Christianity in India

The Anti-Colonial Turn

Clara A.B. Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351123846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

By studying the history and sources of the Thomas Christians of India, a community of pre-colonial Christian heritage, this book revisits the assumption that Christianity is Western and colonial and that Christians in the non-West are products of colonial and post-colonial missionaries. Christians in the East have had a difficult time getting heard—let alone understood as anti-colonial. This is a problem, especially in studies on India, where the focus has typically been on North India and British colonialism and its impact in the era of globalization.

This book analyzes texts and contexts to show how communities of Indian Christians predetermined Western expansionist goals and later defined the Western colonial and Indian national imaginary. Combining historical research and literary analysis, the author prompts a re-evaluation of how Indian Christians reacted to colonialism in India and its potential to influence ongoing events of religious intolerance. Through a rethinking of a postcolonial theoretical framework, this book argues that Thomas Christians attempted an anti-colonial turn in the face of ecclesiastical and civic occupation that was colonial at its core.

A novel intervention, this book takes up South India and the impact of Portuguese colonialism in both the early modern and contemporary period. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Religious Studies, Christianity, and South Asia.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

The anti-colonial turn

Christianity is both Western and colonial, and Christians in the non-West are products of colonial and postcolonial mission. These assumptions are not unusual. We hear them, for example, in Voltaire’s letter 156, dated 5 January 1767, to Frederick the Great condemning Christianity as “assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody which has ever infected this world” (285). Voltaire’s indignation arose from the grim narratives of colonialism that found their way into French society. While his reasons for condemning colonialism were economic (Goldie and Wokler 159), it was also very clear to him that colonial greed was supported by the Christian zeal of Europeans. And so we read in “Quotes on Hinduism” on the website Surya’s Tapestry that Voltaire

France’s greatest writers and philosophers (sic), was a theist, and a bitter critic of the Church, which he looked upon as the instigator of cruelty, injustice, and inequality. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church’s totalitarian grip over men’s lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual.

The West is thus seen as Christian, and the East, non-Christian. As for India, the presence of Christians within its borders is simply further evidence of colonialism’s serious goal to convert Indians to Christianity. What Voltaire, as well as the writer of the aforementioned website, failed to recognize was that Christians lived in India prior to European colonialism and that these Indians fought colonialism as Christians.

In fact, the conclusion of orientalists—namely that colonialism’s purpose was to civilize and Christianize—dominates both popular and academic discourse to this day, including anti-colonial and postcolonial discussions. A host of scholars, many of them political scientists, define the West’s postcolonial reach as Christians going into non-Christian territories (Lewis; Fukuyama; Huntington; Blankley; Todorov; Cliff). These scholarly conclusions, interestingly, include regions such as “the Middle East,” “Africa,” “India,” and “China”—which saw the advent of Christianity in the precolonial period, a fact their research either ignores or minimizes. Postcolonial studies also dismiss the Indian Christian element in the literature on India’s colonization, as practitioners see Christianity as a colonial import (Fanon; Bhabha; Viswanathan Outside; Bell). Once again, they assume that Christianity is Western, that it is colonial, and that Christians in the East are unfortunate leftovers of European colonialism.

The primary goal of this volume is to revisit these presumptions about Christians in India and reveal how communities of Indian Christians, in fact, predetermined Western expansionist goals and defined the Western colonial and Indian national imaginary. I trace the Western notion of the Indian Christian in precolonial times and the encounters during Portuguese colonialism. The volume concludes by looking at some of the consequences of mistaken representations of Indian Christians in the postcolonial and national space in contemporary times.

Through its analysis of canonical and popular narratives on Christianity in India, the project identifies two trends as culprits in imagining Christianity in India as colonial. First, studies on South Asia tend to focus primarily on North India, as a result marking the colonial period as the beginning of Christianity in India. Second, in South Asian Studies, the predominance of the Islamic and, mainly, British colonialism excludes extra-Islamic material on the history and culture of regions (chiefly in South India) that warded off Islamic invasion or experienced different dynamics under other colonizers (the Portuguese or the Dutch, for instance). This book, however, takes up South India and the impact of Portuguese colonialism, covering an area of research—the Thomas Christians—that is basically understudied.

The “Thomas Christians” are a community in India that claims descent from converts of the Apostle Thomas in the first century. They were and are a minority in India. According to veteran church historian A. Mathias Mundadan, their population today is “about nine million” (Concise 700)—in other words, somewhere in size between the populations of Israel and Portugal. In precolonial and colonial times, they were an elite force to reckon with. Their members were growers and traders of spices, with many serving in the armies of native kings. Portuguese mariners and invaders sought out this community to obtain a monopoly of the spice trade and to oust traders from India, Africa, and beyond, and European colonizers later courted their loyalty.

