ABSTRACT
In recent years, India’s Christian minority has come under violent attack by organizations pushing for an officially Hindu nation. In addition to raising questions about nationalism, these attacks have sparked debates over the ethics and politics of religious conversion. What is lacking in today’s conversion debate, however, is a sense of how India’s colonial past has formed the identity categories and viewpoints that all sides take for granted. Conversion, of course, involves a change of religious allegiance. But how did courts of law ever come to distinguish a “Native Christian community” from the rest of “Hindu society?” As simple a matter as this may seem, it often required painstaking interpretation of beliefs, customs and laws of various communities. Furthermore, how did different varieties and classes of Christians adopt, resist or reshape both imperial and nationalist perceptions of their identity? Such questions point to a rich but largely ignored history of Indian Christian engagement with public life, a history that weighs heavily upon current debates over conversion and religious boundaries.
