Introduction

Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah was the most successful leader of grassroots movements of conversion to Christianity in South Asia during the early twentieth century. He was the first and only native Indian bishop of an Anglican diocese from 1912 until his death in 1945. Azariah was a popular leader in rural Andhra, an esteemed builder of Protestant unification within India, and a pioneer in the Christian ecumenical movement globally. Since Azariah was neither a defender of the old nor an apostle of the new political order, his extraordinarily consistent leadership of locally based religious transformations is simply off the radar screen of the modern university-media complex. Unlike Thomas Carlyle’s heroic figures who changed history by the force of their titanic personalities, Azariah displayed his greatest strength in personal integrity and spiritual consistency. Azariah’s life seems to embody, contain, and sum up many of the difficult tensions of his age between conflicting religious, cultural, and political ideals.