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Book of the Month
A History of Christianity in India
Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008. 75.00. pp. xxi + 564 + 8 maps. ISBN 9780198263777).
H
ere are two millenia of Christianity in
India as seen by an American evangelical,
in the series, the Oxford History of the
Christian Church. Frykenbergs early historical
work was secular, dealing with issues of society,
land and power in rural South India in the time
of the East India Company. In this, he initiated
localistic, bottom-up, Indocentric approach to
Indian history. This work, in the 1970s, underlining
the significance of Indian agency in the Raj, was
important. In the preface and introduction to his new
book, Frykenberg suggests that this approach will
shape his history of Christianity in India, highlighting
an indigenous discovery of Christianity.
Two introductory chapters describe the complex
social and religious context in which the Christianity
featuring in the subsequent eleven chapters developed;
after these eleven chapters, there is a conclusion and
an epilogue. There are also eight useful maps, and
thirteen photographs of distinctive and beautiful
churches, all in South India. In the eleven main
chapters, it is clear where the author builds on his
early, secular historical work, and also where his
interest is most enthusiastically engaged. Chapter
four, on the Thomas tradition, is not in these
categories, although it claims for this tradition the
strongest expressions of indigenous Christianity ...
in the continent. Like some other chapters, it is a
successful work of synthesis, resting, it would appear,
exclusively on the work of others.
Conflicts within the Thomas community and
accommodations with, and resistance to, Roman
Catholicism are painstakingly traced in chapter
five, with further material on the Catholicism of
the Padroado and, by contrast, that of adventurous
Jesuits like de Nobili, largely beyond the reach
of Portuguese power. An example of what was
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times
surely an indigenous discovery of Christianity
was the mass movement among fisherfolk on the
Coromandel coast, served by the Jesuits from the
sixteenth to the twenty-first century, but, because
it created a community at times conspicuously
Hindu or Nativistic, as the Jesuits were only
too uncomfortably aware, it only qualifies here as a
case of indigenizing acculturation.
Frykenbergs unqualified enthusiasm is first stirred
in chapter six, on the collaboration in eighteenth-
century South India of German Lutheran missionaries
and their Indian colleagues in making possible what
he calls an indigenous discovery of Christianity
among low-caste groups. Certainly, the Tamil
Christianity that emerged was a vital and creative
Indian appropriation of Halle pietism. The topic gets
further attention, along with neighbouring variants
elsewhere in the South, in the next three chapters. In
chapter eight, we have conversion movements among
avarna (as Frykenberg would say, aka Dalit for
pages at a time, his style is awful) communities.
Chapter nine is on ecclesiastical dominion, almost
invariably Anglican, the authors pet hate, along with
the Church of Scotland, though, of course, most of
the Halle missionaries and William Carey also took
the East India Companys shilling. Chapter ten is
on Christian conflicts with Brahmin elite elements.
Parts of these last two chapters are valuable for
what appears to be a good deal of Frykenbergs own
original research.
In the midst of all this is chapter seven, something
of a sport, on Indias Raj and political logic, and in
this reviewers opinion, the best chapter in the book.
Building upon the authors earlier secular historical
work, the author traces the emergence, through a
process of mercantile collaboration and the growth
of three expanding city-states, of a single, politically
 the expository times
unified India. In a concluding section, Frykenberg asks
what this has to do with the history of Christianity
in India. His answer is not very convincing, but the
chapter provides a valuable dynamic model against
which that history can be traced.
This is done, partially, in chapter eleven, on Elite
education and missionaries, where the functioning
of that dynamic in the construction of modern India
is demonstrated (with some good original data from
Madras). The churches extensive participation
through the nineteenth century is presented,
however, as a misguided response to indigenous
demands for modern education and elite insistence
on the use of English. To Frykenberg, this was
missionary compromise and elite co-option. It was
accompanied, for him, by a decline into dialogue and
misplaced aspirations after mutual understanding,
and, among Indian Christians like Upadhyay and
N. V. Tilak, theological liberalism. Other aspects
of this participation, which made a modernizing
Christianity a powerful social and cultural force of
great historical significance, are ignored.
Chapter twelve moves from Catholic decline and
disarray to renewal and resurgence, culminating
in a Catholic hierarchy constituted in 1886, and a
resolution of relations with the Thomas Christians
leaving two Syrian-rite hierarchies in union with
the Pope. This long, complicated and profoundly
unengaging story of church organization and
politics leaves room for hardly anything on the
glorious contribution to Indian Christianity
made by Catholicism, larger than all the rest put
together. In contrast with the previous chapter,
thirteen focuses on Trophies of Grace, a number
of individual elite Christians, and in particular the
one Indian Christian woman featured in the book,
the much-chronicled Pandita Ramabai Saraswati.
Frykenberg identifies her quest, and that of eight
others as representing indigenous discoveries of
Christianity.
Chapter fourteen returns to the non-elite, in this
case tribals, in Adivasi movements in the North-East,
d
Now, anywhere you hear or see such a word preached, believed, confessed and
acted upon, do not doubt that the true ecclesia sancta catholica, a holy Christian
people must be there, even though there are very few of them.
Martin Luther, On the Councils and the Church (1539)
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75
chiefly, here, those with Baptist and Presbyterian
connections. The remarkable phenomenon of
Christian majorities in three of the seven tribal states,
and one-third of all Indian Christians living in this
essentially non-Hindu region, makes this a significant
but significantly differentiated aspect of Christianity
in India. Frykenberg majors on Nagaland, and on
a nineteenth-century missionary account. His ideal
Naga discoverer of indigenous Christianity rejects
Anglicans and Catholics and all those rituals but
joyfully embraces such new ideas ... imported from
afar as substitutionary atonement. The indigenous
Christianity of the North-East, not least in its
non-Catholic forms, is, of course, though Frykenberg
makes little of this, inescapably hybrid.
There is in that final main chapter a brief reference
to the relatively recent degeneration into violent
separatism in the North-East, but little more on the
perilous passage of these communities to the modern
world, so vividly described by M. M. Thomas
during his Governorship of Nagaland. I think this
is because Frykenbergs claimed indocentrism is
really nativism, with its patronizing overtones and
its reluctance to follow Indian Christianity into the
modern world, where it has many problems but
continues to make a distinctive, often ecumenical,
and significant contribution, both to the nation and
more widely. There have, of course, been many rich
and wonderful Indian discoveries of Christianity
the author adds in his Conclusion and Epilogue
a remarkable contemporary one among the most
marginalized in the Indo-gangetic Hindu heartlands
but his schema for handling these is contrived and
unconvincing.
A book in this series is a major event, but this one,
with excellent passages when Frykenberg pursues his
own professional insights and skills, has too many
instances when he follows a false light or is partial,
and therefore it is something of a disappointment.
Dan OConnor
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh