ways and given distinctive forms by the ‘higher’ caste religious and regional elites who sought to consolidate the Hindu nation. The majoritarian cultural nationalism of the RSS developed from a dense matrix of political struggles and strategies of cultural self-assertion during the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s, in the process of articulating hierarchical, militarist, and supremacist conceptions of collective Hinduism (Bhatt 2001: 3). In these modular constructions of the Hindu nation, a major flashpoint of controversy has therefore been its ‘fragments’ – the Scheduled Castes and the Adivasis. To establish a unified front of Hinduism, the RSS drew upon specific Hindu motifs to oppose the Indian National Congress’s conceptualisation of the nation as a political space over and above the religious communities of the Sikhs, the Muslims, and the Christians. Given the RSS equation between ‘India’ and ‘mainstream Hindu’, it is not surprising that the burden of proof is placed on the fragments with hyphenated identities such as Indian Muslims and Indian Christians to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation (Pandey 1999).

188 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ For V. D. Savarkar, the members of all the ‘higher’ castes, the ‘untouchables’ and the Adivasis were first and foremost Hindus because they were bound by the same blood. The ‘outcastes’ were not foreigners but, in fact, the products of intermarriage among the upper castes (Zavos 2000: 180–1). A crucial point of dispute over the conversions of these ‘fragments’, therefore, is whether or not, in their self-understanding, they are a part of the Hindu nation which claims to have always included them. Members of the Hindu intelligentsia who have asserted that these subaltern groups are, in fact, Hindu have developed a form of ‘strategic syncretism’ in which a Vedic civilisation rooted in individualism and egalitarianism is projected, and at the same time certain elements from western life-worlds are borrowed and creatively adapted. In the 1920s, the Hindu Mahasabha displayed this cultural strategy through an organicist reading of caste distinctions as grounded not in the multiplicity of castes (jāti) but in the four idealised varn.as of classical Vedic civilisation, these varn.as being regarded as non-competitive, functionally interdependent, and tied together in a true organic unity. In this Hindutva reconstruction of ‘caste’, individuality and equalitarian values are synthesised with identity of belonging, and the varn.a system becomes an indigenous pattern of the nation equivalent to individualist European and communitarian Islamic versions of the same (Jaffrelot 2010: 61). In a number of crucial figures associated in various ways with the RSS, the degeneration of the Hindus from their primordial purity of the Vedic times has been attributed to the decline of the organic solidarity of the varn.āśrama system, which led to the emergence of the hereditary jātis that diluted the fellow feeling of belonging to a united nation. Through a recovery of this idealised template, the Hindu nation, in the RSS imagination, would be constituted by the integral connections between the members of the varn.as in a social whole from which all feelings of caste-pride have been excised (Gold 1991: 553). In recent decades, therefore, the term śuddhi with its connotations of ritual purity and hierarchy has often been dropped in favour of dharm parivartan (change of religion), dharm prachār (propagation of religion) or pratyāvartan (return to the Hindu fold) which do not refer directly to the Hindu social structure. In response to the conversion of around 1,000 ‘untouchables’ in Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu to Islam, the VHP intensified ‘reconversion’ activities, and claimed to have reconverted 8,279 Christians and 13,921 Muslims in 1981 and 1982, but did not employ the vocabulary of ritual purification (Jaffrelot 2010: 162). Notwithstanding the Hindu nationalist projections of the ‘untouchables’ as encompassed within the ‘organic solidarities’ of the Hindu social order, various sociological studies of the realities closer to the ground, as well as autobiographical accounts of the Dalits themselves, demonstrate that they continue to suffer from various kinds of atrocities at the hands of the ‘higher’ castes (Stanislaus 1999: 23–5). In fact, Ambedkar argued that the ‘untouchables’, the slaves of the slaves, had suffered a double imperialism, firstly that of the British rule and secondly that of the ‘higher’ castes of Hinduism itself. Ambedkar concluded that the real debate was whether or not the ‘untouchables’ were a part of the Indian nation, and concluded that – in spite of the rhetoric of varn.āśramadharma – they were not,

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 189 for they could not inter-dine or inter-marry with their Hindu neighbours (Deliege 1999: 184). Moreover, Sanskritising movements among the ‘lower’ castes who have sought to upgrade themselves through adopting the rituals and the idioms of the ‘higher’ castes have often provoked violent retributions from the latter. In many cases, the anger of ‘higher’ caste Hindus are directed not at the most depressed groups but at the ones which have demonstrated signs of relative social and economic mobility, and violent recriminations against Dalit Christians can often be traced to issues related to social status and caste superiority. The emergence of the ‘lower’ castes as one of the primary movers on the Indian political scene – for instance, the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party based on Dalit identity in the 1990s – has been noted by T. B. Hansen as a central factor in the politicisation of Hindu identity, which he argues is a majoritarian response, largely by the ‘higher’ castes and the middle classes, who want recognition under the Hindutva ideology of pride, order, and national strength. Through various narratives and experiences the ‘other’ communities such as the Muslims, and often the Christians, are represented as the locus of violence and brutality, and such anxieties are exacerbated by the communal discourse of Hindu nationalism (Hansen 1999). The Mandal Commission’s recommendations – 27 per cent reservations of posts in government jobs to the Other Backward Classes – particularly seemed to threaten the sense of security that the ‘higher’ castes had traditionally enjoyed in the sociopolitical realm, and the increasing visibility of the ‘lower’ castes led to resentment from the ‘higher’ caste communities who found appealing the BJP’s rhetoric of cultural purity and national integrity. Though the BJP, which emerged from the Jana Sangh in the early 1980s, has sometimes been associated with the RSS, the party has usually avoided the explicit anti-Muslim and anti-Christian rhetoric of the RSS, instead using the slogans of self-reliance, Indianisation, and integral humanism (Gold 1991: 573). Notwithstanding these differences, the assertiveness of the marginal groups raised once again for the RSS and the BJP the question of Christian conversions – that Christianity which, according to S. R. Goel, is ‘busy in the backyards’ of Hinduism, might lead these subalterns away from the Hindu fold became an alarming possibility, and hence the emphasis on the ‘foreignness’ of Christianity began to be emphasised even more vigorously (Goel 1981: 16–18). Since Hindus constitute roughly 80 per cent of the Indian population, there is no serious threat that they will suffer an immediate numerical decline. However, the voting patterns of large numbers of Scheduled Caste Hindus who have often moved away from nationalist parties which are perceived to be subject to upper-caste control, the general difficulties in consolidating Hindu unity across denominational, regional and linguistic divides, and other such factors have often led Hindu nationalists to project themselves as a threatened minority. Therefore, as a statistical analysis of data on violence against Christians in 2007 and 2008 shows, violence against Christian organisations would seem to be instigated by the perceived threat that Christians are rapidly improving on economic, social, and political indicators (Bauman and Leech 2012). The idioms of purity and integrity are at the heart of the contestations also between Christian denominations and the RSS over the Adivasis – a vital question

190 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ in this area is whether they are ‘backward Hindus’ or whether they are a distinctive group of people with their own religion, culture, and identity. One of the concerns of the missionaries and the British administrators regarding the ‘mass movements’ among the Adivasis towards Christianity was whether the conversions were motivated by ‘pure’ spiritual belief or whether they were induced by material assistance. It was often believed that the ‘primitive’ tribes were not capable of possessing such ‘genuine’ motives for they simply did not have the capacity for a sophisticated cognitive transformation (Bara 2007). The liberal assumptions of the colonial administrators have often been carried over to the contemporary scene where the Adivasis continue to be portrayed as too ‘backward’ to be able to exercise any active agency to choose an alternate symbolic system or mode of living, so that their conversions to Christianity are assumed to have been effected through fraudulent means (Hardiman 2003: 255). Christian work among the Adivasis in the fields of education and healthcare is considered particularly dangerous by the RSS because it is seen as an insidious means through which Christians acquire the loyalty of ‘innocent’ and ‘backward’ Adivasis. A clear instance of how these assumptions often structure the debates over ‘conversions’ is provided by an ethnographic study of the Adivasis in Mohanpur in Chhatisgarh by Peggy Froer. She notes that Christian attempts to distinguish the Oraon Christians from their Hindu neighbours, by diabolising some their local beliefs and practices, have amplified the cultural distance between the Christian and the Hindu communities, which in turn has been utilised by the RSS and other Hindu nationalist organisations. The Catholic missions among the Oraons at the end of the last century offered them not only protection against their landlords but also a ‘replacement community’ which provided them opportunities for schooling and new moral codes for social mobility. The emergence of this new community is perceived as a threat by the Hindu nationalists who believe that the political allegiances of the Christians are to the ‘foreign’ European Christians and not to the Indian state. Nevertheless, both the Church and the RSS would seem to be engaged in a ‘civilising mission’ similar in certain ways to the one initiated by the British administrators, and later by the Indian state officials, which was based on the notion that the ‘tribal’ groups, who were the ‘younger brothers’ of the civilised plain Indians, needed to be helped out of their condition of primitiveness. While the Church seeks to make ‘proper’ Christians out of the Adivasis by imposing various fines on offenders who backslide into traditional practices, the RSS too has reproduced some of these moves and claims that the Adivasis need to be introduced to the ‘correct’ notions of Hindu practices and trained to protect the nation against ‘foreign’ religious minorities. For instance, the RSS seeks to ‘inculturate’ Sanskritic Hinduism by opposing the practices of ‘wild’ (jangli) Hinduism such as the propitiation of local deities instead of the worship of ‘big gods’ such as Krishna, the use of blood offerings instead of ‘vegetarian’ offerings, and so on. To further the eradication of such ‘superstitious’ beliefs and raise the Adivasis to the level of the ‘civilised’ standards of ‘higher’ caste Hindus, the RSS has set up various rural institutions for their social welfare (Froer 2010).

