Putting Indian Christianities into context: biographies of Christian conversion in a leprosy colony (original) (raw)
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This chapter raises key questions concerning religion, individualisation, and religious individualisation/institutionalisation. It does so by exploring the interplay of conversion, translation, and life-stories. Such interplay was embedded within processes of evangelical entanglements between Euro-American missionaries and central-Indian peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, I focus on autobiographies and biographies of converts to Christianity in the Chhattisgarh region of central India, especially accounts written in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, the ordinary nature and the very details of these texts – mediated by procedures of vernacular translation – not only reveal the writings as key registers of evangelical entanglements. They further foreground critical queries that turn on religion and politics, individual and subject, individualisation and personhood, institutionalisation and akrasia.
Caste, Conversion and Care: Towards an Anthropology of Christianity of India
Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 2019
This paper critically examines Nathaniel Roberts' book, To be Cared For. It argues that by discussing the "unique moral problems and cultural contradictions" that surround the everyday life-world of low caste Dalit Pentecostals in a slum in Chennai, Roberts provides a rich ethnography of caste, Christianity and care in India. In particular, the book makes several contributions: first, it provides a nuanced, contextual understanding of the "pluralities" of Indian Christianities; second, contrary to Gandhian view of "religion as spirituality", it shows (by questioning the hierarchy of the religious world) how materiality or worldly benefits occupy a central role in the life-world of believers; third, it discusses "pastoral innovation" and shows how Pentecostal pastors are constantly innovating new ways of interpreting and reinterpreting doctrines to address the everyday social problems and anxieties of believers, and also how pastoral innovation needs to be understood in the context of pastoral competition and rivalry; and finally, it discusses a notion of belonging that goes beyond territoriality and religious affiliation and shows how "relationality", shared values, and real/imagined connections are essential to belonging. Discussing these four aspects, what the paper shows is, how through careful observation and in-depth ethnographic narratives of everyday religiosity and morality of the slum dwellers, Roberts makes an important contribution to the anthropology of Christianity in India.
The Missionary Position: Christianity and Politics of Religious Conversion in India
The purpose of this article is to critically examine the politics of religious conversion in India. Since Christianity is the main religion espousing and conducting conversion in ever-larger numbers in India, my focus, in the following pages, is to interrogate the debate surrounding this particular undertaking and the attendant conflict dynamics. This study is organized according to the following framework. First, it situates religious conversion in the context of radical Hindu nationalism. Second, it explores the issue of religious conversion in the theories of identity and globalization. Third, it probes the specifics of Christian conversion in India and investigates the issue within the framework of identity politics and secularism. Fourth, it examines the response and reaction of the radical Hindu nationalists towards religious conversion in general and Christian conversion in particular from the perspective of ethno-religious nationalism. Fifth and finally, it evaluates the dimensions of conflict between Christians and Hindus and how they are played out in the shared social arena. In conclusion, this article stresses that religious conversion in India is a form of a socioeconomic emancipatory undertaking. Those who feel stifled by the discriminatory caste order prevalent within Hinduism and live a marginal existence embrace this new identity. In the same breath it argues that Christianity in general, and Christian missionaries in particular, have courted criticism, opposition, and violence from radical Hindus, informed citizenry, and the institution of the state, as they are considered an “external other”—accused of undermining the complex sociopolitical order in the country.
The Compassionate Social Sphere: Native Christian Auto/biographies in Colonial India, 1870-1920
This essay examines the construction of a compassionate social sphere in native missionary biographies and autobiographies from colonial India, 1870-1920. It proposes that the native converts begin the fashioning of such a social sphere when they become dissidents within the home and the family. From this assertion of agency in terms of their choice of faith and their disillusionment with, primarily Hinduism, they move on to constructing moral webs, constituted by textual labours and networks of labour wherein the missionary works to produce texts and generates a series of connections with existing missionary networks and building new ones among the converts. In this process they create a compassionate social sphere founded on Christian faith and labour.
2010
It may be argued that in times of conflict, monuments and other historical structures are destroyed or whole communities converted in one way or the other to conqueror’s religion. The destruction of Hindu temples and monuments by Muslim rulers and vice-versa was a historical reality in the medieval period. 1 Colonial hegemony gave the colonisers not only the power to set the pattern of Indian historiography but also to take up issues related to religion, 2 general progress and modernity to the ‘subject’ peoples. Not surprisingly then, there were formal links between Christianity and the British Raj. Missionaries too had easy access to the highest government offices in British India.When religious doctrines were considered as the essence of world religions, the concept of true religion began to appear in the scene. 6 Nevertheless, the ironies of colonialism were very much visible. 7
Myriad Encounters: Christianity and Colonial Rule in South Asia
… Conference on Colonialism and Globalisation Five …, 1998
Christianity has come to India from different parts of the world, at different historical moments and out of different impulses. One finds it crucial to differentiate between the British and pre-British periods and within both further distinctions become necessary. These distinctions are important because the modes and strategies of conversion are, I would argue, crucially linked with varying political regimes and historical junctures and the possibilities and limitations they hold out.