Abstract
The history of world Christianity has typically relied on certain binary categories such as Western/non-Western, missionary/native, modern/traditional, and liberal/conservative. Our globalizing context, in which well-established political and ideological borders are constantly being crossed, raises questions about the adequacy of such binaries. Using Christianity in North India as a case study, this article explores the limits of these inherited frameworks for the study of world Christianity.
Keywords
Introduction
In this article I examine the historiography of world Christianity using North India as a case study and call for fresh understandings of the past by challenging the limits imposed by inherited frameworks of analysis. 1 Michel de Certeau reminds us that the study of history is significantly influenced by the academic and the general cultural milieu in which it is taking place. 2 As our circumstances change, so do our approaches to the scholarly subject. However, new histories also manifest continuities with previous work. To take Indian Christianity as an example, despite the profound differences between the imperial, nationalist, and postcolonial eras of Indian history, they all produced studies of Indian Christianity that emphasize the differences between East and West, Europe and India. While I do not see these previous perspectives as necessarily wrong, in my view the globalized reality of our world raises questions about these assumed academic binaries, most notably, Western/non-Western, missionary/native, modern/traditional and liberal/conservative. 3 Today, historians of world Christianity need to question these binaries so that a richer understanding of the past will emerge.
History of the historiography of Christianity in North India
There have been several stages in the modern writing of the history of Indian Christianity. 4 John Webster notes that the first histories of Christianity in North India were largely mission histories focused on specific denominations or personalities. 5 These histories emphasized the work of missionary leaders and institutions such as churches, schools, orphanages, and publishing enterprises. Webster notes that Indians themselves “had no significant roles” in these historical narratives “and little influence in shaping … outcomes.” 6 Despite the myopia, triumphalism, and other shortcomings that plague most mission histories, they do provide important data not recorded elsewhere about life and Christian work in India. 7
With the rise of Indian nationalism and the gaining of Indian independence in 1947, the history of Christianity in North India shifted its focus from missionary to Indian lives and work. However, the focus of these histories remained the same: important individuals and church institutions. Only now these individuals and institutions were also Indian, not solely European or American. One example is John N. Hollister’s The Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia, published in 1956. A second-generation Methodist missionary born in India in 1888, Hollister began missionary service in 1912 and retired in 1954. 8 He came of age at the height of Britain’s imperial phase and worked as that empire was assailed by two world wars and decades of Indian nationalist activism culminating in Indian independence. His history gives equal attention to important Indian Christian leaders as well as to missionaries and their activities such as evangelism, church construction, publishing, education, and orphanages. The ease with which he moves between the Indian and American subjects speaks to his familiarity with the people and cultures of India. Yet he continues in the tradition of earlier mission histories by writing about church leaders and institutions.
Once the interest of historians moved from missionaries to Indians, their perspective also shifted from Christianity in North India as a Euro-American transplant to Christianity as part of the larger history of India per se. 9 Another phase of historiography, rooted in the context of the new nation-state, came into being. John C.B. Webster’s The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India exemplifies this shift. Webster addresses an audience that includes both “those interested in the history of Christianity” and “those primarily interested in Indian history.” 10 In the 1970s and 1980s the move to write a “social history” of Christianity in North India arose and was most explicitly and ambitiously embodied in the multi-volume series on the history of Christianity in India commissioned by the Church History Association of India (CHAI) in 1974. 11 The guidelines for these volumes called for a history that “is viewed as an integral part of the socio-cultural history of the Indian people rather than separate from it.” 12 Christianity’s new framing as a sociocultural phenomenon reflects the general trend in the academy since the 1960s to study religion as part of political, economic, and social forces. The temptation here, as David Hardiman points out, is to ignore religion as a motivating force in Indian history. Commenting on the history of India’s aboriginal people, or adivasis, he notes, “As a rule, secular-minded socialist historians are either embarrassed by the existence of what they regard as mere superstitious belief and ignore it, or regard it as a form of primeval consciousness that is shed rapidly once adivasis have been educated by socialist cadres.” 13
One response to such critiques came unexpectedly from Harvey Cox in his 2001 study of the worldwide Pentecostal movement, Fire from Heaven. In the preface he confesses, Nearly three decades ago I wrote a book, The Secular City, in which I tried to work out a theology for the “postreligious” age that many sociologists had confidently assured us was coming. Since then, however, religion—or at least some religions—seems to have gained a new lease on life. Today it is secularity, not spirituality that may be headed for extinction.
