Religious Transformation in South Asia: The Meanings of Conversion in Colonial Punjab

by Christopher Harding

Overview

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, urgent and unprecedented demands among oppressed peoples in colonial India drove what came to be called "mass conversion movements" towards a range of Christian denominations, launching a revolution in South Asia's two thousand-year Christian history.

For all the scale, drama, and lasting controversy of a movement that approached half a million members in Punjab alone by the end of the 1930s, much actually depended upon a varied range of tempestuous local relationships between converts and mission personnel, based upon uncertain and constantly evolving terms. Making extensive use of Protestant Evangelical and newly-uncovered Catholic mission sources, Religious Transformation in South Asia explores those relationships to reveal what lay behind the great diversity of social and religious aspirations of converts and mission personnel.

In this highly accessible study, Christopher Harding overturns the one-dimensional Christian missions of popular imagination by analysing the way that social class, theological training, culture, motivation, and personality produced an extraordinary range of presentations of "Christianity" in late colonial Punjab. Punjabi converts themselves were animated by a similarly broad spectrum of expectations and pressures, communicated through informal social networks and representing a brand of subaltern consciousness and resistance rarely considered by mainstream Indian historiography.

These internal dynamics produced a first generation of rural Punjabi Christianity that was locally variable, highly fluid, and conflict-ridden-testament to the ways in which the meanings of conversion were contested by all sides in an encounter with far-reaching implications for the future of Christianity and religious identity in India and Pakistan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199548224
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2008
Series:	Oxford Historical Monographs
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

My research interests lie in that modern meeting and mingling of European and Asian religious cultures which has affected everything from philosophy and popular religious experience on both continents to social work and policy, political ideology, and ideas about mental and spiritual health. Following many months of archival research and field work in India, Europe, and the UK, and the successful examination of my thesis, I went to live in Japan from September 2004 on a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship to begin comparative South Asia - Japan research alongside intensive language and journalistic training. I returned to the UK two years later, towards the end of 2006, to begin my current post at Edinburgh University, where I teach a range of courses on South Asia and Japan.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. The Meaning of Uplift in Punjab2. British Evangelicals vs. Belgian Catholics: Two Christianities Take Root in Punjab3. The Communication of Christianity4. Living in New Traditions5. Visions of the Future: the Canal Colonies and the Christian Village Experiment6. Conclusion