The literature on missions to India is considerable. This book adds to the growing number of studies of Indian Christianity. But few works go as far as this one in shifting the focus of enquiry from the mission to the new Indian Christian community. It moves from missionary views on India to the perspective that Indians who became Christians likely had of the missionaries and of the new faith, what made it attractive to them, and how they appropriated it. Jones achieves this by using missionary and Indian biographies (many published in India), archival material on Indians who worked with missionaries and led the new churches, and in a few cases their own writings. His knowledge, contacts and understanding of both missionaries and Indian churches have enabled him to identify relevant material and his treatment of it is meticulous.

As professor of world evangelism at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Jones is especially interested in answering the question of how the religious message brought by missionaries connected to the religious experience and understanding of those Indians who became Christians. The missionaries considered are US American Evangelicals who entered the country in the period 1836–70 and based themselves in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. They were both Presbyterians and Methodists, whom Jones describes as sharing a set of Evangelical convictions, a judgemental view of society and revival experience. The main observation that he makes (though this is not entirely borne out by his examples) is that the first generation of Indians who responded were from the section of low-status Indian society that was attracted to bhakti movements, that is communities of devotion to a particular deity, which abrogated gender and caste norms, and worshipped communally and enthusiastically. Although they belonged to different religions, Jones sees ‘religious congruence’ between the Evangelical and bhakti movements as described. (He is not the first to observe their affinity. Although Jones does not refer to it, in the 1920s, in the context of South India, Bishop A. J. Appasamy used this resemblance at the theological level to explain the Christian Gospel as a message of love.)

Jones offers a theoretical framework to explain the attraction of Evangelicalism, arguing that the ‘thirdspace’ (Edward Soja) created by the bhakti movements was hospitable to the new movement. From the point of view of the low-status Indians who responded to Christianity, he argues, the missionaries appeared to be religious experts who were critical of the religious and social situation of north-west India and offered the possibility of a new kind of community. The space was conceptual in terms of religious ideas, communal in that it existed in and between communities and also physical in the sense that Christian community resembled Indian forms of community.

As well as stressing the betweenness and hybridity of the new Christian community, Jones's descriptions of it draw attention to its complexity and diversity. It included not only Indians but also European residents (in addition to the missionaries) and Anglo-Indians or Eurasians, although the latter receive scant attention in the missionary records for reasons that Jones helpfully explains. Its Indian members came from both Hindu and Muslim backgrounds and from different castes. The male leaders whom Jones describes include an upwardly mobile Hindu named Nundy who struggled for equality with the missionaries (which was denied); a truth-seeking Muslim called Haqq who became the first Indian to be a presiding elder in the Methodist Church; and Janvier and Dass, who were both brought up in a mission-run orphanage and educated by missionaries. All of these characters, Jones points out, were already in a liminal social location in the first place and they managed effectively to satisfy both missionary and Indian expectations. Jones also draws attention to the women in the community and makes a serious attempt to describe the world of Indian women workers. Their hiddenness was due, he points out, not only to Indian customs of purdah but also to the reluctance of the (male) European missionaries to recognise their work – or that of European women – as a form of mission.

Jones tackles the contentious questions for Christianity in India of attitudes to caste and of the motives for conversion. On caste, Jones points to its fluidity and the ways in which bhakti movements and Christianity transcended it to some extent. He notes missionary tendencies to racialise caste and also finds that the American missionaries were less anti-Brahmin than the British. Regarding conversion, Jones shows how Indians were attracted to Christ from within their existing religious outlook on life. In the bhakti traditions, material concerns were legitimate and the focus was on this life so that motives could include material well-being, security and other this-worldly gains. Although Brahmins and Western missionaries alike criticised such ‘ulterior motives’, Indians pointed out that Jesus cared for the bodily needs of his disciples.

Throughout this history, Jones is alert to the theological understanding of Indian Christians, which in places differed significantly from missionary theology. He finds affinities with bhakti thought in Christian renditions of salvation as fleeing to God for refuge and of dwelling in God, for example. Jones devotes a whole chapter to the theological works of Dass (though these are not strictly bhakti in orientation). He highlights its indebtedness to missionary sources but also shows how these have been appropriated to address Indian problems, such as the question of suffering rather than guilt. Although this is a historical work, Jones makes some insightful comparisons between the missionary approaches of the period and today – such as that the colonial-era missionaries saw Indians as in need of help and not as their enemies. The book will have wide appeal to church historians, missiologists and researchers in world Christianity.