- Good afternoon.
I'm Emily Auerbach, and I welcome you to
Eloquence and Eminence: Emeritus Faculty Lectures.
We are in our 23rd year of offering this series at UW
Madison featuring professors who are retired and are known for
both their teaching excellence and their scholarly expertise.
We are sponsored by the Division of Continuing Studies, the
Institute on Aging, and the Anonymous Committee.
Our speaker today, for a talk entitled "Christianity in India:
From Beginnings to the Present" is Robert Frykenberg, UW Madison
professor emeritus of history and South Asian studies.
Professor Frykenberg was born in India in 1930,
and he received his PhD at the University of London.
He joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1962
and played a major role in building and chairing
the Department of South Asian Studies.
He also founded the
International Wisconsin Conference on South Asian Studies
attracting over 500 participants.
His publications are many.
Two notable ones are
"History and Belief: The Foundations of Historical Understanding"
and "Christianity in Indian: From Beginnings to the Present,"
which was published by the University of Oxford Press
in 2008.
A book of essays about India, assembled in honor of
Professor Robert Frykenberg, refers to him as
"arguably the historian most responsible
for promoting studies of intercultural
and interreligious interactions in the South Asian context."
A pioneer of bottoms-up and Indo-centric approaches
in India's history,
he has stressed this perspective
throughout his long and distinguished career.
Please join me in welcoming for a talk on "Christianity in India"
Professor emeritus Robert Frykenberg.
[applause]
- Thank you very much.
It is both a pleasure and a privilege to be able to
talk to you this afternoon about this subject about which
I have been much preoccupied for the last 30 years or so.
There are a number of misconceptions
with respect to Christianity in India.
I won't try to detail them all, but I will mention two.
And I think it's good to start with those two
just to sort of clear the air.
One of the-- One very common misconception
is that Christianity in India is recent,
and the second one that's related to this
is that it has been an alien imposition upon India.
I want to see if I can do what I can to dispel
this notion a little bit.
The origins of Christianity in India go back 2,000 years.
Jewish origins in India go back even further.
But, in any case, there's a common belief, it's a canonical
belief among Thomas Christians,
who are the oldest Christian community in India,
that Christianity was brought to India
by the apostle Thomas in the year 1582.
And there is a fair amount of
plausibility given to this
but no proof.
And, of course, Thomas Christians like to say,
"Well, give us a proof for Peter going to Rome
and we'll show you the proof of Thomas coming to India."
But, in any case, I want to, this afternoon, talk about
Christianity in India in terms of five stages or five stories
and see if I can get through these
in the time that I have before us.
And the first of these is to talk about these Thomas
Christians and their arrival in India.
Not just their apostolic origins, but various forms
of corroborative kinds of evidence that's there.
There are ancient epic poems.
There are oral traditions And we know from these that there were
seven villages that were the places of his, that he settled.
Cranganore,
probably more properly Kodungallur, was the ancient
seaport used in the Arabian Sea, sometimes called Muziris.
It was the main place where he's supposed to have arrived.
But Kottayam, Angamaly, and many other places--
And I'll pause here just to simply say
occasionally I'm going to have to resort
to some India words and India places,
and I hope this doesn't get too difficult.
But, in any case, this arrival has been pretty well established
in the sense that they were there at least
by the second century, if not earlier.
And we have inscriptions, stone inscriptions,
copper plate inscriptions, and these epics to go by.
And then the beginnings of arrivals of refugees
who come from the Middle East from persecution.
Particularly earliest big persecution from which they fled
was not just from the Parthians
but from the Sasanian Empire
when there was a time of great persecution.
The Church of the East, which had its headquarters
near Babylon,
Seleucia-Ctesiphon.
There was great persecution going on
in the year 340, 330-340, 345,
in which several hundred bishops were killed,
and, at that particular time, a merchant warrior by the name of
Thomas Kinayi, who worked and regularly went back and forth to
the west coast of India down in the far of the western Ghat
area, there where it says Cochin, just north of there,
arranged with a Perumal,
the emperor, for a group of refugees to be brought there in
the year 345.