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 191 Consequently, the Adivasi churches in some parts of central India seem to be ‘doubly marginalised’: on the one hand, they are accused by the non-Christian Adivasis of having become culturally alienated and detribalised by accepting the beliefs and the behaviourial patterns of Christian life, and on the other hand, they are viewed with suspicion by the ecclesiastical authorities for having made adaptations to the local culture through the development of Adivasi liturgy and theology. The development of Christian identity among the Adivasis has therefore proceeded in various stages through a constant dialectic between the old and the new, and the churches and the RSS, in their distinctive ways, have responded to the various oscillations and instabilities associated with these processes (Kujur 2010). However, while both Hindu nationalist organisations and Christian missionaries have become involved in tussles over the identity of the Adivasis, there have been some movements of Adivasi self-assertion among the Adivasis themselves who claim that they have become fragmented by political parties and religious identities, but that they need to come together as the original inhabitants (moolnivasis) of the land. At a rally at the shrine of Dev Mogra in Gujarat attended by Lancy Lobo, it was claimed that the Adivasis need to recover their own religious identities which have been assimilated into Hinduised idioms, and replace greetings such as ‘Ram, Ram’ or ‘Good Morning’ with ‘Jai Adivasi’ (Lobo 2010).

Gandhi on conversion It is clear that the emergence, and the political successes at the polls, of Hindu nationalism have thrown open a series of debates over religious spaces, the basis of Indian culture, the meaning of secularism and so on, debates in which Hindutva figures have sometimes carried the day partly by sounding the siren of a ‘Christian imperialism’ directed at the Dalits and the Adivasis. Quite often, the figure of Gandhi appears in these debates, and his claim that Hinduism is inclusive of truths and revelations in all religions, so that Hindus should seek for what is good and valuable in them, is put forward as an argument against Christian conversions. While a detailed engagement with the multi-levelled aspects of Gandhi’s thought cannot be attempted here, it is important to highlight that Gandhi’s views on the ‘non-exclusivity’ of Hindu traditions raise some fundamental philosophical questions about the forms of ‘hierachical encompassment’ that we investigated in Chapter 6. Since every such hermeneutic strategy, which starting from a focal point, such as ‘Christian’ or ‘neo-Advaita’, selects and compares elements from other systems relative to this point, resulting in some form of hierarchical ordering of these systems, a moot question is whether it can conceive of difference in non-hierarchical terms. Gandhi’s view of the religions of the world as many rivers leading to the same ocean or many branches from the same root would seem to be based on such a ‘non-hierachical’ conception, which was developed through the Jain notion of anekāntavāda or the many-sidedness of reality, and the syādvāda principle which states that all views are partial and correct only from a specific perspective. Gandhi noted that these Jain views fitted his personal experience that people are right

192 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ from their specific points of view and had taught him ‘to judge a Mussalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his’ (Quoted in Pyarelal 1965: vol. 1, 277). In 1928, Gandhi therefore told the Federation of International Fellowships that after long study and experience he had arrived at the conclusion that all religions are true, all have some errors, and that all are almost as dear to him as his own Hinduism; consequently, for him the thought of conversion was impossible (Larson 1997: 195). This ‘impossibility’ was related to his view that there were no irreconcilable differences across the religions, for if one probed carefully beneath the surface, one would find the master-key of truth and non-violence in them. The supreme religious achievement is to be measured in terms not of scriptures, rituals or dogmas which were imperfect human creations but of a complete mastery over the outer and the inner senses outlined in the second chapter of the Bhagavad-gītā (Jordens 1987). Therefore, he could write to Reverend B. W. Tucker in 1928: ‘I do not want you to become a Hindu. But I do want you to become a better Christian by absorbing all that may be good in Hinduism and that you may not find in the same measure or not at all in the Christian teaching’ (Gandhi 1958: vol. 37, 224). Further, Gandhi’s critique of Christian conversions was based not only on Jain metaphysics but also on his perception that they produced ‘denationalised’ Indians. In a speech in front of Madras Christian College in 1916, Gandhi spoke of self-sufficiency (svadeśī) not simply in terms of the boycott of British goods but also of the protection of traditional religions, and claimed that svadeśī Hindus would refuse to change their religion not because they think it to be the best but because they know that they can complement it by introducing reforms (Mallampalli 2004: 161). As in the case of various other themes such as ‘caste’, Gandhi’s views on conversion changed somewhat over the decades, while they continued to emphasise its ‘denationalising’ consequences for the converts. Between 1919–25 Gandhi asked missionaries to abandon their negative views of India as a land of idolaters steeped in ‘heathenism’, and instead identify themselves with the common people of the country. Missionaries should go out to the people not as their ‘patrons’ but as one of them, to serve them, and also to receive from them. Further, Gandhi emphasised that people should remain in the religion they were born into, and that religious change should involve not ‘conversion’ but Hindus becoming better Hindus, and Christians better Christians. He believed that behavioural patterns mattered more than doctrinal beliefs, and that missionaries should let their lives speak for them rather than their words (Minz 1970). In 1931, Gandhi made a statement in Young India to the effect that if missionaries, instead of confining themselves to humanitarian work, directed their energies at proselytising he would ask them to withdraw, on the grounds that India’s religions were adequate for its people. Christian responses were varied, ranging from The Indian Witness which published excerpts from an interview in which Gandhi stated that missionaries, even if they ‘proselytised’, would have the legal right to do so, to the editor of the Guardian which stated that no future government of independent India would hamper the activities of Christian bodies, to a group of Indian Christians who passed a resolution asking Gandhi to withdraw the statement and to provide

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 193 safeguards in the new Constitution for members of all religions to practice and preach their religions. These doubts were finally set to rest when Gandhi met some leaders of the British missionary societies on 8 October 1931, where he declared that he did not wish for any legislation that would prohibit missionary enterprise, and also that he accepted the resolution of the Unity Conference of 1924 which guaranteed the right to convert (Webster 1989: 80–99). The conversion of which Gandhi spoke favourably was an inner moral transformation within one’s religious framework that led one to work for the nation, and these themes have received a strong emphasis in Indian Christian circles which have often called for an inner appropriation of the Christian message and its indigenisation in Indian cultural patterns. The key question in this context is whether the specifically Christian understanding of conversion as a turningaround to Christ, who is believed to be the transcendental axis around which the world revolves, contravenes the Gandhian interiorised understanding of a spiritual fulfilment within one’s religious tradition. One could argue that some of the presuppositions of Christian conversion conflict with the Jain conception of seven-valued logic (syādvāda), which involves seven types of sentences which are preceded by the term ‘somehow’ or ‘perhaps it is’ (syāt). One of these seems to amount to a simultaneous assertion and denial of the existence of an object (Ganeri 2002). Whether or not Jain logic indeed allows the justifiable assertion of contradictions is a matter that cannot be discussed here. We simply note a possible way to read syādvāda: a proposition p1 is assertible from one standpoint s1 and another proposition p2 from s2, but there is no standpoint from which both the truth of p1 and the falsity of p2 (or vice versa) can be asserted. To take a more specific example, the Buddhist proposition ‘Everything is impermanent’ is ‘somehow’ true from standpoint s1 and the Biblical statement ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever’ (Hebrews 13:8) is ‘somehow’ true from standpoint s2, but we do not have access to one standpoint from which we can establish both the truth of p1 and the falsity of p2 (or vice versa). Therefore, statements which are true from within one faith-stance may not be true from within another, nor is there any commensurability across religious goals such as nirvān.a and salvation which are irreducibly plural. This would be a view that respects the integral unity of each religious conceptual scheme and does not lead to any re-descriptions of its contents from an ‘external’ viewpoint (Heim 2001). It is clear that a systematic application of syādvāda would lead to drastic revisions in the structure of not only the Abrahamic faiths but also of many Indic religious traditions – such as Advaita Vedānta, Vais.n.avism, and Śaivism – which understand their truth-claims as not ‘somehow’ true from a specific standpoint but as ‘unconditionally’ true from all perspectives (Harrison 2006). Such reconstructions will not be attempted here – the basic point we seek to make is that these religious systems have claimed that they have, in some way or the other, obtained access to a vantage-point from which their specific truth-claims can be established. For a Buddhist, this viewpoint could be the Buddha’s enlightenment experience when he gained an insight into the nature of reality as universally permeated by impermanence and suffering. For a Christian parallel, we can turn to

