The publication of a number of books incorporating “the Idea of India” into
their title recent times is indicative that this idea has been in a crisis for
a while. Carpenters and Kings is one
more response to this crisis of India, dealing with an oft-ignored population
group. In an environment where the Hindu Right seeks to suggest the foreignness
of Christianity and Islam in India, this book seeks to “set the record
straight” and demonstrate that the history of Christianity in India is a nearly
two-millennia-long story of great complexity. Divided into three sections that
deal with Antiquity, the Medieval period, and finally the colonial, Siddhartha
Sarma’s book admirably demonstrates that Christianity was present in India from
its very inception.
Sarma writes that Christianity in India predated the conversion of the
Syrian Christians who claim to be the first Christians in the subcontinent
converted from local groups. Sarma points out that Christianity’s emergence was
rather the result of the Gospel taking root among Jewish communities of the western
coastal region, who may not have consciously broken from the religion of their
ancestors.
The presence of these communities was the result of a network of
Greek-speaking traders linking the subcontinent’s maritime commerce with Egypt,
Persia, and Rome. Sarma´s book further challenges the popularly-held idea that
the Latin Church, or the Church of Rome, was first established in the
subcontinent via the Portuguese. Rather, Sarma writes, it was through the
efforts of the Franciscan Giovanni of Montecorvino in the late 1200s, who,
among other things, established a church at the tomb held to be that of St.
Thomas in Mylapore. Sarma uses these facts to affirm that the subcontinent has “never
been a land for a single people, or culture or religion” but populated by a
diversity of groups, transient and settled, which were always in conversation
with one another.
Carpenters and Kings is clearly a political history, locating early
Christianity in the subcontinent among political processes, both local and
global, be it Greek trade networks, the assertion of the Mongols, the rise of
the Arabs, or the expansion of Western Europe. By dealing with the councils of
Nicaea, Chalcedon, or the heresy of Manichaeism Sarma demonstrates that to
explain contemporary Christianity in India it is necessary to go into the very
foundations of the religion, and be familiar with the theological discussions
within Christianity across the world. Given his desire to stress the
foundational nature of dialogue to the idea of India, in various chapters Sarma
stresses intercontinental and intercultural dialogues, pointing, for example in
the chapter titled “The Fruits of the Wisdom Tree”, which discusses the legend
of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat, to how the subcontinent impressed on
Western Christianity.
Sarma is not focused only on how the East influenced the West and Christianity,
however. His chapter “The Forge of the World” refers to how Tibetan Buddhism,
in particular, seems to have interacted with Christ and Nestorian Christianity.
The section that deals with the medieval world references in how the period of
the Crusader states in the Middle East saw conversations between Franks and
Arabs. All in all, the book is a delightful exercise in comparative history,
which Sarma manages in elegant prose.
Nevertheless, the merit of Sarma’s work is compromised by the
methodological nationalism that guides it, i.e. reading the existence of a
contemporary nation-state back into time. For example, despite acknowledging
that the ancients referred to a wide swathe of Asia, and at times even eastern
Africa, as India, Sarma persists in referring to the subcontinent as if it were
the same as the nation-state established in 1947. This ensures a number of
erasures, like that of the contemporary states of Sri Lanka and Nepal which he
subsumes into India, as well as the narratives and agency of Christians in
India.
Another error flowing from Sarma’s methodological nationalism is the
suggestion of the “natural multiculturalism of Indians”, which is not only
mistaken, because it presumes the existence of an Indian society as if the
polities in the subcontinent were an integrated, unified and relatively
homogenous unit, but also a dangerous proposition since it erases the kinds of
violence that have been engaged in but subsequent and prior to the founding of
the Indian state in 1947.
An acknowledgement of caste, the foremost of these subcontinental
violences, is glaringly missing from this reading of subcontinental history.
Illustrating this is Sarma’s description of “an old man who had been born a
Brahmin and had sailed across both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal” and
then converting to Latin Christianity, leading Sarma to surmise that
“apparently, caste restrictions on sea voyages were different in that period,
or perhaps more relaxed.” He ignores the possibility that the brahmin converted
precisely because he had lost caste. Like Islam in the subcontinent,
Christianity has been the refuge of outcastes, and indeed Christians have often
been treated as untouchable.