And this has been fairly well established by archaeology and
by work the work of a scholar by the name of Jacob Kollaparambil.
And this consisted of 72 families, or about 400 people,
two priests or kattanars, and a bishop.
And they got their blessings from the bishop in Jerusalem
at that time.
And they arrived and at the time that they came,
the Perumal arranged for them
to settle on the south bank of the Periyar River.
And, in fact, Kollaparambil's book is entitled
"The Babylonian Origins of the Southists
of the Thomas Christians of South India."
And there they settled, and
they were allowed to settle in an area, according to the text,
that a she elephant could wander for two days.
Which is a very interesting story.
And this became a very elite community, and they are
known as the Malankara Nazranis.
And they distinguish themselves as being Southist, as distinct
from the Northists north of the Periyar River who are an older
community but who did not have as an elite status.
And one of the reasons for the elite status that they held is
that they claimed to be Hebrew Christians, and they also
claimed royal lineage and the lineage of David.
Whether this is true or not, whatever the case, they became
an elite community on the west coast, which intermingled with
and worked kind of the same kind of status as Brahmins and Nairs
and people who held great estates.
And there were about 40 or 50 settlements of these.
And for a while, after the year 1000 and the 1200s, 1300s, these
were even knit together into a sort of loose kingdom within a
kingdom under the capital of Madhavpuram.
And this is the condition that they were in about the time the
Portuguese arrived.
One of the interesting texts relating to the Thomas
Christians is the acts of Thomas.
This also indicates that Thomas came, but it's a fanciful tale.
But it is in the idiom of the east and in fact gives a kind of
poetic presentation of his going.
But where he goes to is in the Punjab, and, according to the
text, a king Gondophares, a Bactrian king, invited him to
come there and build his palace.
According to the text, he went there, the king said I'm going
away on pilgrimage, here is the money, build a palace.
The king went away, Thomas, the apostle, noticed that there were
many poor people, many hungry people, many suffering people,
and he expanded all of his money on this.
And when the king came back, he was very angry when he said,
"Where is my palace?
I can't see it."
And Thomas said,
"Well, I've built a palace for you in Heaven."
And the story goes on.
There are many, many parts of this.
The question is, "Was there ever a Gondophares?"
About 200 years ago, a cache of coins were found, a hoard of
coins was found, in the Punjab.
And in that cache of coins was the coin of King Gondophares,
who reigned from around the year 48 to 55 or thereabouts.
So we know there was this king, and one of my graduate students
actually presented me with this coin.
So this community became very Indianized.
You can almost say that they were Indian or Hindu in culture,
they were Christian in doctrine, and they were Syrian in their
ecclesiology.
Almost all the Thomas Christians looked to the near east and to
the Mesopotamia to Babylon and to Antioch,
but particularly to Babylon,
and for their [inaudible],
their high metrons, as they were called.
And this continued to be so.
The Church of the East didn't have a pope.
It had the catholicos.
It wasn't called a patriarch.
It was called a catholicos.
And this person would in fact ordain priests and bishops who
were to come to India in those early years.
This community is still extremely strong in India.
And, in fact, you'll find bits and pieces of this community in
every other Christian community as well as their own.
The most wealthy live in their great palaces,
their [inaudible],
and their estates.
They are to be found among Pentecostals, among Catholics.
They are very strong among the Catholics and so forth.
In fact, the story of their relationship with the Catholics
is a fairly fraught story and brings me to the second of these
waves of growth of Christianity in India.
This is with the coming of Vasco da Gama in 1498.
He achieved what Columbus had set out to do.
He reached India.
And he was met on the west coast of Africa near Mombasa by two
Indian Christian pilots or sailors, seamen, who offered to
guide him into the shore of India and helped him to get
across to Calicut where he first landed.
And we know about his earliest relationships there
with the Samudra Raja.
The Portuguese corrupted the word into Zamorin,
a Samudra Raja,
the lord of the sea who was the ruler of that city state.
