The sheer range and complexity of scholarship on various themes in Indian life and history places the interested non-specialist in profound need of writers who can bring together, interpret and communicate. The story of Christianity in India, once imagined rather simply in terms of a paternalistic European enterprise linked with imperialism, has developed in the last few years into one of these complex themes, with Robert Frykenberg playing a major role both in moving the debate forward and giving it a wider audience. His contributions to Studies in the History of Christian Missions are a case in point. The present volume, running from the (disputed) Indian ministry of the Apostle Thomas right through to the emergence of Christian states in the north-east of post-colonial India, treats the Indian context as ‘one of several manifestations of a newly emerging world Christianity, in which Christians of a post-Christian West are a minority’ (p. v). The result is a study committed to providing readers with the detailed background on India – geography, anthropology, religious culture, caste, language – essential to understanding the ‘transcultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments’ (p. v) that shaped Indian Christianity. Frykenberg's three introductory chapters, which also include a section on Christian expansion and historiography, make up a significant chunk of the book, but no more so than is necessary if over-simplification later on is to be avoided. The analysis moves on through the Thomas tradition, the arrival of the Portuguese and the resulting conflicts between two Christianities, and the avalanche of Protestant missionaries from Europe and north America in the modern period. Frykenberg reminds readers throughout of the extent to which evangelism and creativity tended to reside with Indians themselves, and less so with under-resourced foreign missionaries whose communication skills were far from perfect and who often knew little of the communication networks and metaphors employed by Indians until the principal work of evangelism had been all but completed. Other major themes include empire and resistance, struggles over ecclesiastical authority, the content and institutions of education, the conversion of oppressed peoples and the notion of social as well as spiritual transformation. This amounts to a fairly comprehensive treatment, if not in regional terms – the north-west of India is relatively underrepresented, and is well-served instead by John Webster's Social history of Christianity: north-west India since 1800 – then certainly in thematic terms. In addition to a broad general readership, Christianity in India would be well-suited for university courses and to postgraduate students embarking on studies in world or Indian Christianity.