The presumption of an Indian society pre-existing 1947 does not
strengthen the idea of India, but is in fact at the root of the contemporary
problems that are unfairly laid at the feet of the Hindu Right alone. For
example, this presumption of a society ensures that he argues that “the victory
of the British over the French and their rapid expansion in India in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created its own form of disruption,
which would have a long-term impact on the Indian society that was emerging in
response to modernity”. To look at the British presence and colonialism in
India as an disruption of a natural
evolution is to go back to the same kinds of hiving that Indian,
and Hindu, nationalists engage in, only his are limited to different periods. While
Hindu nationalists see the “Muslims”, who Sarma correctly refers to as
Turko-Afghans, as foreigners, Sarma accepts them as Indian, but excludes those
who arrived in the subcontinent via the European expansion. The burning problem
that contemporary Christians in India face is not that their history is improperly told, rather it is that their
links with Christianity with the colonial period are seen as problematic. What
is required is a history that accepts and naturalizes this, rather than harking
back to an earlier, glorious past.
Unfortunately, having spent more time on antique and medieval
Christianity, this is precisely what Sarma does not do, and perhaps because of
his methodology is unable to do so. Rather, Sarma engages in the kind of
demonization of the Portuguese that is standard fare among nationalist
historians of all shades. His description of the Inquisition as motivated by
the need for “Faith … to be tested on the rack and by the fire” has all the
marks of the dated Protestant and Northern European propaganda against the
Iberian empires.
Given that contemporary Christians in India are held responsible for the
factual and imagined actions of the Inquisition, this period and the
institution deserves a more nuanced treatment, rather than the popular histories
from which he has drawn his references. Such treatment drawing from
contemporary international scholarship and Dalit histories of the subcontinent would have
highlighted that the violence associated with Portuguese presence, inclusive of
the Inquisition, was just one more violence in a subcontinent filled with
violence, but one that allowed hitherto marginalized castes, both Catholic and
otherwise, the options of social mobility.
Contemporary scholarship would have also pointed out that unlike what
Sarma avers, it was not the Danish missionary Ziegenbalg who was one of the
original Orientalists, but in fact, as Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines Županov
have pointed out in their recent book Catholic
Orientalism (2015), it was Catholic missionaries and the Portuguese Estado
da India, that laid the ground work for much that was then later appropriated
without reference by later orientalists. That the empathy required missionaries
to understand local cultures and attempt conversion through dialogue, a
strategy attempted even by the Portuguese supported missionaries is not
recognised, and that the Portuguese, despite their five-century-long stay in
the subcontinent are not seen as belonging speaks of the unfortunate
nationalist lens through which Sarma writes his history of Christianity in
India.
Sarma’s history also suggests that Indian agitation against proselytizing
and conversions were born from Portuguese violence and brutality or proselytism
in the shadow of imperial British support. These suggestions, in fact, share
much with the assumptions that undergird the ironically named Freedom of Religion legislation, which
effectively prohibits conversion to Christianity or Islam. Sensitive histories
of India and the British Indian anti-imperial nationalist struggle have already
pointed out that, on the contrary, the Hindu sensitivity to conversion resulted
from the savarna fear that Hindus
would be reduced to a minority, ideally embodied by Gandhi’s opposition to
separate elections for Dalits. Like Gandhi, Sarma seems to naturalize caste,
suggesting in his brief reference to the Revolt of 1857 that had the British
accommodated caste, things may have been resolved more amicably. Fortunately,
this observation allows us to perceive that the violence in the subcontinent
was the result of caste, rather than solely because of colonial intervention.
Despite its erudition, charming language and noble intentions, Sarma’s
work does not eventually respond to the needs of Christians in India, rather it
reveals that much of the battle around the idea of India is restricted to
ideological battles between savarna
Hindus, some who prefer secular nationalism, others who prefer religious
nationalism. Both, it turns out, in one way or another minoritize non-Hindus.
Carpenters and Kings: Western Christianity and the India of India, Siddhartha Sarma, Hamish Hamilton.
(A version of this text was first published in Scroll on June 2, 2019.)
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