From China we move west this month to India, a country teeming with people – 150 million in 1801 but today, excluding Pakistan and living on the sub-continent, 1,150 million or one eighth of the world’s population – with 150 million expatriates. The 2001 census recorded 2.4% or 28 million Christians but, as will be explained, this could be a misleading figure. This month I want lightly to sketch the Indian culture and its effect on the Christian church there, next month its decline and persecution.
India’s philosophical and spiritual history, 3,500 years in development, is overwhelmingly that of Hinduism, It is a difficult religion to define since it is all embracing and has so many different ways of expression. Mystics seek Pramana or powerful knowledge through self denial and physical self-abuse; there are ideas of Karma, reaping reincarnation according to the fruit of your life; Dharma, accepting your preordained station in life and associated duties; and through Astrology acting out life under auspicious signs and dates. The Vedas, the most sacred texts and rituals, belong to the Brahmins who form the upper, ruling, lay and priestly community in India. Facets that have attracted Westerners are self- realisation through meditation, often with a guru as mentor; seeing everything as divine; doing as little harm as possible; setting spiritual goals by painful disciplined steps or yoga. Some less attractive facets are Krishna and Siva worship, cobra worship, the sub almost Chattel status of women and Sati; seeking involuntary acts under mystic trance and almost any form of idolatry. When asked where Hinduism begins and ends a very able judge replied You can believe anything and be a Hindu – anything from pantheism to atheism – anything provided you don’t reject the rest’.
Hinduism has a genius for all-inclusiveness but life depends on elimination as well as assimilation. Moreover the Hindu caste structure is stultifying: 12% Brahmin [all top jobs], 42% Forward’ Hindus [merchants, small holders], 24% Dalits’ or Untouchables’. Outside the system are 7% tribal people [mostly mountain dwellers], 12% Muslims and perhaps 3% Christians. It is believed St Thomas visited the Punjab in AD51 and was martyred in Madras a year later. The apostle St Bartholomew was sent in AD55, his fate unknown, but in 528 a traveller, Cosmos, reported a Christian presence along the Ganges. Persecuted Christians from Syria settled in South India during the following four centuries. Missionaries arrived from Portugal [1498], Francis Xavier – a Basque [1542] and a Jesuit from Rome [1605].
The East India company curtailed missionary work but in 1833 London lifted restrictions. Faced by the enormity of the task some 350 British missionaries in the mid-nineteenth formed a local-foreign partnership spreading across India to good effect. What they achieved was remarkable. Disciples were made, New Testaments translated [over 40 languages], schools opened, social work begun, laws based on Christian ethics passed. Large groups of people, preponderantly from the most despised segments of Indian life, turned to the Christian faith. Over the years 1870-1935 Christian initiatives were behind TB sanatoria, leper hospitals, widows’ homes, mental institutions, homes for prostitutes, rehabilitation centres for the deaf, dumb or blind people. All this was in contrast to the Hindu tendency to withdraw from social problems and leave lower castes to their appointed lot in life, viewing them as unimportant to the higher caste society. Whatever is told in our schools today, the most Christian and important British legacy to India was, with rare exceptions, a skilled, meritocractic, basically clean civil service and army, clear laws, uncorrupted police and concern for every caste of person.
India’s Christian movement was a force for empowering the poor and needy. The Christian example in treating outcasts as human beings, educating them, fighting for them to have rights and welcoming them into church had a side effect that, while high Brahmins stood aside, liberal Hindu reformers like Rammohun Roy and Gandhi sought likewise to reform Hinduism. The enlightened principles they and Christians similarly taught still inform many in the Indian government today.
Unsurprisingly, as would please Our Lord, the masses who entered Christianity between 1870 and 1930 were, with important exceptions, mainly from the poorest or untouchable’ strata of Indian Society. Many of them saw it as an escape from the cruel, invisible manacle of Dharma. Some Brahmins saw it as a threat, but had to accept it as inaccessible under British rule. Conversions were abundant especially in South India where 2000 schools and colleges, 100 hospitals and 500 foundling hostels were built. There was, to lesser scale, a similar story in north east India, especially amongst its tribal peoples, but considerably less in the Hindu stronghold of the Ganges basin. Nonetheless India’s high caste’ Christian converts were amongst the best educated in the country, illiteracy from Christian schools was unknown. In 1934 an Indian Bishop recorded that many missions across India had been overwhelmed by vibrant Group movements. Christ seemed poised to enter mainstream Indian religion.
Yet it was not to be. There were already discernible fault lines. Some of the locally recruited missionaries 90% of the total, were poorly informed and educated. A minority of converts had only the sketchiest idea of the Gospels. While numerically church attendance and conversions were rapidly expanding, many were fellow travellers seeking benefit rather than faith. Perhaps of greater concern is the Hindu genius for all- inclusiveness. Their obsession in searching for spiritual realities within the framework of their founders age old structures and philosophies has enabled their teachings to absorb some elements of Christian belief but not its teaching of the equality of man or its creed. As I shall attempt to tell next month, there has been a numerical decline in the Indian Christian church which has suffered discriminatory repression and persecution. It may be stronger for this but needs our awareness and prayers.
The Persecuted Church
Anthony Hutton