Missionaries, Converts and the

State in Colonial India

Tanika Sarkar
Centre for Historical Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University

Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, Province and the Raj: Imperialist Mission

and Missionary Imperialism, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1991,
pp. 273, Rs 375.
Rowena Robinson, Conversion, Continuity and Change: Lived Christianity in Southern Goa, New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1998, pp.
236, Rs 375.
Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict: ldeo%gy, Cultural Contact and
.Conversion in Late Colonial India, Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1997, pp. xvii + 279, Rs 495.
Koji Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 18581936, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. x + 252, Rs 450.
Geoffrey Oddie, Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto Nationalism: James
Long of Bengal, 1814-1887, London, Curzon Press, 1999, pp.
xiv + 261, price not stated.
Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief,
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. xx + 332, Rs 495.
Ines G. Zupanov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical
Knowledge in Seventeenth Century India, Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 1999, pp. viii + 277, Rs 395.

Historical interest in Indian Christians has so far been almost entirely fixed on
foreign missionaries, and on the process of conversion that they supposedly
inaugurated. In other words, a transition to Christianity is primarily situated in
the initiative of the western missions rather than in the experience and sensibility
of Indian converts. The horizon of enquiry is largely filled up with questions
about the consequences of conversion, especially the extent of continuity or break
with an anterior religious identity. The degree of embeddedness of Indian Christians in surrounding Hindu society thus emerges as a central concern. A second

122
set of preoccupations revolve-around the agents behind conversion: whether the
hidden hand of the colonial state was more responsible for it, or it was the social
advancement that the missionaries provided with their educational, health, and
self-improvement schemes.
Some of the more imaginative studies have drawn upon the conceptual apparatus
used in historical anthropology. While Clothey has explained conversion as the
taste of liminality, where the experience of total and instantaneous transition was
crucial, Horton would rather see it as an act of recognition: since most tribal belief structures use a double-layered vision where polytheism is overlaid by a transcendental divinity, they could identify with and accept monotheistic religions
that affirmed a single, universal God. In much of the Indian historical work,
however, a close focus on the specifically religious and theological dimensions
of conversion has been quite rare.
Let us briefly recapitulate some of the important ways in which such questions
have been posed in studies that have preceded the corpus that is being reviewed
here. There is an old tradition of histories of missions that emanated from the
missions themselves. These were stories of trials and tribulations, or triumph which
could either be encoded as successful conversion or as martyrdom. Such narratives
were shaped by theological and evangelical expressive conventions, some of which
work (within our corpus) addresses. Apart from these stories, a powerful
stance has been to view-as K.M. Panikkar had done-conversion as surrender
to not just an alien faith, but, more significantly, to an alien political order.
Robert Frykenberg, too, assumed a fundamental complicity between the imperializing state and evangelizing missionaries. Converts, thus, become mere effects,
created entirely by the desires of colonial hegemony, and of missionaries whose
religious activism is primarily decided by colonial political contingencies. If evan-

Zupanovs

gelicalism itself is a creature of the new state, then converts are doubly objectified:
first to the state, and then to missionaries.
Against this, Richard Eaton has recently pointed out the very important qualification that in the North East, conversion on a mass scale occurred after decolonization-a reminder that very effectively delinks conversion from colonialism.
Susan Bayly provided a richly-textured alternative account of conversion in the
context of the histories of the South where Christianity is reputed to have been in
continuous and multifarious existence since the first century AD. She denies that
a stable ancient religious identity called Hinduism preexisted all other relatively
new-and hence less authentic or rooted-religions. Instead, it is more useful to
think in terms of a floating pool of regional cultural elements, a basic bedrock of
1

W.F.

Clothey, Images of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, Madras, 1982;
rationality of conversion, Africa, Vol. 45: 3, 1975.

R. Horton, On the
2

K.M. Panikkar, Asia under Western Dominance, London, 1923.

Frykenberg, Caste, morality and western religion under the Raj, Modern Asian Studies,
Vol. 19: 2, 1995.
4
Richard M. Eaton, Comparative history as world history: Conversion in modern India, in
Essays on Islam and Indian History, Delhi, 2000.
3

R.E.

