16 Christianity in India from the Sixteenth Century

Ian Clark

When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached the Indian coast in 1498 he came as the representative of a European Latin Catholicism which was soon to face the challenge of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of non-Catholic nations which would compete with Portugal for commercial control of Asia.

The Indian sub-continent, too, was about to undergo major upheaval. In the ensuing five hundred years Christianity took root in India in a variety of forms and underwent a process of transformation as Christians sought to express their faith within patterns of Indian thought, symbol and rite. At the same time, the presence of Christianity as a small but not negligible minority has itself contributed to the changes which have revolutionised at least some aspects of Indian life since the sixteenth century.

By 1500 the great formative period of Hindu religious development was over and other faiths were already established. A divergent group, the Jains, had long been accepted as having a separate identity, and now Guru Nanak (d. 1539) was laying the foundations of the ‘reformed’ version of Hinduism which was to coalesce as the Sikh community. Buddhism had been rejected by the northern areas in which it originated; but Islam, an ‘alien’ religion, had struck deep roots since the eighth century. Kabir (d. 1518) sought to combine elements of Hinduism and Islam, and this openness was encouraged by the Muslim dynasty, the Moguls, who were to rule much of India for three hundred years. Christianity, which had allegedly been introduced by the apostle Thomas in the first century, was flourishing in the south-west where there is clear evidence of a Christian presence from at least the sixth century. This community was in touch with churches in the Middle East, and had been strengthened by the arrival (between 1490 and 1503) of five bishops sent by the Nestorian Patriarch of Babylon.

The ‘St Thomas Christians’ were proud of their ancient customs and liturgy, stemming from Syrian rather than Greek or Latin origins, and had become a respected community under their Hindu rulers.

The Portuguese base at Goa, with its baroque churches and monasteries, embodied a more aggressive ‘Western’ Christianity which appeared strange to Indians. Goa was, nevertheless, a centre for vigorous missionary activity led by Franciscan and Dominican friars and, from 1542 onwards, the new Jesuit Order. It was one of the latter, Francis Xavier, who reaped the first ‘mass movement’ in India among the despised and illiterate Parava fishermen on the Coromandel coast. His methods were rough and ready, including much learning by rote; but the area has remained staunchly Catholic to this day. Very different was the approach of another Jesuit, Robert Nobili (d. 1656) who spent fifty years at Madurai, a centre of Hindu Tamil culture dominated by its enormous temple. Nobili set himself to win the upper castes, living as a Brahmin himself and adopting their customs in dress, diet and even worship. Despite opposition from fellow Christians and trepidation in Rome, where Counter-Reformation piety boggled at his experiments with indigenisation, Nobili poured out a stream of writings in Tamil and raised questions about dialogue and cultural penetration which are still being worked out today. Meanwhile, with a sure instinct for the seat of political power, other Jesuits from Goa responded eagerly to an invitation from the Mogul Emperor Akbar to send a mission to his court in the north. He was gratifyingly pleased to see them, and much inconclusive discussion took place. A precedent was set for a Christian presence near to government. In post-independence India, Christians have been found in the corridors of power out of all proportion to their actual numbers, and have often held politically sensitive posts.

In theory the Archbishop of Goa had jurisdiction over all Christians within the Portuguese possessions in India and was answerable through the King of Portugal to the Pope.

For the ancient St Thomas community this had serious implications. Their historical connection had always been with the various patriarchs of western Asia, some of whom were on at least nodding terms with Rome, but suspicious ofinterfer- ence. At first a certain amount of timely reform was accepted by the Christians of Malabar from the Portuguese, though not always with a good grace. They resented being referred to as ‘pestilential Nestorian heretics’, and Portuguese clerics could be tactless. In 1599 the autocratic young Archbishop Menezes began a Visitation of Malabar, ordaining new cattanars (priests) to replace the old, and extracting from them an oath of obedience to the Pope and repudiation of the Patriarch of Babylon. At the Synod of Diamper that year the St Thomas Christians were placed under the jurisdiction of Menezes, and relations went from bad to worse as Roman customs were imposed on the unwilling community. In 1653 resistance came to a head with the dramatic episode of the Koonen Cross Oath by which they re-established their old independence. This in fact reflected the decline of Portuguese power in India. A decade later Protestant sailors from Holland appeared on the Malabar coast and a new era of encounter began.