But, of course, there were many moors, there were many Arab
sailors there, many Muslims who resented the coming of the
Portuguese and tried to undermine their position in
Calicut.
And very soon an incident occurred in which several
Portuguese were killed, and then Vasco da Gama's fleet bombarded
the port and difficult relations went on from that time forward
as the Portuguese established themselves
on the west coast of India.
Now, it's interesting that
Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
the authority on the Portuguese in India, wrote
a biography of Vasco da Gama in which he describes how they have
quite recently found the texts of the reports of four metrons,
four bishops,
who were on hand on the shore
and described all of the events I'm talking about vividly
from an Indian perspective
on the events that occurred there.
Now, of course, the Portuguese eventually carve out for
themselves a little kingdom, a city state at Goa
and begin to throw their weight across that part of the Arabian
Sea, try to dominate the trade of the east.
And this brings them into relationship with the Thomas
Christians, which, for the first 40 or 50 years, more than that,
60 or 70 years, until the Council of Trent and its
teaching began to kick in, we're reasonably amicable and they
were able to work along.
In fact, they even had common liturgies and arrangements in
which the metrons of the Thomas Christians worked together with
Catholics in the establishing of Catholic churches and schools
that they held in common and so forth.
Well, this was not to last.
And by the end of the century, the Portuguese had discovered
that these eastern Christians did not believe the same thing.
Their doctrines were different.
Not only that but they wanted them to submit to Rome.
And the Thomas Christians always looked to what they called
Babylon.
To Babylon for their bishops and for their ordinations.
Their training ground had been at Nisibis and Edessa.
And they still looked there for their inspiration.
Well, the Portuguese cut off their contact with this and
tried to capture bishops as they were being sent to India.
And archbishop Menezes of Goa in 1599 put forth an edict, the
edict of Diamper, in which he said that hence forth the
Catholic church will assert its authority over all the Thomas
Christians of India.
The authority on which this was done was something called the
Padroado, the patronage of Portugal that the Portuguese
king had received from the Pope for dealing with Christians that
were in Portuguese domains.
Well, with this edict, as a consequence of this edict, many
Thomas Christian schools were destroyed, libraries were
destroyed, many valuable manuscripts were lost, and as
the Thomas Christians were put into subjection to the Roman Sea
and to Goa, mainly.
As a consequence of that, a whole new separate kind of
Catholic Thomas church-- Catholic Thomas church arose in
India.
But the old, many of the old Thomas Christians never
submitted.
They submitted on the outside, but on the inside they tried to
subvert and they tried to get around.
They kept trying to get people off to Mesopotamia to get new
bishops, and their archdeacon kept working away with them.
And, in fact, people in Mesopotamia kept sending out
bishops, many of whom were captured by the Portuguese, and
the tension went on.
Finally there was one by the name of Ahatallah who was
captured in Mylapore, the place where Thomas, the apostle
Thomas, is supposed to have been martyred on the west coast of
India by Madras.
Ahatallah was taken to Goa and the Thomas Christians knew that
he was there.
They begged for him to be brought ashore.
He was not brought ashore.
He disappeared, and we know from later texts that he was drowned
and just disappeared altogether.
By that time, of course, the Portuguese, the Goan inquisition
had been installed in 1560.
So there was a whole machinery of inquisition that was
employed.
Well, the Thomas Christians were outraged at this, and their
archdeacon and many of the priests came together in 1653.
This event, Ahatallah, occurred in 1648, came together in 1643
and at a place called Coonan Cross swore and oath of
independence from Rome.
And this is just the beginning of the schisms that then would
go on for a long period of time.
There are at least seven or eight or nine different
Thomas Christian ecclesiastical structures today.
Some of them Protestant, some of the Catholic, some of the
Orthodox, some of them Syrian, and so forth.
All of this then develops from out of this time of schism.
In the meanwhile, Catholic missionaries had been spreading
out outside of Goa into Hindu countries where they could
establish themselves.
And one of the most prominent, of course, was Francis Xavier.
