Parts of the review by Arun Jones of my Christianity in India: Beginnings to the Present so misrepresents the book that one wonders how much of it was actually read.
It is inaccurate to write that the book's treatment of caste in India is “completely unhistorical,” for pages 19, 139n, and 497 demonstrate my high regard for the work of Susan Kaufmann Bayly's works regarding historical changes, while pages 207 and 257n (also, for example, 268–69) present Will Sweetman's analysis of the views of Nicholas B. Dirks, J. A. Dubois, and Louis Dumont, et al, on caste. Anyone understanding my debt to the late Paul G. Hiebert's scholarship would not make such a charge.
The claim that the book leaves “completely unexplored the symbiotic relationship between British imperialism and Indian Christianity” is simply inaccurate, for it ignores altogether the fact that chapter 10 argues that there was a symbiotic relationship between the Empire and (Brahmanical) Hinduism, a syncretistic culture that nurtured proto-nationalist sentiments. Far from being anti-Brahman or pro-“Dalit,” as the reviewer asserts, the chapter attempts to be even-handed in respect to all communities. Nor, in any way, does the reviewer support his assertion that the work is a “reaction to the dangers currently presented by violent fundamentalist Hindu movements.”
Jones ignores statements showing: that official imperial policy prohibited entry of missionaries into British India (261–62, 270, 320–24, and elsewhere); that Indian Christians were severely persecuted by imperial officials; that Indian Christian soldiers were required to participate in Hindu festivals, in violation of their consciences; that British officials who attempted to propagate Christian faith were summarily cashiered (270); and that British officials, civil and military, who dared to organize a formal petition against government support for Hindu institutions, were reprimanded or required to resign (271–72). Indeed, one noble governor was severely rebuked and summarily removed for using the term “heathen” in official communications and for favoring Christian missionaries (confer 280–83 and 328–33). Relations between the Church of England and the Government of India remained fraught with turbulence; and efforts of Lords Spiritual to assert their authority over India were continually rejected, as Susan B. Harper has clearly shown (confer 261n).
This book is not about race, but about Indian Christians. The racial aspect of European/Indian relationships is neither as central nor as germane to the understanding of Indian Christianity as caste and is a subject that required more space than was possible.
The sweeping charge that my work “completely ignores the voluminous scholarship on Indian history that has been produced in the last thirty or so years” is not true. Lack of respect for what passes as “discourse analysis,” or for the currently prevailing hegemony of literary theory over proper historical scholarship, should not be construed as lack of awareness of a historiography about which I have written extensively. This historiography has already received more attention than is warranted, while the many indigenous sources consulted for the history of North-East India speak for themselves.
