ABSTRACT
In recent studies on Christian missions in India, the emphasis has been on the way Christian rituals either merged with or supplanted the existing rituals, and on how these rituals mirrored the religious and social relationship between mission and congregation. 1 The emphasis on rituals is a legacy from the social anthropologists who have been empirically and theoretically the most prominent in the study of local patterns of authority and in the study of religious identity. Only in very few cases, however, has this extensive knowledge of rituals and socio-religious identity been applied to the study of missions. Louis Dumont for instance treats the question of the caste system in groups which have converted to Christianity rather superficially, claiming that:
Adherence to a monotheistic and egalitarian religion is not enough, even after several generations, to lead to the disappearance of the fundamental attitudes on which the caste system is based … In short, it shows the vitality of caste attitudes: they have survived a partial change in the set of beliefs, and an imported religious belief, whose ideological implications remain little developed, has been impotent against them. 2