And he went down the coast and around the coast,
the tip of India, and up on the eastern side,
and there with two Thomas Christian translators
worked with-- Paravars they were called--
pearl fishers, ocean people, ocean fairing
people, fishermen, traders, who felt threatened by the Moors,
by the Arabs, and who wished for Portuguese help.
And so an arrangement was made whereby they would receive
Portuguese protection, but they themselves will all turn
Christian, much to his joy.
And, of course, shoreline communities, all of them,
many of the Paravar on both sides who were not Muslims
turned Christian at that particular time.
But they turned Christian in a very superficial way because,
though they gave their allegiance to the church, they
did not have formal training in Christianity for a couple
hundred years, and they retained their Hindu culture and their
caste status and their positions and so on.
But to this day the shoreline communities are an important
Catholic community along the shores of India.
And you will find them quite numerous.
And they have been written about by a number of scholars who have
been producing good work on these communities.
So this is really a consequence.
In fact, he is said to have baptized, Francis Xavier, 2,000
or 3,000 people in one particular day.
And what did he do with them once he baptized them?
Well, he said, "We will teach them the Ten Commandments, and
we'll teach them the Lord's Prayer."
These were semi-literate, most of the illiterate, people.
"And we will give them each a person to record their names,
their birth dates, and their death dates, and to record this
and we will ask them to have a time of prayer every morning at
the ringing of a bell."
And a bell was placed in every village along the shoreline.
So, that tradition still continues, and that community is
still there.
Now, another notable Jesuit who came to India at the beginning
of the 27th century was Roberto de Nobili.
Roberto de Nobili didn't go to the lowest people, which is what
Xavier did.
He went to outcasts, untouchables.
Oh, no.
He went to the great temple town of Madurai, which has a daytime
population today, if you were to go into the temple, of over
100,000 people.
A huge temple with markets and all kinds of things going on.
He went there and he learned Sanskrit and he took on, put on
a robe, and he made himself into a Brahman, said that he was a
Brahman and that he was bringing the true Veda, the true Veda,
and began to win disciples to the faith.
He didn't win very many to begin with,
but his progress was steady.
Franciscans and other orders
were outraged by what he was doing.
But this is sort of similar to what the kinds of radical steps
the Jesuits did in China or southeast Asia and Vietnam and
places like that where you have very similar Jesuit kinds of
accommodation to local culture.
As a consequence of this, a monastery was established in the
mountains, which is still there, and there were some notable,
some of the notable Tamil scholars of the next couple of
centuries were in fact Jesuits.
And they had Sanskrit names that they went by.
In the case of de Nobili,
he's Tattuva guru.
In the case of Constance Beschi,
his title was Veeramani Swami, and so forth.
So at Samba Ganaur you have the records of all of these people.
And so a Brahman community was established there which was then
reestablished in the 19th century after the Jesuits were
abolished in the 18th century.
And it's a very strong community to this day.
So if you look at Catholic Christianity in India, Catholics
are the largest Christian community in India.
And I suppose I should have said something at the beginning of
how many Christians are there in India.
I'll make this small digression at this point because I think
it's important for us to at least deal with the question.
It's very controversial.
The census is politicized,
and it is not in the interests of Hindutva people
or other people to admit how many Christians.
Sometimes the number--
At least the number of 2.3% to 2.5% of the population
of India is considered to be Christian to this day.
And, by various estimates that I have found by other studies,
archaeological surveys and so forth, it's up to 7%.
Well, if you take 7% of 1.2 billion people, you're talking
about a larger Christian community in India than there is
in any country in Europe.
It's coming close to what the population, the Christian
population of China is going to be, which is also going towards
100 million or thereabouts.
Now, of that 100 million, over half of that, more than half,
maybe 60% of all Christians in India, are Catholic.
But it's not as simple as that.
There are 28 archdioceses.
In the Latin rite, 121 dioceses.
There's a Syro-Malabar rite, 26.
And wouldn't you know it, there's a Syro-Malankara because
part of the Malankara in the 20th century were brought under
Rome because of the various disputes they've had, and it's
a terribly Byzantine story of complexities, of struggles over
who was going to be the bishop and so forth.
