The theme of the formation of Christian identities and the nature of its implications in politics during colonialism has been a much-neglected area in Indian history. Many reasons can be adduced for this neglect.
I enjoyed reading this book, though as local histories go, it is extremely dense and detailed. Missionary history is a specialist domain, because it chronicles 19th century lifeworlds, very far removed from present circumstances.
Perhaps no period or region in Indian history is as well documented as the Mughal period. The practice of Mughal rulers of maintaining personal records and autobiographies, the encouragement given to contemporary historians to write official biographies and histories,
The central theme of this study is memory. Other important ones include teleology, spectrality, Derridean deconstruction, certain aspects of Marxism, ideas of the messianic plus philosophies of alterity.
One of the few authentic terrors of walking unguardedly into a bookshop in these dark times is that one is almost immediately trapped by an enormous phalanx of thoroughly amiable Spiritual Books on the Inner Self which profess to alleviate all one’s worldly ills, in twelve steps or less, through a sort of spiritual enema:
‘Sir, sir,’ said an excited M. Phil student to me recently, ‘did you see that Naipaul has said he killed his first wife?!’ That was, of course, how the newspapers had headlined the report that an authorized biography of Naipaul had come out, while omitting to say, naturally,