Nidān, Volume 4, No. 2, December 2019, Pp. 61-82 ISSN 2414-8636

Nidān, Volume 4, No. 2, December 2019, pp. 61-82 ISSN 2414-8636 ‘Both Truly Christian and Truly Indian:’ A 20th century example of Indianized Christianity in the visions of E. Stanley Jones1 Nadya Pohran University of Cambridge [email protected] Abstract Sat Tal Christian ashram, located in Northern India and founded by the American Methodist missionary Dr. E. Stanley Jones in 1930, is one of the few Protestant Christian ashrams still active in India today. This article narrates the history of Sat Tal Christian ashram (henceforth STA) and explores some of its original founding visions articulated in 1930 by Jones in a piece of writing called ‘Ashram Ideals’ (Jones 2006: 347-349). The Ashram Ideals included that: (1) it would be a miniature kingdom of God; (2) people would not simply seek answers but would also be an answer through the ways they lived their lives; (3) individuals from multiple faiths could share in spiritual community together; (4) all who sincerely desire God would be welcome there; and (5) it would be “both truly Christian and truly Indian.” I engage with each of these visions more thoroughly in my doctoral thesis; here, I focus primarily on the fifth. Specifically, I seek to better understand precisely what Jones meant by truly Christian and truly Indian, and I articulate some of the external factors which influenced him in these regards. Key words: Protestant Christian ashrams, inculturation, North India, Christian missions, E. Stanley Jones I first contextualize Jones’s visions—shaped by the motifs of ‘inculturation’2, ecumenical living, and interreligious relations—within some of the broader social, 1 This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Cambridge International Trust, and the Teape Trust during the course of my PhD at the University of Cambridge. I also wish to thank Dr. Ankur Barua, Nika Kuchuk, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. 2 The term ‘inculturation’ was not widely used until the 1960s—individuals such as Bede Griffiths then used the term widely. Indeed, Jones, at least not in any of his writings which pre-date 1970, never used the term ‘inculturation’ because it was not available to him when he established STA in 1930. Jones instead used descriptive rhetoric to convey the notion that Christianity could indeed take on some of India’s cultural idioms while still being fully ‘Christian.’ The most comparable singular term that I am aware of that Jones used in lieu of ‘inculturation’ is ‘naturalization.’ (See, for example, Christ of the Round Table, in which he speaks of Jesus being naturalized (p. 106). Nevertheless, I Pohran / ‘Both Truly Christian and Truly Indian:’ political, and historical milieus of the interactions that various forms of Christianity have had with Indic cultures. As I discuss below, Christianity was often represented as a ‘foreign’ religion due to the ways that the colonial powers of Portugal and Britain were occasionally associated with the missionary propagation of Christianity.3 However, toward the end of the 19th century, Christianity was increasingly and consciously presented by some Christian figures as a religious system of belief and practice which should embody Indian, and not exclusively foreign, cultural idioms, expressions, and subjectivities; thus, both Indian Christians themselves and foreign missionaries began to actively configure, enact, and embody varying types of indigenous Christianities. While some popular discourses continued (as they do to the present day) to castigate Christianity as an alien import which cannot be harmonized with, or rooted in, the ‘national’ ethos of Indians, these indigenized expressions significantly challenged the assumption that Christianity was exclusively a foreign transplant on Indian soil. Understanding some of the key events and individuals who influenced both of these rather different identities associated with, or projected on to, Christianity–one as exclusively European and the other as indigenized into distinctively Indic idioms–is an essential starting point for the second section of this article, which explores Jones’s desire for STA to be both truly Christian and truly Indian. I contextualize this desire in some of the broader social and political contexts of India in the 1920s and 1930s to explore some of the external influences at play in Jones’s efforts to make STA both Christian and Indian. I also draw variously from archival records of the ashram, Jones’s own written or spoken words, and oral histories that I collected from a number of individuals who knew Jones personally and/or attended the ashram in its early years. The majority of these oral histories were recorded during the portion of my main fieldwork at STA (August 2016–May 2017), while others were gathered in the following year via phone calls, email exchanges, or in person during short-term return visits to India.4 Finally, I raise some vital questions concerning the particular ways that Jones sought to establish a ‘truly Christian and truly Indian’ atmosphere at STA, and I explore some of the challenges and limitations of his specific methods and visions of inculturation. consistently use the term ‘inculturation’ throughout this article to refer to any practice which sought to merge Christian identity with Indian cultural idioms. 