14
Writing history in an age of globalization
Along with the (re)turn to the religious, our age is also witnessing the increasing force of globalization. 18 While definitions of globalization abound, the following suits my current purposes: “Increasing global connectedness, so that events and developments in one part of the world are affected by, have to take account of, and also influence … other parts of the world … [There is] an increasing sense of a single global whole.” 19 As this definition suggests, globalization blurs boundaries between societies and between nations. 20 Ideas and materials traverse formerly formidable state and imperial borders, transgressing them to the point where familiar distinctions such as “foreign” and “indigenous” are called into question. World Christianity is a major actor in this process of material and ideal globalization. 21 Great numbers of Christians travel voluntarily and involuntarily across the globe today, carrying with them goods, services, money, ideas, prayers, and blessings that affect numerous societies and cultures. They also send goods, services, money, ideas, prayers, and blessings to places far removed from them, thus intensifying the pace and degree of globalization. As boundaries created during the imperial, nationalist and Cold War eras of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are blurred, we can glimpse previously concealed dynamics at work in former periods of world Christianity. Let me suggest four dichotomies whose axiomatic status will be challenged as we pursue the project of writing history from our globalizing perspective.
The Western and the non-Western
First, the neat distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” Christianity—a legacy of the imperial era—begins to fray when we look back at the development of Indian Christianity. Key theorists and administrators of the British Empire, beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, imposed well-defined differences between Indian and British people and cultures, sometimes arguing on the basis of biological determinism. As it responded to the empire in the twentieth century, the Indian nationalist movement appropriated this argument for its own purposes: it could use the purported differences between “Indians” and “British” to rouse the Indian populace to political action. So, too, the postcolonial state and society deployed the Western/non-Western distinction for their work of nation-building.
In today’s globalized era, however, scholars question the rigid demarcation between Western and non-Western cultures. To begin, they question whether the term “world Christianity” should include the study of Christianity from around the world, or whether it should refer to Christianity in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. At least three recent textbooks include Europe and North America in their survey of world Christianity, pointedly questioning the exceptional nature of either Western or non-Western Christianity. 22 By putting Western and non-Western Christianity on equal footing, they are able to theorize about interaction between various forms of Christianity across the globe. In such works, there is no more or less difference between European and African Christianity than, say, between European and North American Christianity.
Another consequence of the blurring of the Western/ non-Western divide is that it is no longer a given that certain ideas, activities, and materials are “Western” or “non-Western.” To take one example: in India, did converts to Christianity accept missionary ideals of Christian womanhood as manifestly Western ones? The answer is not as clear as once assumed. Chad Bauman writes perceptively about Indian Christians’ indigenous reasons for adopting Victorian ideals of femininity. 23
Here it is important to recall that the terms “Western” and “non-Western” often carry moral evaluations; frequently there is an implication, if not an outright claim, that one is superior to the other. The study of world Christianity in an age of increasing globalization calls such judgments into question; all forms of Christianity need appropriate critique and appreciation. For example, the reflexive judgment of scholars who criticize the adoption of Western Christianity in the mission field should be challenged. In studying nineteenth-century North Indian Protestants I discovered that sometimes it was Indians, frequently in the face of missionary criticism, who were eager to take on certain aspects of Western culture and blend it into their own. Such eagerness to incorporate foreign elements into Indians’ Christianity intrigues me. Was it simply a misapprehension of true indigenous Christianity, or was it an authentic form of local Christianity drawn from multiple sources? Here, the line between Western and non-Western Christianity begins to look like a line in the sand, neither as fixed nor as deep as previously thought. 24
As we call into question the distinction between the “Western” and “non-Western” worlds the temptation will be to discard this distinction altogether. In my opinion, this would be a serious mistake, since the distinction still explains much in the history of world Christianity. For example, in the high imperial era, when European peoples controlled most of the territory of the world, many people understood European culture as qualitatively different from non-European culture. Furthermore, many people made moral evaluations of these cultures. 25 Nonetheless, what the blurring of the divide between Western and non-Western Christianity provides is a more nuanced understanding into the nature of world Christianity, both past and present.
