Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at subaltern notions of Christian belief and practice by focusing on conflicts that broke out between outcaste worshippers and European administrators in various Catholic churches in the colonial port city of Madras in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on a series of disputes that broke out in outcaste churches in the colonial port city of Madras in South India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that these protracted conflicts between Catholic "Paraiyar" worshippers and European church administrators were over diverse issues of Christian belief and practice that ranged from the election of church headmen to the legitimacy of Tamil versions of the Bible. The paper argues that the self articulation of these groups as Christians, as urban laboring communities, and as entitled subjects of the East India Company gives us an insight into the changing nature of subaltern religiosity, as well as into their relationship with the colonial state and emerging structures of urban rule. The East India Company was the arbitrator and mediator in these conflicts and indeed, the complex relationship between a Protestant government and outcaste Catholics is key to looking at the ways in which Catholic Paraiyars understood their own histories, and staked various social and political claims.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the contemporary character of South Asian Christianity in India as experienced, negotiated and altered by the Dalit Christians through the study of two novels ("Siluvai Raj Sarithiram" and "Kalacchumai") written by Raj Gautaman, a Dalit Christian himself.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the contemporary character of South Asian Christianity in India as experienced, negotiated and altered by a Dalit Christian, Raj Gautaman and narrates his story—indeed the collective experience of Dalit Christians—through his two novels: "Siluvai Raj Sarithiram" and "Kalacchumai."

The paper shows that Dalit Christianity in India is not so much a particular form of Christianity but a field of contestation and negotiation between three matrices: the cultural matrix of Dalits, the religious matrix of caste-ridden Catholic Christianity and the secular matrix of Indian Nation state. Placed at the intersection between the three, a Dalit Christian faces different forms of discrimination and resistance to the emergence of his subjecthood. In his transition from childhood to adulthood and from village to city, Raj Gautaman, with his inherited and ambivalent dual identity of a Dalit and a Catholic Christian, sees no scope for his self-cultivation either within or outside the Church.

Making use of Bakhtinian framework of analysis, the paper aims to explore the subaltern's construction of inner self in relation to the outer-world and, shows how in the process, not only the religious identity of an individual but also the contemporary character of Christianity is negotiated, interrogated, punctured and altered.

South Asian Christianity in India is primarily a lived-in social space and it can cease to be a religion for the Dalits when it fails to help them conquer their subaltern victimhood and construct their modern selfhood in the society.

Paper short abstract:

The paper argues that reformers and nationalists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal deployed the Christian concept of incarnation, and related it to Indic concepts of avatara, in order to create a powerful legitimating support for emerging Indian nationalism.

Paper long abstract:

The Bengali Christian convert Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, the Christian-influenced Brahmos Keshub Chunder Sen, Bipin Chandra Pal and Rabindranath Tagore, and the Hindu nationalists Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Nabinchandra Sen, and Vivekananda, played a critical role in Indianizing the Christian doctrine of incarnation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal, moving away from the criticism of incarnation which had been present in Bengali reformist circles in the age of Rammohun Roy and the early-mid nineteenth-century Brahmo movement. While existing scholarship has focussed on individualized studies of some of these Bengalis, what has been surprisingly absent in scholarship is a broader analysis of the political rationale behind the emergence of the positive valuation of the doctrine of incarnation. I argue that Bengalis, by relating concepts of incarnation and avatara, presented Jesus as an exemplar of 'Asian' nationalism, and simultaneously as a model for nationalizing Indic saviour avataras like Krishna. The incarnate divinity thereby became the prototype for the future nationalist citizen. Taking a cue from Andrew Sartori's brief remarks on 'immanentist monism', I further argue that in nationalist hands, the doctrine of incarnation provided a critique of the supposedly vacuous abstractions of mechanical politics and capitalist economy which Bengalis identified as the hallmarks of British rule. The legacy of the pro-incarnation trend would last into the first half of the twentieth century as several nationalists described the Indian struggle against the British as comparable to the supposed Judaeo-Christian revolt against the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reinvestigates the writings of Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) through the lens of postcolonial scholarship. Using his notions of "mysticism" and "religious experience", the paper will show that the French monk was influenced both by orientalist thinking and by his own Indian experience.

Paper long abstract:

Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) has been often studied from a "traditional" perspective. Yet the notion of mysticism, central to his thought, has not been seriously questioned. What does it mean to be a "mystic" for Abhishiktananda? How did he use the word, in which context, and for what reasons? The notion of "experience" is also tremendously important in his thoughts. Not necessarily linked to mysticism, but closely related, "experience" seems to be more in tune with what he *lived* rather than what he *thought* about India.