194 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ Prudentius (around 400 CE), who in reply to the claim of Symmachus, a Roman senator, that to a mystery as great as the transcendent, there could not be only one way, declared: ‘What you say could well be right if we were searching for God (except that we should all fail!); but God has in mercy provided the way Himself’ (Quoted in Sturch 1991: 86). The Christian emphasis on the priority of revelation has resonances in some Vedāntic life-worlds such as Rāmānuja’s, where knowledge of the Lord is gained not through unaided reason’s exercise in ‘natural theology’ but primarily through the Vedic scriptures which are manifested through the Lord’s grace (prasāda). Therefore, it is possible, from a Christian perspective, to go some distance with the doctrine of syādvāda and claim that reality is indeed many-sided, but assert that Christ has provided to the world a criterion with which to approach this multifaceted reality. A neo-Advaitin could make a similar claim with respect to the criterion of Advaitic ‘experience’, and a Vais.n.avite with respect to the criterion of her tradition-specific exegesis of scripture. In other words, in Christian self-understanding the gospel is not ‘conditionally’ true for some places or epochs but has a universal significance, and this is a theme that was reflected in a memorial presented to Gandhi by some Indian Christians on his departure to attend the Round Table Conference: We can think of no effective Freedom of Conscience without the right to preach our faith openly and freely. To us, as to you, the use of corrupt and unfair methods of conversion is distasteful. We condemn them wholeheartedly. But we may not be denied the right to preach the Gospel. That is a sacred duty which our Lord Himself has especially enjoined upon us, and in the discharge of that duty have our Saints and Martyrs laid down their lives. (Quoted in Webster 1989: 89) While proponents of Hindutva often appeal to Gandhi’s views on ‘proselytism’ to call for a ban on conversions to Christianity, they usually ignore these inner complexities relating not only to the question of universalising truth-claims across religious traditions but also to Gandhi’s qualified statements about the right to preach religious life-forms in independent India. The Hindutva attempt to appropriate Gandhian themes for opposing Christian conversions is shot through with various instabilities, for the RSS has usually rejected the specifically Gandhian understanding of non-violence, non-cooperation, and social justice. Through its ethnic conception of the nation it seeks to reproduce a specific ethnonational culture, which is opposed to the Gandhian notion of a civic nation that stands above religious and ethnic diversity, and defines citizenship in terms of the principles of democracy and justice.

Conversion and multiculturalism More generally, in recent political theory, there have been intense debates over how to guarantee certain basic rights which are universally shared by all citizens

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 195 while recognising cultural diversity and accommodating differences. The crucial term in these contexts is ‘multiculturalism’, and many of the important issues that its theorists deal with – the importance of cultural identity, the political resolution of cultural differences through dialogue and discussion, a differentiated citizenship where groups such as indigenous communities and religious minorities would have certain rights, and so on – have strong resonances in the Indian context (Bhargava et al. 2007). A multicultural society that is characterised by differences embedded in and sustained by culture has to deal with two conflicting demands and needs to evolve political structures that will reconcile them in a manner that is just and collectively acceptable. On the one hand, it has to foster a strong sense of unity and common living among the citizens because without such a sense a community cannot take collective decisions and regulate conflicts, but on the other, it has to respect differences because the cultural diversity in its midst cannot be suppressed without severe forms of coercion. The model of political integration that the RSS favours in response to these demands is a strong assimilationist one in which the state undertakes the task of assimilating the minorities to a common national culture. If they do discard the traces of their distinct cultures, they will be treated as fellow-citizens, failing which they will be subjected to discriminatory treatment. As Bhikhu Parekh emphasises, however, such a model ignores the claims of diversity – while a shared sense of national identity is essential for unifying the members of the nation around a common self-understanding and vitalising their sense of common belonging, this sense can also be potentially divisive and alienate certain groups of its citizens. Therefore, the identity of the nation should be located in political and institutional structures, that is, institutions, values, and forms of public discourse, and not in ethnic and cultural specificities which pertain only to distinct groups. Therefore, the notion of national identity should be expansive enough to allow for multiple identities – such as Welsh and British or Breton and French – without calling for the charge of divided loyalties. Though there is in principle no conflict between a religious or ethnic identity and a national identity, such clashes can emerge if one of the two is defined exclusively to eliminate the other, as for instance, when being American is defined exclusively in terms of Protestantism, one cannot be Jewish and feel fully American (Parekh 2000: 230–5). Though India is not constitutionally a ‘multicultural’ state, the ongoing contestations over secularism centred, for instance, around the demand for a uniform civil code for all communities, show that it too has had to deal with the differing demands of unity and diversity. The litmus test of such a state is sometimes couched in terms of its ability to ‘tolerate the intolerant’ – that is, to accommodate forms of diversity that militate against or even violate certain foundational principles that the state is based on. The RSS has often claimed that the right to preach Christianity is an instance of such an infringement and that it is not consistent with India’s secular democracy (Narayanan 2002: 259–60). However, these statements are based on unsubstantiated claims that conversions have instigated massive demographic shifts and produced ‘denationalised’ Indian Christians whose loyalties are located in western nations. Further, as we have

196 The political bounds of ‘toleration’ emphasised, it is only through a somewhat curious misreading of the crucial term ‘conversion’ – as violating an individual’s freedom of conscience – that it can be set in opposition to the basic liberties that are guaranteed by the Indian Constitution to all its citizens. Both these points can be highlighted with reference to the state of Nagaland which, given its high proportion of Christians and its history of militancy, the RSS sometimes holds up as an instance of how the spread of Christianity leads to ‘anti-national’ Christian conspiracy. Since the separationist movements in Nagaland have often employed military metaphors drawn from Biblical sources, it is not surprising that the RSS claims to have detected the presence of a ‘foreign hand’ behind these insurrections in an anti-Indian ‘Christian Nagaland’, implying that it is specifically their Christian affiliation that has led the Nagas to oppose the Indian state. However, in connection with the Christian religiosity of the some of the Naga militants, it is vital to note that this is one of those cases where religion does not create, but reinforces and supplements, an ethnic identity that has already been crystallised through various other complex processes. Thus, while the leaders of groups such as the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) speak of ‘Nagaland for Christ’, the Naga sense of ethnic separateness was not instigated by Christianity – in fact, it was partly produced by long centuries of warfare with the Ahom kings of medieval Assam who had tried to subdue them and later sustained by the apprehension that the distinctiveness of their communities would be annulled through absorption into the dominant society of the plainspeople (Frykenberg 2008: 440). Further, while slogans such as ‘Nagaland for Christ’ are displayed publicly, these expressions of the ‘Christian-ness’ of Nagaland elide ongoing tensions, intersections, and negotiations between a Christian identity and the resurgence of animist beliefs, rituals, and practices. Public celebrations by Naga Christians often utilise elements of ‘traditional’ Naga culture such dress styles, dances, music, and so on which had been discouraged by Christian missionaries as ‘pagan’, while Church revivalism has sometimes indigenised Naga beliefs in spirits by associating them with the healing power of the Holy Spirit (Joshi 2012: 5). Given these ruptures within ‘Naga Christian’ identity, it would be misleading to conclude that the Naga Christians, most of whom are Baptists, are unilaterally opposed to the Indian state: while some of the so-called Maoist Naga Baptists are engaged in anti-India hostilities, many other Naga Baptists have been members of the Legislative Assembly, the government of Nagaland, and the Indian Administrative Service (Frykenberg 2008: 445). In any case, Christianity in Nagaland should not be viewed as an alien transplant, for census reports of the Christian population between 1881 and 1981 reveal that the most significant increases have taken place after the end of British rule and the expulsion of western missionaries by the Government of India. Therefore, instead of focusing entirely on the activities of the missionaries, Richard Eaton argues that we need to examine how certain indigenous frameworks were sympathetic to the received messages, so that complex interactions were set up between these precontact cosmologies and Christian doctrines. For instance, the Sema Nagas were hardly exposed to any missionary influence, and