The native and the missionary
Globalization also affects the historiography of world Christianity by questioning the clear distinction between “missionary” and “native.” There is no doubt that missionaries arrived in India with a great deal of baggage, be it physical, cultural, or ideational. They typically lived in houses unlike Indian homes, with a distinctly European lifestyle. As one Indian Presbyterian minister remarked in a missionary conference in 1862, “the social position of the missionary, his intellectual and spiritual attainments, his highly civilized ideas, and his cultivated, refined feelings, must place him so far above his converts, generally, that there can scarcely be any fellow-feeling between them.” 26 Yet now we see that the gap between missionaries and natives was not a complete void, but was in fact populated. There were European missionaries who became so at ease in Indian culture that they became part of the fabric of native life. One such figure was the Prussian Pietist Christian Frederick Schwartz (1726–98). 27 Schwartz landed in Tranquebar, South India in 1750 and soon became extremely knowledgeable about the local culture. A born linguist, he mastered Tamil, Telegu, Urdu, Persian, Hindustani, English, and Portuguese and successfully started and maintained Lutheran churches and schools in the Tamil-speaking areas of India. Schwartz was also a key political figure, being perhaps the only person of social stature trusted by Indian and European warring factions alike. The Tanjore king was so impressed by Schwartz’s erudition and integrity that he appointed him as the teacher and mentor of his son Serfoji. The two developed a very close relationship that lasted until Schwartz’s death.
Not only missionaries refuse to conform to the well-developed templates of historical scholarship; Indian Christians also crisscrossed the missionary/native divide. Born into a Hindu household, Ishwari Dass (1827–67) entered a Christian orphanage at the age of seven during a famine, and quickly became a favorite of his missionary guardians. They took him to the United States to study, and thereafter he served as a teacher and principal in mission schools, publishing prize-winning works in English and Urdu. 28 He was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church and died while pastoring a congregation. Dass both embraced and was embraced by the missionary establishment. Yet he also remained committed to his fellow Indians. His book describing North Indian society, written primarily for a European audience, lacks much of the vitriol that characterized similar missionary accounts of his era. 29
While Schwartz and Dass may appear as the exceptions that prove the rule about a divide between missionaries and natives, I view them as beacons directing us to an unnoticed and understudied area in world Christianity. Two examples are the Christian village and the Eurasian community in nineteenth-century North India. The Christian village emerged when new converts, often people from the lowest castes, faced persecution due to their shift in religious allegiance and subsequently fled to missionaries for protection and care. What began as a stop-gap measure quickly turned into a veritable institution in Indian Protestantism as Indian Christians formed a fully functioning community dependent on missionary resources. While many missionaries complained about the time and energy spent in maintaining Christian villages instead of reaching the “heathen” with the gospel, they could find no escape from their enmeshment in the lives of the native Christians. The Christian village was an institution that came to occupy the gap between missionary and native Christian as a creation of Indians and foreigners dependent on each other for their lives and work. 30
Another neglected area of North Indian Protestant history is the role of Eurasians in the formation and development of the Indian church. 31 Europeans had come to live and work in India in significant numbers since the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. The great majority of these Europeans were male, and many of them found female companionship within the local population and started and raised families in India. The British soldiers of the East India Company had Indian “wives” (in certain circumstances they could not be legally married) and children who became part of the Company’s personnel. Since the soldiers were nominally Christian, their offspring were as well. What is not well studied is how the Eurasian population formed the nucleus of nineteenth-century North Indian Protestant Christianity. For example, many of the first Baptist and Methodist preachers in North India were Eurasian. 32 My point here is that only when we pause to focus on the interstitial space between the “European missionary” and “native Christian” can we appreciate the many ways in which individuals and communities moved and lived between these distinct groups. 33
The traditional and the modern
A third dichotomy that appears questionable in light of globalization is that of tradition and modernity.
