ABSTRACT
Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, Christians of the Madras Presidency – both Catholic and Protestant, elite and non-elite – grew increasingly isolated from evolving notions of a Hindu society and nation. The prevailing tendency of existing scholarship has been to attribute this isolation to essential features of the Christian religion or to Western cultural values of foreign missionaries. This study has explored how Brahminical or Sanskritic assumptions of the British Raj were most instrumental in pushing Christians to the margins of the Indian polity. An official knowledge about Christians was constructed around the image of the apostate convert’s severance from the Hindu family. This official knowledge, derived from the colonial period, continues to define the plight of India’s Christians to this day.
