Foreword to Mar Aprem Metropolitan's Indian Church History Lectures. Trichur (Kerala, India): Mar Narsai Press, 2007. (original) (raw)
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Christianity in India: A Select Bibliography
2021
Indian Christianity is an important part of the story of World Christianity that began with the Apostle Thomas. The texts in this bibliography tell some of the stories of Christianity in India. This bibliography provides a substantial introduction to Indian Christianity, but is not exhaustive in scope. Only monographs and edited volumes are included; adding individual chapters or academic articles would require at least hundreds of pages. Most titles listed are in English; a few are in other European languages. Titles in Indian languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu, Telegu, Marathi, Punjabi, and Assamese (among others) are not included: those who can read one or more of those languages most likely do not need to refer to a bibliography such as this! [latest revision: 29 November 2023]
Contextualizing Christian Theology in South Asia: An Analytical Study from 1542-1947
Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 2019
Abstract: South Asian region has largely been under the influence of Indian, Chinese and Arabic cultures. All of the religious traditions have been strongly localized and tolerated various forms of folk cultures. Christianity in this region came in the early sixteenth century and flourished in the colonial era. It is normally assumed that it escaped from the process of adaptation and syncretism. However, this is not the case, as there were a number of missionaries not interested in Europeanizing their converts as in the case of Jesuits missionaries in India. Here in this article an attempt has been made to explicate the early attempt of western missionaries and local Christian to localize Christianity. To achieve this goal this paper has been divided into three sections. First section sheds light upon the overall attitude of early missionaries to the indigenous cultures and religions of India. Second section deals with the early efforts of contemporization in Indian Subcontinent. Third section will illustrate the situation church had to face after the partition of India, and how this partition impeded the process of contemporization movement. As a method, this article reviews the efforts of both native Christians and missionaries to indigenize Christianity in Indian first chronologically and then thematically. Keywords: South Asian Christianity, Indian Christianity, contextualization, Malabar controversy, Jesuits in India, religion and culture
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Did you know that the apostle Thomas reached India? The likely date for his arrival in the Indus River Valley was 40 AD. Gondophares, whom Thomas evangelized, was the king of a Hellenistic Indo-Parthian kingdom there in what is now Pakistan and westernmost India, reigning from 19-46 AD. Thomas was probably in South India no later than 52 AD. Some of the later traditions of the fourth century Thomas of Cana, a Syrian or Persian missionary to the Malabar Coast, have likely been conflated with the older traditions about the apostle, but the evidence for Thomas serving as a missionary in India is every bit as strong (and perhaps stronger) than the evidence that Peter went to Rome. Communities of "Thomas Christians" remain among the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world.
This seminar explores the claim of diverse Christian traditions in South Asia to be religious traditions of South Asia, with special attention to these traditions’ indigenisation and social interactions with majority Hindu traditions. Our study will begin with an overview of the historical development of Christianity in India from the first century CE to the present. In a second unit, we move to close readings of four major theological articulations of an indigenous South Asian Christianity: M.M. Thomas, Vandana Mataji, James Theophilus Appavoo and Wessley Lukose. Finally, our attention will turn to the concept of ritual hybridity in Christian practice and the ethnographic study of Christian communities in India. Most of our attention will be focused on Christian traditions in India, but students are encouraged to choose topics related to Christianity in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and/or Bhutan for their research papers.
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY IN SOUTH INDIA: HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CRITIQUES-A REVIEW
It has been a forced departure from the idea of narrating historical stages of Christianity in South India but to delve on the existing historiography on early South Indian Christianity. The rationale behind is that the writings of different authors about the emergence of Christianity in India, south India in particular has still been not accepted completely and kept as a debatable topic. Paucity of primary data in this particular field makes historians handicapped. The available historical sources comes in the way of 'tradition' are not sufficient to satisfy international community on this important socio-cultural history of India. The fact is that there are many areas in the historical past for which historians do not have sources to construct them elaborately for understanding. They fell right in the historical period for which historians supposedly have plenty of sources to understand that stages. These are the black holes exist in historical past. This could completely turn around the structure of a particular society if not a whole state when they are explored and understood. The early history of Christianity in south India cannot be put under Dark Age type either, as it has some sources (Indian tradition) and references (apocryphal writings on Indian Christianity) to build an idea. Nevertheless, array of historical writings both in missionary perspectives and historical methods on this field has been established from 3 rd century AD for the first type and from 19 th century AD for the second type. The missionary based writings are declining in postcolonial setup. Through Eric Frykenberg's self accusation of his own master narratives with post colonial and subaltern methods one can observe that shift had happened quite long before his original work on the 'Christianity in India: From the Beginnings to the Present'. Religious texts always have evangelical proselytizing trait inherited onto them. Understanding the psycho lingual nuances, embedded objectives and contexts of these texts are very difficult for even a trained historian to maintain historical objectivity let alone the common reader. This is the problem of the given topic. However, acceptance, towards historical truths will lead us to the destination of historical objectivity. Here, some writings and their subjective themes are derived in order to understand the problem.