The political bounds of ‘toleration’ 197 yet there were significant conversions to Christianity among them, a fact which Eaton explains partly by pointing out that the Semas spoke of a supreme overarching god, Alhou, whom they were able to identify with the high God of the Christians (Eaton 1997). The formation of Christian identity proceeded through the domestication and the assimilation of Christianity into Naga cosmologies, producing a distinctive Naga Christianity of the type that an anonymous informant speaks of: When Europeans became Christians they made it a European indigenous religion. Now I, like many Nagas, am a Christian, but I am not a European. Now my God can speak to me through my dreams, just as happened to my Angami ancestors . . . What I am talking about is Naga Christianity – an indigenous Naga Christianity. (Quoted in Eaton 1997: 271) The crucial challenge therefore seems to be over the forms that Christianity takes in its attempts to become an ‘Indian indigenous religion’, in ways similar to those in which, as the informant noted, Christianity once became a ‘European indigenous religion’, so that in spite of the various strains and stresses that Christianity introduces into local cultural patterns the old is not simply jettisoned but recast into newer moulds (Downs 1992). The debate then is between those who see such complex long-drawn processes, with their instabilities and ambiguities, as work in progress towards the evolution of a common culture in societies marked by ethnic, linguistic, and religious difference, and those who view them as deeply threatening to their sense of self and seek homogeneity through the imposition of a dominant religious and ethnic tradition. Such a plural culture, of course, requires a shared sense of national identity, which must be understood not in ethno-cultural but in political-institutional terms so that individuals and communities can identify with a political structure which recognises and affirms their distinct identities. Indian Christians, like other ‘minorities’ in the country such as Indian Muslims, have in different ways confronted the challenge of maintaining their distinctiveness while participating in various streams of national life. S. C. Chatterji was pointing to the emergence of such Indianised Christianities even against the shadow of empire when he asked: ‘And is it not natural for a people to preserve their nationality; is it not natural for a people to be patriotic; is it not natural for us Indian Christians to be Indians to the core in our thoughts, sympathies and aspirations?’ (Chatterji 1914: 215). We should therefore avoid a false either–or that studies of Indian Christianity sometimes exhibit: either they project a radical break between Christians and the ‘Hindu’ traditions of the land or they speak of their blending into the wider environments with the subsequent loss of their particularities. Both these readings fail to note how Indian Christians have often self-consciously and creatively imagined various forms of Christian community, articulated different types of Indian Christian identity, contributed to the stock of ‘ideas of India’, and through the use of legal and political institutions have charted out distinctive trajectories of their social and political advancement.

198 The political bounds of ‘toleration’

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9

Conclusion

Our discussion has highlighted three central groups of debates that have structured the last three hundred years or so of Hindu–Christian encounters – historical, theological–philosophical, and legal – though we have also tried to indicate how these conceptually distinct types are sometimes interwoven with one another. Christianity often continues to be characterised as an ‘alien’ religion that was forcibly transplanted to Indian soil. Concurrently the appeal is made by Hindu nationalists to recover the indigenous traditions of the land which are supposedly more tolerant and universal than the ‘foreign’ faiths tainted through their association with European colonialism. At a historical level, of course, such characterisations are inaccurate: whatever may be the basis of the claim of Thomas Christians in south India that the apostle Thomas landed in the Malabar sometime around the middle of 100 CE, it is certain that communities of Christians in south India were established by the third or the fourth centuries (Frykenberg 2008: 115). In recent decades, however, even some academic trends have, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuated the notion that the precolonial natives were haplessly dragged along by the complex political, social, and religious currents that were set in motion through the colonial encounters. Colonial discourse studies tend to see the transmission of power and knowledge in a unilinear fashion from Europe to India, and often conclude that various explanatory categories that now circulate among the once colonised – whether ‘religion’, ‘caste’, and, most importantly for our purposes, ‘Indian Christianity’ – were merely European constructs. Ironically enough, the conclusion they arrive at is often similar to that of the earlier Orientalists – that the precolonial traditions were frozen into an ahistorical passivity before the Europeans arrived on their shores to insert time, culture, and history. We have tried to show in several places that it would misleading to characterise the converts to Christianity as passive stooges of the British empire, for not only were the missionaries positioned at shifting distances from imperial policy but also the converts themselves soon raised the banner of a native Church that would be free from missionary control. Therefore, the primary emphasis – in some of these conversions at least – should be, as Robin Horton indicates, ‘not on the incoming religious messages, but rather on the indigenous religious frameworks and on the challenges they face from massive flows of novel experience’ (Horton 1993: 315). Nevertheless, for much of the missionary centuries, the native converts continued

202 Conclusion to be regarded as the ‘children’ of the missionaries who needed the latter’s care and guidance, and were incapable of exercising autonomous control over their Indian churches. Given the pervasive influence on the missionaries of the Victorian motifs of liberalism, Darwinism, and racialism, they often sought to ‘Europeanise’ their converts, thereby leading to the charges of ‘denationalisation’ that continue to be levelled against Indian Christians to this day. Interestingly, the colonial view that the natives were sunk in a ‘childlike’ condition from which they needed to be recovered has been replicated by some members of the Hindu intelligentsia with respect to the Dalits and the Adivasis who are allegedly unable to exercise rational agency in choosing a ‘foreign’ religion such as Christianity or Islam. Our discussion of some historical studies centred around the term ‘conversion’ has indicated that this understanding of the subalterns as the passive receivers of Christian themes is incorrect: in fact, in some so-called mass conversions it was they, and not the missionaries, who played the critical role. The various complex products that these interactions produced were marked, on the part of the converts, by different degrees of accommodation of and opposition to the message that the missionaries preached. Further, from some Hindu perspectives, conversions from the ‘lower’ castes are specifically opposed on the grounds that they are motivated only by the ‘non-religious’ search for social mobility. As we have highlighted in our discussion of ‘conversion’, such views ultimately presuppose certain metaphysical notions of what, in fact, constitutes the spiritual life. For a religious standpoint that views the religious end exclusively in terms of a spiritual liberation, any applications of religious themes to the temporal domain will seem ‘irreligious’; however, religious schemes that conceive this end more broadly to encompass material well-being too will support the quest for social improvement. The Christian understanding of ‘conversion’ itself has undergone various shifts during the colonial era and later across the international missionary conferences: Christian missionaries were forced to revise some of their ‘spiritualising’ notions of conversion particularly in the light of movements towards Christianity from the ‘lower’ castes who sought not simply the ‘spiritual bread’ of the gospel but also the prospects of material welfare. Consequently, given the fact that the missionaries were often influenced by an evangelical theology which did not emphasise the issues of social justice, G. Oddie argues that ‘one of the most striking features of the British missionary movement in India throughout the [nineteenth] century is that so many men [sic] . . . should have become so caught up in ‘temporal’ affairs and social protest’ (Oddie 1979: 245). Today, it is accepted by most Christian denominations that conversion involves the acceptance not simply of a different cosmology or specific theological dogmas but also of an alternate social vision, which may include ‘material’ concerns such as some measure of security and prosperity (Bauman 2010: 285).

Conversion and the conflict of truth-claims One of the most powerful sources of Hindu criticisms of Christian conversions, however, is not so much the alleged incapacity of Dalits and Adivasis

Conclusion 203 to comprehend the contents of the message being offered to them as the very ‘intoleration’ of preaching the gospel at all. An underlying assumption in such claims seems to be that the propagation of any message that is grounded in some fundamental criterion through which the religious experiences of humanity can be graded as ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ is intolerant. As we have noted, however, the proclamation of truth-claims based on specific criteria is not in itself intolerant – though they can, and in the Christian case, have often led to the persecution of dissent and heresy. Toleration, properly understood, is the exercise of voluntary restraint so as not to prevent the spread of views which are believed to be inadequate, and a careful examination of ‘Hindu toleration’ reveals that the latter too is based not on the blanket acceptance of any view whatsoever but on specific beliefs about the nature of reality which rule out others as incomplete. The crucial question is not ‘whether toleration?’ – for both the Christian and the Hindu traditions have internal resources for developing tolerant stances towards the religious others – but ‘why toleration?’ Christian theologians who utilise various forms of the fulfilment theme see Christ already at work in Hindu life, and Hinduism as incorporated into the universal economy of salvation through Christ (Panikkar 1964: 34). In contrast, proponents of neo-Hinduism often see Christianity as a younger sister religion, and because they hold the ‘true Religion’ to be grounded in a non-duality between the world and the transpersonal ultimate, they view the historical dimension of Christianity – centred in Jesus, the son of Mary – as an unnecessary appendage. Therefore, they regard the Christian claim that Christ is the true goal of all humanity, and the inspirer of all that is good and holy, as a species of patronising arrogance, especially when some Christian theologians argue that the positive values of Hinduism need to be ‘supplemented’ in the light of the Christian faith. Given that Christians, neo-Advaitins, Vais.n.avites and others appeal to specific criteria for their distinctive reconstructions of the religious traditions of the world, the central issue is, therefore, whose criterion is objectively valid, and whether it is even rationally possible to demonstrate this validity (Bachelard 2009). Philosophers of religion strongly disagree over whether it is possible to establish any non-question-begging criterion to adjudicate between the competing truth-claims of the different religions. For instance, it will not be very helpful in a dialogical context to set up ‘the belief in a personal God who has decisively intervened in the world’ as a criterion for the rational superiority of a religion and then go on to claim that Christianity fulfils it, for this criterion will not be accepted by, say, an Advaitin Hindu. Other criteria such as internal consistency, spirituality, morality, psychological health, or liberating capacity do not always fare better, for what weight to assign to these and also how to assess the success of their application will itself depend on personal judgements which are ultimately grounded on metaphysical commitments. Therefore, while J. N. Figgis believed that Christianity has satisfied more than any other religion the fundamental needs of human nature, non-Christians might disagree over precisely what these needs are and what is the best environment for their satisfaction (Bouquet 1921: 163). One influential view in these matters is that because each religious practice is thus confronted with a

