Hinduism and Christianity in India

Anand Amaladass SJ, "Mission der Kirche definiert von der Kultur eines Missionslandes: Am Beispiel eines missverstandenen Genies in der Missionsgeschichte Indiens: Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656)" in Glaube in der Welt von Heute: Theologie und Kirche nach dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil: Festschrift für Elmer Klinger, edited by Thomas Franz and Hanjo Sauer (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 2006): vol. 2 Diskursfelder: 306-318.

The “Make Your Own Religion” class project was designed to address a perceived need to introduce more theoretical thinking about religion into a typical religion survey course, and to do so in such a way that students would experience the wonder of theoretical discovery, and through or because of that discovery hopefully both better retain knowledge gained from the project and nurture within themselves the practice of thinking more analytically about religion (and other social and cultural things). Despite a number of challenges and unresolved questions associated with the project, it has proven relatively successful at introducing and provoking theoretical thinking about religion in a compressed period of time, without taking an inordinate number of class periods away from the survey itself. A brief description and analysis of the assignment is followed by four short responses.

Anand Amaladass, "The Writing Catechism and Translation Strategies of Three Jesuits in South India: Henrique Henriques, Roberto de Nobili and Joseph Beschi", in "Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World", eds. Antje Flüchter and Rouven Wirbser (Leiden - Boston: Brill, 2017): 170-194.

Critics of Christianity in India have frequently accused Christianity of being a predatory, imperialistic religion with absolutist tendencies, and have framed Christian evangelism as an aggressive, uncouth act. More recently, however, and in an idiom that resonates with many contemporary Indians, Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930-) has made the more controversial claim that the attempt to convert another person is itself an act of violence. In three parts, the paper 1) describes Dayananda’s claims, while bringing them into conversation with the arguments of earlier critics of Christianity (e.g., Mahatma Gandhi, Sita Ram Goel, Ashok Chowgule, Arun Shourie), 2) analyzes and critique Dayananda’s use of the term
“violence,” and 3) demonstrate how the claim that conversion is an act of violence blurs somewhat easily into a justification of acts of violence against those who attempt to convert others. In the end, I argue that whether Dayananda’s claim that proselytization is a form of violence makes sense depends not only on one’s definition of “violence,” but also on one’s definition of “religion.”

The unfortunate event of the historical intersection of European colonialism and the Christian mission has become problematic for Christian identity in India. While the stark reality of Indian religious plurality has to be adequately addressed, the existing theological responses to religious plurality – Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism - are found to be lacking on either the parameter of establishing the plurality of religions that accounts for parity among religions or the parameter of preserving the particularity of individual religion.
The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and extend the Postliberal/Post-pluralist theological method that employs Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theory as an alternative approach that will establish interfaith relations between Christianity and other Indian religions sans the imperialistic notion. The first chapter discusses the cultural-linguistic model which understands religions as resembling languages and semiotic systems, that shape and mold human experiences within the matrix of cultural and linguistic factors. Religions are conceived as “communal phenomena,” and attempts are made to understand the concrete expressions of an individual faith community in its liturgy, sacraments, rituals and other forms as decisive for shaping their religious experiences. Thus, Lindbeck successfully identifies religions as multiple instances of linguistic/semiotic systems that are characterized by their internal “forms of life.” Within Lindbeck’s methodology, in his attempt to uphold the particularity of Christianity, his conception of religions as “comprehensive interpretive schemes” that emphasizes the “untranslatability” of Christian higher truths into other religious’ idioms is found to be problematic.
The second chapter analyses Hans Frei’s narrative reading of the Scripture as an alternative conception to preserve the particularity of Christianity in the person of Christ, whose identity is established through the narrative, “history-like” depiction of the Gospel stories. This “unsubstitutable” identity of Jesus Christ becomes the “final primacy” criterion for all “particularistic” Christian faith articulations without denying the possibility of other religions’ particular claims.
Further, in the third chapter, Lindbeck’s concepts of “incommensurability,” “untranslatability” are reexamined based on Macintyre’s deflated significance of “incommensurability” and also Homi Bhabha’s conception of Hybridity and Third Space categories. Francis Clooney’s “Comparative Dialogue” was reflected upon as a methodical demonstration of initiating interreligious dialogue between the “incomparable” doctrinal/textual traditions, especially between the Uttara Mimamsa Sutras and Summa Theologiae. Such, beyond a post-pluralistic understanding of comparative dialogues that upholds both the plurality and particularity of all religious traditions can be a useful tool in the hands of the Indian Christian community to seek interreligious harmony and in the process regain their Indian identity.

