Webster has written a valuable and outstanding supplement to his earlier The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (1976). The study of Christian communities in India, their history, culture and social structure has recently acquired an independent identity within the academia. Though numerically small and unevenly scattered, the Christians have occupied an important place in the subcontinent, particularly as the second largest community in the country with a long history of involvement and innovation in the educational enterprise. Indian Christianity is an extremely complex phenomenon with its diverse composition, patterns of stratification, traditions, cultural and social practices, modes of worship, and challenges and changing identities. However, till recently, scholarship on Christianity in India has faced neglect, much of the research on the Christian community being carried out by scholars working in the western universities.
Not only have there been very few research works on Christianity in general, but the Christian communities living in northern India and north-west India have been barely studied. Webster’s book is, in a sense, an attempt towards correcting this lacuna. In 1974, the Church History Association of India proposed to bring out a series of volumes on the history of Christianity in India, region by region, from a new perspective, viewing Christianity as an integral part of the people’s history rather than merely as a fragment of the history of India. Webster’s work was undertaken as a part of the ongoing project.