204 Conclusion number of ‘uneliminated alternatives’, and because of the difficulty of finding some external reason to demonstrate the superior epistemic status of one’s own, the only rational course is to hold on to the religious scheme that serves one well in guiding one’s activity in the world (Alston 1991: 274). Therefore, coming to know about religious diversity should not in itself reduce the epistemic confidence of a believer in her own faith, for most religious traditions are internally complex, and believers can use their resources to explain why incompatible traditions exist (for instance, they are works of the devil or they are products of selves with defects of karma). On a somewhat different view, if maximising truth is a basic epistemic duty, then a believer who acknowledges epistemic peer conflict – that is, the fact that seemingly sincere and knowledgeable individuals hold different religious perspectives – cannot justifiably claim that her beliefs are cognitively superior to those of others unless she subjects them to critical assessment (Basinger 2002: 13). The knowledge of religious diversity can, according to this view, produce an ‘epistemic uneasiness’ which can be a ‘neuralgic point of creative conceptual growth for Christian thought’ (Griffiths 2001: 97). Our discussion has indicated how Hindu–Christian encounters have, in fact, led to such uneasiness on both sides of the divide, leading to various patterns of reformulation of both classical Hindu thought and traditional Christian theology. From the Hindu side of the encounter, these reconfigurations of Hindu approaches to the religious other range from Raja Rammohun Roy who sought to distil the ethical essence of Christian thought out of its doctrinal statements, through Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan whose affirmation of religious diversity was rooted in the doctrine of the mystical interiority intimated by Advaita to Mahatma Gandhi who appealed to the common moral values underlying the different religions (Sharma 1988). Partly in response, Indian Christian theologians such as A. J. Appasamy (1942) and V. Chakkarai (1930) have tried to develop Indian Christologies by using the resources of the bhakti traditions to speak of Christ as the unique, permanent, and complete avatāra. Therefore, Hindu versions of Christology often take us back to one of the central questions that Christian theologians down the ages have grappled with: how to make sense of the claim that a series of occurrences in Israel two millennia ago is the fulcrum around which world-history turns and is constitutive of the salvation of all humanity in all times. In recent decades, against the socio-political backdrop of religious identities, the boundary walls across Hindu–Christian dialogue have often grown higher, with Hindu critics sometimes alleging that Christianity is an irrational faith-stance whereas the truths of Hinduism can be demonstrated in a rationally perspicacious manner. As we have indicated, such charges are a caricature on two counts: first, the Christian traditions have a rich history of reflection on the relation between reason and faith, and, second, the Hindu religious traditions themselves have sometimes claimed that the primary means of knowledge for the existence and the nature of the divine reality is not reason but scriptural authority (Rambachan 1987). In a recent twist, some Hindu intellectuals have claimed that Hinduism is the universal religion of the future because its beliefs are scientific and evidence-based, but such apologies for ‘Vedic science’ ultimately turn out to be contemporary

Conclusion 205 reworkings of Vedāntic metaphysics with their specific presuppositions. Whether, and to what extent, ‘reason’ can be the arbiter of competing truth-claims across the Hindu and the Christian traditions therefore is one of the vital issues that will continue to engage partners on both sides of these dialogical encounters, especially if it is the case that ‘reason’ itself is often guided by ‘faith’ commitments (Clooney 2001: 49). Many Christian philosophers have argued that though the arguments of ‘natural theology’ can provide support for the claim that the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ as the incarnate God illuminates, even if dimly, all facets of human experience, they should not be regarded as logically compelling for all rational inquirers. For instance, John Cottingham has emphasised that spiritual praxis is prior to metaphysical doctrine because unlike in the sciences where detached scrutiny is required for understanding, in the religious domain personal involvement and self-transformation are essential preconditions for the knowledge of God. However, the claim that praxis is the framework for intellectual assessment and that religious conviction is the means through which a seeker moves towards God does not imply that the question of whether religious belief is epistemically responsible can be ignored. The religious outlook must be able to integrate the diverse facts of common human experience – for instance, defend the claim that the world is a creation of a benevolent God in the face of evil – and while the religious claims may not be empirically testable, they should at the very least be ‘possible candidates for truth’ (Cottingham 2005: 152). The form of ‘committed pluralism’ that we discussed in Chapter 6 can be seen as one mode of dialogical encounters in the midst of these complexities: on the one hand, it affirms a specific tradition as one among many others which are tenable, for we cannot stand outside all relative positions and attain a ‘neutral’ vantage-point, but, on the other hand, denies that all of them are of equal epistemic merit for each position is undergirded by certain beliefs and presuppositions which can assessed for their consistency, validity, and plausibility.

Conversion and the Hindu nation Nevertheless, in recent Hindu–Christian encounters these philosophical–theological issues have often taken a back seat and political struggles over identities have returned to the fore. The ongoing contestations over the Indian pasts and the attempts to recover ‘indigenous’ traditions have resulted – from the Hindutva perspectives especially – in the constructions of fixed and singular identities not only of the Hindu nation but also of the ‘minorities’ such as Christians and Muslims. The projection of such identities can be seen in the Hindutva argument that Christianity is a ‘foreign’ religion subversive of the timeless traditions of Hinduism which is indigenously and eternally Indian. The historicisation of these identities reveals, however, that they did not fall down pre-formed from some ahistorical space, but were products of complex historical currents. Thus while Hindutva groups often employ Hindu and Muslim as polarised analytic categories, social anthropological studies of ‘village India’ have shown that individuals sometimes use multiple, overlapping, and composite identities such as ‘Hindu’,

206 Conclusion ‘Muslim’, ‘Indian’, village resident, member of a caste, and so on, and that Hindus and Muslims interact with one another in various ways in both public and private spaces. For instance, the description of Benares as a ‘Hindu’ city ignores the presence of a sizeable Muslim population – presently a quarter – and the fact that while some Hindus participate in Sufi shrine veneration, the Hindu pilgrimage economy is supplied by Muslims in the forms of saris, sacrificial animals, decorations and so on (Gottschalk 2000: 36). Further, in some places in Rajasthan, Muslims sometimes participate in Hindu temple festivals, and in one instance in the fifteenth century Hindu Rajputs and Pathan Sunnis who were devotees of a certain Sufi saint fought together to preserve the independence of a new kingdom (Khan 2004: 31–8). However, the sense of an inevitable conflict across these boundary lines was heightened by Hindu nationalist anxieties over the numerical decline of the ‘Hindu population’ through conversions to Christianity of the ‘lower’ castes and the Adivasis. The attempts of Christians to forge dual identities, through their self-description as Indian Christians, and sometimes through the ‘interculturated’ products of their Christian patterns of life, are often viewed as threatening. Prominent figures associated with the RSS have responded by projecting an allembracing Hindu social body, structured by the non-competitive ‘organic solidarity’ of varn.āśrama, to oppose the ‘foreign’ religions which are supposed to practice fraudulent means to deceive the subalterns (Zavos 2001). Further, the perception of the ‘alienness’ of Christianity, which stems to some extent from its connections with British imperialism, was reinforced by certain colonial policies which sought to address the legal ambiguity of India’s Christian population (they had no personal law unlike Hindus and Muslims) by constructing a monolithic Christian community over which Christian laws were applied more rigidly than Hindu laws. Under the Judicial Plan of 1772, Warren Hastings decreed that all disputes concerning matters such as inheritance, caste, and other customs would be settled by the Company in accordance with the laws of the Quran and the śāstras for Muslims and Hindus respectively. The presuppositions of this Plan were that it was possible to distil a Hindu code out of the śāstras by ignoring the vigorous traditions of contested interpretations centred around them, and further that the natives of the land could be brought under two clearly discernible heads, ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’. This had the double consequence of bracketing together, for legal issues, groups such as Jains and Sikhs under the category of ‘Hindu’ and of ruling out Indian Christians as, in effect, foreigners who did not fall under the purview of indigenous legal traditions. While the marginal status of Indian Christians – with respect to the evolving notions of the Hindu nation during the latter half of the nineteenth century – is sometimes attributed to the distinctive beliefs of Christianity or to the western assumptions of the missionaries, the construction of their religious identity as culturally ‘non-Hindu’ should be attributed to some extent also to legal judgements relating to inheritance and marriage. British colonial policies sought to stabilise the Christian community by defining it in terms of personal laws that were distinct from their Hindu and Muslim counterparts, and these laws ‘served to reify Indian Christians as an alien community’ (Mallampalli 2004: 197).