Nobili, Roberto. "Preaching Wisdom to the Wise: Three Treatises by Robert de Nobili, S.J. Missionary, Scholar and Saint in 17th Century India". Edited by Anand Amaladass and Francis Xavier Clooney. Indian edition; 1st ed. USA, 2000. Chennai: Satya Nilayam Publications, 2005.

In the last decade, the question of multireligious identity has begun to receive academic attention. In particular, scholars are beginning to explore examples of people who have experienced two religious traditions equally seriously – that is, the experience of 'double religious belonging'. This paper reframes, in the light of the notion of double belonging, the lives and experiences of three Roman Catholic priests and monks who moved from Europe to India in the twentieth century and are regarded as 'founders' of the Saccidananda Ashram in South India, while providing insights on how we understand double religious identity and the process of religious identity formation.

As a secular democracy, India’s constitution enshrines relatively robust safeguards for religious equality and freedom. Article 25 provides all citizens the right to “freely profess, practice, and propagate” religion, and avoids assigning to Hinduism any special role or explicit privilege (in contradistinction to the situation with Buddhism in Sri Lanka, for example). Moreover, the Indian government itself has not generally engaged in any systematic or flagrant way in the direct persecution or oppression of its religious minorities.
However, India’s religious minorities do face certain challenges. Among them are several legal and judicial issues. Judicial rulings in independent India have weakened the safeguards of the constitution in several ways, such as when, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court declared that the constitutional right of “propagation” did not include (or protect) the right to intentionally convert another. Similarly, half a dozen Indian states have now passed “Freedom of Religion” laws (called “anti-conversion” laws by their critics) that have been problematically and prejudicially implemented, as has a national anti-defamation law. Additionally, national laws securing reserved seats in Indian legislatures, civil service, and educational institutions for lower-caste Hindus (but not for lower-caste non-Hindus) provide implicit disincentives to lower-caste Hindus considering conversion. Finally, a weak and easily corrupted criminal justice system exacerbates many of these legal issues, and is frequently used by anti-minority actors who exploit the legal ambiguity with regard to religious freedoms in India to harry religious minorities with spurious charges or unlawful imprisonment, thereby undermining the protections that Indian law does afford religious minorities.
In addition to these legal issues, religious minorities in India are occasionally threatened, intimidated, harassed, sexually assaulted, and attacked by their neighbors, in both small-scale, isolated incidents and in the context of large-scale riots. While the perpetrators of these incidents are not state actors, generally speaking, they do in many cases enjoy the explicit or implicit support of local or even national law enforcement and political officials. For example, local, regional, state, and even central governments have been accused, at various times, of intentionally responding slowly, or even inhibiting a police response to instances of anti-minority violence.
The more secular of India’s two dominant political parties, the Indian National Congress (or “Congress”) party, has occasionally been linked to anti-minority activities, most notably in the anti-Sikh bloodletting that took place after the party’s powerful prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Nevertheless, accusations of involvement in anti-minority activities are far more regularly leveled, and justifiably so, at the broad association of nationalist social, religious, and cultural organizations called the Sangh Parivar (or “Sangh”), and at the political party associated with it, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, “Indian People’s Party”). It is for this reason that the BJP’s resounding national electoral victory in late 2014 appears to have emboldened anti-minority social and state actors, and has caused India’s religious minorities a great deal of concern.
In what follows, I provide the minimum amount of historical and contextual information necessary to understand contemporary dynamics at a basic level. After that, I describe the contemporary situation in more detail. In the final section, I provide some recommendations to US foreign policy specialists on how to intervene (and/or not intervene) productively in support of religious freedom and religious minorities in India.

