The Christian Ashram Movement in India

Zdeněk Štipl

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367244224
• eBook ISBN: 9781000057027
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book is one of the first to present a definitive history of the Christian Ashram Movement. It offers insights into the development of the Movement, Europe's Orientalist view of Eastern mysticism and how the concept of the "ashram" spread beyond the borders of India.

Drawing extensively from ashram literature and the author's field research, the book critically analyzes the notions of inculturation in the encounter between Christianity and Hindu spirituality and ritualism. It looks at how the Movement grew out of the colonial encounter and how it evolved through the years, which was contingent on developments within Christian churches outside India. The volume also discusses the reinterpretation of the idea of the "ashram" by Christian theologians, the introduction of elite Brahmanical concepts within the Movement and the unique theological perspectives which were nurtured in these ashrams.

The book offers an alternative perspective to the generally perceived history of Christianity in India. It will be of interest to scholars and researchers of religious studies, Christianity, sociology, social anthropology and religious history.

1
PRELIMINARY NOTES ON CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA

The history of Christianity in India has already been told on thousands of pages in dozens of voluminous synthesizing works. It stands to reason that key events keep recurring throughout them, while their interpretations differ here and there, as does the emphasis placed on specific persons or churches. This happens in particular in connection with the changes of the political, cultural and religious context of the period of time when the works were created. Thus, the crucial “driving forces” are paraded in front of the reader whether in the form of orders and missionary organizations or exceptional individuals. The latter often appear at the turn of historical periods (Francis Xavier), standing out with their original approach (Roberto de Nobili) above their surroundings and, as a matter of fact, also the times, or changing through their decisions the confessional status quo of a specific church or community (Mar Thoma I or, in the opposite sense, Mar Ivanios). In this overview, the history of Christianity in India would seem to be in particular segmental histories of the individual churches that penetrated India and in later development stages were directly established in its territory. Although Christians with their total representation in Indian society constitute a minority group (about 2.3 percent),¹ the number of churches operating in India today can be counted in tens, if not even hundreds. With some amount of justified exaggeration, it could even be stated that hardly any of the forms of Christianity that appeared in the global context of its development also failed to reach the Indian subcontinent (Frykenberg 2008: 5). It is the heterogeneity of Indian Christian churches, the variety of the expressions of their religious life and also the complexity of the network of the mutual relationships existing among them that leads a number of contemporary researchers to think that it is not possible to talk about a single monolithic Christianity in India but about many various Christianities (Bauman and Young 2014: ix–x).

Christianity in India has never had any trouble catching the attention of historians. The first, often multi-volume, series on the history of Christianity in India had already emerged during the 19th century. Their authors were Anglican pastors, (former) missionaries and also retired officers who had worked for the East India Trading Company (e.g. Hough 1839). These mostly apologetically approached works saw the advent of Christianity in India as an inevitable phase in the development of religious thinking, as a transition from imperfect or in principle completely misguided archaic religious ideas towards the fullness of truth revealed in the person and teaching of Jesus Christ. The evidence and by-product of this qualitatively culminating development and also the cause of such a point of view was supposed to be, quite logically, the territorial expansion and subsequent dominance of Britain as a victorious colonial power. This supposition was based on the view of Britain’s officials and subsequently also historians that their country was bringing to India the light of religious cognition alongside numerous civilizational achievements. The influence of the Indian cultural and religious context in which churches had to operate was more or less ignored or immediately regarded as damnable at the time. After all, it followed from the logic of the development that it was inevitably predestined to gradually, spontaneously perish.

The trend set by historians of high colonialism to a considerable degree continued for most of the 20th century. As part of it, the history of Christianity in India was seen and presented as the history of successes or failures of missions, the fates of exceptional individuals that had been their bearers and the particular churches to which these individuals belonged. The history of Christianity in India was thus seen strictly in the context of missiology, as the history of missions (Bauman and Young 2014: ix). The actual identity of Indian Christianity, what these missions, individuals and churches had left behind them in India and what was often further developed spontaneously through impulses from the Indian cultural and religious environment, had seemingly remained completely unaddressed. Despite the growing production of scholarly literature dealing with Christianity in India, the historio-graphic approach to its history, seen in its complexity, that had been formed in the previously described manner and is by its very nature Eurocentric did not change much until the 1980s. Then the monumental, although unfinished, work by Stephen Neill (1984, 1985) appeared. Thanks to his lifelong collecting and studying of sources, his stay in India lasting for several decades and last but not least his vast erudition, Neill was the first who tried to approach historical developments across individual churches, regardless of his own denominational affiliation. It was the latter which, on the contrary, had limited many previous authors to such an extent that they had overlooked, if not even systematically ignored, the developments in churches other than their own. At the same time, Neill also turned his attention to the influences coming from the Indian environment which Christianity, in particular its individual churches in respective cultural regions of India, was exposed to. After all, these influences contributed to the many various forms of Indian Christianity, and so their share in its resulting plurality, which was becoming differentiated, is comparable to that of specific characteristics of the churches, even before the latter came to India.

