Enabling Encounters: The Case of Nilakanth-Nehemiah Goreh, Brahmin Convert Richard Fox Young n the preface of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall ous evidence. First, at the high end, the Indian corollary to an IDown: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Colli- “ivory tower” intellectual, I adduce Vitthal Shastri, a Maratha sion of Two Cultures, author Anne Fadiman, a self-described pandit who taught Hindu philosophy at the Benares Sanskrit “cultural broker,” sets forth her reasons for writing the book. I College, which had been established with British patronage in find them more broadly relevant than she perhaps anticipated. the last decade of the eighteenth century. The missionaries, he They are intriguingly descriptive of the creative possibilities explained, “mistake our silence. When a reply which we think awaiting people who situate themselves between cultures, soci- nonsense, or not applicable, is offered to us, we think that to retire eties, and religions: “I have always felt that the action most worth silently and civilly from such useless discussion is more merito- watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. rious than to continue it. But our silence is not a sign of our . There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these admission of defeat, which the Missionaries think to be so.”3 places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can I shall return to Vitthal Shastri later, for the most interesting see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either cross-cultural intellectual activity taking place in Benares in- one.”1 The mission history of nineteenth-century India, indisput- volved the Sanskrit College. For a sense of what was happening ably full of frictions and incongruities, suggests exactly that— in the more public spheres of Benares, however, I turn to standing at the point of tangency between Hinduism and Chris- Pratapnarayan Mishra (1856–94), the editor of a local Hindi tianity could be transformative and sometimes was. One indi- periodical. In an essay entitled “The Useless Efforts of the Mis- vidual for whom this was true was the now out-of-vogue Indian sionaries,” Pratapnarayan tells of having silenced a missionary Christian theologian Nilakanth-Nehemiah Goreh (1825–85) of by challenging him to compare the Bible with the Ramayana. Benares (more commonly Varanasi or Kasi), whose conversion Chagrined at having his ignorance of the sacred text exposed, the urges us, even at this distance in time, to rethink where the edges missionary beat a hurried retreat. What makes the anecdote between Hinduism and Christianity might actually lie. especially noteworthy is that Pratapnarayan claims to be an admirer of Jesus, whose teachings he praises as “nectar for the On the Edges in Benares soul of man.”4 Like Vitthal Shastri, there may have been other moderates In mid-nineteenth century Benares, which was far from the who experienced more than a mere flicker of “active theoretical metropolitan centers of colonial India where Christian mission- interest” in Christianity, even though the evidence is yet to be ary endeavors had by this time attained a public notoriety, the found that would attest to it; likewise, there may have been other edges between Hinduism and Christianity were hardly notice- activists like Pratapnarayan Mishra who responded to “the able. One census put the number of Christians in the city at 390, foreign challenge,” even though a single instance of intervention most of them orphans, mestizo drummers of the East India only underscores how courteous most people were, most of the Company regiments, and outsiders from elsewhere in India— time. Relations with the missionaries were rarely adversarial; the even though by this time missionaries from the London Mission- worst the missionaries complained of was the occasional verbal ary Society, Church Missionary Society (CMS), and Baptist Mis- taunt or well-aimed brickbat from Hindu hecklers and rabble- sionary Society were active in the city. For a sample of the Good rousers, who were few. In Benares, a countervailing force for the News they proclaimed, consider a tract from the archives of defense of Hinduism never emerged, the likes of which one finds Princeton Theological Seminary, printed by the Presbyterians in around this time in the metropolitan centers of colonial India. It Allahabad for distribution in Benares: “Beloved friends! Reflect seems all the more noteworthy, therefore, that when resistance to on this, that all people deserve to suffer in hell, for all have sinned Christianity began to manifest itself in the mid-1840s, it was a and provoked God’s wrath.” A bleak proclamation indeed! John Maratha youth, a Chitpavan Brahmin by the name of Nilakanth 3:16, the classic escape clause for substitutionary-atonement Goreh, barely nineteen years old, and from a backwater princely theology, comes next, followed by the Ten Commandments, lest state in Bundelkhand, acting alone, who took the lead. Nilakanth anyone mistake