Anand Amaladass SJ, "Die Begegnung zwischen Hinduismus und Christentum in Indien", in "Weltkirche und Weltreligionen: Die Brisanz des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils 40 Jahre nach Nostra aetate", eds. Josef Sinkovits & Ulrich Winkler;
Salzburger Theologische Studien interkulturell 3 (Innsbruck-Wien: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2007): 231-245

आपके सवाल - हमारे जवाब  Apke Sawal - Hamare Jawab  (Anuraj Prakashan 2021). A Hindi translation of Premraj Dharmanand's Your Questions - Our Answers: Answers to 15 Popular Questions Asked by Hindus to Christians (Dehradun: Author, 2003). Both editions are available at Amazon.com

Among the theologies peripheral to our Western orbit, Hindu-Christian theology presents some remarkably interesting features.  In their millennial groundworks we can decipher codes for reinterpreting the Christian faith.  Wilfred’s work—whether in history or contemporary contextual paradigms and theologies—has been of extraordinary help in making the main elements of these foundations clearly accessible to us, allowing us to see where an original reciprocity between Hindu cultures and Christianity is developing.

Pre-publication/un-edited draft: Featured in this chapter are a number of prominent Indian critics of evangelism and conversion to Christianity over roughly the last one hundred years. After briefly covering early twentieth-century figures like Savarkar, Hedgewar, and Golwalkar, the chapter focuses primarily on postcolonial leaders of the last few decades, especially Mohandas Gandhi (who survived just barely into the “postcolonial” era), Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Ashok Chowgule, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, and Radha Rajan. Finally, at the end, to demonstrate the multinational scope of these polemics, I briefly discuss the views of the Hindu American Foundation and Rajiv Malhotra. It is important to note that the critical focus of this chapter’s polemicists differs somewhat from those in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, who tended to focus on perceived religious differences of an ethical, theological, soteriological, or epistemological nature. While such differences remain of concern to the figures featured in this chapter, they tend to focus more on the sociological or political ramifications of those differences, and therefore on the sociological and political manifestations of Christianity in India.

Amaladass, Anand. "Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges: An Appraisal of the Missionary Legacy in India: 20th Anniversary Commemorative Issue of Dharma Deepika: A South Asian Journal of Missiological Research (1995-2015)", eds. Joshua Kalapati, Daniel Jeyaraj, Gabriel Merigala (Chennai: Mylapore Institute for Indigenous Studies - Inter Church Service Association, 2016): 164-182.

A major emphasis for the field of postcolonial studies is to respond to discursive literature centered on European colonization efforts in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific and throughout the world. Many postcolonial scholars have engaged in relocating both their space and place as an answer to the suppression of colonial voices by the dominant colonizer.

Spiritual Care and Counselling, based on Western psychology, was unknown in Asia until the middle of the 20th century.
Then American and Eurpean "Western" psychologists and theologians introduced it in the Philippines, in Japan, in India and Indonesia.
Another research interest coming from the "Western hemisphere" is feminism and research on the social situation of women in Eastern Asina countries.

Co-authored with Michelle Voss Roberts

A volume such as this is valuable as a snapshot of a field at a particular time and place, and the assembling of it provides an opportunity to reflect both on perennial and emerging themes. Under the five headings below, we highlight five of the themes that cut across the various essays in the volume. The meanings of the terms, “Hindu” and “Christian,” in “Hindu-Christian Relations” is a recurrent theme, as are intersectional considerations of caste, race, nationality, and gender, for understanding religious identities and interreligious relations. The enduring legacy of the colonial encounter emerges as a theme across the volume as well, including in the shifting appearances of power and resistance to various forms of hegemony. Two important sites of contestation and controversy, within these shifting constellations of power and resistance, are conversion and the academic study of Hindu traditions itself. Throughout this project, we have endeavored to take seriously the variety of perspectives and voices in both religious traditions. A final theme, then, recognizes the ongoing and fruitful theological exchanges that occur as Hindus and Christians consider, and reconsider, in the presence of one another, questions of human meaning and religious truth.

