John B. Carman - Christians in South Indian Villages, 1959-2009

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Christians in South Indian Villages, 1959-2009

Decline and Revival in Telangana

John B. Carman & Chilkuri Vasantha Rao

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

Contents

2014 John B. Carman and Chilkuri Vasantha Rao
All rights reserved
Published 2014 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carman, John B.
Christians in South Indian villages, 1959-2009: decline and revival in Telangana /
John B. Carman & Chilkuri Vasantha Rao.
pages cm. (Studies in the History of Christian Missions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8028-7163-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4674-4205-3 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4674-4171-1 (Kindle)
1. Christians India Telengana History 20th century. 2. Christians
India Telengana History 21st century. 3. Telengana (India) Church history
20th century. 4. Telengana (India) Church history 21st century.
I. Vasantha Rao, Chilkuri. II. Title.
DS432.C55C37 2014
275.484 dc23
2014020234

www.eerdmans.com

This project began as a restudy of the Church of South India (CSI) congregations described in Village Christians and Hindu Culture. By the end of that 1959 study, their future seemed uncertain. Would they grow because of many new dramatic conversions, or would they slowly dissolve into the larger Hindu society around them? There was, of course, a third possibility, that they would continue more or less unchanged: each Christian congregation living as a small community in the Dalit hamlet at the edge of a larger village, and also living on a religious edge, on a boundary where the Christians continued to participate both in Christian worship and in Hindu rituals.

As co-author of Village Christians, John Carman twice urged Christian scholars in India to undertake a restudy of the same congregations in order to answer these questions. Finally, in 2008, the opportunity arose for him to undertake such a follow-up, working with Chilkuri Vasantha Rao, professor in the Department of Biblical Studies of the Andhra Christian Theological College (ACTC) in Hyderabad. From May through December 2008, he conducted the initial fieldwork in the Wadiaram pastorate of the CSI Medak Diocese. He was aided by eight students from the diocese, then enrolled at ACTC, who spent most of May visiting villages in the western part of the pastorate where there are or were in the past CSI congregations. Each student was assigned two villages, sometimes gathering information about each Christian family, sometimes talking with elderly members of a congregation no longer functioning, and sometimes interviewing the pastor of an independent church in that village. During the following months, while classes were in session, they met with Vasantha Rao to report on their findings. One of them, Erolla Prabhakar, was able to return to the Wadiaram pastorate several times during the year for additional research. Two years later, in May 2010, the eight students returned to the same villages to seek answers to questions specific to each congregation.

Vasantha Rao spent from May to December in 2008 visiting the same villages and some others, as well as translating and writing up reports conveying the information that he and the students had gathered, which he sent to Carman in numerous email files. In January 2009 Vasantha Rao came to the United States to begin a one-semester appointment as a senior research fellow at Harvard Divinity Schools Center for the Study of World Religions. He and Carman shared the results of both the old and the new studies in a course entitled Christian-Hindu Interaction in Some South Indian Villages. By the end of the semester, the outline of a book was emerging, an outline that has grown and changed during the past five years.

Vasantha Rao returned to full-time teaching at ACTC in June 2009. A year later, he began a four-year term as principal. Since returning to India, he has supervised some additional research by the eight student assistants and translated reports and interviews from Telugu into English. Carman utilized all this material in drafting the chapters of this book. During the past five years, three trips to Hyderabad enabled Carman not only to visit some of the congregations that were being studied, but also to discuss various aspects of the study with Vasantha Rao and the students.

Both Vasantha Rao and Carman, more than a generation apart, spent their early childhoods in Telangana, the part of Andhra Pradesh that was formerly in Hyderabad State. At the time, Carmans father was in charge of the Baptist mission hospital in Hanamakonda, ninety miles northeast of Hyderabad. After fifteen years in the United States and Holland, Carman returned to India for six years as an American Baptist missionary, the first four years affiliated with the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society in Bangalore. From 1963 until his retirement in 2000, he was professor of comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School and for sixteen years was director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. His primary research has been on the South Indian Vaishnava tradition of Ramanuja, which he later compared with conceptions of God in other theistic religions.