123

belief and styles of worship that were based on shrines and cults of fierce goddesses,
warrior heroes, and a ranking system. All the contending and multiple local kingdoms, the distributive and redistributive mechanisms that dealt with exchanges
of material and ritual resources, would draw their normative power from these
traditions which anticipated the great religions of the South: Hinduism, Islam and
Christianity. Moreover, all these religions, simultaneously iand in overlapping

shaped themselves around the cultural traditions of the region. The Syrian
not only abided by the purity-pollution taboos of Brahwere
awarded
the status of the twice-bom in local shrines and in temple
mans, they
ritual. The real change came in the nineteenth century with the advent of a different
kind of Protestant evangelism which overthrew the local embeddedness of the
Syrian Christians by challenging caste hierarchies.
As Bayly shakes up the notion of -bounded and enclosed communities with a
dominant anterior one as the overarching religious horizon, Percival Spear looks
at the status of the convert after the act of transition. He perceives in the convert
an accumulation of identities, a series of deposits of cultural traces, rather than an
exclusivist gesture that rejects and abandons one identity for another. The convert

ways,

Christians, for instance,

retains the marks of his earlier cultural life even as he adds on the new marks.
Conversion thus becomes an Indian way of,configuring religious plurality, the
convert being an embodiment of several and conjoined identities. Conversion, in
this reading, is impure or incomplete change, always open to new appropriations.
In his earlier work, G.A. Oddie explained conversion as primarily an act of
conscious social rebellion by marginalized and exploited castes and classes who
find no dignity in their community and who identify its doctrines as the basis of
social injustice. Duncan Forrester, on the other hand, objects on the grounds that
this understanding of conversion dissolves an act of religious choice into a material
incentive or a social protest, and nullifies the possibility of religious and spiritual
quest among low caste, peasant or tribal people.
In his new work that will be discussed in this essay, Oddie also shows how the
colonial states commitment to social hierarchies clashed with missionary involvement with low caste and peasant struggles. It is also important to remember that
even when the two worked together, it would have been the exception rather than
the norm. Penelope Carson has carefully historicized the state-missionary connection that actually shows up, on careful investigation, a brief and atypical moment
of closeness against a wider history of distance and mutual suspicion.8 Michael
Nazir Ali has explained some of the distance by drawing attention to developments
within certain Christian orders in England; the mid-nineteenth century Oxford
Movement among Anglican groups, for instance, prescribed an obligatory
5
Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society,
, Cambridge, 1989.
1700-1900
6
Percival Spear, India, Pakistan and the West, Oxford, 1958.
7
D. Forrester, Caste and Christianity in India, London, 1980.
8
P. Carson, An imperial dilemma: The propagation of Christianity in early colonial India, The
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 8: 2, May 1980.

124

of the religious order from state influence and patronage. Dick

Kooiman has underlined the social gulf between an aristocratic colonial bureaucracy and missionaries who often came from lower middle class backgrounds,
lacked an Oxbridge education and were autodidacts.1o In this connection, it is
important to remember an observation made by an Indian scholar-bureaucrat,
P.N. Bose, in 1894: officials were often jealous of the wide and deep social influence that missionaries commanded among the lower segments of Indian society
and that colonial state representatives knew that they lacked.&dquo; It is surprising that
even after such a wide range of work that complicates a simple binary between
Indian and Christian, state-driven conversion and authentic, indigenous religion,
a crassly-simplified and communally-charged exclusion of Christians from Indian
religious histories, a relegation of Indian Christianity to colonial strategies, still
persists and dominates popular commonsense to a very large extent.

self-distancing

II
The books under review stretch out these earlier general propositions in new and
different directions and also problematize them. It seems appropriate to begin
with Gerald Studdert-Kennedy since the study straddles the world of the missionary
as well as the world of the convert. It encompasses two core areas amidst an ambitious and crowded description of almost everything under the sun: nationalism
in India, wars in Europe, Indian literature and English literary pedagogy in India,
Christian educational establishments and colonial religious policies. Apart from a
few interesting citations-as for instance, Curzons insistence that Christianity
and Empire are neither equivalent nor very compatible-many of his conclusions
and observations are neither new nor always accurate.
One of the core areas is the Industrial Christian Fellowship in England in the
1920s, and the other is the Madras Christian College between the 1880s and the
I 920s, with special reference to the social-professional profile of its alumni and
the literary pieces in the College magazine. The latter have been used to suggest
that English literature lent itself to designs for colonial political conquest and
cultural hegemony. The precise relationship between religion and literature remains
obscure in Studdert-Kennedy. The section on the Industrial Christian Fellowship
is interesting since it involves an imperial and social conservatism allied to a
muscular Christianity. It is not, however, clear how it is meant to resonate with
the other thrust-the Madras Christian College. There are some initial promises
of a potentially important sketch of British political, radical and Church circles
but this does not really get off the ground. Similarly, despite a load of fairly interesting snippets from college scrapbooks, the segment on the Madras Christian
9
Michael Nazir Ali, From
1991.