It was only from Neill that the process of seeking the history of “Indian Christianity”, not merely “Christianity in India”, started. And although he himself, in the words of a sympathetic critic and also admirer, did not manage to completely get over his strong ties to the Anglican Church, which some of his judgements and observations were affected by, and a certain colonialist approach to the studied topic (Frykenberg 2008: 18–19), Neill’s numerous successors oriented their subsequent research exactly in this direction. As yet, the last significant contribution to the topic of the complex history of Indian Christianity is a voluminous synthesizing work by Robert Eric Frykenberg from 2008. It is the result of the author’s longstanding research interest in intercultural communication and the relations of missionaries to the autochthonous religious traditions of India. In this work, due attention is paid in particular to the significance and influence of educated converts and also mass movements, which were not led by outstanding missionaries but on the contrary by the Christian laity. Even though Frykenberg’s work has undoubtedly already become a standard in the academia, unfortunately it covers development in the 20th century only minimally. However, the trend of activating the laity culminated in the course of this century, significantly affecting the current form of virtually all big churches.

The current increased interest in indigenized, inculturated and folk Christianity is largely connected to the political and social emancipation of underdeveloped and ostracized segments of Indian society. These have been overlooked for a long time, even though a substantial percentage of Indian Christians come from their ranks. It is this laity, so far considered rather a passive mass and a mere object of missionary activities, that has been in the spotlight of contemporary researchers through a number of subordinate studies. These researchers recognize in them authentic bearers and mediators of spontaneous, not centrally managed and planned indigenization/inculturation. Its description and analysis, in terms of case studies (e.g. Raj and Dempsey 2002) and also macro history approached in a complex manner, searching the roots and development stages of the process of naturalization of Christianity in India (e.g. Collins 2006), seems to be the mainstream of the scholarly interest in Indian Christianity today.

Christianity in context – changes in relationships towards the surrounding environment

To present history from just one point of view is essentially insufficient, the more so if such a view is determined, sometimes even motivated, by some ideology or a religious belief. It is the relationships between individual religions and the concentrated observation of their development, whatever it happens to be in the course of history, that are absolutely crucial for a pluralistic culture and society of the Indian type. A good many studies have already dealt with interreligious dialogue, Christianity and Hinduism in this case, whether it was really implemented or only hypothetically considered. In his so far unsurpassed work, Wilhelm Halbfass (1988) approached this dialogue as a general philosophical and hermeneutic issue of the encounters between Europe and India throughout their historical development. Richard Fox Young (1981) focused on the interaction between the opinions of the apologists of both religions in the 19th century, which took place over specific texts and the theological questions arising from them. Bror Tiliander (1974) analyzed the conceptual religious terms of Hinduism and pointed out their possible theological parallels or, on the contrary, fundamentally irreconcilable differences with the Christian concept. Hans Küng with Heinrich von Stietencron (1987) introduced the mind-sets of both religious systems, drawing attention in particular to the specific difficulties related to different understandings of the very content of the term “religion”, and then they tried to examine and propose opportunities for mutual understanding that would enrich both engaged sides. The issues handled relating to interreligious dialogue in terms of methodologies and opinions may be almost as plentiful as the scholarly literature dealing with them.

For introducing the topic of the Christian Ashram Movement, much more important than the interreligious dialogue itself is, however, the question of the relation of Indian Christians to the foreign religious environment in which they had and still have to move. If we try to view the history of Christianity in India from the very perspective of its interaction with the majority Hinduism, several different approaches will unfold in front of us. With a certain degree of simplification, they can perhaps be perceived even as the sub-phases of the development of this history that can help us create its clearly arranged periodization. At the same time, these phases always inevitably follow from the context of the respective period of time and are for the most part inseparably linked to the development of Christianity outside the territory of India. Indeed, the far-reaching cultural, religious and political changes in Europe were later reflected in Indian reality, especially in changing perspectives on it. These phases also faithfully reflect the pre-understanding of the Indian religious world of that time and various expectations connected with it. The meaningful periodization of the history of Christianity in India, the goal of which is to be only a rough overview, will concurrently set the historical framework of the Christian Ashram Movement and indirectly identify the causes of its origin, conditions of its development and subsequently also the reasons for the decline of ashram activities.