Successions were very complicated.
And these successions are made more complicated because
it so happens that the people of southwest India, the elite
communities, are matrilinear in their social structure,
and these are a very Indian community.
And being matrilinear, there was a succession of priests
in which the nephew
would get the priesthood from his uncle.
His mother's--
His sister's son would become the next bishop
in his succession.
And there are stories, succession stories, of bishops
that go back 80 generations.
80 generations.
So they traced themselves back, you see, to Thomas.
Now, that is what the Malankara people do, and in their case
it's even more complicated because they went from being
accused at being dyophysite, or Nestorian, which is the term
that Catholics use, it's a sort of epithet, to being
monophysite, or Jacobite, during the 17th century just after the
Coonan Cross incident that I was referring to.
So this is rather complicated business.
So there are these three hierarchies of Catholics in
India.
Now, the third community that I'd like to talk about this
afternoon are the beginning of what we call the Protestants,
but they didn't call themselves Protestants: Pietists from
Germany.
But they-- What I'm interested in are the Pietist Tamils.
Pietist Tamil Christians.
Pietist Tamil Christians have their roots in a Danish trading
community on the west coast of India, halfway down the coast
from Madras, Thanjavur, in the delta of the Kaveri River, in
which the Danish had a station and the English who didn't like
the Danish trade smuggled two German missionaries onto the
Danish mission in order to establish them there so that
they could hurt the Danish trade.
[laughter]
So it's a long and complicated story, except to say the
Ziegenbalg was a university trained person from Holy
University, the student of Wilhelm Franca.
And Franca was a great Pietist who believed that every man,
woman, and child in the world should have access to holy
scripture, and in order to have access to holy scripture, this
person should be literate.
And numerate.
And not only should that person be able to read the word of God,
but that person should be able to read the word of nature.
And the nature-- This was at the beginning of the German
enlightenment, different from the French enlightenment, in
which science and the study of nature was very much prized.
And he had his own Kunst und Wunderkammern
and so forth in his orphanage in Hala.
His Waisenhaus.
And he had trained Ziegenbalg,
and he put his hands on these two young men,
Ziegenbalg and Plutschau,
sent them off to India in 1706 where their first task was to
translate scripture, set up a printing press, put together
schools, and start giving people literacy.
And this is something that Ziegenbalg immediately did with
some success and modest success.
He soon had several dozen schools and there were small
groups of shall we say chapel school preachers, catechists and
so forth, who worked with him in that.
The same time that Ziegenbalg was doing this, he can be seen
in some respects as one of the very earliest or the
orientalists because he got in touch with the high literati of
that area and began to record their beliefs and their
understandings of the world, their philosophy, their theology
and so forth.
And we have something like 200 of his letters back and forth
between Tamil pundits and Ziegenbalg.
All of this has now recently been published
by Daniel Jeyaraj.
So that at two levels he was working.
And he died in 1717 as still a comparatively young man
feeling that he hadn't accomplished very much.
Though he had built a church, which he designed in Tranquebar,
which was anathema to the Danes
who kept their old church there and so forth.
And, of course,
the Jesuits were not very pleased with his
presence there either because, after all, he was a Protestant,
he was a heretic But what I had noticed in the study of
Christianity in India is there's a sort of incubation period.
And other missionaries came out, and finally, in the middle of
the century, another person come from Hala by the name of
Christian Friedrich Schwartz.
And eventually he was to become the raju-guru of maharaja of
Thanjavur.
But in the early days, he trained and had pilgrims that he
trained who sent out two-by-two all over south India to
different villages and different places, and they established
little congregations along the way.
Most of them were not lowest caste.
They were in the middle class.
Literate caste, Vellalar caste people.
And, as a consequence of this, I see a kind of period of
incubation, and finally there's an explosion.
And by the end of the 18th century, there was a mass
movement that occurred way down in the tip of India
in an area called Tirunelveli Valley,
in which in one short period over 3,000 Nadars,
they're called now, Nadars, became Christians through a
convert who had been a disciple of Christian Friedrich Schwartz.
