Christianity in India from Beginnings to the Present
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OXFORD HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Edited by Henry and Owen Chadwick This page intentionally left blank Christianity in India From Beginnings to the Present ROBERT ERIC FRYKENBERG 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Robert Eric Frykenberg 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Frykenberg, Robert Eric. History of Christianity in India / Robert Eric Frykenberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–826377–7 (alk. paper) 1. India—Church history. I. Title. BR1155.F79 2008 275.4—dc22 2008002511 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–826377–7 13579108642 PREFACE The religion of Christ is one of the most dynamic factors in the world. It always bursts its boundaries, however strong and rigid those bound- aries may be. It refuses to be conWned to any one race, class, or caste. It seeks to embrace all. (Vedanayagam Azariah, Bishop of Dornakal, 1932) Christianity has always been, in its inherent nature and especially in its expansive phases, transcultural and migratory. Its bent, as manifest in its historical and universal claims, has been to change with each wave of expansion. From its initial cultural matrix in Jerusalem, each successive set of interactions—with cultures of the Graeco-Roman (Mediterranean) world, with Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic Europe, as also with cultures of Persia, India, and China—has led to alterations within Christian culture itself. Modern interactions between Western and non-Western forms of Christianity have brought further mutations: with distinctive nuancing of ceremonials and doctrines, institutions and ideals, qualities and styles. Many of the manifold variations in the content and culture of Christianity, especially in localized forms, have yet to be fully or properly studied, much less better understood. This study seeks to explore and enhance historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and institutions within the Indic world from their beginnings down to the present. As one out of several manifest- ations of a newly emerging world Christianity, in which Christians of a post-Christian West are a minority, it has focused upon those transcultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments which have made Christians in this part of the world distinctive. It seeks to uncover various complexities in the proliferation of Christianity in its many forms and to examine processes by which Christian elements intermingled with indigen- ous cultures and which resulted in dual identities, and also left imprints upon various cultures of India. Belief that the Apostle Thomas came to India in ad 52, and that he left seven congregations to carry on the mission of bringing the Gospel to India, is a hallowed part of the canon among all Thomas Christians. In our day the impulse of this mission is more alive than ever. With the rise of Pentecostalism, the fourth great wave of Christian vi Preface expansion in India has occurred, so that there are now ten to Wfteen times more missionaries than ever before in India’s history. Movements to form such committed and devout volunteers began about a century ago, with the formation of the Indian Missionary Society and the National Missionary Society, under the leadership of Vedanayagam Azariah. This work aims to provide a comprehensive and fresh understanding of the history of Christians, Christian communities, and Christian institutions within the ‘Indic’ world. It is an attempt to do this by means of an approach which is at once ‘Indocentric’, integrative, and contextual—something which has hitherto never before been accomplished within a single volume. Such an approach must draw upon many previous research eVorts which have focused upon the particular cultures of Christianity within various indigenous, Indic, or ‘Indian’ frames of reference. Christianity within the Indic world (encompassing both the Indian subcontinent and the ‘further India’ of South-East Asia1) is not, and can never properly be seen as, simply something alien to the cultures and societies within which it is found; something implanted, or somehow imposed, by foreigners. In this ap- proach, two further perspectives need to be balanced: one has to do with the character, nature, place, or role of Christianity within that world, especially in its inXuence and its authority among the various indigenous cultures, peoples, and societies of the subcontinent and beyond; another has to do with the character, nature, place, and role of many indigenous cultures, peoples, and societies in their inXuence and sway upon the nature of Christianity and upon Indo-Christian communities. Each of these per- spectives raises questions concerning: (1) what ‘indigenous’ (‘Hindu’, Islamic, Buddhist, or other) cultural components have, at one time or another, resided within various forms of local Christian culture within these regions; (2) what features have made Indian or Indic Christianity and various Christian cultures what they are, for example, within what is called ‘the Church’, distinct from Christian cultures elsewhere; (3) why Christian communities in India have consistently failed to reach out beyond the bonds and bounds of birth and blood to embrace, encapsulate, and enclose believers who come from ‘polluting’ lineages; and, Wnally (4) what elements within Indian Christian cultures have made, may yet be making, or may never be able to make contributions to the formation of an entirely new or diVerent kind of truly ‘universal’ (‘catholic’) or world Christianity. The size of India’s Christian population today is a highly sensitive subject. By itself, it is now estimated as surpassing entire populations of every 1 Including mainlands of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia, and islands of Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Preface vii country of Western Europe except Germany. This population in 2005, according to the World Christian Database, was 68.189 million. As such, India has the seventh largest Christian population in the world—after the USA (252 million), Brazil (166.8 million), Mexico (102 million), China (101.9 million), Russia (84.4 million), and Philippines (73.9 million).2 While these Wgures may be open to challenge, especially by the heavily politicized Census of India, the fact remains that Christianity in India, with high and increasing literacy even among its poorest adherents, now commands a position of inXuence that can be neither denied nor ignored. That being said, the historian is faced with the fact that Christianity in India is anything but a single whole or a monolithic entity. A critic might well argue, with strong justiWcation, that this volume is mislabelled—that this is really a history about many separate Christianities, rather than about one. The extreme complexity and multiplicity baZes and challenges any eVort to draw together a neat synthesis of understandings. At the same time, since Christianity in India is far from being the alien implant or ‘colonial’ holdover that some of its foes solemnly aver, there are grounds for con- sidering exactly how this is not true. Christianity within India is ‘Indian’. But, while it is indigenous in some localistic or particularistic sense, yet for the most part, even the various forms that may be seen as very indigenous are not manifestations that may be called ‘Indian’ in any comprehensive or all-India sense. Writing about Christians in India or about Christianity in India is not the same as writing about Christians of India, ‘Indian Christians’, or ‘Indian Christianity’. So many and varied are the diVerent Christian communities that the historian is faced with seemingly limitless sets of diYculties and dilemmas in deWning the contours of particular phenomena that can be Wtted within the broader concept. As will also be seen in the chapters that follow, therefore, more often than not Christians within India can be seen as being rooted within the history of distinct ethnic communities, each diVerent from the next. These are distinct peoples that have not or do not, as a rule, intermarry or even interdine outside of their own community, and often do not share many common memories or traditions. ‘Caste’ is the catch-all concept that has long been used to capture what is a uniquely indigenous, if not Indic (or Sanskritic) legacy, in this particularistic sense. ‘Birth’, in Sanskrit, is ja¯t; and ja¯ti, the Sanskritic term for ‘caste’, its most precise or accurate indigenous 2 Data acquired here, from the World Christian Database (Boston: Brill, 2007) and website http://worldchristiandatabase.org, comes from a reliable and sober Center for the Study of Global Christianity, at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.