The subsequent history of the Orthodox communities in India is tangled but colourful. In 1665 a bishop was sent to India by the Patriarch of Diabekir. He belonged to a line which had never recognised the Council of Chalcedon (451) and was technically at the opposite end of the ecclesiastical spectrum to the Nestorian Church which had supplied bishops to India in the past. The Nestorian Catholicos today presides over a community of several thousand at Trichur. The Syrian Christians number millions, and are divided between those who look to the Patriarch of Antioch, and those who acknowledge a Catholicos in Kerala as their leader. In the nineteenth century, under the influence of Protestant missionaries, a portion of the Syrian community broke away to form the Mar Thoma Church which is Reformed in doctrine but uses a modified version of the old Orthodox liturgy.

Others in Kerala today adhere to the Roman Catholic Church but use Orthodox forms of worship. All are conscious of representing an age-old Christian presence in India, and can be understandably resentful of condescension from ‘younger’ Christians in the West.

When we turn to the impact of Protestantism the picture becomes very confusing. While it is not entirely true to say that the missionaries followed the merchants and the merchants followed the flag, it is certainly the case that patterns of Christian distribution in India today were to some extent determined by the accidents of military, commercial and colonial activity by European nations in the past. A short voyage up the River Hooghly, for example, will take the traveller from the neo-Gothic spires of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Calcutta (which also contains an ancient Armenian, and later Greek Orthodox church, and a Scots kirk, amongst many other sacred edifices) to Serampore, a former Danish possession which sports a Lutheran church dedicated to St Olaf and the great college founded in 1818 by the English Baptist shoemaker, William Carey, outside the East India Company’s territory, where for some thirty years he and his companions translated the Bible into twenty-four Indian languages. Further upstream the former French settlement at Chandernagore is dominated by its Roman Catholic church and hotel de ville. Further still lies the old Portuguese enclave of Bandel with a small whitewashed pilgrimage church and devout population. On his way the traveller might have speculated about the enormous cathedral-like structure at Belur, which is in fact the temple of the Ramakrishna community whose founder was not uninfluenced by Christianity in the nineteenth century.

The two and a half centuries which separate the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries, the Germans Ziegenbalg and Pliitschau in Tranquebar in 1706, from Independence and the beginnings of restriction on missionary activity from outside India in 1947, are best seen as a

period of encounter between the very diverse peoples of India and the equally variegated forms in which Christianity was presented, usually by ‘professional’ missionaries seeking ‘conversion’.

Alongside this primary goal most missionary activity acknowledged a need to break down social attitudes (such as caste) which oppressed individuals and communities, to stimulate education, to introduce higher standards of health-care and to foster new agricultural and industrial methods. It was not always easy to distinguish between the aspirations of the missionaries and the aims of the British rulers who increasingly controlled the sub-continent. Originally it had been the policy of the East India Company to exclude missionary enterprise among Indians, but successive revisions of the Charter between 1793 and 1833 coincided with the Evangelical Awakening in Europe, and by the middle of the century there were Anglican diocesan bishops, a network of chaplains and missionstations, and a field wide open to missionaries from all churches and many lands (including, increasingly, North America).

