Over the years Christian movements fared better in areas outside the direct authority of the Raj. Beginning in south India, Christianity spread from Tranquebar to Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, Tirunelvali, and thence to South Travancore (Tiruvanthapuram). By the late nineteenth century Christianity had spread slowly and unevenly northwards, culminating in the wholesale conversion of tribal peoples in mountains surrounding the Assam valley in north-east India.
In the century after the arrival of Royal Danish Halle Pietist missionaries in 1706, Vellalar Christian disciples from Tranquebar and Thanjavur spread a network of chapel schools across south India. Tamil leaders initiated each expansion, which, after decades of incubation, led to movements among lower-caste peoples. ‘Hindu Christians’ of Thanjavur provide a lens through which to comprehend what later happened among lower-caste Christians. The most renowned Thanjavur Christian was Vedanayakam (Pillai) Sastriar (1773-1864), who became a master teacher and writer. Schools he served, supported by rajas of Thanjavur, Shivaganga, and Ramnad, became so famous that Company directors subsidized them. Prominent Maratha Brahmans vied to have their sons enrolled. The Tamil-English curriculum provided learning beyond anything available elsewhere in India. The Saraswati Mahal Library, with its laboratory and ‘Cabinet of Wonders’, epitomized the Enlightenment. Vedanayakam, with reverence for Cankam culture, founded modem Tamil literature. His lyric verses extolled wonders of God’s grace and wonders of science as revealed in the stars of the sky, beasts and birds of the held, cities of the world (in America, Asia, and Europe), and absurdities of inhuman behaviour. His old fellow classmate Serfoji, the Maharaja of Thanjavur, made him ‘poet laureate’ (affixing Sastriar to his name).
Christianity also took root in Tirunelvali during the 1760s, before the establishment of Company rule, when Savarimuthu Pillai, an ex-sepoy, and Rasa Clarinda, an affluent Brahmin widow, opened a chapel-school in Palayamkottai. Twenty years later Satyanathan Pillai became the first pastor-missionary of a tiny Christian community. David Sundaranandam, a Nadar (formerly Shanar) convert trained in Thanjavur, was sent as a missionary to his own people in the late 1790s. When whole villages of Nadars turned temples into chapel-school halls, they aroused the wrath of local landlords and warlords (palaiyakarrars). Chapel schools were destroyed, books were burned, and thousands lost their homes. Inspired by biblical precedents, David Sundaranandam established a ‘village of refuge’. This was so successful that many similar settlements were established over the next century. After 1806 this fledgling community lost most of its leaders and continued to struggle until it caught the attention of James Hough, a military chaplain brought into Company service by the Claphamite lobby. Struck by the phenomenon of ardent hymn-singing in Tamil, he asked for help from the Church Missionary Society (CMS), who responded by sending Karl Rhenius, a brilliant if fiery Prussian military veteran with Moravian convictions, who soon became a heroic figure among Christians of Tirunelvali.
Rhenius encouraged, instructed, trained, translated, and held dramatic public debates. His disciples, known as pilgrims, fanned out; thousands, again whole villages, turned Christian. The community doubled and trebled in size each decade thereafter. As congregations proliferated, so did chapel schools and self-help societies, with missions for the homeless, widows, and orphans. Rhenius’s wife, a Ceylon-born Tamil speaker of Dutch extraction, ran schools for girls and women, teaching basic literacy and home health— setting a pattern that would soon be followed elsewhere. Teacher shortages led to recruitment of Catholics and non-Christians, some of whom also converted. High schools, colleges and seminaries, and hospitals sprang into existence as Tirunelvali society was transformed. Again and again violent opposition occurred. Landed gentry (zamindars) and dominant religious figures (pandarams) mounted sporadic persecutions, riots, and attacks upon Christian villages. As early as 1828 a voluntary society called the Vibuthi Sangam, or Ashes Society, modelled on local Christian societies, organized efforts to thwart mass conversions. Company officials were called in to keep the peace, and missionaries were blamed for causing trouble. Local court decisions were appealed to the High Court in Madras during the 1840s. Tirunelvali Christianity became a dominant regional culture, and a unique kind of ‘Hindu Christian’ communalism developed.
Christian expansion into south Travancore began with Vedamanickam. Converted in Thanjavur while on a pilgrimage in 1799, he brought his new faith back to Mylaudy, his home village. There his success in gaining a following of several hundred provoked persecutions. While returning to Thanjavur for help, he met William Tobias Ringeltaube. This zealous German of the London Missionary Society (LMS), then working among Nadars in Nagarkoil, accompanied Vedamanickam to his home. Within the steeply structured agrarian society of Travancore, the very existence of this small Christian community was an offence. Caste people, landlords who were Brahmans, Nayars, and Thomas Christians, were not prepared to let ‘soil slaves’ take liberties. That polluted people dared to declare a new faith was enough to provoke beatings and seizures. Sons were taken for corvee labour and daughters for worse purposes. Women daring to clothe their bosoms were flogged. Pukka houses were pulled down, chapel schools burned, teachers imprisoned, and sabbath worship denied.
