Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835

Studies in the History of Christian Missions

by D. Dennis Hudson

An informative study of Protestant missions in colonial India. This historical narrative of Protestantism in India records the views of the Tamil-speaking peoples among whom German Pietists worked beginning in 1706. The views recorded here include those of Hindus, Muslims, and Catholics, but special attention is given to Tamils who became Evangelicals. Drawing on concrete historical analysis, Tamil writings, and archival materials, D. Dennis Hudson's work not only illumines a little-known period of religious history but also raises significant questions about the relationship between faith and culture.

Genres: History

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Abhishek]

In a continuation of the religious wars in Europe, the early protestants in India had to contend with not just the heathen other, but also catholics. A lot of their early literature attacks not just the religions of the natives - Saiva, Vaishnava, Islam - but also Catholicism. Many of these early protestants were Velalans, and the church was Lutheran, following Dutch Reformed liturgy. Eventually the Velalans were to develop their own theology. The Velalans were the elite in the South, with access to the king, treasury and lands. They held caste titles such as Pillai, Chetty, Mudaliar etc. They did not see any reason conversion should result in a loss of social status, or changes in what they should eat. The primary impetus driving the need for a Velalan theology was a defense of native practices in opposition to top down enforcement of European values from the Anglican church.

Even if the prohibition on killing and eating cattle and the observance of purity and pollution distinctions among castes had been based on Veda, the Malabarian Evangelicals did not understand them as part of the sacred social order of Dharma. They viewed them instead as secular practices in the category of social custom (valakkam). Still, social custom was to some degree sacred to them, because it was the fabric that held Tamil society together, and God, they believed as Lutherans, is the one who ordains the good order of any society.

Vedanayagam Shastri, a contemporary of Tyagaraja, was a Pietist Lutheran and a great Carnatic music innovator. He along with the Tanjore evangelicals were responsible for articulating a theology that was accepting of jati. In the prime years of his life, he composed music propagating the peitest faith and of all things, tearing down the catholic one. The evangelicals regarded the catholics as no better than heathens - the Saivas and Vaishnavas (as an aside, the Tamils regarded the Christians as heathens, each using the same word to describe the other - ajnana). Sastri’s Bethlehem Kuruvanci was an sustained assault on "popery”. The same Sastri, when the schism did arrive in the Tanjore in his later years, thanks to missionaries from the Anglican church, used Beschi and Nobili, catholics infamous for going native, to augment his arguments for accepting jati within the church.

…the four classes (varna) were ways to organize many different castes and lineages (jati, kulam) into groups, with the unnamed cluster of ‘alien’ castes constituting ‘the fifth’ standing outside. But, Sastri noted, when the Europeans used that model, they used the word ‘Paraya’ (Paraiyan, ‘Pariah’) to designate the entire ‘fifth class.’ By talking of five varnas or classes, the Europeans implied that there was no distinction between ur and ceri, between ‘Tamilians’ and ‘aliens’; and that there is only a single Malabarian society divided hierarchically into five classes. Moreover, by lumping the ‘right hand’ and ‘left hand’ groupings of castes together as collective ‘untouchables’, the Europeans obscured the significant caste distinctions those people made among themselves. Furthermore, the Europeans neglected to include themselves (and the ‘Portuguese’) in the classification.

Dennis Hudson’s work is invaluable not just for tracing protestant developments in the early years in India, but also for constructing the native, elite worldview, of Ur and Cheri, of valakkam, and of something any Tamil would still know - the concept of echchil. As should be evident from the above excerpt, even the identity of being a Tamil, as far as Velalans were concerned, applied only to themselves. The experience of the protestant church is not unique. Dennis Hudson finds parallels with other Indian streams of religious thought that had an egalitarian basis, but accepting of jati distinctions. Chaitanya Vaishnavas of 16th century Bengal quite consciously maintained a ‘two tiered stance toward social relationships’, behaving in an egalitarian manner with each other in devotional ceremonial situations and according to Dharma distinctions with each other elsewhere. There’s similar accommodation in the Sikhs.

[Rick Sam]

Thorough, Detailed, Scholarly work about Religious History in Tamil Nadu.

Specifically, Protestantism, subset of Christianity in Tamil Nadu.

Foremost among, Protestants was Christian Friedrich Schwartz, a Polyglot.

He left with impeccable character.

I'd recommend to anyone, who wants to know about Religious History in Tamil Nadu.

Deus Vult,
Gottfried

[Gui]

good