ABSTRACT
The encounter of non-Western societies with Christianity is often viewed as inextricably bound up with the spread of colonial power. Christian converts are perceived as living firmly within the orbit of the mission’s influence, decultured and alienated from their religious and cultural roots. Symbolized by its Europeanstyle churches, Western clerical dress and liturgy, Christianity in India has also been judged as a legacy of the colonial past. Many Indian Christian thinkers today within both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches share this concern about cultural rootlessness and are anxious to free the church from its colonial heritage and missionary paternalism, and to develop a truly Indian form of Christian spirituality, worship and church organization. Such thinking also reflects wider changes in the church worldwide. The second Vatican councils, for example, held between 1962 and 1965, introduced a number of reforms into the Roman Catholic Church which recast ecclesiastical thinking on the relationship between Christian faith and local culture. These now endorse and encourage moves to indigenize or ‘inculturate’ theology, forms of worship, liturgy or architecture and to initiate inter-faith dialogue. 1
The assumption that Christianity will supplant local systems of belief and ritual is part of a wider view of colonial experience as ‘modernization’, which portrays subject groups as progressively absorbed into dominant colonial cultures. This view is revised in several recent studies which attempt a writing of mission history from the point of view of the missionized themselves (for example, Bayly 1989; Comaroff 1985). The image of the passive proselyte is replaced with a view of converts as active creators and manipulators of symbolic and ritual systems which serve indigenous social and political ends. Rather than transforming local practice the missionary is, through complex exchanges, often unwittingly drawn into these systems. This chapter describes such a context and examines the strategies by which both missionaries and local Christians have used local ritual systems to serve often very different agendas.
