ABSTRACT
Christian respondents to Hindu narratives of the missionary centuries sometimes sidetrack certain vital questions by seeking to make a distinction between forced conversion and current activities in the fields of interreligious dialogue, healthcare, education. Hindu-Christian polemical contexts as mutually opposed, a close examination of these terms shows that they are in fact dialectically entangled. Consider the following three statements, from the perspectives of metaphysical naturalism (MN), mainstream Christian theology (CT), and classical Advaita (CA) respectively. In contrast to certain strands of postcolonial literature which do not sufficiently emphasise native agency, they underscore the embattled position of missionaries from the start as they had to face a Hindu backlash in the form of a 'neo-Hinduism' or 'higher Hinduism' which claimed to encompass the 'lower' truths of religions as Christianity itself. In short, Hinduism is a complex, multi-stranded, open-ended process that has developed by responding to various social, political, and economic conditions, some of which provided by the circumstances of colonialism.
