The Subhedar's Son

Abstract

The book The Subhedar’s Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra is based on an annotated translation of the Marathi book Subhedārāchā Putra written in 1895 by Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar. This book explores the experience of Christian conversion among Brahmins from the earliest Anglican missions of the Bombay Presidency (Church Missionary Society) established in the nineteenth century. Investigating how Brahmin converts counterbalanced social and family ostracism and accusations of procolonialism by retaining upper-caste and Marathi identity, this book demonstrates how retaining multiple identities facilitated Christian participation in the early nationalist and reformist intellectual movements of Maharashtra. Further, Brahmin Christians contributed to the burgeoning vernacular literary market as authentic rationalists and modernists, who countered atheism and challenged Hindu social-religious reform as inadequate. Not only did early vernacular Christian literature contribute to the precipitation of knowledge on ‘religion’ in colonial Maharashtra, as sets of dichotomized ideas and identities, but converts also transcended these dichotomized binaries by staging ‘conversion’ as a discursive activity straddling emergent religious, ethnic, and caste differences. Discussing whether nineteenth-century Marathi upper-caste converts constituted an ethnic community, the book explores how interstitial identity between multiple and ascribed ethnicities in colonial Maharashtra produced Brahmin Christians as a political minority whose demographic strength dwindled with the independence of India. Their presence today, elicited only within the history of vernacular literature from nineteenth-century Maharashtra, reveals how converts sought to integrate themselves with both Marathi and Christian society by rearticulating Christian devotion within Indic frameworks of Bhakti.