Everyday to Everywhere: A

World view

of Christian Witness, London,

10
D. Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London
South Travancore in the Nineteenth Century, Delhi, 1989.
"
P.N. Bose, Hindu Civilisation and British Rule, Calcutta, 1894.

Missionary Society and

125

College

does not add

anything

substantial to the discussion. In between, Indian

nationalists and colonial rulers drift in and

out as

unlocated, free-floating ap-

paritions.
Within India, Antony Copley provides a useful lay of the land in terms of summing up scholarly perspectives on conversion, an enumeration of different denominations active in India, a brief history of their changing relationships with the
colonial state, as well as the plurality of mission work and theological stances,
especially towards Hinduism. He makes a distinction between elite, often individual
conversions, which he characterizes as cultural migration, a conscious rejection
of vital aspects of ancestral culture, and mass conversions that involved marginalized groups and their material and social, rather than cultural-spiritual dissatisfactions. He offers a history of both levels of conversion and of the missions
that effected them. It is interesting that so many denominations competed over
souls, and an exploration of cross-mission conversions would have added a new
dimension. There were deep contentions even among Catholic orders, and the
prolonged mutual hostilities between the Portuguese Padroado and the Vaticanled De Propaganda Fide crippled Catholic evangelicalism for nearly a hundred
years, till the late nineteenth century. Here, a resum6 of specifically theological
inter-denominational differences was especially called for.
Copley points out that till the late nineteenth century, when England passed
the Catholic Emancipation Act, there were restrains on Catholicism in Britain,
while till the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant proselytization progressed under
German, rather than British mission auspices in India. There seems no historical
reason, therefore, to conflate evangelical interests with specifically British imperial
ones, nor to ascribe conversion successes to British political calculations alone.
The British weighed Christian motivations against social stability and political
expediency continuously, and, on the whole, declined to utilize missionary reformism about caste and gender uplift in order to claim a progressive and interventionist
self-image. It is important in this connection to recall the British policy framework
regarding religious usages within India, although none of these books embarks
on a full-length discussion of that aspect. There was a withdrawal from intrusive
reformism, and caste was regarded as the major source of a stable and productive
hierarchical order. Untouchability was not legally disallowed till the advent of
independence. Copley also points out the gender components of mission work. A
very large proportion of missionaries in mid-nineteenth century India were unmarried women. An untold story of womens religious life and gender relations within
the West is gestured at, though Copley himself does not venture into this field. It
is interesting that while the book opens on a note of missionary-bashing, unproblematically holding them responsible for the origins of religious intolerance in
this country that led up to the demolition of the Babri Mosque, he then proceeds
with an account that problematizes and abandons this ahistorical framework
entirely. In fact, the data and the narrative suggest a picture of social uplift and
rebellion, reform and political partisanship against the state, as well as highly

126

fractious internal dissensions among missionaries. It also suggests an engagement

with Hindu traditions that were plural and often respectful and sympathetic.
Ines
study of Robert Nobilis very distinctive form of Jesuitical
in
proselytization early seventeenth century Madurai exemplifies the jostling of
several alternative theological and proselytizing stances within the single Order
of Jesus-differences and contentions that blended religious controversies with
national, class and educational asymmetries among European members of the
order. It helps to break up notions of the monolithic construct called missionaries.
Apart from the heterogenizing of evangelicalism, the book offers an important
is influmethodological breakthrough in the area of discourse studies.
Michel
de
that
the
of
texts
reworks
both
enced by
Certeaus argument
power
social and textual spaces. Her work in this respect traces two parallel lines of
dialectic: between the textual and the socio-cultural, and between the textual and
the religious-cognitive. What marks out her attempt sharply from the kinds of
colonial discourse studies that abound here is her ability to identify individual
components within a single discursive tradition, to align them to their internal
codes and conventions, to indicate possibilities of manipulating them in different

Zupanovs

Zupanov

ways to stage very different, even contradictory effects.