This volume aims to identify moments of collusion and conflict in Thomas Christians’ encounters with oppressors. Such an examination, I suggest, can provide a counter-discourse to mainstream and nationalist narratives that conflate colonialism and Christianity and represent Christians of India as artefacts of colonialism. With this goal in mind, I explore key texts and contexts from before the seventeenth century, highlighting the colonial aspirations and activities of both the Church and the State.

Colonialism is Christian: where the East and the West meet

There is much truth in statements that lump Christianity and colonialism together. Questions on the justness of war and the morality of depriving the peoples of the Americas of their land and livelihood assumed theological proportions in the middle of the second millennium. Western emperors obtained the blessing of the pope in parcelling out the lands of the New World. The New World, in turn, saw the advent of priests on ships meant for merchants and soldiers. Not surprisingly, modern scholars from the metropolis and ex-colonies, both orientalists and anti-colonialists, agree that Christianity was a companion and often facilitator of colonialism. Some go further to conflate the two, suggesting that colonialism is Christian. And all of them assume that Christianity is Western.

Thomas Thompson and Granville Sharp, for example, while opponents in their views of Christianity, agreed that colonialism was a Christian endeavour. Thompson had put forward a Christian defence of slavery in his pamphlet The African Trade for Negro Slaves, Shewn to be Consistent with Principles of Humanity, and with the Laws of Revealed Religion, which he dedicated to The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. Granville Sharp, in his An Essay on Slavery (1773), criticized Thompson for falsifying his so-called Christian arguments. As Edward E. Andrews explains, “Sharp envisioned … an empire of universal Christian benevolence where religion, rather than race, was the true marker of benevolence” (25–26). Both Thompson and Sharp reasoned on the basis of the colonialism-is-Christianity equation. Stephen Neill’s A History of Christianity in India 1707–1858 and, especially, A History of Christian Missions also present colonialism as a Christianizing mission, and this, even when Neill’s A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to A.D. 1707—acknowledged precolonial Eastern Christianity in India. More recently, Robert Eric Frykenberg in several of his works, but mainly Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present, underscores the Christian nature of colonialism. Thus, for instance, he ends his chapter “Indian Christians and the ‘Hindu Raj’” observing that present-day Maharashtrian Hindus objected to Christianity because it challenged the caste system—a complaint also made by the colonizers in the colonial period. These several scholars, even when acknowledging certain problems, see colonialism as a very Christian and, therefore, positive enterprise. Furthermore, the “Westernness” of not just colonialism but also Christianity per se is integral to their philosophy of research.

Those who oppose colonialism, whether or not labelled “postcolonialists,” also see colonialism as a Christian enterprise. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth deplores the psychological degradation and objectification of colonized Algerians perpetrated by the self-acclaimed and morally superior colonizer’s declaration that the former were insensitive to ethics. He concludes that “the Christian religion” (41) is to blame, for “the Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor” (41). Fanon’s quarrel is thus with the Western colonial administration, which, as he sees it, is directed by a Western colonial Christianity that spells disaster for the native population. “The Christian religion” is Western. Yet, in the case of Algeria, the most famous Christian in the West is none other than Augustine of Hippo, who was born in Numidia, that is, modern-day Souk Ahras, Algeria. Like Gandhi in India, Fanon appears to be oblivious to the continued presence of communities of precolonial Christians.

Similarly, writing about colonial efforts in China, John Atkinson Hobson makes a slight distinction between what he calls the early Catholic missionaries who brought about small-scale conversions through their sanctity and preaching and in the process introduced Western sciences and others. Hobson defines these latter through the choice image of “an educated Chinaman” (215):

The Chinese have watched with much concern the sequence of events—first the missionary, then the Consul, and at last the invading army… . We cannot wonder that the Chinese officials should hate the missionaries. Their Church is an imperium in imperio, propagating a strange faith and alienating the people from that of their ancestors. (215)

One would think that his complaint is against the specifically Western and colonial Church in contrast to the Eastern and non-colonial Church that had a history in China. But this is not the case. For Hobson, there were good missionaries and there were bad missionaries. These former were the “early Catholic missionaries,” likely William of Rubruck or Giovanni di Monte Corvino and his companion—the Dominican, Nicholas of Pistoia—in the late thirteenth century or even Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century. The bad ones (and Francis Xavier might easily be among them) paved the way for Portuguese and later colonizations. Hobson makes no mention at all of the waves of missionaries from the Levant who entered China beginning at least during the Tang period in the seventh century and by the eighth century had created metropolitan centres (see Wilmshurst 109; also see Malancharuvil 14). The Oxford Reference Online refers to the “legend” of St. Thomas the Apostle having preached in China, and songs and folklore of the Thomas Christians refer to him having visited China, among other places. Alphonse Mingana provides evidence for the spread of Christianity to China well before 790 C.E. And Philip Baldaeus writes,

It is general opinion here, that St. Thomas the Apostle coming first to Socotora, an isle at the entrance into the Red Sea, there preached the Gospel with good success; whence coming to Cranganor and Coulang [Quilon/Kollam], he converted a great number to the Christian Faith. From hence taking his way thro Coromandel into China, he returned to Maliapour, where he suffered Martyrdom. (630)

None of these narratives, however, enter into Hobson’s consideration of the precolonial period.

