The process by which people turned Christian was primarily a by-product of indigenous rather than foreign agency; moreover, this was most pronounced at the lowest margins of society or in remote frontier regions of the subcontinent—as indeed in the British Empire as a whole. (See p. 8.) However, this did not prevent Western missionary societies from regarding India, along with China, as the great prizes for global evangelical activity. Consequently, in the decades after 1813, when the ban on admission to Company-ruled territories was lifted, inflows of overseas missionaries grew from a trickle to a flood. What so many missionaries accomplished is open to question. Most were not at the cutting edge of conversion movements. Not a single major movement was ever initiated by a foreign missionary. Their principal importance lay in their provision of institutional support in the form of seminaries, schools, and hospitals. However, the overseas missionary presence fuelled vexing denominational rivalries and quarrels over ecclesiastical authority.
To avoid endless conflicts over jurisdictions, inter-mission conferences led to a series of gentlemen’s agreements, called ‘comity’. No missionary was to work in territory already staked out by another mission. The result was a patchwork of contiguous and overlapping fields defined through a series of conferences: a General Conference of Bengal Protestant Missionaries in 1855, a South India Missionary Conference in 1858, and the Bangalore Conference of 1879. The Fourth Decennial Indian Missionary Conference, more elaborate and carefully prepared, assembled 160 delegates from twenty-six societies. Of course, there were always large numbers of missionaries from non-mainstream societies or faith missions, not to mention Catholics, who never participated in these ‘ecumenical’ events. Missions of Lutherans, Free Church missions, Plymouth Brethren, Salvation Army, Pentecostals, and faith societies of various kinds never agreed with comity. At the heart of many discords were relations between those Anglican societies committed to Anglo-Catholic ideas of hierarchy and establishment and other missions. (See pp. 57-58.) Many of the issues at stake were highlighted in the Rhenius affair.
At the time when Tirunelvali country was caught up in its remarkable expansion, the CMS dismissed Karl Rhenius and replaced him with two new missionaries. Reasons for this abrupt action lay in a new ethos reflecting new ecclesiastical aspirations then rising among some Anglicans. During the eighteenth century a triangular alliance between Halle, Copenhagen, and London had existed. C. F. Schwartz, the Halle-trained Prussian who worked in the Danish Mission supported by the English SPCK, epitomized a ‘soft’ or informal ecumenicity. But in the 1820s the fading SPCK turned its work in India over to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the CMS. Tamil Christians leading the social revolution in Tirunelvali had little idea of how this change was straining relations between Rhenius and Anglican authorities. The entire movement in Tirunelvali, depending almost entirely upon locally trained pairs of ordained ‘pilgrims’, who, like Schwartz’s ‘helpers’ fifty years earlier, carried the gospel to every village, rested on an ‘open’ ecclesiology. Tensions between Rhenius and the CMS increased after the arrival of Daniel Wilson as the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta. This first metropolitan, with a domain stretching to Australia, asserted claims to authority over all Anglican missionaries. When he rejected Tamils, whom Rhenius had recently ordained, for failing to conform, Rhenius published a pamphlet lamenting the imposition of Anglican forms upon Indian Christians. In 1835 the CMS Directors summarily declared the Society’s connection with Rhenius at an end.
Rhenius at first withdrew to Madras. But the obvious distress caused by his dismissal among Tirunelvali congregations drew him to return. He struggled on with funds from supporters in India, Europe, and America until his death in 1838. The Anglican takeover of an indigenous movement arising from the initiative of Tamil disciples of Schwartz fifty years earlier and rekindled by Rhenius’s followers raised an international furore that put Anglican missionaries on the defensive. A war of pamphlets continued for two decades, while Tirunelvali churches continued to grow along with Rhenius’s posthumous stature as God’s heroic ‘Apostle to Tirunelvali’.
But, even as other mission societies became embroiled in this affair, a new kind of phenomenon appeared. This was the Melpakkathar, a ‘Hindu Christian’ movement that broke away from all European connections, blaming Anglican machinations for Rhenius’s death. A precursor of later nationalisms, the Melpakkathar was a reaction to ecclesiastical missionary ‘colonialism’. The Rhenius affair and its aftermath caused continuing regret among Anglicans. Robert Caldwell of the SPG, a renowned missionary-scholar who became one of the twin suffragan bishops in Tirunelvali, lamented that ‘Americans and the Germans [had done] far more for India, proportionately to their interest in it, than [was] being done by English churchmen.’ Statistics for 1852 showed ninety-nine Germans (many under Anglican societies) and sixty-seven Americans against only 138 Anglicans, not counting English Dissenters and Scottish or Welsh missionaries in India and Ceylon. This Caldwell saw as a ‘national disgrace’. Lamenting that ‘the zeal of the Germans for the evangelisation of India puts us to still greater shame’ and that ‘the Germans know about the antiquities of India... better than we do’, Caldwell anticipated an Anglo-German rivalry that would haunt later missionary movements.
