Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500 (review)

Frykenberg presides over a distinguished list of contributors, including Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Geoffrey A. Oddie, Richard Fox Young, and Paula Richman. The chapters range across the geographical breadth of India, from Tamil Nadu to the Punjab to Assam, with relatively more emphasis on South India. Avril Powell's chapter is alone in examining Christian-Muslim interactions. Despite the title, the book focuses heavily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although it addresses earlier periods in the first chapters and occasionally as historical background elsewhere. The great variability in subject matter is counterbalanced by a shared emphasis on constructing rich biographies of missionaries and Indian converts, along with detailed descriptions of social conditions and of associated literary and intellectual developments. Some of the chapters, such as Iwona Milewska's otherwise interesting chapter on early Sanskrit grammars produced by missionaries, seem only tangentially related to Christianity in India. Few of the chapters directly address broader theoretical questions, with some exceptions described below, where postcolonial theory becomes a target.

One of the common problems of such a collection, as Frykenberg admits, is the lack of any single theme, message, or conclusion. The volume instead "attempt[s] to provide samples, of various kinds, of the complex and confusing problems that any serious scholarly study of the history of Christians and missionaries in India can encounter" (31). Measured against this standard, the volume is a clear success. Frykenberg's introduction provides background about some of the key issues in the history of Christianity in India: the problem of communication (and miscommunication) between European missionaries and Indians, the struggle to reconcile dual identities, and controversies about caste and conversion. The chapters illustrate these themes in various ways, ultimately creating the desired effect of a sophisticated and complex picture that emphasizes the Indian nature of Christianity in India. Frykenberg's historical overview of Christianity in India in the second chapter lends additional coherence to the volume, although a general bibliography would have made the book more suitable as an introductory text.

A further goal of the volume is to reject the conflation of Christianity with colonialism. Frykenberg states that the label "colonialism" has "itself become an instrument of oppression" (7). He notes that Christianity in India preexisted, and was frequently at odds with, the colonial administration. Young, in his examination of Hindu responses to European cosmology, similarly questions the existence of a monolithic "colonial science" connected with Christianity (216). The attack on postcolonialism emerges most forcefully in the chapter written by Peter B. Andersen and Susanne Fosse, which criticizes Inden's application of Edward Said's theories to colonial India.¹ Andersen and Fosse argue that the classification of the Santals as "tribal," as distinguished from "non-tribal," Indians, together with the lack of unity between Christians and colonialists, calls into question the premise of postcolonial critiques that colonialism made a "basic distinction between Westerners and Indians" as monolithic categories (313). On the other hand, Oddie's chapter on the contribution of missionaries to the construction of "Hinduism" has more in common with postcolonial critiques. Although these arguments are largely submerged in the remainder of the volume, the general emphasis on Indians' response to Christianity reinforces such challenges to less sophisticated versions of postcolonialism.