South Asian Christian Diaspora

Invisible Diaspora in Europe and North America

Selva J. Raj, Selva J. Raj, Knut A. Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138745254
• eBook ISBN: 9781317052296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The South Asian Christian diaspora is largely invisible in the literature about religion and migration. This is the first comprehensive study of South Asian Christians living in Europe and North America, presenting the main features of these diasporas, their community histories and their religious practices. The South Asian Christian diaspora is pluralistic both in terms of religious adherence, cultural tradition and geographical areas of origin. This book gives justice to such pluralism and presents a multiplicity of cultures and traditions typical of the South Asian Christian diaspora. Issues such as the institutionalization of the religious traditions in new countries, identity, the paradox of belonging both to a minority immigrant group and a majority religion, the social functions of rituals, attitudes to language, generational transfer, and marriage and family life, are all discussed.

PART ONE
Europe

Chapter 1
South Asian Christians in the UK

Eleanor Nesbitt

Introduction

This chapter presents a framework for exploring the history and contemporary experience of Christians of South Asian background living in the UK. Importantly, it draws attention to the near absence of scholarly research on a largely invisible and growing sector of the UK population.

For ease of reference, in this chapter the terms ‘South Asian Christians’ and ‘South Asian Christian community’ will be used. However, it needs to be emphasized at the outset that, while the individuals concerned all have family roots in South Asia and share their self-identification as Christian and certain aspects of their experience, there is none the less no strong sense of comprising a single community overriding the many cross-cutting factors such as regional origin in South Asia, family language and culture, migration history and Christian denomination.

Any account of the development of Britain’s South Asian community necessitates attention to three demographically major groupings. Accordingly, in terms of states of origin in the Indian sub-continent, we will look particularly at South Indian (mainly Keralite) Christians, Goan Christians and Punjabi Christians (from the Punjab states of present-day Pakistan and India). In denominational terms, we will be looking respectively at what may broadly be called ‘St Thomas Christians’ (including Syro Malabar rite Catholics) as well as at Roman Catholics and at Protestants of various denominations.

The individuals and groups concerned identify with a range of religious and geographical designations. To take just one: ‘Malayalee’ is one preferred identification for Malayalam-speakers, including Christians, from the South Indian state of Kerala.1 In different contexts, UK South Asian Christians express different strands – ethnic, linguistic, religious, national – of their multiple identities.2

This chapter’s opening acknowledgement of the 400-year-old relationship between Britain and the Indian sub-continent leads into a summary account of each of the groupings mentioned above, as well as an indication of the broader diversity of South Asian Christians in the UK. Comment on the current extent of relevant research and publication introduces key issues that emerge from such data as are available, plus mention of some prominent individuals.

Statistics

Statistics for faith communities are notoriously elusive and unreliable, and in the case of Britain’s South Asian Christians, numbers are especially problematic. Some individuals are only nominally Christian, so do not appear in counts of congregational membership. In any case, although some South Asian Christians worship in separate South Asian congregations, many others belong to ‘white’ churches. Easton,3 following the Alliance of Asian Christians (AAC),4 suggests that the ratio of worshippers in Asian congregations to worshippers in non-specific congregations is 60:40.

After 1851, and until 2001, there was no question in the UK census on religious allegiance. In recent decades, several attempts were made to provide statistics, including, for example, research for Brierley which included, under its heading ‘Other churches: overseas nationals’, these three estimates of church membership for the year 2000: 480 members of the ‘Syrian Church, Mar Thoma’,5 1100 members of ‘Tamil congregations’ and 50 members of ‘Urdu and Punjabi’ congregations.6 The fact that in 1991 I was told of approximately 60 Punjabi Christian families in Coventry alone suggests the extreme unreliability of the figures available.7 According to one estimate, some 45,000 UK Christians are South Asian.8

From the 2001 Census, Christians emerge as the largest faith community in the UK (42,079 million, 71.6 per cent) in terms of self-identification, but the data do not allow for reliable correlations between ‘South Asian’ and ‘Christian’. The available information that 77,637 Christians were born in India, 902 in Bangladesh, 9353 in Pakistan and 18,276 in Sri Lanka (a total of 106,168) is likely to include many ‘white’ individuals who were born during British colonial rule.9

Historical Background

Interaction between Britain and India can best be understood in the framework of successive periods: the activity of the East India Company, the consolidation of empire (the Raj), and lastly, the period of independent states. The present state of India gained its independence in 1947, and the simultaneous partition of India resulted in the formation of Pakistan, which itself subdivided in 1971 with the birth of Bangladesh. Although migration to Britain long pre-dated India’s independence, substantial South Asian communities in the UK formed only in the second half of the twentieth century. In widespread discourse, these families are most frequently referred to as ‘Asian’, alongside the more scholarly and precise ‘South Asian’. In order to understand the experience of South Asian Christians in the UK, a sense of the wider UK South Asian context is vital.

