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. A few of the most plausible among them are the treatment meted out to Christians as a ‘negligible political quantity’ due to their numerical smallness and the colonial construction that tended to recognize the Hindus and Muslims as the major contending communities of India; and the failure of Indian Christians to organize themselves politically in the postcolonial period. Nevertheless, the growing Hindu Right wing mobilization in India during the past two decades, and its systematic militant manifestations that unleashed sporadic violence on Christians, has opened fresh vistas to explore this theme. As a result, there is now a growing number of scholarly works on Indian Christians that have begun to appear in the wake of an increasing interest in Hindutva perceptions of Christianity as foreign, alien and anti-national. This book under review offers us yet another fresh, valuable and exciting addition to this slowly growing pile of literature.
Mallampalli’s book has 12 chapters neatly grouped under 3 broad parts. Drawing on historical, legal, political, print media and archival sources, he seeks to examine the dominant question that pervades his work—whether there was ever a ‘single Christian community’ within the Madras presidency which had a high proportion of India’s Christian population. He sets out on this search by exploring the British legal interventions in defining the native Christians. In the first part of the book, he convincingly argues that from the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 that ensured the ‘natural rights of individual converts’ in matters of property, guardianship of children and conjugal rights, British law treated them as if they were Hindus. In this, British law was driven by ‘a desire to privilege Hindu institutions and their religious underpinnings had taken priority over any commitment to individual rights or freedom of conscience’ (p. 22). However, in contrast to the Act of 1850 which recognized the ‘diverse and highly indigenous cultural practices of native Christians’ (p. 38), the Indian Succession Act (X of 1865) placed them with the Europeans under a single law of inheritance. ‘By the 1870s, the imperial courts had come to define the Native Christian community according to European cultural standards and in opposition to the customs of indigenous caste society’ (p. 2) and attempts were made to codify the laws pertaining to them, modelled upon English Common Law. Made to conform to English personal law through the enforcement of the Indian Succession Act of 1865 and the construction of a single body of civil law around a single law of marriage for Christians—the Indian Christian Marriage Act of 1872—the legal definition of Indian Christians became increasingly narrow. While the judiciary treated Hinduism as diverse and pluralistic, it attempted to impose a singular homogeneous character on Indian Christian practices. Treating Christians as a single monolithic block facilitated the identification of Christians as separate. As Mallampalli points out, the move severed Christians from their communities of caste and custom—though their actual multiple practices were closer to what was defined as Hindu personal law—reifying them as a ‘foreign community’ and pushing them to the margins of a predominantly Hindu society.
In the second part, Mallampalli proceeds to unfold the story of how Catholic and Protestant Christian elites have attempted to locate themselves as a political community within the evolving Indian nation. He examines the contesting notions of the ‘Indian Christian Community’ generated by Catholic and Protestant elites as the Indian politics came to be shaped increasingly by new forms of political mobolilization based upon caste and religious identity. Moving on, he then looks at how the Christian identity was multifaceted and elucidates the contrasting approaches to politics advocated by them in order to produce a homogenized Indian Christian community. Strained by the sheer diversity of India’s Christian population, this project of envisioning a single Indian Christian community succeeded only partially. According to Mallampalli, the Catholic elites opted for retaining strong communal boundaries and entered the domain of a communal politics that was criticized as anti-national and communal by Hindu nationalists. It is obvious that the Catholics stood in favour of the Communal Award affirming themselves as Catholics within the provincial councils and district boards. English educated Protestants, by contrast, rejected the separate electorates for Christians as ‘loaves and fishes’ and tended to blend with the ‘higher ideals’ of national culture by identifying themselves with nationalistic politics. Despite assuming this stance, they failed to get themselves accommodated as united Indian Christians in the mainstream nationalism due to its ‘Hindu character’ and in fact grew more marginal to the public life of South India. Failure of the elites’ project of constructing a united—as—Indian Christians front further led to their alienation from the lower caste rural converts.
The third part of the book deals primarily with the politics of dalit Christians. Mallampalli points out the variations in the patterns and shapes and forms of the modes of dalit assertions in the Catholic and non-Catholic church contexts. Mallampalli notes, ‘They either strove to become more integrated into the life of their respective Christian communities, or they tended to assert their autonomy from the dominant sections (i.e., so-called “caste Christians”) of those communities’ (p. 171). With the strong Catholic emphasis on their distinct and separate religious identity in the public domain, the dalit Catholics tended to protest and seek redress for their caste discrimination primarily within the existing structures of the Church. On the contrary, the Protestant elites favouring de-emphasizing religious identity and weakening of the communal boundaries and disavowal of communalism in the name of national culture/nationalism, the Protestant dalits displayed stronger tendencies toward seeking an autonomous dalit identity independent of the Church and beyond the walls of the church. This well-documented volume is significant for more than one reason. First, in this impressive ground-breaking work, Mallampalli leads us into hitherto largely unexplored terrain—the histories and processes that went into the making of Indian Christians during colonialism. Secondly, it is a well argued robust piece of research that sets out to dismantle the concepts that have congealed into stereotypes, challenging particularly the Hindu Right’s deliberate assumptions and narratives of Christians as a homogeneous monolithic group wedded to a foreign religion and culture and hence, denationalized. Mallampalli’s book is lucid and painstakingly researched and evocatively written. Offering us brand new insights, it is an exciting and impressive intellectual debut, contributing in no small measure to the enrichment and understanding of the ‘multifaceted character of Indian-ness’ that rendered the ‘notion of an Indian Christian even more complex and unstable’ (p. 201).
- Vincent Kumaradoss is Professor of History at the Madras Christian College, Tambaram, Chennai.