Siddhartha Sarma - Carpenters and Kings: Western Christianity and the Idea of India

T he history of Christianity in India is a nearly two-millennia-long story whose complexity rivals the history of the subcontinent itself. Christians comprise a significant minority population, which has played a key role in the post-Independence period in the country, as have Christian institutions and clergy. In terms of historiography, however, the treatment of Christianity in India has remained problematic. As the political climate of India changes, as the Hindu Right extends its political dominance into the intellectual sphere, and as revisionism becomes a key tool for reimagining Indian history through a very narrow nativist and bigoted lens, it has become increasingly necessary to examine the history of Christianity in India and to set the record straight.

The problem is twofold. For the Right, it is necessary to delegitimize the presence of Islam and Christianity by creating a narrative that claims that the history of these two Abrahamic faiths in the subcontinent was a disruption in an otherwise harmonious society. Therefore the claim that Islam spread primarily by the sword, ignoring the evidence of conversions, such as in eastern Bengal, by charismatic Sufi preachers, or the long history of the faith on the Malabar Coast predating Turkic invasions from the north-west. These aspects of the history of Islam in India are related to complex social changes in geographically disparate regions. However, the Rights narrative views the history of the religion purely in terms of invasion, large-scale violence and conversion by the sword, in an attempt at convincing other communities that the Muslims of the subcontinent, particularly India, are inheritors of a continuous legacy of disruption and turmoil.

Similarly, Christianity is considered an inevitable adjunct to the colonial experience; modern Christians of India are considered descendants of Hindus who chose the religion of colonial administrators, thus simultaneously betraying the faith and culture of their ancestors and the native political structure which resisted colonialism. This narrative often ignores the presence of Syrian Christians in Malabar, a history which is as old as Christianity in Syria, Persia and the eastern Mediterranean. Nor was it only a geographically limited presence, for as this book shows, Christian communities existed and thrived on the Indian coast from Gujarat to Sri Lanka and the Coromandel Coast from a very early period of the Common Era, and had well-established ecclesiastical structures which were seamlessly integrated into Indian societies.

The second problem has been the post-colonial narrative, which has classified Indian Christians into two categories. While acknowledging the Syrians, this narrative has not dealt adequately with how Syrian Christians became an integral part of Indian society, how the West was aware of Christianity in India long before the colonial period, or how Syrians reacted to Portuguese imperialism and attempts by the Catholic Church to enforce communion with the Church of the East in India. One reason for this narrative is the inadequate presence of the history of south India in the overall historiography of the subcontinent, where more emphasis is placed on events and personalities from the Indo-Gangetic region.