It might very well be true, as the author muses toward the end of this study, that it is impossible for any one person to possess the vast “expertise and grasp and insights” necessary to write a thorough history of Christianity in India (455). However, Prof. Frykenberg has been studying the religious and political history of India for approximately fifty years, and he would be one of a small group of scholars who could make a serious attempt at this possibly impossible endeavor.

Rather than a narrative of Christianity in India from the beginnings to the present, this work presents a series of explorations of important historical developments in the history of Indian Christianity. After an introductory chapter and two helpful chapters that lay out the geographical, ethnographical, sociological, and religious context of the Indian sub-continent, the first historical development that the author explores is the tradition of the Thomas Christians, who claim that their church was founded by the Apostle Thomas in 52 c.e. The historicity of this claim is judiciously treated, as is the development of the Thomas Christian community in South India. Frykenberg next examines the advent of Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Church's disparate attempts to establish pockets of Christianity and Christendom in South India. Next come some fascinating biographies of famous and important evangelical Christian missionaries, and the churches they spawned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, again in southern India. Chapter 7 explores the complicated genesis and development of the British Raj through the mechanism of the British East India Company, stopping short of the high imperial era (1857–1947). The author's implicit argument seems to be that British imperialism manifest itself in Christianity almost solely through the workings of the Anglican establishment, which he explores in chapter 9. Preceding this, in chapter 8 he examines a few key mass conversion movements of low caste groups in the South. Chapter 10 takes up conflicts between South Indian Christians who had come out of low caste backgrounds with various groups of influential Hindu elite. This chapter has a decidedly anti-Brahminical perspective, based on the experiences of the “Dalit,” or “outcaste,” of Indian society, who predominate in the Indian Christian community. Then follows a discussion of mission education, which Frykenberg argues evolved in response to pressures from the upper classes of Indian society. Chapter 12 usefully delineates the complicated development of various groups and traditions within the Roman Catholic Church in India, while the next chapter is mostly devoted to the story of Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), a famous high caste Hindu convert. The final development in Indian Christianity that Frykenberg explores is Christianity in North-East India, and he closes this long monograph with a “Conclusion and Epilogue.”

It is evident that Prof. Frykenberg's interest and expertise lie in South Indian Christianity up to about 1850. My own study has been of Christianity in parts of North India (as distinguished from North-East India), which the author ignores, perhaps justifiably since Christians are concentrated in South and North-East India. However, there are some overall serious historiographical problems with this study which must be noted. First, there is a completely ahistorical treatment of caste in India, as though Indian social structures have been fixed and unchanging since time immemorial. As Susan Bayly has convincingly demonstrated in Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), social structures in India have been constantly changing and adapting to Moghul and British rule. Second, perhaps in reaction to the dangers currently presented by violent fundamentalist Hindu movements, Prof. Frykenberg leaves completely unexplored the very important symbiotic relationship between British imperialism and Indian Christianity during most of the important nineteenth century. Instead, the reader is left with the impression (455) that the fundamental relationship between British imperialism and Christianity was one of indifference or conflict (see, for example, his description of William Carey on page 323). This simply is not true, especially in the long nineteenth century. Third, this study makes no mention whatsoever of the issue of race. Again, the author may be reacting to recent historical work that at times overemphasizes the role of race in European/Indian relationships since 1500, but to ignore this issue completely is to ignore a crucial element in Indian Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, Prof. Frykenberg almost completely ignores the voluminous scholarship on Indian history that has been produced in the last thirty or so years (see 460–61 for such an admission), which is a fourth problem with this study. Attention to at least representative literature would have prevented certain romantic and naïve readings of primary materials. A representative example of such readings is his description of the Naga culture of North-East India: “Since Nagas, from time immemorial, had lived in a Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ where war of every village against every village, and every tribe against every tribe, often made life ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ all members of a village community (sang) had to be ready, on the instant, for armed combat” (432). Such a caricature of Naga culture easily arises from uninformed, prejudiced Indic/Sanskritic as well as European/missionary perspectives, something that the people of North-East India have been fighting against for well over a century.

It would be interesting to compare this work with other recent broad studies of Indian Christianity, for example Leonard Fernando and G. Gispert-Sauch's Christianity in India: Two Thousand Years of Faith (New Delhi: Viking, 2004) and Rowena Robinson's Christians in India: An Anthropology of Religion (New Delhi: Sage, 2003). The relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and perspectives could be better assessed in such a comparative study. Despite the problems of the work under review, this monumental undertaking further brings to public view how ancient, large, variegated, and vibrant a tradition is Christianity in India today.