Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact and Conversion in Late Colonial India

Religions in Conflict is the story of Protestant Missions and Indian Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century. Looking in particular at eastern and northern India as well as Tamil Nadu and parts of Andhra, this book studies certain crucial themes pertaining to Christianity in India: mission as ideology; the nature of the cultural contact between missions and Indian religions; the conversion experience of an Indian minority and the consequent conflict of cultural loyalties within an Indian Christian elite. This study of grassroots inter-faith relationships explores the impact of missionary endeavours on Indian religions, in particular Hinduism, but also Islam and Sikhism. In doing so it opens up a wider debate on the nature of imperialism and proto-nationalism. At one level it looks at how the missionary ideology ties up with imperialism, and at another at the ideology developed by Indian religions to fend off the missionary onslaught. The author argues that India’s traditional institutions and their functionaries did more to ward off this challenge than did the later religious reform movements.