Conclusion 207 However, Hindutva projections of Christian identity as ‘anti-Indian’ usually ignore such micro-studies of historical processes and instead accept certain sweeping assumptions about each cultural formation as a self-enclosed totality which is structured by certain ‘essential’ elements. As a matter of fact, far from being self-contained groups with radically alien norms and values, most cultures contain within themselves a variety of subcultures, and in some cases it may even be easier to facilitate dialogues across these cultures than within them – say between ancient Greek materialism and classical Indian materialism, than between Indian forms of atheism and Advaita. The important question is whether it is possible for a member of one culture to understand another without any preconceptions or presuppositions, and likewise whether one can remove from an indigenous culture all ‘alien’ categories of understanding (Halbfass 1991: 12). Christian readings of Hindu life-worlds as ‘deficient’ in that they insufficiently recognise the transforming presence of Christ, and likewise neo-Advaitic interpretations of Christian worldviews as ‘provisional’ to the attainment of the higher truth of non-duality should be properly challenged not on the grounds that they are ‘mere interpretations’ from the perspective of a distinctive standpoint – for all accounts are interpretive – but on the basis of how plausible, adequate, and informed they are. Therefore, the assertion that other religious traditions have elements of truth and goodness in them (whether made by Vatican II or neo-Advaita) and the attempt to present the cognitive, experiential, and spiritual superiority of one’s view-point, to the extent that this is possible through rational argument, are not incompatible with being ‘tolerant’ of these traditions. Nevertheless, the essentialist motif of Hinduism as grounded on an immutable foundation, with the implication that any critical reading of its traditions is necessarily an act of interpretive violence, continues to be articulated by some Hindu thinkers. For instance, S. R. Goel argues that ‘Hindu culture grew out of Hindu religion over many millennia. The one cannot be separated from the other without doing irreparable damage to both’ (Goel 1988: xv). However, such views overlook the internal diversity of the multi-stranded formations of Hinduisms, and the various ‘internal’ movements that have interrogated, critiqued, and challenged its contours. For an instance of how modern ‘Hindus’ have positioned themselves visà-vis the classical traditions, we may turn to the conflicts between the defenders of ‘orthodoxy’ and the members of the Brahmo Samaj in colonial Bengal. In the 1850s and 1860s, many young men who had renounced ‘orthodox’ Hinduism and moved into Brahmoism were socially excommunicated by their families, and they often joined the Brahmo Niketan set up by Keshub Chunder Sen in 1871 to provide them a sanctuary. In the run up to the Brahmo Marriage Bill, which was enacted by the government in 1872, orthodox Hindus argued that Brahmos were an integral part of Hindu society (samaj), to which P. C. Majumdar replied that while nationally and socially Brahmos regarded themselves as Hindus, in matters of ethics, belief, and social practice, they were Brahmos and not Hindus, for they did not accept the infallibility of the Vedas, the incarnations of Vis.n.u, and so on (Kopf 1979: 104). Therefore, questions such as how Hindu ‘culture’ is related to Hindu ‘religion’, whether elements of the former can be retained even with the rejection of the latter,

208 Conclusion who are to be regarded as the ‘orthodox’ defenders of these aspects, and so on have a wider scope than the domain of Hindu–Christian encounters – they have also played a vital role in structuring internal Hindu debates over ‘reform’ movements. There is, of course, a significant grain of truth in Goel’s comment in that given the dense overlaps between the processes of ‘culturisation’ and ‘religionisation’, the attempt to take individuals from their cultural backgrounds and orient them towards a ‘non-indigenous’ religion leads to various types of strains, as the Indian Christian critics of the ‘denationalisation’ of converts have sometimes pointed out. The key question, however, is this: when Christian theological themes are woven into the fabric of Hindu cultural patterns, the process of transcreation leading to the emergence of distinctive forms of Indian Christianity, is the product an instance of an ‘irreparable damage’ to both or a ‘fruitful synthesis’ of both? There can, of course, be no blanket answer to this question – every case of interculturation will have to be examined on its own merits. For instance, while some Christian theologians have sought to develop the Christian understanding of creation through ‘creative adaptations’ of Advaita, these translations have also been interrogated by other Christian theologians on three grounds. Firstly, in singling out Advaita as the medium through which Christian doctrine can be indigenised, such translations ignore the richness, diversity, and vitality of the bhakti material; secondly, these Christian translations sometimes diverge from . the self-understandings of contemporary Advaitins who read Śamkara in certain traditional ways; and thirdly, the liberative message of the gospel can arguably be more adequately translated into the dynamism of the bhakti movements than the Advaitic theme of world-transcendence (Ganeri 2007). As these intra-Christian debates show, Indian–Christian theology today faces – its ‘external’ moment – the challenge of giving shape to, and participating in, the movements of the subalterns in their struggles against oppression and injustice, while also nurturing – its ‘internal’ dimension – the specific intra-community Christian patterns of worship centred around the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. It is important to highlight the polyvalent and the multi-stranded realities of Indian Christianities, and how differing views on the relations between ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ lead to somewhat divergent responses to the question of indigenising the gospel into Indian forms. For instance, while the Catholic Church has developed a ‘gradualist’ approach and helped in the formation of an Adivasi-ised Christianity, a ‘new breed’ of missionaries emphasise speed in conversions and demand a clearer distinction between the Christian faith and the surrounding cultural environment. Since the 1980s, a large number of evangelical groups from south India have swept across parts of Adivasi areas in Gujarat by preaching the power of Christ to cure the deaf, the dumb and the crippled. In the context of the social and the economic marginalisation of the Adivasis, the charismatic groups offer a message that is clear and absolute –they will be cured and freed from evil forces by the power of the Holy Spirit (Lobo 2010). On the other hand, mainline churches in India sometimes criticise these ‘fringe groups’ for focusing too exclusively on spiritual liberation and ignoring the wider socio-political dimensions in which individuals are embedded. The central issue seems to be whether the primary emphasis in Christian

Conclusion 209 witness should be on ‘Christianisation’ – preaching the gospel and redeeming individuals from their condition of sinfulness – or ‘humanisation’ – participating in movements towards social justice by forging broad solidarities across religions. The intra-Protestant debates regarding, firstly, whether conversion to Christianity requires Hindus to enter into the Church which, Kaj Baago argued, had become tainted by its colonial associations or whether ecclesial participation is a distinct marker of Christian life, as Lesslie Newbigin emphasised, and, secondly, whether the true meeting place for Hindus and Christians is the secular realm where Christianity should seek to establish a Christ-centred fellowship, as M. M. Thomas argued, are all different reflections of the ongoing attempts of the Indian churches to search for distinctive Indian Christian identities in the multicultural and religiously plural landscape of the country (Kim 2003: 88–108). There is a further complication in that the various moves towards indigenisation will be evaluated and assessed in somewhat different ways depending on whether one takes an ‘internal’ Christian perspective or an ‘external’ Hindutva perspective. For a parallel example of an ‘insider–outsider’ difference, we may consider the following shift in Christian attitudes to Darwinian evolution. Over the last two hundred years or so, many Christian theologians have given up the belief in the inerrancy of scripture, and hold that the book of Genesis is not to be read as a literal account of the world’s origins – these are to be provided by physics and evolutionary biology – but rather as an allegory of humanity’s falling away from God. Now from some atheistic perspectives, these movements will be read as the gradual retreat of religious views in the advance of the superior forces of scientific progress, whereas some Christian figures would claim that they were enabled, in the light of scientific discoveries, to separate what was ‘essential’ in the gospel from certain ‘peripheral’ assumptions relating to cosmology that it had picked up during the medieval period. Similarly, the debate over whether Christianity, which was earlier driven by an ‘imperialist’ motive to dismantle local cultures, has started speaking the language of indigenisation because of a resurgent Hinduism – as Hindutva figures claim – or whether Christian reflection on these matters has been shaped by a deeper understanding of the ‘incarnationist’ basis of the gospel – as Christian theologians today may argue – does not admit of a straightforward resolution. For an instance of the latter, in a service for the repentance of the sins of the Church, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) prayed: Lord, God of all men and women, in certain periods of history Christians have at times given in to intolerance and have not been faithful to the great commandment of love . . . Have mercy on your sinful children and accept our resolve to seek and promote truth in the gentleness of charity, in the firm knowledge that truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself. (Quoted in Fernando and Gispert-Sauch 2004: 318–19) From an ‘external’ Hindutva perspective, such ‘repentances’ will probably seem disingenuous, for it is often claimed that Christianity has not abandoned its view of the centrality of Jesus Christ and remains as intolerant as ever.