Schwartz established schools which the maharaja himself
funded and two other maharajas.
Three schools.
And these schools trained not only preachers and teachers but
they also trained the maharaja who had been, in fact, his son
had been a protege of Schwartz, Serfoji, who became the maharaja
was one of the earliest members of the royal geographic society
and strongly interested in the enlightenment and science and
the development of knowledge in south India.
This is all stuff which had happened quite early.
And one of the major disciples and a classmate of Serfoji was a
leading Tamil writer.
He had become a Tamil writer.
And for 60 years, Vedanayakam Sastriar worked there
and trained people in those three schools.
And they, of course, helped to train people further south where
the mass movements were taking place.
So that there's an expansion of Protestant Christianity.
They wouldn't call it that.
They'd call it evangelical Tamil Pietists or Tamil evangelical
Christianity in the deep south, which continues to this day.
It's the one place in India, one of the places in India where,
when I met at the railroad station in the bishops white
car, there's a sign on the back window that says "Jesus is
Lord."
And, you know, if you're from the part of India where I grew
up where Hindus are dominate, this is not the kind of thing
you put in the window of your car.
So it's rather astonishing to see what kind of an influence
this Christian community has in that area.
Now, that community has continued to grow, and it's an
important community, and it had an influence on the growth of
Protestantism everywhere in India.
Just as the Thomas Christians are to be found everywhere, in
every denomination that I think exists.
Protestant or not Protestant or Pentecostals, you'll always find
some Thomas Christian leaders.
There's even a Thomas Christian Billy Graham that is a kind of
combination of Billy Graham and John Stott.
A kind of scholarly Billy Graham by the name of Ravi Zacharias,
who's in this country.
The great preachers in this country, you see.
Because they have a command of the English probably better than
ours, almost.
And so they get large audiences.
And so the impact, the cultural impact of Indian Christians
today is growing.
I could go back and we could talk about why is this so, but
this is because these roots were planted and there was this sort
of period of incubation.
Another thing that occurred is that once persecution came upon
a group of Christians, and there were whole bunches of villages
that became Christian and they turned their temples into
schools and chapels and so forth, persecution came upon
them, and they were thrown out of their villages.
Well, they established what they called-- They went back into
the Old Testament and they found something there called the
villages of refuge, and they established in Tamil country
villages of refuge.
The first of them was called Mudaliar.
The second one was called Nazareth,
and so on and so on and so on.
First one means first village.
So that is the second wave.
I'm getting on here.
I've got to keep moving.
The third I would just touch upon briefly.
I mean the fourth I'll just touch upon briefly.
And that is that due to the influence of the Pietists,
we have the rise of the evangelicals
in England and America.
The evangelical movement.
And William Carey was a prominent,
the first Baptist missionary.
First and his--
The innovation with him was that instead of having
denominational mission societies, such as the Catholics
had and such as the Anglicans had, SPG and the SPCK,
the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge, he
established voluntary societies separate from any church.
Which has been the mode of missionary activity--
The modern mission movement, missionary movement has
more or less been based upon the voluntary principle,
and it starts with William Carey and in Bengal.
Now, I need to pause here to say that the East India Company,
which established and in fact, shall we say,
constructed the modern India
that we know today, though it disappeared in 1858
in a cloud of blood and smoke,
the East India Company was dead opposed to missionaries.
Did not want missionary societies.
Did not admit them in.
The court of directors back home in London said no way.
Though they contradicted this in dealing with Catholic priests
in India, and they contradicted this in dealing sometimes
with some of these Germans Pietists and so forth.
Still, nevertheless, they--
The reason for this was that their armies
were made up mainly of Hindus.
And their civil servants were Brahmins.
They did not want to alienate them.
Not only that, but they took over the administration,
the actual administration, of tens of thousands of temples.
They were under government management.
Not management exactly but supervision so they could have
the accounting of the books and so forth to make sure there
wasn't corruption, according to them.
And also festivals.
And, of course, when English evangelicals heard about this
in the 19th century, oh my goodness, there was a petition
against the East India Company, against its Raj,
saying get rid of this heathen government that the East India
Company is running in India.