3 As a sort of shorthand, I refer to ‘the Portuguese’ and ‘the British’ in this article. But it should be noted that there is a mini discipline which explores precisely to what extent the Portuguese state and the British state were directly involved in spreading Christianity. (See, for example, Stanley, 2003). 4 I thank the former and current Acharyas, as well as the former and current managers and hostesses, and other ashramites of STA for sharing their recollections with me. I am also grateful to the archivists at Asbury Theological Seminary and Asbury University, as well as members of the E. Stanley Jones foundation, for helping me access valuable resources regarding Jones’s life. 62 Nidān, Volume 4, No. 2, December 2019, pp. 61-82 ISSN 2414-8636 Indian Christianity as Foreign and Indigenous: An Overview Whether the various doctrinal beliefs and ritual practices of Christianity in India ought to be viewed as being either the distinctive inflections of their Indian locations or the results entirely of their foreign sources remains an intensely debated topic amongst theologians, scholars of religion, and laypeople alike. Some scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which any discussions concerning the foreignness of Christianity arise from a (false) premise that Christianity is necessarily Eurocentric and that it is therefore only familiar (that is, not foreign) within European or Europeanized cultures. In a recent contribution to the scholarly discussion of whether Christianity should always be viewed as a foreign religion insofar as India is concerned, Chad Bauman and Richard Fox Young reject the notion that there is one (western) normative Christianity as the ideal archetype to which Indian expressions of Christianity could be compared or should conform (Bauman and Young, 2014). Their interrogation of the very concept of the ‘foreignness’ of forms of non-western Christianity is also seen in the works of some scholars in the field of Early Christianity, who have often highlighted the conceptual-institutional instabilities associated with defining precisely what makes an individual or a community ‘Christian’ (Harrison, Humfress, and Sandwell, 2014; Boyarin, 2006; Fredriksen, 2018). Instead of affirming the existence of a normatively valid Christianity from which other expressions supposedly deviate or become diffused, they argue that the difficulty of defining Christianity has been present across the Christian traditions since the first century and is therefore not unique to modern times. These scholarly frameworks which resolutely reject, from various theological, historical, and sociological perspectives, the idea that there is one normative Christianity located in European metropoles, raise significant objections to the presuppositions that undergird many of the claims of Christianity’s ‘foreignness’ in India. And yet, such claims continue to be widely accepted across large sectors of Indian collective consciousness. These perceptions have been addressed in detail by several scholars who show that one of the main reasons that a discourse of ‘foreignness’ has generally prevailed is that a significant number of conversions to Christianity are associated with European missionaries who had operated within Portuguese and British colonial milieus (Webster, 2012). In this vein, Alexander Henn provides an overview of the specific ways in which some early-modern Portuguese Roman Catholics violently enforced their religious views on other cultures; notable in this regard are the Catholic Church’s official stance to ban all forms of accomodatio and, in particular, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which put forth several mandates which explicitly targeted Asian Christians who were deemed by the Council to have lapsed from the true faith and having developed too much overlap with earlier forms of religiosity (Henn, 2014: 47). Consequently, individuals who appeared to be too closely linked with their pre-Christian roots, or with any practice which was not explicitly Christian, underwent careful scrutiny from the 63 Pohran / ‘Both Truly Christian and Truly Indian:’ Roman Catholic Church (Badrinath, 2000: 14). We see this kind of scrutiny of religious belief

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