210 Conclusion The basic dilemma that Christian theologians, who hold on to the normative revelation of God in Christ, seem to be struggling with in working out a Christian position on religious diversity seems to be the following. On the one hand, one can assert a Christo-centric position that only those who have heard the gospel and been baptised into the Church may (not, of course, ‘must’) attain salvation. However, this response is prima facie inconsistent with the view, accepted by almost all the Christian traditions, that the God who was, and continues to be, active in Christ has offered salvation to all and not just to a segment of humanity (‘theological regionalism’) or only those who lived within a particular strand of history (‘theological epochism’) (Jathanna 1981: 35–40). Therefore, some Christian theologians have claimed that we may discern God’s activity also in religions in which individuals have never had the occasion to respond to the gospel. On the other hand, the claim that even those who for whatever reasons have not been able to respond to the gospel are somehow encompassed by Christ’s grace could imply that they are being dragged willy-nilly, without any conscious knowledge of the Christian God on their part, to the Christian hope of salvation. The crucial challenge, therefore, is: how to weave a path between, on the one hand, a ‘Christomonist’ claim that God’s activity is limited to the institutional structures of the Church, and, on the other hand, the ‘assimilationist’ claim that all religions are always-already oriented to the full salvation that the gospel speaks of, even without their individuals acquiring some specific knowledge about its claims. This is the task that the Catholic International Theological Commission identified when it asked: ‘How can one enter into an interreligious dialogue, respecting all religions and not considering them in advance as imperfect and inferior, if we recognize in Jesus Christ and only in him the unique and universal Saviour of [hu]mankind?’ (Race 2008: 160). To put the matter slightly differently, the theological challenge is therefore to hold together in a creative tension the ‘historical Jesus’ who is held to be the normative locus of the divine revelation and the ‘Christ-principle’ who is not exhausted by specifically Christian forms but is working through all of human history. These are complex issues that Christian theologians have increasingly begun to deal with, and we have tried to emphasise that the key issue here is not wellphrased with slippery terms such as ‘toleration’, for the interpretation of the significance of religious diversity through a specific criterion – whether Hindu or Christian – need not in itself lead to intolerant consequences. Even against the backdrop of the religious persecutions of the English Civil War, John Locke could write that toleration was the ‘chief characteristic mark’ of the Church, because the true mark of a Christian is love and the faith which works, not through compulsion, but through love (Wootton 1993: 390). Similarly, though ‘Hindu toleration’ has received much battering in recent years, especially from Dalits and feminist groups who have pointed out that it is often a smokescreen with which various forms of caste-based and gendered oppression are masked, it needs to be emphasised that the Hindu traditions have significant resources for developing relations of hospitality towards the religious other. Swami Vivekananda’s words at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 remain a powerful reminder of

Conclusion 211 the devastations that religious violence caused in early modern ‘Christian’ Europe and continue to scar large swathes of the world today: ‘Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair’ (1972: vol. 1, 4). The Swami’s view that such violence should be renounced because all the religious traditions of the world lead to the common Destination is one that some Christian thinkers too have emphasised, even if they would disagree with him over what is the most fundamental debate in the entire religious history of humankind – how to conceptualise the same Goal.

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212 Conclusion Oddie, G. A. (1979) Social Protest in India, New Delhi: Manohar. Panikkar, Raimundo (1964) The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Race, Alan (2008) ‘Interfaith Dialogue: Religious Accountability between Strangeness and Resonance’ in Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, ed. Paul Hedges and Alan Race, London: SCM Press, pp. 155–172. Rambachan, Anantanand (1987) ‘The Place of Reason in the Quest for Moksha: Problems in Vivekananda’s Conceptualization of Jñānayoga’, Religious Studies, 23, 279–88. Sharma, Arvind (ed.) (1988) Neo-Hindu Views of Christianity, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Swami Vivekananda (1972) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Wootton, David (ed.) (1993) Political Writings of John Locke, New York: Mentor. Zavos, John (2001) ‘Conversion and the Assertive Margins: An Analysis of Hindu Nationalist Discourse and the Recent Attacks on Indian Christians’, South Asia, 24, 73–89.

Index

Adivasi 20, 21, 105, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 202, 206, 208 Advaita 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 22, 23, 24, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 80, 118–21, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 133, 137, 138, 142, 146, 158, 172, 204, 208 Advani, L.K. 176 agency 13, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29, 37, 64, 96, 102, 108, 109, 116, 140, 190, 202 Ambedkar, B.R. 102, 188 Appasamy, A.J. 204 Apte, S.S. 14 Archer, W. 75 Arya Samaj 69, 70, 101, 102, 104, 179, 181, 186, 187 Azariah, V.S. 55, 78, 100, 180 Baago, K. 209 Balagangadhara, S.N. 25 Banerjea, K.M. 12, 159 Banerji, K.C. 78 Barth, K. 5, 32, 139 Bateman, R. 86 Bauman, C. 90 Bayly, C.A. 64, 69 Bayly, S. 72 Bebbington, D. 53 bhakti 5, 9, 72, 106, 123, 135, 204, 208 Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī 6 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 14, 15, 176, 177, 180, 189 Bhargava, R. 174 Benares 206 Bosch, D. 153 Bose, R. 71 Brahmo Samaj 71, 74, 77, 98, 164, 207

Buchanan, C. 56, 57, 58 Buddhism 9, 18, 25, 35, 101, 104, 106, 119, 120, 121, 131, 138, 141, 143, 151, 166, 177, 179, 193 Caldwell, R. 50, 55 Calvinism 29, 54 Carey, W. 54, 65 caste 18, 19, 20, 26, 29, 30, 31, 45, 48, 58, 59, 60, 64, 69, 83–92, 95, 98, 100–110, 119, 121, 138, 160, 163, 168, 175–78, 183–190, 192, 202, 206, 210 Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) 16, 88, 89, 151 Cave, S. 2 Cederlof, G. 93, 101 Chakkarai, V. 78, 204 Chandrashekhara Bharati 35 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra 68 Chatterjee, M. 129 Chatterji, S.C. 76, 197 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 44, 55, 67, 72, 77, 86, 87, 90, 91, 95, 160 Clark, R. 76 Clarkson, W. 49, 51 Clooney, F.X. 24 colonialism 6, 12–20, 26, 27, 29, 37, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 79, 83, 89, 93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 119, 145, 168, 174, 175, 180, 185, 187, 190, 201, 202, 206, 207, 209 Constituent Assembly 178, 180 Constitution of India 88, 116, 175, 178, 180, 184, 193, 196

214 Index conversion 1–6, 12, 13–19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27–40, 45, 54, 55, 58, 60, 70, 71, 72, 75, 80, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90–110, 132, 139, 141, 144, 152, 162, 163, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179–85, 188, 189, 190, 191–95, 201, 202, 205, 206, 208 Copley, A. 29 Cottingham, J. 205 Cragg, K. 32 Dalit 21, 88, 101, 103, 107, 111, 163, 168, 177, 178, 183, 185, 188, 189, 191, 202, 210 Darwinism 43, 47, 50, 53, 60, 63, 202, 209 Datta, Akshaykumar 71 Day, J. G. F. 133 Day, Lal Behari 75 D’Costa, G. 150, 157, 158, 162 De Nobili, R. 83, 86, 87, 89, 150 Devanandan, P.D. 154 dharma 24, 26, 31, 32, 63, 119, 120, 121, 132, 176, 180, 183, 184 dialogue 12, 13, 14, 21, 24, 39, 154–58, 166, 195, 210 Doniger, W. 21 Donnelly, J. 145 Duff, A. 54, 62, 67, 92, 140 Dulles, A. 36 Dundas, P. 35, 106 Dupuis, J. 124, 165 exclusivism 3, 116, 117, 119 evangelicalism 54, 55, 58, 65, 66, 71, 92, 202