She studies the Jesuitical epistolary conventions which had been established
by Loyola, and their manipulation by the learned Italian Nobili and his Portuguese
rival Fernando. While Nobili came from the cosmopolitan, academic, theological
environment of Rome, and from an aristocratic background, Fernando had had a
provincial, merchant-soldier background in Portugal. His source of strength was
his closeness to the Portuguese military power which regarded the Jesuits as its
instrument. The two rivals represented two contending styles of accommodation
or absorption into the missionary order, derived from alternative ontologies.
Fernandos universalism consisted of remaking the Other in ones own image
whereas Nobilis strategy involved a slippage into the persona of the pagan Other,
a strategy that was followed by Matteo Ricci in China and Alessandro Valignano
in Japan. It enabled the Jesuits to make distinctions within the pagan world; China,
Japan and India being seen as immeasurably superior as cultural orders to all
other pagans and constituting something like an approximate self rather than an
unambiguous Other.
Nobili steeped himself in Brahmanical habits and texts, both Vedic and Bhaktibased : he scrupulously followed purity-pollution taboos, described the Bible as
the lost Veda and himself as a renouncer within the Brahmanical tradition.
Fernando, on the other hand, observed hierarchical differences between paganChristian and Portuguese-Indian, abhorred syncretism, and sought out larger, mass
level, low-caste potential converts. In their letters to the European Jesuitical establishment, they sought to mobilize support for their respective styles through very
different representations of Tamil Hindu caste and religious orders. Moreover,
they did so through very different epistolary styles: while Nobili deployed the
resources of a highly erudite comparative theology, analogical reasoning, and

127

religious speculation, Fernando used a demotic mode, classifying, enumerating,

recording eyewitness accounts or ocular evidence.
The religious history of the Tamil world follows the well-known trajectory of
post-Vijayanagara times which were marked by conflicts between martial clans
from the dry northern areas who poured into the wet coastal settlements and
disturbed an earlier Brahman-Vellala landowner symbiosis. Both settlers and
invaders required legitimation from local shrines and cults. Christian proselytization is placed against this context and is framed also within early Christian traditions
of local saints and the Bhakti cults commemorating them. It would have been immensely useful if Zupanov had elaborated upon these local cults. The two rivals
are then provided with a European frame in terms of variegated Jesuitical requirements, national differences and social diversity that were carried over into the
Tamil landscape. What remains firmly sustained is the epistolary prism with its
formal properties through which such differences are refracted and represented.
Rowena Robinson provides an account of Catholicism in Goa in two phases:
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries at the time of the Portuguese conquest and rule, and after 1961 when that rule had been dismantled. Papal Bulls
between 1452 and 1456 authorized the King of Portugal to conquer and Christianize the East, creating an exceptionally tight interlock between politico-military
power and Christianity that was unusual in India. The inquisition-set up between
1560 and 1812-persecuted Christians for apostasy with great severity. Although
there were occasions of Hindu-Christian conflict, they remained intermittent,
while Portuguese enmity with Muslims was powered by memories of ancient
conflicts from the times of the Crusades, as well as by the Portuguese bid to dislodge and take over Muslim control over the Asian spice trade. There were masof Muslims in Goa.
Portuguese rule definitely subordinated Christianizing to political governance
and exercised both through coercion. In the recent politically-ch4rged environment,
this has been used by polemicists like Arun Shourie as the typical face of the
evangelical practice. Robinson shows that the efficacy of large-scale conversion
lay rather in points of familiarity and recognition between the two communities
in the area of rites, festivals, ritual calendars and so on. What is most significant is
how much the churches retained ranking practices and Brahmanical privileges
among converts as well as in labour patterns and social hierarchies in the nonChristian world. Even after the end of Portuguese rule, churches continued to
follow caste-based discrimination and exclusion in seating practices. Endogamous
marriages and landowning patterns similarly retained the marks of caste-based
privileges and dispossession. It seems that in the mutual encounter of opposed
religious practices which occurred within a context where one was politically and
militarily dominant, the overflow of the caste habits of the dominated into the
dominant community unsettled the meaning of both military and religious power.
Koji Kawashima introduces a new dimension in the study of mission-state and
mission-low caste relations. He locates missionary enterprises in nineteenth
century Travancore which was governed by a Hindu dynasty under the tutelage
sacres

