Indian Christians and the Appropriation of Western Civilisation in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

While the western Christian missionary desire to ‘civilise’ Christians from other cultures has been well documented and researched, the desire of local Christians to appropriate western civilisation in the face of missionary resistance to such appropriation has not been critically studied. This article examines debates in nineteenth-century North India missionary conferences between Indian Christians who wanted to adopt many accoutrements of western civilisation, and missionaries who wanted Indian Christians to retain as much of their Indian culture as possible. The article also looks at parallel cases in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that local Christians were extracting and employing materials from European civilisation and culture to create new religious and social identities for themselves in their own particular contexts. This argument provides a counterpoint to Homi Bhabha's view of hybridity and mimicry as processes imposed by foreign western imperial regimes on subject peoples. In the process of creating new communal identities, local Christians clashed with missionaries who were at least partly motivated by the ideal of a native and indigenous church, but who also were worried about losing their authority to westernised Asian and African Christians in the emerging church. Local Christians also clashed with other members of their own society who wanted the former to keep their low social status. Indian Christians’ understandings of what counted as indigenous – which could include foreign influences – differed in significant ways from missionary and some Indian views of indigeneity.