ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses Padmanji’s autobiographic self-image as masculine and privileged, making Padmanji’s conversion more than just a story of how he acquired “stigmata”. Padmanji’s autobiography is also a story of how these stigmata became celebrated due to his affluence and privilege, a saga of ceaseless educational success, exotic travels, and scintillating social relationships with equals and mentors. Padmanji continued intensifying this privilege by framing his conversion journey as a righteous spiritual marker of holy, celebrated, and saintly status, furthermore describing his post-conversion life as blessed and devoid of complicated suffering. A fundamental element of Padmanji’s thoughts about conversion, “heathenism”, and Protestant conviction lay in his social privilege. Padmanji belonged to a well-to-do family, receiving educational opportunities far beyond an average Indian, and certainly beyond those available to rural, lower-caste converts. This enabled him to access a different range of opportunities that shaped his own post-conversion social and familial interaction with Hindus.