Under-nuanced and clumsily hypercritical reports like those produced by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom play into and exacerbate concerns about western hegemony and intrusions in Indian affairs, concerns that in turn likely contribute to an increase in the targeted harassment of Christians. Analyses of Hindu-Christian conflict and anti-Christian violence in India that fixate on local Indian religious and ideological matters alone, while ignoring the wider global and historical context in which they exist, are therefore by definition incomplete. Find the full paper at https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/the-complexity-of-anti-christian-violence-in-india/

A lot has been written on Thuggee and nineteenth century British operations against it. Instead of delving directly into either of these two well investigated areas of research, this paper seeks to chart how several nineteenth century British writings exhibit a curious fear of Thug infiltration. Keeping in their minds some actual instances, early British colonial officials worried about the Thugs joining government services under them to survive and sabotage the anti-Thuggee campaign. This paper argues that this apprehension gradually developed into the fantasy of being reverse colonized by the Thugs. Late Victorian writers of fiction fantasized the Thugs invading England, or, what must have been more unnerving to them, converting the Britons themselves to Thugs. Using unpublished official records and literary works as sources, this paper tries to map how colonial anxiety of 'Thug infiltration' originated and later grew into the fantasy of reverse colonization by the Thugs. It also tries to link this to specific historical developments in that period.

A lot has been written on Thuggee and nineteenth century British operations against it. Instead of delving directly into either of these two well investigated areas of research, this paper seeks to chart how several nineteenth century British writings exhibit a curious fear of Thug infiltration. Keeping in their minds some actual instances, early British colonial officials worried about the Thugs joining government services under them to survive and sabotage the anti-Thuggee campaign. This paper argues that this apprehension gradually developed into the fantasy of being reverse colonized by the Thugs. Late Victorian writers of fiction fantasized the Thugs invading England, or, what must have been more unnerving to them, converting the Britons themselves to Thugs. Using unpublished official records and literary works as sources, this paper tries to map how colonial anxiety of ‘Thug infiltration’ originated and later grew into the fantasy of reverse colonization by the Thugs. It also ...

The Indian Government’s open policy on satellite television is attracting a plethora of American-based charismatic television ministries in India. This study, albeit based on preliminary findings from a limited study of church and Hindu community leaders, shows that Charismatic pastors are more positive about Charismatic televangelism than non-Charismatic pastors. Both groups, however, have strong reservations on issues like fundraising, dress code and western dancing. The high-caste Hindus revealed during the research that they were resistant to any form of Christian evangelism including televangelism. Besides caste, class, language and gender, televangelism faces cultural barriers in reaching Indians. The prosperity, success and healing doctrines of Charismatic teaching seem to appeal to Hindus from the middle to lower level economic classes. Concerns have been expressed, however, by Christian leaders that these Hindus who are attracted to Charismatic televangelism may be espousin...

Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, with particular attention to the 2007–2008 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of intergroup conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years?

Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization and, in particular, the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps to provoke. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians.

Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva, or "Hinduness," explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns among some Hindus about the Western sociopolitical order with which they associate global Christianity.

T o start these discussions off, let me share with you a few cursory observations of a philological nature on a Sanskrit word commonly used in the Vedantic tradition, a word that comes close to describing what I regard as a necessary predisposition for doing what this forum invites us to do, which is to "rethink" Hinduism. The word I wish to draw attention to is jijnasa, a desiderative form of the root verb jna, to "know" or "understand." In the Vedantic tradition, salvific knowledge, mokashajnana or muktijnana, isn't for just anyone, isn't a universal entitlement. To qualify for it, one must seek for it single-mindedly, out of an overwhelming sense of urgency, because no other knowledge is more desirable, more salvifically consequential. Jijnasa, of course, isn't the only prerequisite (among other qualifications, one must also have a front-to-back familiarity with the Vedas), but without jijnasa, the predisposition to rigorously rethink the assumptions we routinely make, one might as well stay home (in the idiom of the Indian tradition, as a householder, grhastha), conduct oneself well according to the dharma, pursue the good things of life (artha, wealth, and kama, pleasure), and transmigrate a while longer to realize just how inconsequential all these things really are, compared with salvific knowledge. To repeat, one just isn't ready for Vedanta unless the glint of jijnasa shines in one's eyes. 1