“Christians and Christian missions in India have as much claim to being considered ‘Indian,’ indigenous, and products of cultures that have arisen within the continent as any other socio-religious institution within the subcontinent.”Footnote ⁷ It is this claim, as much as any other, which characterizes the overall trajectory of the work of Robert Eric Frykenberg, celebrated here. To a greater or lesser extent all of the contributors have been “‘adopted’ into the Frykenberg vamsavali,” (p. 8) as the editor puts it in his thumbnail sketch of Frykenberg's career. Not all, however, would go as far as Frykenberg in asserting the indigenous genesis and character of Indian Christianity and, despite the volume's title, not all of the contributions address this claim, even indirectly. Of those that do, the most interesting is Chandra Mallampalli's examination of South Indian Catholics’ use of the courts to protect their caste privileges. Mallampalli demonstrates that while the development of Indian Christianity was not a matter of “the imposition of an alien religion … upon passive Indians” (p. 154), the actions and choices of the Indian Catholics who pursued such cases were constrained by “taxonomies the Raj imposed from above” (p. 145). Nevertheless even here the issue is not as clear-cut as it might seem—Mallampalli reflects Frykenberg's wider claims about a “Hindu Raj” when he concludes “the Idealization of the judiciary counters any tendency to view Catholics as victims of purely European assumptions and decisions” (p. 156).

The Indianness of Christianity was of growing concern for missionaries as the Indian nationalist movement gained momentum. In a fascinating essay, Gunnel Cederlöf explores the interactions between nationalists who saw mission as a part of Western domination of India, and Swedish and German missionary visions of a national—but Lutheran—church nourished by nineteenth-century “romantic and nationalist notions of the Volk” (p. 198). Judith Brown extends the frame into the post-independence era, examining the difficulties Nehru faced in dealing with hostility to Indian Christians from those who did not share his secularist and internationalist vision for independent India.

Peter Andersen's study of the Kherwar movement among the Santals takes up another of Frykenberg's concerns: understanding “the role of ‘primal religion’ [when] trying to explain how and why Christianity was received and appropriated by some communities and not by others.”Footnote ⁸ Wilbert Schenk's account of modern missionary relations with the ancient Eastern churches—in India and elsewhere—recovers a vision of a unified church, which was, however, based on a superficial understanding of the “ancient churches” on the part of modern missionaries. Michael Bergunder surveys changes in Christian affiliation in India since the arrival of modern missions and demonstrates how different groups sought to advance their interests through such changes of affiliation. His idiosyncratic restriction of the term “proselytism,” to refer only to such movement between Christian groups, is perhaps motivated by an attempt to avoid what he calls the stereotypical polemics (p. 191) underlying alternative terms such as “sheep-stealing.”

Among the other essays, the only explicitly theological contribution is a reflection, “long postponed” (p. 236), by John Carman on Christian interpretations of Hinduism, including his own. Daniel Jeyaraj argues that older missionary hagiography has underplayed the significance of indigenous agents. His study of two such agents in the Tamil Lutheran church should be read together with Heike Liebau's recent extended study of several hundred Indian workers in the Tranquebar mission (Heike Liebau, Die indischen Mitarbeiter der Tranquebarmission (1706–1845): Katecheten, Schulmeister, Ubersetzer (Tübingen: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag, 2008)). Brian Stanley engages directly with hagiography in what “can only be described as the ‘cult’ of Henry Martyn” (p. 109). His account of the development of this cult is much stronger than his answer to the final question he sets himself, namely, “how far is it possible to draw aside the hagiographic veil … and discover something of [Martyn's] personality and the impact it made, both on Europeans and on the Muslims of north India and Persia who met him” (p. 120), relying, as he does, almost exclusively on European sources. As Avril Powell shows in her study of Abdul Masih, “whose conversion was the only one directly attributable to the influence of Henry Martyn” (p. 87), it is possible to recover Indian perspectives on Christian mission from an early period even where those perspectives are—as in this case—now available only as filtered through processes of selection and translation by missionaries. Richard Fox Young likewise “resurrects” P. Ragaviah “from the archival tomb” (p. 69) in order to examine his views on Christianity and colonial knowledge of India. Geoffrey Oddie reviews the role of pandits in shaping missionary knowledge of Hinduism, concluding that, in all but a few exceptional cases, other sources were more influential.

Frykenberg has been, at times, dismissive of the value of theory, preferring the firmer ground of the primary source materials in the substantial archives generated by Christian communities in South Asia. He will therefore likely appreciate the closing chapters of this volume, which provide useful overviews of missionary archives relating to South Asia in the UK, by Rosemary Seton, and of Protestant collections in the US, by Martha Lund Smalley. The book contains also a useful bibliography of Frykenberg's works to 2009.