How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book ...explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. A family dispute resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. Chandra Mallampalli uses this case to examine the lives of those involved, and shows that far from being products of a 'civilizing mission' who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately - when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system - obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.
This book tells the story of how Catholic and Protestant Indians have attempted to locate themselves within the evolving Indian nation. Ironically, British rule in India did not privilege Christians, ...but pushed them to the margins of a predominantly Hindu society. Drawing upon wide-ranging sources, the book first explains how the Indian judiciary's 'official knowledge' isolated Christians from Indian notions of family, caste and nation. It then describes how different varieties and classes of Christians adopted, resisted and reshaped both imperial and nationalist perceptions of their identity. Within a climate of rising communal tension in India, this study finds immediate relevance.
List of Abbreviations Preface 1. Introduction Part 1 Legal Constructions of Religious Identity 2. Rights of Converts within British and Princely India, 1870-1895 3. Inheritance Law and the 'Native Christian' Community, 1863-1917 4. Marital Law - Constructions of Hindu and Christian Identity (1870-1920) Part 2 Conceiving a Political Community 5. The Spiritual vs. the Political: Global Religion and Indian Politics, 1917-1933 6. The Protestant Disavowal of Christian Communalism, 1910-1933 7. The Indigenization of Catholic Action, 1921-37 Part 3 Caste and Communal Identity 8. Religion, Caste and Political Rhetoric, 1925-37 9. At the Margins of Marginality: Dalit Christians, 1917-1937 10. Conclusion Bibliography
Chandra Mallampalli earned his Ph.D. in South Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Westmont College. His main areas of interest include religious nationalism, secularism, post-colonialism, and the history of Christian missions in modern South Asia.
'The book is valuable for at least two reasons. First, it brings to life a hitherto unexplored but important slice of the Indian Christian story. Secondly, its well-documented and persuasive argument that it is hardly possible to talk about the Indian Christians in the singular, is important particularly in the face of the Hindu right's deliberate attempt to portray them as homogenous.' - International Journal of Asian Studies
'This is the best book written so far on Indian Christians and Indian nationalist politics...As a whole this book is well researched, tightly argued, and very insightful. This is an important book that I strongly recommend.' - International Bulletin of Missionary Research
Postcolonial perspectives on India's past have tended to focus on representations, which served the purpose of colonial domination. The view, for instance, that Indian society is fundamentally ...constituted by caste or religion legitimated the supposedly secular or neutral system of governance introduced by the British. Building upon Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), scholars have suggested that some of our most widely held assumptions about Indian society were more rooted in an imperial worldview than in real social experiences of Indians. The attempt of colonial administrators to understand and govern India through the study of ancient texts formed the basis of an Indian variety of Orientalism. How colonial courts deployed this text-based knowledge in relation to the actual practices of religious “communities” is the central focus of this essay.
Abstract
In recent years, a global tilt toward rightist majoritarianism has made Muslim and Christian minorities of Asia more vulnerable to violence and displacement. China’s program of ...“de-extremification” among the Uyghurs, Myanmar’s military operations against the Rohingya, and Hindutva-inspired violence in India illustrate strong-handed homogenizing impulses, even by governments that profess to embrace diversity. By examining these different contexts through a common lens, it becomes possible to recognize recurring patterns and think beyond the nation-state as the only framework for addressing minority vulnerability. After comparing Muslim and Christian vulnerability across a variety of Asian contexts, the essay explores the possibility of “Islamo-Christian” solidarity in the face of majoritarian violence. This new alignment defies a longstanding imperialist framework, whose geopolitics pits a Christian West against a Muslim other. It also embraces an ethic of empathy that transcends the language of “religious freedom” – a principle arising from the same geopolitics that manufactured majority-minority distinctions to begin with.
Abstract
In recent years, a global tilt toward rightist majoritarianism has made Muslim and Christian minorities of Asia more vulnerable to violence and displacement. China's program of ..."de-extremification" among the Uyghurs, Myanmar's military operations against the Rohingya, and Hindutva-inspired violence in India illustrate strong-handed homogenizing impulses, even by governments that profess to embrace diversity. By examining these different contexts through a common lens, it becomes possible to recognize recurring patterns and think beyond the nation-state as the only framework for addressing minority vulnerability. After comparing Muslim and Christian vulnerability across a variety of Asian contexts, the essay explores the possibility of "Islamo-Christian" solidarity in the face of majoritarian violence. This new alignment defies a longstanding imperialist framework, whose geopolitics pits a Christian West against a Muslim other. It also embraces an ethic of empathy that transcends the language of "religious freedom" - a principle arising from the same geopolitics that manufactured majority-minority distinctions to begin with.
As the East India Company prepared for its First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42), its officials grew suspicious of a Muslim uprising within British India. They became convinced that itinerant Muslim ...reformers—mislabeled “Wahhabis”—were inciting princes of India's Deccan region to rebellion. This article describes how the very talk of this “Wahhabi conspiracy” not only triggered the interventionist impulses of the colonial state, but also inspired local intrigues associated with the downfall of two Indo-Afghan princes of the Deccan, Kurnool's Ghulam Rasul Khan and Udayagiri's Abbas Ali Khan. In both cases a preoccupation with the transnational Wahhabi operative masked local and sometimes petty interests, which drove the politics of these smaller regimes. The case studies of Kurnool and Udayagiri illustrate how news of events arising in one region of imperial conflict could “travel” to remote regions of India's Deccan, evolving into conspiracy narratives along the way. The discourse of conspiracy provided a pretext for military action and the annexation of territory. The story being told, however, is not simply about paranoid colonial officers who were all too eager to intervene, but is also about local entrepreneurs who knew how to exploit the situation toward their own ends.
In April 1839, 29 Muslims in Vellore (South India) accused their maulvi, Sayyid Shah Modin Qadiri, of preaching seditious sermons in his mosque, which exhorted Muslims to wage jihad against the ...ruling East India Company. The ensuing criminal trial of Maulvi Modin illustrates key aspects of liberal imperialism as it was interpreted and implemented in pre-Mutiny India. As a central ideology of the British empire, liberalism championed the rights and freedoms of rational individuals and constraints on state power. At Modin's trial, however, this framework did not lend itself to a sanitary, evidence-based enquiry that bracketed the identities of the accused or the accusers. Rather, the trial measured a Muslim's place within networks of patronage that ensured namak halal, or the bonds of loyalty between rulers and subjects. Far from being a post-Enlightenment adjudication of guilt or innocence, his trial reveals the Company's investment in a particular kind of social order maintained by its scrutiny of class backgrounds and its patronage of traditional identities—a fact that softens the distinction often made between a commitment to liberal transformation before the Great Rebellion of 1857 and a return to conservatism afterwards.
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Since 1950, the Government of India has maintained its policy of denying affirmative-action benefits to Dalit converts to Christianity. Debates about Dalit Christian reservations are most often ...centered on contemporary political trends. Far less attention is paid to developments during the colonial period, when sharp differences between religious 'communities' were formulated as policy. As much as the colonial state attempted to grapple with ethnographic realities on the ground, it ultimately embraced an idealized notion of a 'casteless Native Christian community'. Against massive data that revealed the persistence of caste among converts, this idea of casteless Christianity was readily appropriated by the postcolonial state, which has been all to eager to use it as the basis for denying affirmative action to Dalit Christians. Dalit Christians seeking a change to this policy must therefore grapple with the past, by refuting assumptions embedded in nineteenth-century missionary rhetoric and state policies.