Priorities and emphases varied, and many mistakes were no doubt made. Educated urban Indians looked out upon a sort of vast ecclesiastical cafeteria in which everything was on offer. The millions in the rural areas and tribal regions were usually only aware of the brand available locally, be it American Methodist, Welsh Baptist or Tractarian Anglican, to name but a few. The nature of the response varied enormously, from enquiring Brahmin (Nehemiah Goreh, d. 1895) or Muslim (Imad-ud-din, d. 1900), nationalist and poet (Narayan Vaman Tilak, d. 1919), evangelist (Solomon, d. 1909, apostle of the Nicobar Islands), Bengali intellectual (K.C. Banerji, who called himself a Hindu Christian) or wandering sadhu (Sundar Singh, who vanished into the Himalayan snows in 1929). For many millions the way into the Christian community lay through one of the rural mass movements whose precise mechanisms are still obscure. In other areas it was tribal peoples who opted for a Christianity which replaced their animism but bypassed the Hinduism which they associated with their overlords.

The missionary era, with its hospitals, schools and colleges and the variety of Christian communities which it evoked, and the permeation of social and political attitudes which it sometimes achieved, cannot be assessed in merely numerical terms. Historians calculate that in the nineteenth century Protestants made the greatest percentage advance, but in 1914 Roman Catholics still outnumbered them. In some tribal areas today Christians form a majority of the population and have long since replaced foreigners as agents of evangelism. The figure of 2.6 per cent which is usually given for the whole Christian community represents an actual Christian presence of some sixteen million. Much less quantifiable are such factors as the influence of Christian ideas on Gandhi, architect of Independence, through his English friend C.F. Andrews; or the changed perceptions of social justice through the writings of the Mar Thoma theologian M.M. Thomas; or the activity of an Anglican priest, the late Subir Biswas, in the bustees of Calcutta—less well known but no less charismatic than the Albanian-born Mother Teresa.

Long before the end of the missionary era it was apparent that out of the variety of responses to Christianity, the lineaments of an authentically Indian Church were beginning to emerge. At times it has been hindered by insensitive interference by foreign churches and their reluctance to let go. Equally, it has been inhibited by a sense of insecurity as a minority in a surrounding sea of other faiths. Insecurity has sometimes bred extreme conservatism, a litigious preoccupation with property, and a complacent dependence on overseas funding. These factors are outweighed, however, by the gradual articulation of a Christianity which is rooted in the soil of India. Sometimes this has been the conscious programme of a great Christian leader (e.g. Bishop Azariah of Dornakal, first Indian Anglican bishop in 1912). Often it has been a quiet process of spiritual insight at humble village level.

Dialogue with other faiths, pursued in the stillness of ‘the cave of the heart’ by men such as Swami Abhishiktananda and others in ashrams and pilgrimage centres from Cape Cormorin to the Himalayas, is perhaps a precondition for this rooting process. At a less rarefied level most of the mainstream communities have moved towards an explicit Indianisation not only of the externals of worship, but of the inner structures of theology. Catholics and Protestants alike have increasingly brought traditional symbols into their worship: the oil-lamp and the offering of flowers, the use of agabatti (incense-sticks), Christianised forms ofancient invocatory chant, and the gestures, posture and architectural setting which come naturally to Indian worshippers. The rich regional musical tradition has been absorbed into a new Christian bhakti, bringing with it deeply rooted Indian thought-patterns which are used both to articulate the gospel and communicate it. Artists have focused the classical tradition of painting on the themes of the Incarnation and transposed symbols which go back deep into the Indian consciousness. The interior of the aggressively ‘foreign’ St Paul’s Cathedral in Calcutta came alive for many in the 1960s during the Bangladesh freedom-struggle and against the sombre background of the ongoing battle for dignity for the poor of the city, as the young Sudhir Bairagi gradually filled it with images of a Bengali Christ in a Calcutta Gethsemane, or standing triumphantly risen beside a fetid slum tank where, surprisingly, lotus and water-hyacinth blossom. Jyoti Sahi’s work in the chapel ofVidyajyoti College in Delhi carries the same vision of a Christ who fulfils the integral Indian experience, ‘secular’ as well as ‘religious’.

