Book Review

Religion in a political minefield

Christianity in India: from beginnings to the present

We hear a lot these days about India as a potential economic superpower, as a scene of Hindu-Muslim conflict and as an object of Raj nostalgia, but not much about Indian Christians: recent headlines about violence against Christians in Orissa are an exception. It may come as a surprise to learn that the Christian population of India, still growing fast, is now estimated at between 70 and 80 million people, of whom Catholics are the largest component. India is one of the main areas in the world where Christianity is both vigorous and expanding. It is also, as this impressively scholarly and up-to-date overview by Professor

Eric Frykenberg tells us, a country in which "scarcely a week passes without some church building being destroyed or some Christians being killed".

Nothing about India is simple. It contains over 1 billion people speaking 325 different languages and comprising more than 80,000 different "cultural and ethnic identities", each to some degree divided from the other by its own history and self-understanding. Although the great majority are Hindus (a portmanteau term, originally meaning simply the forms of religion practised by people beyond the Indus), there are almost as many Muslims as in Pakistan, along with Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsees and different denominations of Christians. In addition, there is a huge but virtually unquantifiable number of tribals: Adivasis following various forms of "primal" religion, along with the Dalits (the former "untouchables"). Caste still plays a crucial role in Indian society (including among Christians, who are legally casteless).

Christian communities have been part of this complex patchwork of cultures and identities since at least the third century AD, and possibly since apostolic times, when tradition says that St Thomas brought the Gospel to south India and was martyred near Chennai (Madras). (Frykenberg seems cautiously ready to give this tradition the benefit of the doubt.) When the Portuguese arrived in 1500, they found a long-established Christian community - today's "Thomas Christians" - occupying 60 towns along the Malabar coast, led by their own (Syrian) bishops and capable of raising an army of 50,000. In the wake of the Portuguese, Catholic missionaries - Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites and above all Jesuits - began spreading across India. Protestant missionaries arrived in the seventeenth century; and the lifting of the East India Company's ban on missionaries in 1813 led to an accelerating influx of Anglicans and Evangelicals, followed recently by the Pentecostals. Soon Indians themselves took on a missionary role, and today there are "10 to 15 times more missionaries than ever before in India's history" - most of them Indians. 

Frykenberg steers a careful course through the rapids of "orientalism" and anti-colonialism which, together with the postmodern suspicion of objective truth, make historical interpretation in an Indian context so tricky. He has also had to contend with the current rewriting of Indian history in the interests of ideological purity by Hindu nationalists and proponents of Hindutva (the idea that only Hindus are the true Indians), which has turned the subject into a party-political minefield.

On the whole, he manages this task with skill and impartiality. Without underplaying the "colonial" flavour of much nineteenth-century missionary activity, he gives the British credit for the fairness of their administration, pointing out that the Raj was in many ways an Indian entity, the manpower which sustained it being overwhelmingly Indian. He describes Macaulay's famous minute, recommending the formation of a class of Indians "English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" as "outrageously chauvinist"; but he does not fully convey the strength of feeling behind the early-nineteenth-century evangelical endeavour, which led no less humane a Christian than William Wilberforce to describe Hinduism as "licentious and cruel".

Frykenberg's focus of interest seems to be on Indian Protestantism, but he has two interesting chapters on Catholicism. One relates the painful story of Portuguese intolerance towards the Thomas Christians; the other traces the "renewal and resurgence" of the Catholic Church in India from the early nineteenth century onwards and its rise to become, under three separate hierarchies, the largest, best organised Christian community in the country. He shows that Christianity has flourished most vigorously where it has had least connection with British rule (hence the relative success of Catholicism) and in areas remote from a central administration, whether British or Indian; and he argues convincingly that Christianity in India, so far from being a colonial implant, is "profoundly indigenous".

In making this case, he puts great emphasis on the notion of "primal religion", by which he means an understanding of the Transcendent which is "universally present within all humankind", which can be overlaid but not superseded, and between which and biblical Christianity there is a natural affinity. For people with a primal religious background, conversion to Christianity means "turning to Christ what is already there and not a total denigration of one's past". If I understand him rightly, he sees this as the main explanation for the dramatic expansion of Christian belief among the Adivasis and the Dalits, who now account between them for two-thirds of the Christian population. It is also true that for the Dalits, conversion to Christianity (or to Buddhism) means an escape from the prison of castelessness and an awareness of their basic human rights - in other words, an important element in their "politicisation", as a young Indian Salesian in central India told me with enthusiasm.

It is this politicisation of a previously compliant people - leading to the assertion of their political rights against their oppressors - that accounts in part for the rise in hostility to Christians among some of the higher castes. At a more ideological level, the political furore about conversions and the increasing hostility to both Christians and Muslims stem also from the fact that Christianity and Islam are seen as "converting" religions, whereas Hinduism is not: one is born a Hindu but, strictly speaking, cannot opt to become one. From this point of view, conversions constitute a form of aggression which Hindus cannot reciprocate.  

As Frykenberg makes clear, his book is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Indian Christianity: its denominational and theological variety is impossible to compress into a single volume. There is little about the content of different versions of Christian teaching, about the motivation of the different sorts of Christian missionary, or about (for example) the current state of Indian Catholicism in the wake of Vatican II. Instead, he has drawn on a lifetime's immersion in the cultures and history of India to trace some of the main strands in the growth of Indian Christianity and to examine the extent to which it should be regarded as essentially Indian. The result may not be an easy read, but it is an invaluable treasury of insights, both into Christianity in India and into the manifold problems of "acculturation" in a globalised world.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...