128

of the Government of Madras which, in its turn, was directed by the Government
of India. The several and different layers of authority are carefully separated and
treated as distinct units. The Travancore Raj strongly underlined its Hindu affiliation, yet from the mid-nineteenth century, the modernizing Diwan solicitedand received-considerable missionary guidance in educational and health
schemes. It is interesting to note that this included a compromise with the state,
which kept low castes out of government schools till the end of the century. The
Diwan, moreover, saw in Christianity a useful buffer against the low caste and
radical religious upthrusts like the Shri Narayana Guru sect which possibly threatened a more serious internal challenge to Brahmanical Hinduism. The compact,
however, would be severely strained whenever missionaries encouraged s ~lfrespect and protest movements among low caste converts, which had the potential
of spilling over into non-convert sections. On occasions-as in 1868----Brahmans
would beat up missionaries with impunity and virtual state sanctions would be
imposed on them for encouraging low caste converts to use public roads.
During the breast cloth controversy among Shanar women, missionaries encouraged low caste female converts to flout upper caste injunctions that made it compulsory that they must bare their breasts in public places. The state proved intractable
and repressive. In 1829, a massive Shanar agitation forced its hands and the wearing
of breast cloth was legalized finally, but only for convert women. When nonconverts disobeyed the state ban on breast cloth-with missionary support-convert and non-convert women were freely molested and mission schools and
churches were burnt. The attacks were fuelled by the suspicion that the missionaries
had threatened yet another bastion of caste privilege by prodding the Government
of India to push through the abolition of slavery which was largely caste-based.
The royal proclamation of 1829 laid down that converts were not permitted to
act towards persons of higher castes contrary to the usages of their own castes
before they became converts. Even the Secretary of State, Charles Wood, otherwise known for his pro-missionary sympathies, turned down missionary pleas for
a blanket legalization of the breast cloth.
While the Madras Government was by and large status quoist in matters of
caste, agrestic slavery and gender relations, the Government of India, at times of
social conflict, would order the Resident at the royal court to restrain missionaries
and low-caste converts. Curzon abbreviated the legal rights of converts to their
share of property inheritance for fear of disrupting the Hindu joint family property
holdings. Lord Minto warned missionaries in 1909: The reforms should emanate from the Durbar and grow up in harmony with the traditions of the state.
Kawashima could have linked up this policy of restraint with Mintos version of
rallying the Moderates, that is, privileging princes to build them up against the

Congress.
G. Oddie extends his earlier work on missionaries as catalysts of social protest
in a full-length biography of Reverend James Long, which gathers together many
of the themes that are scattered among the other books. Long performed many
tasks for the Bengal Government that some scholars identify as cultural

129

surveillance. 12 He prepared catalogues of Bengali newspapers and publications,

he urged the Government to arrange for weekly translations of important press
coverages to keep abreast of public opinion, he urged it to monitor and suppress
obscene books, along with Bengali intellectuals like Bankimchandra. While Oddie
recounts all this, he combines it with Longs love for both Sanskrit and Bengali,
and his efforts to acquire for Bengali the status and academic recognition due to
a great language. Long abandoned an early espousal of elitist-Anglicist education
and hopes for a filtration effect among the illiterate masses and proposed instead
mass-level vernacular elementary education. He also came to acquire a deep love
for the Bengali rural landscape where he settled down for decades. The landscape,
however, was no idyll for him, for he also loved what he called poor ryots and
fishermen and grieved for their immensely vulnerable existence. His preaching
of the Gospel as the ultimate Truth was based on no hatred, for he wrote: The
more I see of Hindus, the more I like them. They have been misrepresented by
Europeans who did not know their language and who absurdly took the European
as the sole standard of civilization.
Oddie weaves in these political choices with Longs early non-conformist
upbringing in an Irish Protestant family, as well as his experiences of poverty and
unemployment among Irish weavers. He also links up Longs later work for the
relief of Bengali peasants from landlord and planter oppression with a larger history
of missionary involvement in this area from the early 1850s. In the mid 1850s,
missionaries of twenty-five denominations signed a petition against European
planters, and began to supplement the work of Bengali journalist-activists like
Harish Mukherjee to expose the coercion and tyranny of indigo planters. Long
himself wrote in the Bengal Hurkaru about the complicity between European
magistrates and planters that had unleashed a reign of terror ... a peace procured
by the dungeon and the stocks, and about the rape of peasant women. Oddie
adds rich details of the Church Missionary Societys involvement with the antiindigo movement, whereas Longs own partisanship, especially in undertaking to
publish the English version of the play Neel Durpan, to circulate among the members of the Indigo Commission, are relatively sketchy. The descriptions of the
libel charges that planters brought up against him, the trial, his imprisonment,
and the commemoration of these events in popular traditions in Bengal are also

sketchy.
Despite the highly diverse themes and foci of these books, they have certain
strong unifying threads running through them. They pluralize missionary work,
theology and evangelical understanding; they complicate and problematize their
relationships with colonial states, Portuguese and British; they look at the very
different ways in which the various missions approached the different social segments within the country. At the same time, we miss in all of them the standpoint
of the Indian convert, her religious choice and her status in the eyes of the state.
12