The price of the natural integration of the Saint Thomas Christians

The first and longest stage in the development of Christianity in India and the associated first way of approaching the Indian religious and cultural context relates to the existence of a small Christian community in the territory of today’s Kerala in South India, dating as far back as to the first centuries after the beginning of the Common Era. The questions that have not been convincingly answered so far regarding the origins, exact date of the formation of the community and historical relevance of the traditional legend concept that considered Thomas, Christ’s disciple and apostle, the founder of the community are not important for our topic (for a summary of these subjects, see Brown 1956: 49–51). Much more interesting are the relationships to the environment surrounding the early Indian Christians, which they therefore inevitably came into daily contact with. The influence of this environment on the doctrine and the overall lifestyle of the Saint Thomas Christians, as they had called themselves for centuries, or also Syrian Indian Christians (Fernando and Gispert-Sauch 2004: 61), or Nestorians (Frykenberg 2008: 105), as they used to be and still are often inaccurately called by the outside world, is particularly remarkable. Although unintelligible to an overwhelming majority of believers, Syriac as the exclusive language of the Christian liturgy had remained in use until the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century. On the contrary, their living in the middle of the Hindu religious culture and in particular everyday encounters with the ritual rules of the caste system created a completely new identity for the small but internally probably quite differentiated Christian community (Amaladas 1993: 16). The local Hindu environment had left significant marks on its habits related, for example, to clothing and diet matters and also influenced some elements of the liturgy, which we have learned about from the fragmentary news left behind by European travellers (Frykenberg 2008: 109, 113). But, above all, this environment with its typical inclusivistic approach to every otherness included the Saint Thomas Christians in the caste structure (Visva-nathan 1993: 3). They were engaged mostly in trading activities, and in some ports along the south-west coast they controlled overseas trading for centuries; in some areas, they were perhaps even blood relatives of the local royal houses. Their economic status thus ensured them a respected position in the caste hierarchy (Bayly 1989: 8; Amaladas 1993: 18; Frykenberg 2008: 112).

The Saint Thomas Christians from Kerala lived in cultural and political isolation from the Christian world, which was only occasionally broken by a traveller from Europe or a new migration wave of fellow-believers fleeing the religious persecution in the Middle and Near East. This isolation lasted for more than one thousand years, and the small Christian community probably did not develop its own theological thinking during it. So that they could live in peace and prosperity in the middle of the majority religion, the Saint Thomas Christians accepted its basic condition, the logical attribute of the caste system, always determining every man his specific place and status in society. They became yet another of the Indian endogamous religious communities when the seemingly indispensable creedal necessity to spread the Gospel, which means a call for religious conversion, disappeared from their Christian practice (Brown 1956: 173–174; Forrester 1979: 100–101).² It is this conversion that actually changes the status of man before God, but also in the eyes of other people. The question remains as to whether the resulting state can really be considered “a dialog in life [meaning: between the two religions]” (Amaladas 1993: 16) or just another example of the strong Indian influence on all extraneous elements that happen to emerge in the territory of India. In any case, the Saint Thomas Christians can be classed as being a fully integrated Indian Christian community, the presence of which has not left any significant marks on the coexistence in a complicated multi-religious environment.

The power-motivated invasion of European Christendom under the Portuguese Padroado

An entirely new stage in the development of Christianity in India set in after the arrival of the Portuguese. The earlier period was characterized by the absence of regular, firmly established contacts between Christian Europe and India. With the arrival of the first Portuguese fleet in 1498, the religious and political situation in Europe, however, began to be reflected in the manner of how Christian missionaries approached the religious context of the country to which they were bringing their conception of Christianity. The main motivation of the Portuguese expeditions of discovery was the spice trade or rather the abolition of the monopoly that Arabian merchants had over it in the western part of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the search for Christian allies in the rear of the expanding Ottoman Empire also played a vital role, in particular after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This was fuelled by a vague notion of the existence of an ancient Christian community in South India and also by the legend about the mythical kingdom of Prester John, which was extremely popular in Europe at that time (Neil 1984: 91; Halbfass 1988: 22). The traumatic experience with Islam, which the Christians in the Iberian Peninsula had carried with them from the time of its reconquista, left its mark on the general character of the expeditions of discovery, the relationship to the foreign religious environment and the future forms of interacting with it (Frykenberg 2008: 119–120). The aggressive asserting of Portuguese trade interests was thus accompanied by religious intolerance and attempts to spread Christianity or rather the militant form of Catholic Christianity alongside the influence of power (Ibid., 127). As became apparent, the role of the Church had been crucial in creating the reconquista identity of the Portuguese kingdom and missionaries who were leaving it for the newly discovered territories.

The domination and religious patronage of the Portuguese king (so-called Padroado Real) was confirmed by several papal bulls from the middle of the 15th century. They authorized the king to represent the Catholic Church in newly discovered countries, conquer them, subjugate their misbelieving inhabitants and turn them into devout Christians (Robinson 2003: 300). The tool of this mission became Catholic orders, out of which Franciscans were the first to reach India. They were soon followed by Jesuits and Dominicans, who set up the infamous Inquisition in Goa, the bastion of ecclesiastical and political power of the Portuguese in India, in 1560 (Kuriakose 2006: 34). This institution of God’s jury in India had never expanded to such hideous proportions as in the Catholic countries of Europe (Frykenberg 2008: 134). Nevertheless, its task in India was similar – to see to the purity of belief of Indian Christians and also to fight against any attempts to implement ancient ritual practices into Christianity in the territory under the direct rule of Portugal (Henn 2014: 50–52). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• 1 Preliminary notes on Christianity in India
• 2 Inculturation of Christianity
• 3 History of the Christian Ashram Movement
• 4 The phenomenon of the Christian ashram
• Conclusion: interpretive possibilities of the Christian Ashram Movement
• Index