the Christian dharma (moral order, religion) for did so by taking to the ghats, chowks, and bazaars where William an easy way out. And then a gratuitous slap on the face of Hindu Smith (1806–75) of the CMS was sure to be found, eager to talk up Benares, gloved in the cadences of Sanskrit: “Fools who afflict the Gospel. themselves with the pains of asceticism, who worship idols of When Nilakanth took to the Benares streets to confront clay, metal, and wood, cannot attain salvation.” missionary Smith, it was not only because Smith’s no-other-way- When the missionaries presented Christianity in this man- than-faith-in-Christ-the-avatar-of-God Hindustani preaching style ner, it comes as no surprise that there was “no sign of active irked him greatly. To Nilakanth, Benares was under spiritual theoretical interest” from the learned communities of Benares, or siege, not by ordinary mortals but by the same destabilizing that representatives of Sanskritic Hinduism, the pandits, were forces lurking in the cosmos that were always undermining cool toward it and made “no attempt to . enter into a ‘dia- dharma. Nilakanth articulated this perspective on Christianity in logue.’”2 This was certainly so; still, one wonders why. Fortu- the idiom of antiquity, drawing on stories about fraudulent nately, we have from Benares a range of helpful contemporane- avatars who propagate fraudulent religions—Jainism and Bud- dhism are generally implied—by propounding fraudulent scrip- Richard Fox Young is the Timby Associate Professor of the History of Religions, tures to deceive the witless and hapless and thereby establish Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. adharma (moral disorder, religious anarchy). Missionary Smith 14 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH, Vol. 29, No. 1 well knew the biblical corollary, for he spoke of equipping philosophical systems), also in Hindi, dating to 1860.9 Ample himself with the “full armor of God” before going out to the scope is afforded by these three texts for a diachronic view over streets: “[O]ur struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, a twenty-year period, most of which transpired in Benares, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic where Nilakanth served the CMS as a catechist and appropriated powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of the freedom to individuate himself and assert his identity, often evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). In short, a colossal— in opposition to the one missionary Smith envisioned for him. probably overdramatized—confrontation was in the making. Even in these early years Nilakanth came into contact with other European Christians who broadened the horizons of his Saboteur or Seeker? emerging self-identity. Before turning to those individuals, it must be emphasized that the early postconversion Nilakanth It may seem counterintuitive, but Nilakanth the saboteur was was virtually the mirror image of missionary Smith, who, to actually a seeker, and so the denouement of his confrontation reinforce his new Christian’s wavering commitments, had with missionary Smith need not be delayed by withholding the Nilakanth out on the thoroughfares of Benares in no time, fact that Nilakanth eventually apostatized and converted to proclaiming the no-other-way-than-faith-in-Christ-the-avatar-of- Christianity, receiving at baptism the name “Nehemiah.” How- God message that had irked him so much initially. For an ever, once we take into account certain predictors of a future individual almost pathologically indecisive, the routine and conversion experience, the hunch seems valid enough that events rigor of CMS discipleship was genuinely reinforcing. The dark would take this course. The ties of Nilakanth’s household to the side, however, was that Nilakanth was plagued to his very prestige of declining princely families in rural Bundelkhand, deathbed by an unshakable regret that his conversion had not Nilakanth’s ties to an overprotective father at whose feet he been like the apostle Paul’s, which is to say, sudden, ecstatic, precociously mastered Sanskrit, his ties to a tyrannical uncle so mystical, and once-for-all, according to the conventionalized orthodox that Nilakanth could not mingle with students of the account of it that, inspired by the Book of Acts, dominated in Sanskrit College, where the action most worth watching in Evangelical circles. As a lad in Yorkshire, missionary Smith had Benares was then occurring—all these factors indicate an iden- experienced a conversion of that very kind. tity tightly bounded by family and community. Why exactly the Evangelical idiom of metanoia resonated so Obviously, Nilakanth might never have transcended such resoundingly with Nilakanth remains unclear, because the Ver- an identity had missionary Smith not gotten in the way, offering dict, his preconversion treatise on Hinduism and Christianity, unsolicited critiques of other peoples’ religion and envisioning talks of sin only abstractly as a problem of theodicy.