ABSTRACT
Padmanji was undoubtedly a pioneer of vernacular Christianity and Christian feminism in Maharashtra. An avant-garde, intellectual, and a prolific author, who trailblazed Marathi writings on the subject of religion and women’s reform from a Christian perspective, Padmanji’s interventions produced a new social field in the Bordieuan sense, established and defended by leaders like himself. Padmanji wrote from the subject position of a convert, an opaque interiority of stigma resulting from a journey of truncation with Hinduism, the Hindu body, and the Hindu family. Though Padmanji was deeply influenced by Western education, Scottish missionary mentors, and the Free Church Institution, he was completely self-made as a Christian feminist and social interventionist, interested in effecting a transfer of power and learning from the European Protestant mission to native converts, who were writing and preaching in the vernacular like himself. Significantly ahead of his times and a pioneer of vernacular Christianity, Padmanji, however, despite his huge following, also remained socially isolated.