And they were cashiered, many of these people.
They went home to England and pamphlets, 13 pamphlets.
The Anti-Adultery Connection League went to Parliament and
put down things in Parliament.
Do something about the company.
Meanwhile, of course, the company had been forced to let
missionaries in, and you get American missionaries coming in,
you get British missionaries coming in, and they begin to
spread across the country, and you find them establish
themselves in various parts of the sub-continent.
And following the pattern of the Tamil Pietists, they established
little places, and there are mass movements among Telugus and
others so that soon there are hundreds of thousands of
Baptists, Telugu Baptists.
The largest Mennonite church in the world is Telugu today, if
you can imagine it.
So Telugu Mennonite brethren and so on.
So they spread across the country, and it's a long and
complicated story except to say that the influence of the
Pietists and of their mission spread over and then you get the
coming of the admission, the formal admission of
missionaries.
And the East India Company was then stuck.
It was stuck between the demands of the Christians to allow
missionaries into India and the demands of the Hindu
establishment of its Hindu raj, the people who ruled Indian, the
300,000 soldiers who were in its army, the 300,000-plus civil
servants who were in its administration and its
bureaucracy who wanted them to keep the missionaries out and
who resented the coming of missionaries.
The East India Company was just caught in a hopeless situation,
and eventually this was to lead to acrimony and to rebellion and
finally to the Indian mutiny and, in a sense, to the
beginning of the end of British rule in India because it really
begins with a reaction against the company's having to try to
straddle two things, begin both Hindu and Christian at the same
time.
Of course, their policy was one of toleration.
Their policy was one of letting everyone have their own place of
neutrality.
This was the formal policy.
But this didn't necessarily go across very well.
Now, the fifth of these movements that I have to touch
upon in the short time that we have is the one where the
largest concentration, one of the largest concentrations of
Christians is today.
And this is in the northeast corner, to the east of the
Brahmaputra River, right on where you see the boundary line
there.
Those are mountains.
The land all stands on end.
You can hardly climb it, the hills are so steep.
In fact, one missionary finally said, when he was describing it,
"Not a horse, not an elephant, nobody can climb this thing."
And yet they had to go up by foot.
Among these people who lived along the edges of the
sub-continent and everywhere inside of the sub-continent
there were tribal aboriginals.
Tribal aboriginals who had always somewhat been at odds
with central power, with any kingdom.
With the oppression that they saw, when they were absorbed
were considered untouchable.
So they remained separate.
They kept in their fortified villages.
They attacked the plains.
They attacked the Hindus.
They attacked the people.
They resented the Hindu merchants who they said were
money grubbing people who were constantly cheating them and so
forth and so on.
So they would sometimes threw three or four attacks on the
plains every year.
And there are, among those people, at least seven of those
tribal groups, all of whom became Christian over the last
century.
The Nagas, the Nagaland, the Khasis, the Garos, the Mizos.
And how did it happen?
It's a fascinating story.
It's a fascinating story about how an Assami school teach who
had become a Christian had visiting him a Naga who would
come down to trade in his little town up in upper reaches of
Assam.
And he and his wife befriended this Naga, and over a period of
several years this Naga became a Christian.
And then the Naga said, "I feel that I'm not being very kind to
my own people.
You must take this Christian message to my people."
So what happened is he took [inaudible]
with him to the Nagas at the footed hills, and said,
"I want to take him up to our village."
"Oh, no, he's a spy.
We don't want him coming.
He'll get killed."
But they pleaded.
And he said, "Well, I'll take my chances."
So he was taken up into the hills,
and then when he got up there, they were outraged to see him.
And he was imprisoned, put in a bamboo cage,
and there he decided that the only thing he could do
was pray and sing.
So he sang.
And he had all kinds--
He had a good voice, and his voice would attract
the little children and it would attract the women,
and after a while they got attracted to what he was doing
and what he said and he persuaded--
Before long, to make a long story short,
about a dozen or more of them became Christians.