Eventually, after an incubation of fifty years, radical movements of conversion broke out. People in several communities, from non-slave castes and slave castes alike, turned Christian. Desperation, and the possibility of liberation from demons, fear, and bondage, drove these movements. Each movement began when leaders within a particular caste led their own people into the new faith. Supporting institutions and schools followed, through the assistance of missionaries (LMS, CMS, etc.). These events in turn provoked chain reactions of protest, oppression, and petitions to the authorities. Concerned over mounting disturbances, deaths, and adverse publicity, British authorities in 1855 pressed for abolition of slavery. Brahman-Nayar gentry blamed missionaries. Pressures on the Maharaja mounted when Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, demanded remedial action. As events escalated—with conversions and demands for relief from oppression following each other—leaders within each Christian community became more assertive in opposing missionary paternalism.
Events in Tirunelvali and Travancore set the pattern for what later happened in Telugu country, Karnataka, and places further north. Avarna (‘colourless’) polluting peoples of the lowest castes and adivasi peoples along heavily forested interior frontier escarpments began to respond when members of their own communities became missionaries among them. (See pp. 93-95 and 132-33.) As new Christian communities came into being, missionaries provided educational, medical, and social infrastructures. Away from the big cities and towns, for the most part these institutions were neither Anglican nor British.
Following twenty or thirty years of evangelism, group conversions began in Telugu country during the 1860s when a Madiga-Christian couple heard the gospel message from a relative. After baptism by an American Baptist missionary, they carried the Christian message back to their own community, leading to many conversions—with the baptism of over 2,000 in a single day. Similar movements were observed by American Evangelical Lutherans and Roman Catholics. The success of CMS, Methodist, Plymouth Brethren, and Pentecostal missions demonstrated that receptivity to Christianity did not depend on the denominational or national affiliation. One of the last large movements among Telugu peoples was led by V. S. Azariah, a Nadar missionary from Tirunelvali, Bishop of Dornakal. A nationalist eager for the end of Empire, he epitomized the spirit of later conversion movements that have rapidly multiplied since the nations succeeded the Empire.
Some of the most dramatic religious changes occurred in forested mountains around the territorial edges of Empire and in the interior wilderness areas of the interior. Particularly significant were changes among Naga, Khasi, Mizo, and Garo peoples, as also among the Karens, Chins, and Kachins of Burma. In each instance, after an apparent failure of overseas missionaries, foundations laid in the 1840s brought results thirty years later, when indigenous Christians ventured into the hazardous mountains with the Christian message. American Baptists and Welsh Presbyterians who followed took up the tasks of translating, printing, and teacher training. In the areas now known as Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya, Christianity became the dominant culture, even more than in Tirunelvali. The lion’s work of evangelization was done by indigenous missionaries, each speaking the gospel in his or her own mother tongue. Such events occurred in areas not yet under British rule, backed up by infrastructural aid and support from American or European, Indian, or Welsh missionaries. The intellectual and ideological roots owed at least as much to the American Midwest, Halle, and Herrnhut as to the British Isles.
In the Naga case Godhula, an Assamese Baptist, went up into the Naga Hills, well beyond the reach of imperial rule, and won hearts among the Ao Nagas of ‘Old Molung’. Years later, in 1876, after Ao Nagas had been baptized in the frontier town of Shibsagar, overseas Baptist missionaries joined Godhula, helping to found a fortified village of refuge, and instigating the process which brought translations, printing presses, and schools. Eventually, Ao Naga pastors and teachers, both male and female, launched other movements that spread to Angami and Lotha Nagas. Sema Nagas turned Christian as if by spontaneous combustion—that is, without coming into direct contact with missionaries, Naga or American. They then became the most explosive evangelizing force in the region. (See pp. 93-95 and 141-44.) Although more overseas missionaries came, it was the Nagas themselves who carried on the main work of missionary expansion and whose selfsupporting village congregations backed them. Even after the formation of the Naga Hills District of Assam, the region remained free from direct imperial rule. Naga autonomy, enhanced by military action during the Second World War, ensured that the Nagas would resist direct rule by India. Largely Christian and well educated, they leapfrogged into the modern world, escaping both Sanskritization and Islamization, which had occurred in areas less peripheral to the Empire.
The Naga experience was repeated among Garo, Khasi, Abhor, Mishmi, Lushai, and other peoples surrounding the Assam valley, where the Ahom- Hindu cultural heartland remained largely impervious to Christian influence. This same pattern, to a lesser degree, operated within the interior frontiers of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Orissa, and almost all hill regions. On geopolitical frontiers of South Asia, among adivasi peoples, conversion movements of increasing volume and frequency were led by indigenous leaders, with missionary support coming mainly from non-British missionaries. Across a wide belt of forested mountain areas, from Kanya Kumari up through central India, beyond Assam, and across Burma to Thailand, conversions occurred among hundreds of separate peoples, none of whom had ever been Sanskritized or Islamicized. Having led precarious existences marked by fear and insecurity, they reinterpreted the Christian message to fit local conditions. Mission-based educational and health services reached hitherto neglected or oppressed peoples: adivasi and outcasts—the impoverished, impaired, and disease-stricken. People in these areas enthusiastically welcomed the revolutionary idea that all men, women, and children were equal in the eyes of the law. It is not surprising that many of the newly literate Christians went on to higher education and then joined radical movements.