Christianity in India: The anti-colonial turn by Clara A.B. Joseph (review)

Christianity in India: The anti-colonial turn makes an incredible contribution to the postcolonial historiography of India by focusing on subjugated, rather forgotten, readings of precolonial Indian Christianity. It offersa fresh approach to look further into postcolonial historiography to probe the existence and identity of Christians in precolonial India. The main purpose of the book is to educate and enlighten those who think Christianity is primarily colonial and a relic of European colonialism in India.

The author investigates the historical challenge of proving the existence of St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, India. She admits the risk of scant historicity of Thomas' coming to India and evangelizing Brahmin families in Mylapore in AD 57 (p. 17). Since all internal pieces of evidence and sacred books of the community were burned by the Portuguese, external Western resources are summoned. Other modern sources of Indian Christian history call for reconciliation for categorizing Indian Christians as unpatriotic. Joseph argues that such categorizations are associated with the Eurocentric view of Christianity in India as a colonial enterprise (19). Joseph utilizes literary analysis with careful attention to genres and terminologies employed in a postcolonial reading. She exposes the resources to the hermeneutics of suspicion, exposing the pitfalls of a generic procolonial reading of Indian Christianity. Joseph uses Edward Said's secular criticism and critiques postcolonial interpretation of cultural hybridity between Portuguese traders and St. Thomas Christians (18). The trend of looking at foreign origins of a community as non-Christian and listing converts as unpatriotic and anti-nationalist is orientalism as its best, according to Joseph (19).

The European imagination of Orientals in India was detrimental, as Joseph poignantly notes (27). The Portuguese employed civilizing techniques on the culture of St. Thomas Christians, deeming it uncivilized. The complex codes and associated meanings of Hinduism didn't appease valorizing colonial minds. Joseph traces these anti-sentiments to five hundred years of cultural imagination of India as a wealthy and hospitable country. These cultural prejudices resulted in a Western view of India as a "Christian nation." The existence of St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, India, was a surprising discovery for the colonialists. Joseph probes into the mysterious search of the Portuguese for Prester John, the legendary Christian king of India. During the early twelfth century, Europeans found the existence of a "Christian India" as a potential economic source and an ally for their crusade endeavors. The search for shared grounds was evident in colonial missions. Joseph identifies the "imperial logic of Christian expansion" (quoting Christopher Taylor) in which external threats of Islam would be repressed, and a global Christian network could rise once and for all. It sounded promising because the self-other dynamics of the colonizer and colonized work simultaneously for a common objective. The author contests the "self at the center" colonial hermeneutics, according to which, Paul Ricoeur writes, prioritizing the colonizing self over the colonial other would actually tend towards "solicitude for one's neighbor and… justice for each individual" (34). The commonness or sharedness was a distant dream for both parties since the ideals of mutuality were perturbed because of India's alleged heretic roots.

In Chapter 3 Joseph explores the life-situations of St. Thomas Christians in relation to the cultural transmission with the Portuguese. The overarching narrative is adapted from the travelogues of Vasco Da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral. The main findings of Joseph circle around the literature available in the form of writings in the seventeenth century that were translated in the modern era. Gama and his comrades were highly militaristic and worked tenuously to defeat the Moors (Islamic invaders), which in turn caused fear of and resultant actions against Eastern Christians. The stiff competition in trade from the Muslims, as Joseph says, caused the Portuguese to switch to a colonial mode of invasion (64). In her own words, the fear of the Moor was "how colonial responsibility, whether civic or ecclesiastical, was meted out" (65). And the sheer resemblance of Eastern Christians to the Moors invoked a sense...