ABSTRACT
The earliest Christian society may well have been egalitarian in some respects, at least as far as property was concerned. India, however, was not a “Christian nation”, and the desiderata of Christian Chartism clearly could not be applied across the board, in the community as a whole. In 1787 Schwartz reported that, as far as the congregations in Tanjore and Tranquebar were concerned, it had become the custom for men and women of the higher castes to sit together on one side of the church, with men and women of the outcaste groups on the other. Nineteenth-century Neo-Lutheranism was a complex phenomenon, passionate both in its affirmations and its antipathies. In it, religious, social and political elements were tightly interwoven. The Neo-Lutherans of Saxony established a tiny missionary seminary in Dresden in 1836. The Tranquebar connection was deliberate. It had been to Tranquebar that the first Lutheran missionaries had come in 1706.