For Gauri Viswanathan, at least as she explains the problem in her award-winning book Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief, conversion has a destabilizing effect in modern society. She writes, “Secularization in the colonies remains a flawed project, even more than in England, because of the absence of an emancipatory logic that steers a once monolithic religious culture into the gradual absorption of pluralized groups into the nation state” (13) (emphasis mine). In my essay “The S(p)ecular ‘Convert’: A Response to Gauri Viswanathan’s Outside the Fold,” I trace the problem in Viswanathan’s work to the following two presumptions. The first is that conversion is a key element in the definition of modern society. The identity of the state as “supreme legislator and arbitrator” proceeds from the tensions that conversion raises. Her second assumption is that whereas the religious culture of England was always diverse, the religious culture of India was once monolithic. I show that these two points are interlinked such that the premise of the first is the second:

That is to say, conversion in the context of India is politically troublesome because India (a colony), once being “a monolithic religious culture,” knew no need for conversion until recently. India therefore lacks an indigenous system to survive in the face of this new-comer. Colonization is one major force that often created converts and, even more, attempted an (impossible) assimilation of the various groups into the nation state. Later on, the (still colonial) hegemony of secularism did no better. (106)

Viswanathan’s narrative affords no place for precolonial Christians in the colony because Christianity, according to Viswanathan, was a colonial (if not British) import.

Viswanathan is not the only source from the Indian, or non-West, side that views Indian Christians as converts of foreigners. If colonialism is conflated with Christianity, then it becomes difficult to think that native Christians would struggle for freedom from colonialism in India. Out of this assumption, then, we have Arun Shourie’s accusation, in Missionaries in India, that Christians did not participate in the Freedom Struggle in India (200). Other scholars who acknowledge native Christian resistance to colonialism present it as a rather late movement in the history of colonialism in India. In this vein, we find studies of Christian influence on the nineteenth-century Brahma Samaj¹ or of independence struggles by Christians named as such only after the “first freedom struggle” of 1857 (Savarkar, Indian). The impression this late dating of the anti-colonial struggles of Indian Christians gives is that Indian Christianity is rooted in Western Christianity and that Indian Christians came to the battleground of the freedom struggle only after they realized they would profit from the independence that the rest of the nation was guaranteeing them. The dating makes Indian Christians both traitors and opportunists, bizarrely denying them even the natural tendency for self-defence when under oppression. One consequence of the circulation of such narratives and the related ideology is the persecution of Christians, which continues today in India. In Early Christians of 21st Century and again in Who Killed Swami Lakshmananda? Anto Akkara reports on recent experiences of numerous individual Christians in Kandhamal, in eastern India, who were persecuted—people tortured or driven out of their villages or whose relatives or friends were killed. Religious persecution in the Indian context, then, both past and current, demands the premise that Christianity in India was a European colonial introduction.

In his preface to the 2012 edition of Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Walter D. Mignolo highlights his thesis that coloniality is very much a part of modernity, in fact that the latter cannot exist without the former. In an attempt to counter unidirectional and Eurocentric historiography, he focuses on the borders, where he sees the divide of “Western and Eastern civilizations, Christianity and Islam” (x). For Mignolo, too, Christianity can fall only on the “Western” side. If there is “no universal location to talk about Christianity” (73), then it is because that location is clearly Western. I would argue that the reason Mignolo cannot find “any case in which Christianity presents itself in serious engagement with Islam” (xxi) is because he himself does not engage in the oblique—“/”—“border thinking” (ix), promulgated in the title of his book and throughout, about how both Christianity and Islam survived in the East.

Finally, and to return to perhaps the most well-known example from the West, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” is not just a clash of peoples of different faiths—Christians versus the rest—but is one first of all premised on an imaginary the-West-is-Christian-and-the-rest-is-not condition of the world. Such a formulation has no place for non-Western Christian communities, including those who became Christian prior to the advent of colonialism.

For all of these scholars, then, whether or not they are blatantly anti-colonial, colonialism is Christian and Christianity is Western. Their philosophy of research, like those who take a slightly more favourab...