Gary McKee’s impressive monograph, painstakingly meticulous with its ear always, close to the archive, offers a window into the entanglements between theology and politics in the nineteenth-century princely state of southern India called Travancore. As the author notes in the acknowledgements, this monograph develops from his PhD thesis undertaken between 2014 and 2018. The central focus of the work is the interaction between the Church Missionary Society’s (CMS) initiative, called Mission of Help, and the Thomas Christian community of Travancore in South India during the nineteenth century. This scrupulous account of interaction is refracted through the archives of the well-known but notably under-researched translator of the King James Version Bible (including both New Testament and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) into Malayalam, Benjamin Bailey (1791–1871).

McKee’s central claim in the text is that ‘politics should be placed alongside theology in playing a significant role in the mission’s prosecution, seeming failure, and ongoing effects’ (p. 3). In other words, something is amiss if the history of this mission, its rise, its demise, and everything in between, is read only as function of its theological (in)compatibility with the Thomas Christian churches. More simply, in the interaction between Christians, Indian Thomas Christians and British Anglicans, the role of Empire is not to be underestimated.

To set the stage, the CMS was founded by the Evangelicals of the Church of England in 1799 in response to the global expansion of Anglicanism (p. 4). The Mission of Help initiative was designed to assist in the strengthening of the local churches across various Oriental Orthodox Churches (p. 8). The initial chapters provide the context for the Mission of Help in Travancore. Chapter i focuses on the British Evangelical context that forms the backdrop to the Mission’s formation, showing how the Evangelical revival brought a renewed focus on biblicism, conversion and the idea of a return to a ‘primitive church’ (p. 19). Chapter ii centres the south Indian context by examining the specific Travancore setting to which the mission is responding. The issues that come to the fore for McKee – largely because of the sources consulted – concern culture and the Thomas Christians. Namely, the astonishment at finding Thomas Christians, as Christians, continuing to follow and uphold caste practices presumed to be limited to Hindus in Travancore. This important chapter could have been augmented by bringing this encounter between Anglicans and Thomas Christians in conversation with an earlier encounter which the British were determined to forget, or, at the very least, dismiss as ‘popery’. The historical context of the long encounter between Roman Catholics and Thomas Christians would have been helpful. Especially relevant here is the growing scholarship on Jesuits in India by scholars such as Ines Županov, Dhruv Raina, Margherita Trento, Paolo Aranha and Annie Royson among others.

Chapter iii examines the role of the British Resident and later Diwan of Travancore, Colonel John Munro, who held that the propagation of Christianity not only benefited the citizens of the country but also provided greater stability to British rule (p. 51). Chapter iv presents a case study of the CMS missionary Joseph Fenn’s address to the Syrian Christians, calling for reformation. Chapter v helps readers see the complex entanglements between the British Resident and the calls for reformation, especially regarding theological matters alien to Anglican sensibilities, such as prayers to the saints and local cāttam festivals. In chapter vi, McKee delves into Bailey’s private correspondence and presents a convincing argument that the Evangelical Protestant lens was central to Bailey’s understanding – and misunderstandings – of the doctrinal and ritual elements of Thomas Christian religion. Chapter vii looks closely at the multiple forces at play, namely personal, theological and political, at the end of the mission.

Chapter viii, ‘Contested legacies: Benjamin Bailey and Indigenous Christianity in Travancore’, addresses a central debate that the book has at its core. This debate concerns whether the nineteenth-century reformations in the Thomas Christian churches trickled down from presence of CMS and its social mobilisation in Travancore or if it was a grassroots movement created and compelled by issues arising from the local context. McKee adopts a middle ground position in his answer, arguing that the new Mar Thoma Church – a new fraction of the Church that emerged from the reformations in the Jacobite Church in 1889 (p. 158) – and other divisions in the Thomas Christian churches were influenced by the Anglican presence in the region but not sufficiently explained without attributing the changes to local agency. In this moderate position, McKee stands with Kerala scholars like E. M. Philip, Sabu Isaac Auvaneesewaram, M. M. Thomas and Augustine Kanjamala, who tend to see the reformation as fed by both Anglican as well as local Travancore forces.

The strength of the book lies in its meticulous attention to detail, particularly in McKee’s use of the personal correspondence of Bailey and other figures within the CMS network. His impressive command of the archival material is a laudable achievement. The chapters devoted to Benjamin Bailey constitute a significant contribution in their own right, drawing scholarly attention to an understudied yet widely recognised figure and, in doing so, effectively bridging the gap between academic discourse and broader public understanding. However, at times, it seems that the author missed the forest for the trees. For example, on page 174, McKee summarises his main argument:

The larger questions that remain – questions that McKee is particularly well equipped to address given his command of the archives – concern not only the subtleties of CMS’s complicity with empire, important as that is, but also the ways in which a particular Christian theology was constructed within, and at times in opposition to, Empire to engage with Christians who were both Indian and ‘ancient’. This case study raises several critical questions: How was caste constructed, perceived, or resisted in the interactions between Indian and Western Christians? What made Thomas Christians oscillate between Christian and Indian concerns – or, perhaps, were these categories themselves destabilised in this encounter? In other words, in this significant work that renders visible the politics underlying what were previously considered purely theological issues, how are our understandings of theology, Indian Christian identity and empire and its relationship with Indian Christian converts transformed? Given McKee’s expertise and extensive archival work in both Kerala and the United Kingdom, one hopes that his future scholarship will take up these broader questions. This book is highly recommended for advanced courses in the history of Christian missions, interreligious dialogue and World Christianity.