And then they said, he said, "Well, I want to take you down
to the plains to meet a missionary down there
who will baptize you."
And he took him down.
And then, down there, Dr. Edward Clark said,
"I want to go up into the mountains there too."
This is how it started with the Nagas.
How did they do it?
He then went and translated, painstakingly translated 50 Naga
languages there are.
This is only Ao language, one of the 50.
Translated this, slowly translated the bible into Naga.
I might add here that I have colleague friends who've been
working on what missionaries did for the Assami's language
meanwhile on the plains among the high caste people.
But up there, this happened and eventually a whole village was
formed and a separate village of refuge was formed, which was an
entirely Christian village.
With a school where they taught modern sciences, where they got
modern American magazines.
This is an American missionary.
American Baptist missionary.
Today, somewhere around 98% of all of Nagas are Christians.
The Mizos, 80%-85%.
Among the seven sisters of the tribes along the-- Of course,
this has meant there's been lots of trouble with the Indian
government, with the Assami's government.
They themselves felt they didn't belong to India.
They said, "We want to have a separate independent state, we
want to have our own country."
And, of course, they declared
when Nehru went up there in 1947,
he said, "Now I want you to behave yourself
and submit yourself to India."
They said, "No way."
They didn't want this.
They turned their back on him, walked away.
Ultimate insult.
And there was armed conflict for many, many years,
and there still is.
But, in 1963, the state of Nagaland was established in
which you could find, if you look at the legislative assembly
and the membership of the Naga church, you'll find that there's
almost a one-on-one correlation between the members of one and
the members of the other.
They're very, very similar.
At this time, now, there are other influences that have come
in amongst the Nagas.
There are Catholic Nagas and other denominations
have come in.
To being with, the Nagas, they were very strict missionaries.
Very strict.
They said you shouldn't drink, they shouldn't do this.
Now new Presbyterians have come in.
They said oh, this is not so bad.
And so there have been changes here that have been made.
But the largest Christian communities in India,
aside from the Thomas Christians of the south-southwest,
are in the far northeast.
And if you put these all together with all of the
various Christian communities in different parts of India--
I'll just close with a couple of statements here.
And that is
they were Indians who did the converting.
And they were Indians who brought--
It was usually the same people
who brought the message to their own people.
What did the missionaries do?
They were translators.
They were hewers of wood and drawers of water.
They established printing presses.
They established schools and so forth
and hospitals and so forth.
But no mass movement was ever run or engendered by
a missionary, that I know of, except for Francis Xavier.
That's one thing.
The second here that there's a cultural hybridity.
They are-- They are,
shall we say, Hindu in culture.
Certainly, there's a sort of dual identity.
In many places,
people don't want to say that they're Christians
because they're discriminated against as far as
affirmative action against untouchables are concerned.
So they'll say, "I have a Christian church on Sunday,
but I have a Hindu name on weekdays."
Fourth thing that's very interesting here is that, though
English was brought to India and mainly pushed by the Brahman
elites who worked under the company who demanded English
because they wanted it for themselves and though
missionaries originally opposed that and wanted vernacular
languages to be stressed, nevertheless, since, in the case
of the Nagas and so forth, all of their bibles are in the Roman
script, they've learned English very quickly and very easily.
And so there have been professors at the University of
Pennsylvania who are Nagas, for example, this sort of thing.
People who have learned English so that just as India today is
the second largest English-speaking country in the
world and very prominent in literature and science and so
forth, this has been a great advantage to the Christian
communities of India because they've been able to cash in on
this because they too have been able to learn English and gone
through many schools and have become,
shall we say, a global diaspora.
They travel everywhere.
You'll find Nagas everywhere.
You'll find Indian Christians everywhere.
You'll find Telugu Christian churches down in Chicago.
They're all over the place.
There's a diaspora of Thomas Christians, of Naga Christians,
and there's hardly any kind of Christian that I've ever seen
of any Catholic persuasion,
of any Orthodox persuasion,
or of any Protestant or Pietist persuasion
which there aren't some Indians.
I think I better quit there.
Thank you.
[applause]