Tapti Roy, Disciplining the printed text: Colonial and nationalist surveillance of Bengali
literature, in Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal,
Calcutta, 1996.

130

Gauri Viswanathans extremely important, thoughtful and complex approach addresses these questions to uncover further layers of complications.
It is difficult to summarize the entire scope of Viswanathans book, for it traverses the missions and denominations in England, the legal usages about conversion
and judicial resolution of intercommunity property disputes in India, the census
enumeration of the state as it strains to attain religious neutrality by privileging
the anterior condition of the convert and his ties to the ancestral community. It
also develops an intensely-focused life story of a convert and her lonely search
for an adequate spiritual position. At this point of the discussion, conversion as
the exchange of one stable community identity for another becomes shadowy
and is dissolved within an individual self-fashioning which Viswanathan describes
as the real challenge that conversion poses for all communities, including the
new one that the convert has formally embraced.
Using a number of convert narratives and their handling under colonial laws
and courts, she concludes that the Lex Loci law that the state had enacted to procure for the outcasted convert his share of ancestral property, involved a deeply
paradoxical trade-off: property rights were recovered through a judicial insistence
about the continued cultural and social ties of the convert with the ancestral community, to the point when his entry into another community is rendered inconsequential, marginal, secondary. The insistence on an unfractured identity, upon
which the act of conversion seemed to sit lightly, like almost a minor absentmindedness, sought to reassure the Hindu community of its continued hold on even
those who had officially seceded from it. This notion of entangled identity minimized the impact of religious choice, rejection, the will to develop another identity
and status that the convert had expressed. Youthful conversions, especially, were
classified as abduction, and even young adult converts were asked to seek parental
consent for marriages on the ground that they remained tied to their older community despite conversion: parental consent was obligatory since Hindu marriage
was non-consensual. In several ways, the choice of conversion was cast into doubt
as an authentic act of will. It seems then that recent Hindutva charges that the
convert is simply a manufactured object without agency replicates very precisely
a colonial construction.
If the convert had married before conversion, then, notwithstanding the wifes
own opinion, she was counted as a Hindu. On the whole, the state disliked the
disruption of Hindu joint family ties through conversion-something that also
comes through in Kawashimas work. Viswanathan provides an excellent case
study of the young girl Huchi whose conversion in the 1870s was first judicially
nullified since she was a minor, and she was forced to marry a Hindu husband
against her will. Even after she attained maturity and secretly converted herself,
she was prevented from dissolving her previous marriage, since women who had
been married before conversion were denied access to the Native Convert Marriage
Dissolution Act. Since she was baptized she had been outcasted, but her husband
was still allowed full access to her. He slept with her but did not eat the polluted

131

food that she would cook. She was forced to live within a non-consensual marriage
where she was treated as a prostitute.
The chapter on Census enumeration principles reveals the way the new identity
of Muslim converts was qualified systematically. While the primary classificatory
device was religious, in the case of the Muslim community, religious identity was
divided and broken on ethnic lines: a wedge was inserted between Muslims of
foreign origins, and those who had converted, in however remote times, within
India. Once again, the original identity was reaffirmed and reintroduced.
Viswanathan not only presents rich empirical data to prove the states commitment to familial, kinship and caste ties and discipline, which were privileged
over and above the impulse for Christianization, she confronts us with the uncomfortable issue of the converts choice of rejection, of deliberate secession from
the Hindu faith. The tendency among secular historians, on the other hand, has
been to minimize this and to highlight cultural continuities and embeddedness in
the anterior identity.
The deeply sensitive and rich chapter on the religious life of Pandita Ramabai
adds a vital but largely-missing dimension to the abundant secular-feminist literature on Ramabai, and reconstitutes the historical meaning of her life on a new
axis. What is more interesting is that Viswanathan actually complicates and problematizes-perhaps unwittingly-her own introductory statements and problematic. She had described the secularism or religious neutrality of the colonial
state as a way of purchasing the political consent of Hindus and a recasting of
Indian identity as modern colonial subjects. She then conflated this with modern
Indian secularism which, for her, subordinated religious preoccupations to political