34
Tradition and modernity increasingly coalesce in expressions of Asian, African, and Latin American Christianity today, due especially to the rise of Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism. The history of world Christianity also contains moments when tradition drew modernity into its embrace, or modernity employed tradition for its own purposes. An example of the former comes in a statement by the Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Golaknath, at the 1862 Punjab Missionary Conference. Under discussion was why Indian Christians were so eager to Westernize or modernize their lives when they could continue living in traditional ways without threat to their new faith. Golaknath’s response questioned the rigid distinction between the “modern” and “traditional”: Native Christians, in common with their Hindoo friends, try to imitate the manners and customs of their rulers. They did so in the time of the Mussulman,—and they will do so now. If you go among the Sirdars, or visit a respectable Hindoo or Mussulman in town, you will find chairs, tables, drawers, and couches. In almost every place they prefer English things to those of country manufacture. The missionary should not oppose Native Christians in these matters, but leave them to their own inclinations. You cannot stay the progress of civilization.
35
The liberal and the conservative
A final dichotomy I would challenge in the contemporary and historical study of world Christianity is that of “liberal” versus “conservative” Christianity. Philip Jenkins has popularized the notion of non-Western, or Southern, Christianity as conservative, in contrast to a liberal Western Christianity.
36
He describes Southern Christianity in the following terms: These newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and Puritanism, all founded on clear scriptural authority. They preach messages that, to a Westerner, appear simplistically charismatic, visionary, and apocalyptic. In this thought-world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith-healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all basic components of religious sensibility. For better or worse, the dominant churches of the future could have much in common with those of medieval or early modern European times. On present evidence, a Southernized Christian future should be distinctly conservative.
37
The growing inadequacy of the liberal/conservative dichotomy in the study of world Christianity will influence the historical study of Christianity in the Global South. In his study of North Indian Catholics in the 1980s, Mathew Schmalz notes that efforts by clergy to indigenize Catholic ritual and Christianity along more Sanskritic Hindu lines met with strong resistance by the laity, who preferred the Christianity of the foreign missionaries of a previous generation. 39 While such foreign-loving Indian Christians may appear as “conservatives” who were nostalgically attached to the European empire, the picture becomes much more complex when we realize that the majority of Indian Christians come from very low-caste backgrounds. A primary reason that they, or their recent forebears, converted to Christianity was to escape from what they perceived as the clutches of caste Hinduism, and to gain a measure of self-respect and dignity. 40 The apparently “conservative” tendency among Christians from low-caste backgrounds actually manifests a deep desire for social and religious liberation—something most often associated with liberalism. Further complicating the picture is the fact that many Christian priests and ministers come from upper-caste backgrounds, which makes both their affinity for upper-caste Hinduism, and their efforts to inculturate Christianity according to Sanskritic Hindu norms, understandable. Yet it also shows how “conservative” they are. While the category of liberal/conservative does not explain some of the most important issues facing the Indian church, it continues to be popular in assessments by Western Christians (be they liberal or conservative) of their co-religionists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. It is indeed a matter of great sadness that some of the most illiberal appraisals of African, Asian, and Latin American Christians come from progressive North American and European Christians. 41
Conclusion
My discussion of emerging changes in the study of Indian Christianity shows how globalization is making its mark more generally on the study of world Christianity. In a time and place where borders are being transgressed with increasing frequency and velocity, conventional academic distinctions such as Western/non-Western, missionary/native, modern/traditional, and liberal/conservative can no longer be considered axiomatic. A renewed writing of the history of world Christianity in light of our context will bring to view persons, ideas, beliefs, and practices that were formerly obscured and misunderstood. Indeed, the transgressing of borders in the age of globalization reveals how permeable and malleable our borders have been all along.