Another controversial intervention by the Bishop of Calcutta concerned caste distinctions in church. Shortly before his death Bishop Reginald Heber (1823-7) had defended caste-segregated public worship from missionary attacks, arguing that Indian Christians of different castes who sat separately were no worse than Christian masters and slaves in America or Christian gentry and servants in Europe who sat and worshipped separately.
Bishop Wilson reversed that position by pronouncing a ban on caste discrimination in Vepery, on 12 February 1834. When Paraiyar Christians were ordered to sit on grass mats on the Vellalar side of the sanctuary, Vellalars abandoned the building and withdrew their children from the school. Later 700 of them were punished by excommunication for refusing the common cup and common bread of the Eucharist. Three thousand more in Thanjavur suffered the same. The District Magistrate of Thanjavur was asked to flog ‘Hindu Christians’ for refusing to abandon caste strictures, so that one required ‘professional assistance of the Surgeon’. Petitions against missionary intrusions described humiliations, fines, imprisonments, and beatings. Indian Christians found themselves marginalized and oppressed. Like the non-Christians surrounding them, Indian Christians resented these forms of domination.
Caste was not just a simple matter of birth (jati). As Vellalar Christians, Muttusami Pillai and Vedanayakam Sastri remarked that being ‘Christian’ was not a mere abstraction. Each Christian belonged to a family and a community on earth—with locality and speciWcity, face and name, jati and blood (vamsha, ‘lineage’), tongue and taste. Jati, caste, intelligence, language, pollution, social ranking, and status were anything but common. At the ‘Lord’s Table’ different beings could only ‘sit together separately’. They could still enjoy ‘spiritual unity’ within contexts of social diversity where different peoples lived differently and separately, enjoying different status, wealth, and wisdom. Christians should be free to organize themselves according to earth-bound resources and distinctions, whether of caste (India) or class (Europe). However, new and radical ideas from America and Europe had altered aspirations of missionaries in India. These now sought to impose equality, trying to mix cream with milk. They were calling for all to worship together, occupying the same seats, eating together from the same dish, drinking together from the same cup, singing together the same songs, studying together in the same schoolrooms, working together in the same fields, but wedding persons of different birth.
Thus, after a century of independence, Tamil evangelical Lutherans in Pietist congregations found themselves ‘converted’ overnight into Anglican Protestants—forced to read strange words (different translations), sing strange songs, and recite strange chants from an unknown Book of Common Prayer. At the same time, relations between the Anglican establishment and the Government of India were also turbulent. Bishop Wilson’s scoldings of the Government for interfering ‘in purely spiritual matters’ were roundly rebuffed.
Eventually, Vedanayakam Sastri, the most renowned Tamil evangelical of Thanajvur, who had run the school system for many years and whose status as former poet laureate in the durbar had brought glory to the entire community, was summarily dismissed. The outraged community, complaining to the Governor of Madras, accused the new missionaries of committing four cruelties: (1) tampering with Tamil Scripture by replacing old versions with their own; (2) forcing integration of all Christians into one caste and excommunicating from the Eucharist all who refused to comply; (3) prohibiting flowers for festivals, weddings, and funerals; and (4) removing Tamil lyrics and Tamil music from worship. When George Uglow Pope and other high-church (SPG) missionaries, attempting to ‘reform’ the schools that Schwartz had founded, where Vedanayakam Sastri had taught for fifty years, had even asked officials to flog ‘Hindu Christians’ for refusing to heed ‘Church’ commands, their actions damaged relations for generations thereafter.