What some have attempted in music and colour, others have seen as a programme for theology. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (d. 1907), uneasy Roman Catholic convert, wrestled to formulate the Christian concept of the Trinity within the framework of advaita (non-dualist) Vedanta drawn from the philosopher Shankara. In a different tradition which comes from Ramanuja, the Protestant theologians Vengal Chakkarai and A.J. Appasamy explored the Hindu concept of avatdra as a vehicle for understanding the Incarnation, fully conscious of the danger of a simplistic search for equivalences. The lay theologian and judge, Pandippedi Chen- chiah (d. 1959), called for a rethinking of all inherited Western doctrine, in order that India might achieve pratyaksa (direct encounter) with what he called ‘the raw fact’ of Christ. The paradox with which Indian theologians have had to grapple is perhaps best summed up in the titles of two formative books. In 1964 Raymundo Panikkar wrote in The Unknown Christ of Hinduism of the task of unveiling the Christ who has been present all along in the Hindu experience, as he was within the Jewish and Hellenistic context of the Early Church: a truly ‘Indian’ contribution to the Christ of universal Christian faith. In The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance (1968) by contrast, M.M. Thomas pointed to the great array of social reformers (such as Rammohan Roy, d. 1833) in the nineteenth century who responded eagerly and with devotional reverence to the Christ whom they encountered from the West, but who found the Church singularly unattractive.

The discovery of an Indian identity by Christians is reflected also in the part they played in the nationalist movement which culminated in Independence in 1947. From its foundation in 1885, Christians took a prominent part in the National Congress, as they had done in the intellectual preparation for it earlier in the century. During the first all-India General Elections in 1952 Dr V.E. Devadutt pointed out that the secular democracy to which India had committed herself stood much closer to Christian ideals of human value and social responsibility than did the classical Hindu tradition. Chandran Devanesan, S.K. Chatterji and many others have sought to bring a prophetic critique to bear upon defining goals of social change, freedom for victims of inherited social structures and the building of a more just society. M.M. Thomas, whose Christian Response to the Asian Revolution (1966) was itself rather revolutionary, and the publications of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, have helped to wean Christians away from unthinking adherence to the Congress Party, and to explore the implications of other cross-currents in the process of nationbuilding.

Finally, the self-identity which the Indian churches have gained in these various areas has undoubtedly acted as a catalyst in the achievement of ecclesiastical unity. The realisation that Western denominational differences hampered mission and made little sense on Indian soil anyway slowly dawned on Indians and expatriates alike in the nineteenth century. A series of decennial Conferences, with increasing Indian participation, culminated in the Edinburgh World Missionary gathering in 1910 and the establishment of the principle of comity to obviate overlapping of work and local ‘poaching’. Joint institutions (e.g. Madras Christian College, and the foundation of a number of united theological colleges) fostered the desire for closer organic unity between churches, and after long negotiation the Church of South India brought together Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists (the two latter already united since 1908) in the first successful union of episcopal and non-episcopal traditions. Although the procedure for union, which involved the mutual recognition of existing ministries, led to thirty years of estrangement from the Anglican Communion, the CSI’s ability to grow together, evolve a remarkable consensus of liturgical practice and establish an identity which impressed itself on the government and people of India, spurred Christians in the north to follow suit. The Church of North India, inaugurated in 1970, was formed on a Plan which provided for the sharing of ministries through a mutual laying on of hands which allayed Anglican scruples. A much greater hurdle, the question of infant and adult baptism, was successfully surmounted and it has been possible for many former Baptist congregations to join the CNI. In 1978 the CSI, CNI and Mar Thoma Church formed ajoint Council and are pledged to seek deeper federal union.

As long ago as 1923 the newly-formed National Christian Council looked forward to the day when the Indian Church would be united, self-sufficient in resources and personnel, truly national in ethos and theology, and self-propagating. There is nothing in the record of Indian Christianity to suggest that, despite set-backs, that goal will not eventually be attained.

16 Christianity in India from the Sixteenth Century

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