Footnotes
1
I am deeply grateful to Jonathan Strom and Ted A. Smith for reading a draft of this article and making helpful comments and suggestions as to its content, argument, and structure. I also thank Jeania Ree Moore and Joy McDougall for their able editorial assistance.
2
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia, 1988), 60–69.
3
Again, Certeau is very helpful in reminding us how we unconsciously adopt the mental views and criteria not only of previous ages, but of the people we are studying supposedly from a distance. Certeau, The Writing of History, 36–40.
4
John C.B. Webster, A Social History of Christianity: North-west India Since 1800 (New Delhi: Oxford, 2007), 1–11. For more expanded overviews of the historiography of Christianity in India, see Webster, “The History of Christianity in India” and “Christian History as Indian Social History,” in idem, Historiography of Christianity in India (New Delhi: Oxford, 2012), 14–63, 141–80.
5
For example, Historical Sketches of the India Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Allahabad: Allahabad Mission, 1886); Joseph Warren, A Glance Backward at Fifteen Years of Missionary Life in India (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1856).
6
Webster, A Social History of Christianity: North-west India, 3. There were a few notable exceptions : Andrew Gordon's Our India Mission about the work of the United Presbyterian Church of North America “devoted considerable attention to the lives, trials, and contributions of Indian converts and workers.” Webster, A Social History of Christianity: North-west India, 3.
7
For example, the highly chauvinistic, self-laudatory memoirs of Methodist missionary William Butler provide us with unique data about the 1858 Uprising or Mutiny, such as a complete letter of his Indian co-worker Joel Janvier, and the name of a fakir (Himam Bhartee), mentioned anonymously in other accounts, who rescued a European child and brought it to the British Commissioner in Meerut. William Butler, The Land of the Veda (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1872), 252–57, 280–81.
8
John N. Hollister, The Centenary of the Methodist Church in Southern Asia (Lucknow, India: Lucknow Publishing House, 1956), ix. The date of birth was provided by staff at the United Methodist Archives (personal email of Frances Bristol to author, Feb 27, 2013), and the dust jacket of the book provides the date of the commencement of his missionary career.
9
Of course, one cannot examine the Indian context from 1800 to 1950 without taking into account the British Empire. For a compelling biography in the mode of “social history” that deals judiciously with both British and Indian factors, see Susan Billington Harper, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
10
John C.B. Webster, The Christian Community & Change in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1976), xi.
11
Webster, Historiography of Christianity in India, 176.
12
A. Mathias Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, Vol. 1 (Bangalore: Theological Publications India, 1984), vii.
13
David Hardiman, “Origins and Transformations of the Devi,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 105.
14
Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2001), xv.
15
It has also affected the historiography of other religious traditions; for example, see William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), 14.
16
Mathew Schmalz, “A Space for Redemption: Catholic Tactics in Hindu North India” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1998); Chad M. Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); Kerry San Chirico, “Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, Hindus, and the Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012).
17
David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley: University of California, 2012).
18
There are deep connections, I believe, between the rise of religion and globalization as important factors in the workings of our world, which I do not have space to delve into here. My thanks to Ted A. Smith for raising this issue with me.
19
Richard Tiplady, ed., One World or Many? The Impact of Globalisation on Mission (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2003), 7. My thanks to Jehu Hanciles for pointing me to this definition, along with others.
