Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on everyday interactions between Lutheran and Jesuit missionaries and newly-defined 'tribal' communities in colonial Chotanagpur. These interactions, I argue, cannot be simply viewed in isolation from the political economy of agrarian change in this eastern Indian region.

Paper long abstract:

Postcolonial historians have tended to share, somewhat uneasily, with the Hindu Right a particular view of Christian missions as handmaidens of empire in British India. In the annals of subaltern studies, too, there exists a conspicuous silence on missions, which is surprising because subalterns in colonial India converted to Christianity in fairly large numbers. Beyond South Asia, the Comaroffs famously argued that Christian missions in southern Africa contributed to the 'colonization of consciousness' there.

Recently, however, such settled historical truths are starting to be unsettled. Historians such as Tanika Sarkar, Geoffrey Oddie, Saurabh Dube, Sangeeta Dasgupta, Rupa Viswanath, and David Mosse have questioned the easy equation of missions with empire in South Asia. This paper builds on their work by focusing on everyday interactions between Lutheran and Jesuit missionaries and newly-defined 'tribal' communities in colonial Chotanagpur. These interactions, I argue, cannot be simply viewed in isolation from the political economy of agrarian change in this region. From the mid-nineteenth century, Christianity emerged as a powerful resource for those forest-dwelling groups that the Raj christened 'tribes' in an ongoing war over property rights with their upper-caste Hindu zamindars. German and Belgian missionaries were, willy nilly, forced by their new wards to enter the arena of agrarian conflict, often against their will and sometimes at odds with the Raj. At the same time, the missionary interest in codifying 'tribal' languages and comprehending local theological traditions produced fresh cultural-religious resources for 'tribal' subjects who sought to pursue a new politics of difference.