By religion, the majority of Britain’s South Asians are Muslim (1 million of Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims are from South Asia, including two-thirds from Pakistan, under a third from Bangladesh and the remainder from India),10 Hindu (559,000, with the majority self-identifying as Indian) and Sikh (336,000, all of whose family roots are in present-day India or Pakistan), with smaller numbers of Christians, Jains, Buddhists and Zoroastrians (often known as Parsis). In terms of ethnicity or region of origin, the largest South Asian communities in the UK are from northern Pakistan (mainly from Azad Kashmir and Punjab), north-west India (from Punjab), western India (Gujarat), Bangladesh (from Sylhet) and Sri Lanka (mainly Tamils). Studies of South Asian communities correspond to this profile, and so focus almost exclusively on Muslim, Hindu and Sikh populations, whereas scholarship on Britain’s South Asian Christians is almost non-existent.

Migration to the UK was triggered both by ‘pull’ factors, such as the shortage of labour in industry and transport in British cities after the Second World War, and by ‘push’ factors including the increasing restrictions on South Asians resident in East Africa, another area of the former British Empire, in the late 1960s, which climaxed in the expulsion of ‘Asians’ from Uganda in 1970. Along with the exodus of Hindus and Sikhs, and smaller numbers of Muslims and Zoroastrians, many Goan Catholics also came to Britain from East Africa. From the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, as from Sri Lanka, migration has been smaller-scale and is particularly evident in the National Health Service.

While settlement of South Asian Christians in Britain probably began with Goan seafarers arriving in London in the seventeenth century, the history of Christianity in India goes back much further, almost certainly to the first century CE. The ensuing account of the South Asian Christian groupings that are most strongly represented in Britain follows the sequence of the history of conversion in India rather than of emigration to the UK. It also takes account of the fact that a growing minority of South Asian Christians in the UK are individuals who have converted to Christianity while living in the UK.

UK South Asian Christians’ Sub-continental History

Christianity in the Indian sub-continent (in the southernmost states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu) almost certainly pre-dates the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in the British Isles. The strong belief among South Indian Christians that the apostle Thomas himself came to Maliankara village in AD 52, converted local Jews and established seven Christian communities cannot be proven, but there is no evidence that disproves it, and its possibility is strengthened by recent archaeological, geographical and historical investigations. These include a sea journey undertaken in 2000 by the British historical writer William Dalrymple, who followed the route mentioned in a Syriac manuscript, the Acts of Thomas.11 Certainly, by the first century CE, Jewish traders were settled in South India and the sea route between South India and West Asia was well known.

In the case of Goa, further north on India’s west coast, Christianity arrived almost a millennium and a half after it had reached South India, and it came from western Europe not western Asia. Following the navigator Vasco da Gama’s arrival via the Cape of Good Hope at Calicut on India’s west coast in 1498, the Portuguese identified Goa as particularly well suited to serving them as a port. They conquered it in 1510 and killed many Muslim inhabitants. Subsequently, the Portuguese adopted violent means of making the Hindu populace Catholic.

Sadly, the Portuguese encounter with the Christians of South India was similarly coercive, as this long-established community had had no reason to acknowledge the primacy of the Pope. As a result, the most ancient Judaeo-Christian tradition in South India was all but wiped out and the South Indian ‘St Thomas Christians’ fractured into separate churches ranging across a spectrum with linkages that have shifted over the centuries. Today’s churches include the Mar Thoma Church, which retains a Syriac identity while maintaining close association with the Anglican Communion, as well as the Malabar Independent Syrian Church, two Orthodox churches, two Eastern Catholic churches and the Chaldean Syrian Church.

By contrast with Goan and South Indian Christians, few people from the more northern state of Punjab had become Christian before the 1890s.12 Most of the missionaries in Punjab were British (although some came from Scandinavia and North America), so Punjabi converts learned generally British styles of Christianity. Although the missionaries had hoped to win high-caste, influential converts, most of those who responded to their call belonged to families from the Dalit (literally ‘oppressed’) caste that was associated with a particularly ‘polluting’ hereditary occupation, and so suffered many forms of discrimination. This has had continuing implications for how other Punjabis in India and (since its establishment in 1947) in Pakistan, and more recently in the UK, tend to view South Asian (or at least Punjabi) Christians.

Although, in line with respective numbers in the UK, the present chapter focuses particularly on Christians with family roots in these three areas of the sub-continent, it must be remembered that some British South Asian Christians’ roots are elsewhere. Thus the Anglican theological writer Mukti Barton writes as a Bengali,13 from a community evoked in Alison Mukherjee’s novel, Nirmal Babu’s Bride, which is set in both Bengal and the UK.14 The Quaker Lilamani Wickramaratne, writer of a report on racism within the Religious Society of Friends,15 is from a Singhalese Methodist background in Sri Lanka.

Moreover, an increasing number of the UK’s South Asian Christians are from non-Christian families, and themselves converted either shortly prior to migration or while settled in the UK. Indeed, Barbara Easton found that most of her Asian Christian contacts in Wolverhampton had converted since coming to Britain in the late 1960s.16 Attempts to proselytize among people of ‘other faiths’, and so among South Asians especially, are made by evangelical organizations such as Operation Mobilization and (from outside the theological mainstream) by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In Wolverhampton, two retired American missionaries with experience of northern India plus a Punjabi couple ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Contributor’s Memorial
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Making an Invisible Diaspora Visible
• Part One Europe
• Part Two North America
• Conclusion South Asian Christians in the West
• Index