20
In this way, as in others, globalization is an extension of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western imperial era, when Europe and America forcefully intruded into the lives of societies all around the globe.
21
Jehu J. Hanciles, Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008).
22
Charles Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Sebastian Kim and Kirsteen Kim, Christianity as a World Religion (London: Continuum, 2008); Noel Davies and Martin Conway, World Christianity in the Twentieth Century (London: SCM, 2008).
23
Bauman, 187–88, 228–29.
24
I borrow this use of the image of the line in the sand from Vincent Cornell, “The Ethiopian's Dilemma: Islam, Religious Boundaries, and the Identity of God,” in Jacob Neusner et al., Do Jews, Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? (Nashville: Abingdon, 2012), 85–129.
25
Andrew Walls has persuasively argued that the divide between Western and non-Western Christianity is due to the European Enlightenment, which non-European cultures and civilizations did not experience in the same way that European ones did.
26
The Rev. Goloknath, “How Can Foreign Missionaries Secure, in the Highest Degree, the Sympathy and Affectionate Confidence of their Native Brethren?,” Report of the Punjab Missionary Conference Held at Lahore in December and January, 1862–63 (Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission, 1863), 166.
27
Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (New York: Oxford, 2008), 153–58.
28
The life of Ishwari Dass can be found in Arun Jones, “Christian Mission and Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Ishwari Dass,” in Martin Tamcke and Gladson Jathanna, eds., Construction of the Other, Identification of the Self (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), 140–41. For missionary appreciation of Dass, see his obituary in The Foreign Missionary (Sept 1867), 93–96.
29
Ishuree Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of North India (Benares: E. J. Lazarus, 1866); William Ward, A View of the History, Literature and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of Their Manners and Customs, and Translations from Their Principal Works: In Two Volumes (Serampore, Baptist Mission, 1815–18). One wonders whether Dass wrote his work to provide a counterpoint to Ward's hostile depiction of Indian society, which was very popular in India, Europe, and North America; see Geoffrey Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (New Delhi and London: Sage, 2006), 160–83.
30
Discussion of the nature and desirability of the Christian Village in India can be found in The Report of the General Missionary Conference, Held at Allahabad, 1872–1873 (Madras: C. Foster, 1873), 349–72.
31
For a history of the Eurasian community in India, see Christopher J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1883 (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1996).
32
See the first decade of annual reports of the Methodist mission in India; for Baptists, John C. Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1850), 74.
33
The investigation of hybridity pioneered by scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Nestor García Canclini and Joel Robbins greatly advances our understanding of such persons. See the discussion of hybridity in Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners (Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 328–33.
34
Here Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph's argument that modernity and tradition actually work together is useful for the study of world Christianity: Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967).
35
Goloknath, “Sympathy and Confidence,” 184. The term “Sirdars” refers to Sikhs.
36
Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford, 2002). I quote this edition of the book because it is the one that gained such popularity.
37
Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 8; italics added.
38
Cox, Fire from Heaven, 123–38, 163–67, 195–203.
39
Mathew Schmalz, “A Space for Redemption,” 9–10, 187, 195–203. “Catholics [from outcaste backgrounds] do not want a religion that chooses to enter a social space defined by caste Hindu standards. Instead, they want their religion to point to something above and beyond the social world in which they live. It is this desire that motivates [Catholics’] praise of the [nun's] habit for a habit would evoke resonances of otherness, power and status that have long been associated with the Western world in Indian society” (p. 198).
40
Similarly, in the first half of the twentieth century, the infusion of Hindu ideology in the Indian nationalism of M.K. Gandhi and the Congress Party worried religious minorities and low-caste groups—which is one of the reasons for the formation of the state of Pakistan, and for the outcaste leader Dr. Ambedkar's famous embrace of Buddhism.
41
It is due, in part, to such attitudes that Lamin Sanneh wrote Whose Religion Is Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).