Goa 45, 87, 88, 163 Golwalkar, M.S. 179 Griffiths, B. 21, 151 Griffiths, P.J. 24, 25, 26, 141 Goel, S.R. 18, 21, 22, 24, 46, 60, 116, 132, 150, 151, 189, 207, 208 Goreh, N. 72, 96, 110, 143 Grant, C. 57, 65, 71 Grierson, G.A. 51 Guha, R. 108 Guru Nanak 107, 152 Haan, M. 69 Hacker, P. 118, 128, 129 Hansen, T.B. 189 Harper, W. 85 Hart, T. 139 Hasan, Z. 178 Hedges, P. 50, 51, 117 Hick, J. 117, 124, 125, 156 Hindu Mahasabha 105, 186, 188 Hindutva 13, 14, 15, 31, 38, 39, 40, 105, 109, 151, 152, 169, 173, 175, 176, 179, 184, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194, 205, 207, 209 Hogg, A.G. 134, 140 Horton, R. 201 Hrangkhuma, F. 92 idolatry 37, 51, 53, 56, 64, 66, 80, 87 Illaih, K. 107 inclusivism 3, 19, 21, 117, 118, 128, 129, 130, 150, 164 Ingleby, J.C. 56

Farquhar, J.N. 8, 51, 52, 53, 62, 110, 129, 133, 134 Fergusson, D. 141 Figgis, J.N. 203 Forrester, D. 55 Fuller, A. 54 Frykenberg R.E. 46

Jain, G. 59 Jainism 7, 9, 25, 35, 36, 106, 121, 166, 179, 191, 192, 193, 206 Jathanna, O.V. 136 Jewson, A. 53 Johnston, J. 65 Jones, J. 49, 139 Jones, W. 48, 50, 64

Gandhi, M. 15, 59, 159, 180, 191–94, 204 Geertz, C. 159 Ghose, M.C. 140 Giddens, A. 110 Gispert-Sauch, G. 156

Kabir 107 Karlsson, B.G. 183 karma 8, 9, 24, 29, 32, 35, 36, 102, 118, 121, 125, 142, 184, 185, 204 Kartabhaja 91, 100

Index 215 Katz, S. 138 Kelsey, D. 135 Knox, J. 67 Kraemer, H. 134 Krishna Pillai, H.A. 96, 97, 98 Kumārila 27, 119 Kung, H. 164, 165 Laing, S. 52 Larson, G. 167 liberalism 17, 37, 47–50, 52, 53, 56, 75, 83, 202 Lindbeck, G. 131 Lipner, J. 137 Locke, J. 210 London Missionary Society (LMS) 54, 67 Long, J. 160 Loomba, A. 108 Lorenzen, D. 63 Luker, V. 73 Lyall, A.C. 51, 65 Lyotard, J.-F. 168 Maconochie, E. 75 Madan, T.N. 173, 174, 175 Madhusūdana Sarasvatī 27, 121 Madhva 34, 166 Massey, J. 103, Matilal, B.K. 145 Maurice, F.D. 33 Maw, M. 52 McGrath, A. 131 Mendus, S. 126 Mill, J. 47 Mill, J.S. 47, 71, 126 Miller, W. 57 missionaries 8, 13–22, 29, 31, 37, 44, 45–48, 51, 52, 53–57, 59, 60, 62–70, 72, 73, 75–79, 83–85, 90–92, 101, 102, 106, 108, 125, 130, 132, 133, 135, 139, 43, 144, 152, 153–58, 160, 163, 184, 185, 193, 196, 201, 202 Mitchell, M. 49 Monchanin, J. 158 Monier-Williams, M. 51, 52, 110 Monius, A.E. 7 Moor, E. 64 Morley, J. 47 Mojzes, P. 155

Mott, J. 65, 153 Mueller, M. 51, 52 Muir, J. 36, 143 Mukerji, U.N. 185 Nagaland 196, 197 Nandy, A. 173, 174 Neevel, W.G. 124 Neill, S. 144 Netland, H. 161 Newbigin, L. 157 Nicholson, A.J. 64 Niebuhr, R. 162 Niyogi Commission 183 Nock, A.D. 102 Nussbaum, M. 166 Oddie, G. 65, 79, 89, 100, 202 Oommen, G. 100 orientalism 14, 15, 26, 27, 37, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 58, 60, 63, 64, 68, 69, 73, 99, 106, 119, 145, 172, 176, 183, 187, 201 Pandita Ramabai 98, 99, 103, 110 Panikkar, R. 155 Parekh, B. 195 Parry, B. 44 Paul, K.T. 77, 180 Pelikan, J. 159 Pennington, B. 26 Phan, P. 13 Phule, J. 168 Piggin, S. 55 Plantinga, A. 140 pluralism 3, 13, 19, 116, 117, 122, 124, 125, 130, 139, 140, 141, 146, 165, 205 Porter, A. 56 Potts, D. 90 Radhakrishnan, S. 3, 5, 13, 25, 29, 34, 74, 115, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 142, 146, 172, 176, 204 Raghavan, V. 125 Rahner, K. 5, 161 Rae, M.A. 2 Rai, Lala Lajpat 8, 26, 105, 179 Rajaram, N.S. 116 Ramakrishna 122, 123

216 Index Rāmānuja 120, 121, 122, 166, 194 Rambo, L. 28, 94, 95, 96, 109 Ramey, S. 152 Ram Singh II 10 Ram Swarup 20, 24, 116, 150, 156 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 14, 31, 105, 152, 176, 179, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 206 Ratzinger, J. 209 Rayan, S. 65, 93 Raychaudhuri, T. 68 relativism 118, 123, 128, 129, 144, 145 religion 1–6, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19–22, 24, 25–27, 28, 31–34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 92, 97, 98, 102, 104, 105, 106, 115–19, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129–35, 137–39, 143, 145, 146, 150, 151, 153, 155–62, 164–67, 169, 172, 173–82, 184, 185, 188, 191–93, 196, 197, 201–210 Robinson, R. 163 Roy, Rammohun 8, 26, 73, 119, 204  Śamkara 7, 9, 27, 35, 74, 118, 120, 122, 138, 208 Said, E. 15, 17, 68, 69 Śaivism 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 26, 27, 33, 39, 72, 104, 110, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 129, 130, 139, 193 Saldanha, J. 14 Sardella, F. 6 Savarkar, V.D. 105, 152, 179, 188 Schmidt-Leukel, P. 127 secularism 13, 19, 169, 173–79, 195 Sen, A. 166 Sen, K.C. 97, 207 Shourie, A. 16, 116, 162, 164, 165 Sikhism 104, 106, 152, 177, 179, 187, 206 Singh, B. 79 Singh, Sadhu Sundar 12, 160 Slater, T.E. 52, 135 Smith, D. 173 Srinivas, M.N. 103 St Augustine 36, 143 Stewart, R. 66 Stoeber, M. 137 Stokes, E. 58, 66

Stokes, S. 160 subaltern 17, 20, 21, 60, 108, 109, 110, 188, 189, 202, 206, 208 śuddhi 15, 101, 102, 181, 186, 187, 188 Supreme Court 173, 176, 177, 181 Swami Abhishiktananda 59, 155, 158 Swami B.H. Bon Maharaj 8 Swami Dayananda 73, 119 Swami Nikhilananda 4 Swami Prabhupada 4, 5, 124 Swami Saradananda 34 Swami Shraddhanand 186 Swami Vivekananda 2, 3, 8, 13, 22, 26, 33, 34, 36, 68, 73, 74, 115, 118, 121, 122, 123, 166, 172, 176, 204, 210 Symmachus 194 Temple, R. 53, 92 Thomas Christians 72, 201 Thomas, G. 180 Thomas, M.M. 209 Tilak, N.V. 151 toleration 3, 19, 21, 22, 39, 40, 115, 118, 119, 121, 125–30, 144, 145, 172, 174, 176, 203, 210 truth 1–9, 14, 18, 19, 21–25, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 62, 64, 70, 74, 78, 79, 96, 99, 110, 115–39, 141–44, 150, 151, 153–58, 160, 161, 162, 164, 172, 174, 176, 185, 191–94, 202–205, 207, 209 Tucker, B.W. 192 Untouchables 19, 21, 83, 87, 101, 102, 103, 105, 175, 178, 185, 186, 188 Upadhyay, Brahmabandhab 12, 71, 96, 97, 151, 160 utilitarianism 17, 37, 43, 47, 53, 55 Vadakkankulam 87 Vaisnavism 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 26, 27, 36, 39, 98, 104, 110, 120, 121, 122, 124, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 139, 142, 152, 193, 194, 203 Vajpayee, A.B. 15 varnāśramadharma 103, 186, 187, 188 Vatican II 14, 89, 151, 152, 158, 162, 164, 207 Vaughan, J. 91, 95

Index 217 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) 14, 15, 31, 180, 187, 188 Viswanathan, G. 71 Von Stietencron, H. 73, 106

Wilson, D. 85 Winslow, J.C. 76 World Council of Churches (WCC) 154, 183, 130

Wadhwa Mall 44 Weber, Max 110 Webster, J.C.B. 101 Westcott, B.F. 33, 34, 85, 161 Wilberforce, W. 58 Williams, Rowland 3

Yadav, B. 164, 165 Young, R.F. 72 Young, W.M. 58 Zelliot, E. 102

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