On the other hand, she drew upon such secular schemes in nineteenth
century Britain, wherein the citizenship rights of Jews and Catholics were recog-

rights.

nized. What

they gained in terms of the political rights of the community, she

argues, they lost in terms of a fuller, absorbing and autonomous religious selfhood
which now was diluted and marginalized in favour of citizenship.
There are certain suggestive and interesting arguments here, but also some
crucial absences. The colonial states policies towards Hindu and Muslim religious
establishments and a comparison with its patronage to missionary ventures would
have strengthened some of her points: it would show that the state was neither
leaning noticeably towards, nor privileging the status of, converts to Christianity.
Second, she reduces the multiphonality and polyvalence of Indian secular positions
into a single monolithic stance. Also, while discussing Jewish and Catholic Emancipation, she should have posed them against European situations where emancipation was positively denied and majoritarianism and discrimination were the
accepted norm under Fascism, for instance. The grant of equal rights can only be
questioned and replaced with an assertion of unequal religious communities. There
can be no possible middle ground. Moreover, she is deeply suspicious of a transformation of inherited traditional identities which new political possibilities may
abbreviate and transform. It is as if she regards religious identities as given, stable
and essentially fixed, and located in the rights of equally fixed communities. Any

132

internal adjustments with non-religious contingencies would supposedly undermine them fatally.
These problems, however, are creatively resolved and implicitly transcended
in her discussion of Ramabai, who converted to Christianity only to plague her
new religious order with transgressive readings of doctrine, a display of her superior
grasp of the tenets of her new religion that surpassed the knowledge of her new
religious guardians, her statement that I must be allowed to think for myself.
Viswanathan concludes that conversion here was more than a movement between
stable, pre-established identities and disciplines. It could involve a series of arguments with different religious orders through which the convert ultimately withholds complete submersion or identification with any particular version of faith,
but gathers ingredients of an individual interpretation. Ramabai thus asserts a
claim to a religious self-fashioning, rather than allow herself to be made anew
by a new set of authorities. Here faith is detached from community, conversion
from obedience to a different order. It embodies a conviction that is continuously
recreating and reinventing itself, declaring the sovereignty of its own reason and
commitment. Through the critical interlocution of converts all faiths are, moreover,
reconstituting themselves.
We may extend the explicit thrust of such work to arrive at a rather controversial
position on the problem of religious identities within a multicultural situation
where a dominant community wields overwhelming power. Some of its spokesmen
could claim to fix the nations cultural identity upon what is most pervasive and
continuous in its religious history. Any exit from this would then amount to a
betrayal of the national culture, the essential identity. The usual mode of secularist
resolution has been to suggest a mosaic of identities which either express the
same cultural essence irrespective of denominational difference, or where rejection
of the dominant religious identity does not imply cultural rupture, since a single
culture reigns over and above religious divisions. This resolution, however, returns
us to a larger problem. What about the conscious breakaway and rejection of both
an earlier faith and its social matri.x-like caste, for instance-that conversion
may also signify in some cases? By limiting the implications of conversion to a
nominal shift, this resolution in some ways repeats the colonial position. It also
reaffirms the absolute necessity of continuous cultural embeddedness without
interlocution or criticality. Also, this attempt to cast conversion as embodied
plurality rather than a possibly contentious and conflictual stance can quite easily
be confronted with an undeniable history of past religious conflicts which would
then entirely invert its premise: if a single culture is a necessity, then conflicts
would seem to suggest different nations.
We can, instead, accommodate histories of breaks, difference, mutual rejection,
along with very live and dynamic traditions of sharing and interchange only if we
reconceive the nation as a field of dispersed identities, continually traversed by
autonomous individuals; communities that are possibly not always connected,
and sometimes even conflicting. Here communities could enjoy equal rights without needing to prove allegiance to a common essence which must reign dominant,

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would historians have to eschew histories of discord in embarrassment. Such

nation can be conceived only if individuals as well as, and as much as, religious
communities, are seen as repositories of faith and of its ever-changing, infinitely
nor
a

plural understandings.