Race, Authority and Conflict in the Indian Church

Abstract

It is impossible not to notice that the two rival ‘outside’ participants in Indian nationalism, Charles Andrews and Leonard Elmhirst, had to step out of the domain of Christian missions in order to take up their new mantles as servants of the Indian nation. Skill-sharing across a diverse, even conflicting spectrum of religious and political hues was indeed a reality, but the boundaries imposed by organized Christianity were equally substantive. These boundaries included those imposed by law: other scholars have pointed out how, in the twentieth-century, the British Government of India required missionaries to sign a pledge committing themselves to refrain from involvement in politics, especially subversive politics. The burden of this pledge was passed on to Indian employees of missions, restricting their ability to participate in nationalist politics,⁶⁶¹ while they remained under the authority of the Christian missions. Both Andrews and Elmhirst did in fact remove themselves from the control of such authority, but their trajectories were exceptional. This chapter will discuss the structure of religious authority that constrained and shaped the opinions of most Christians in India in our period, both Indians, and others. In doing so, it will reopen the issues raised in Chapter 2, where we noted that Christian churches were part of a spectrum of religious institutions in India, which were all undergoing rapid reorganization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was suggested there that the specificity of Christian religious authority in this period was its expression as a racial hierarchy; it is to this distinctive experience of Christians that this chapter will return.