The exploration of these notions of "mysticism" and "religious experience" will be twofold. First, the paper examines how his vision of a "mystical India" can/should be reviewed through Richard King's critique of conceptions of the "mystical East". To what extent, for instance, has Abhishiktananda been an inheritor of the orientalist trend in his thinking? The second part will focus on how experience played a central role in Abhishiktananda's understanding of this "mystical India", that is, how some of his preconceptions or representations about Hinduism were progressively turned upside down by his own experience.

I argue that for Abhishiktananda, experience is the locus of a unique encounter between some form of Hinduism and Christianity. Because his portrait remains complex - with clear influences from a romanticized "mystical India" but with some adventurous steps toward a tradition he did not really "know" beforehand that transformed his own understanding of himself and of Hinduism - Abhishiktananda remains an important figure for exploring what deep intercultural/interreligious encounter may imply.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the ways that the Rev. Ishwari Dass, a pioneer 19th-century North Indian Presbyterian leader, adapted and presented Reformed theology in his "Lectures On Theology" for a religious audience that included both Muslims and Hindus.

Paper long abstract:

In 1860 the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta published a prize-winning essay, "Lectures On Theology, Adapted To The Natives Of India," written in the 1850s by a Presbyterian minister and teacher from Uttar Pradesh, the Rev. Ishwari Dass. A cursory reading of the theology leaves one with the impression that it is simply a presentation of the Princeton theology of Dass' American missionary mentors and colleagues. However, upon closer examination the text yields surprising results. Dass is well aware of important religious ideas in his North Indian context, and at critical junctures in his work he adapts the strict Calvinism being taught at Princeton Seminary (which he had visited as a young man) so that it coheres with Hindu and Islamic thought that he knows. The text thus periodically harmonizes Hindu, Muslim and Christian thought. Dass also strongly opposes some religious ideas that he sees prevalent in his milieu. Throughout the text, he aims to handle his material so that it both makes sense to a North Indian reading public, and garners the approval of the missionary community to which he was responsible. The conference paper will examine Dass's theological work, showing how it was indeed a Protestant Christian theology adapted for the natives of North India, but also adapted for European Protestant missionaries working in North India who were, after all, providing the prize of Rs. 500.

Paper short abstract:

An analysis of the disproportionate targeting of Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Independent Christians in the anti-Christian violence of contemporary India.

Paper long abstract:

If the extant statistics on violence against Christians in contemporary India are accurate, Pentecostals, Charismatics, and other independent, non-denominational Christians are disproportionately targeted. According to most Indians, both Christian and non-Christian, the reason they are disproportionately targeted is their more aggressive evangelizing. While this is surely an important factor, a deeper investigation reveals a more complicated story involving, among other things, caste, class, denominational structure, healings, distinctive Pentecostal approaches to culture, and the symbolics of dress and music. Drawing on interviews, statistical analysis, and fieldwork in India, this paper will enumerate and explore this range of factors.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon recent research on the Khrist Bhaktas of Banaras, this paper explores the wider theoretical and methodical issues involved in any "Hindu" and "Christian" study, arguing that a concentration on the particularities of such a comparison are of singular importance.

Paper long abstract:

In light of recent research (2008-2011) in the Banaras region of Uttar Pradesh on the religious community known as Khrist Bhaktas, this paper steps back to explore the wider theoretical and methodical issues involved in this study and in "Hindu" and "Christian" studies more generally, arguing that a concentration on the particularities of such work are of singular importance. This paper traces the genealogies of the terms Hindu and Christian, arguing that they are not in fact as equivalent as we often take for granted. Moreover, the colonial history of Hindu-Christian encounter makes this work particularly fraught and complex. Modern, normative notions of "religion," "Hinduism" and "Christianity" developed out of this interaction, with significant implications for Hindu traditions, Christianities, and the development of the Religious Studies subject-field in subsequent centuries. To complicate matters still further is the postcolonial, post-Independence reality in which we find burgeoning Christian communities, new religious and political emancipatory movements of subalterns, and other movements that refuse to fit into simple categorization. These realities coupled with the rise of transnational Hindu nationalism and charismatic Christianity requires especial interpretive subtlety. The Khrist Bhaktas, for example, can be interpreted as a Hindu movement, as a new Christian community, as pre-Catholics, or as something else. And given the nature of multiple identities or "relational identities" we must refrain from too easily re-inscribing common dyads, e.g. victim-victimizer, oppressed-oppressor, and even Christian-Hindu. Realities on the ground demonstrate that the ground is always shifting.