But the most audacious action of the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta was his attempt to compel Thomas Christians of Travancore to conform to Anglicanism. They saw themselves as far more ancient than the Church of England. ‘Hindu’ in culture, Christian in faith, and Syrian in polity, rituals, and doctrines, they traced their origins to the Apostle Thomas’s arrival at Malankara in ad 52. Formerly merchant-warriors who wore tonsures like Nayars and Brahmans, occupied tharavad houses, avoided the pollution of interdining, intermarriage, or disposal of their dead, and tied thalis on the necks of their brides along with marriage cloths, Malankara Nazaranis were landed aristocrats. Their priesthood was hereditary, with nephews succeeding uncles. Some lineages (vamshavalis) even claimed descent from Brahman converts of the Apostle, going as far back as seventy or more generations. Patriarchs of Antioch and Babylon had long vied for ecclesiastical sway over them. While Thomas Christians themselves cared little about doctrinal disputes, whether Diophysite (Nestorian) or Monophysite (Jacobite, Jakoba), the community’s culture had been all but hermetically sealed for a thousand years. The Portuguese, initially welcomed as allies, had aroused resentment when their Estado da India tried to impose Catholic hegemony at the Synod of Udayamperur (Diamper) in 1599. The Archbishop of Goa, Alexius de Menezes, had cast aside Syrian institutions and burned Syrian libraries. But resistance to Catholic domination persisted. Then, in 1653, a solemn assembly of kattanars (priests within the Thomas Christian Community) at Koonen Cross (Koonen Kurisu) had consecrated their own native Indian priesthood. Then, shortly after the Dutch conquest of Cochin had dramatically improved their situation, a Jakoba metran (bishop within the Thomas Christian community) sent by the Catholicos of Antioch (then in Debhikr) had claimed ecclesiastical supremacy. Struggles between Antioch and Babylon, as between Orthodox Syrians and Roman Catholics, had been endemic ever after.
The first Company Residents in Travancore, Colin Macaulay (1800-10) and Sir John Munro (1811-19) were aggressively evangelical. When troops suppressed insurgencies and ‘rescued’ the Maharaja, Raja Rama Varma made Munro his diwan (chief minister). With Varma’s death in 1814, Munro became virtual ruler, and displayed a partiality towards Thomas Christians that would have brought reprimands elsewhere in India. Christians, freed from compulsory service, were appointed to judgeships. Malayalam translations of Scripture were printed and placed in each church. On lands given by the Parvati-Rani, a seminary for Syrian priests was established in Kottayam. By 1816 pastors hd been brought under instruction, both in Malayalam and in Syriac; and the Metran and CMS missionaries had taken up residence at the seminary. When, in 1816, Mar Dionysius II also died, Munro tried to influence the succession. The new Metran, Punnathra George Kattanar, consecrated as Mar Dionysius III, then convened the Synod of Mavalikkara (1818). With missionaries sitting on each side, he told the assembled kattanars that henceforth all ceremonies, doctrines, and rites were to conform with Scripture (as interpreted by missionaries). Konallu, a leading malpan (‘instructor’), stood up to warn that the changes were too rapid. Already, due to missionary pressure, too many schools had been opened, clergy had been made to marry, images had been removed, and the reading of Scripture each Sunday in Malayalam had become almost mandatory.
After the retirement of Munro in 1820 relations deteriorated—both between Hindus and Christians, and between Anglican missionaries and Syrian clergy. Hindus turned their resentments upon both Thomas Christians and missionaries. After Mar Dionysius III died in 1825 and Philipose Malpan was elected as Mar Dionysius IV, Christians lost their government positions. The new Resident was not sympathetic; and even as fresh quarrels broke out between Malankara and Antioch, with opposed parties of Thomas Christians claiming Patriarchal support, resentments against missionary interference boiled over. The conciliatory Bishop Heber having died, Bishop Daniel Wilson came to Travancore and took a harder line. He so outraged the community with his presumptions that, at the Mavalikkara Assembly in 1836, they totally rejected Anglican ecclesiastical authority and reaffirmed their ancient tradition. All formal connections between Thomas Christians and Anglicans abruptly ended, with struggles over Kottayam property henceforth aggravating the rupture.
Thus, after three decades of Anglo-Syrian collaboration, two evangelical groups of Thomas Christians emerged: an insignificant Anglican branch tied to the CMS, and a much larger branch that stayed staunchly within the Thomas Christian tradition. While fierce battles continued to rage over doctrine and leadership, the dominant Thomas Church gradually grafted reform doctrines onto ancient institutions. Hostility to Anglican domination never extinguished reform within the Church. New schools continued to multiply, and literacy increased. After 1888, when the Mar Thoma Evangelistic Association was founded, its missionaries reached out to lower-caste peoples, ashram-like settlements were established, and Maraman, in Kerala, became famous for its great annual conventions.