All Indian Christians knew that their religious identity could never supersede other identities that were grounded in history and culture. Traces of this dilemma never disappeared. On one hand, ceaselessly revolving around each inner conflict—Indian or Westerner, Catholic or evangelical, Anglican or Nonconformist (Dissenter), Mar Thoma (Syrian) or Nazarani, Jakoba or Nestorian, Brahman or Vallalar or Nadar, conservative or liberal—was the problem of birth or caste (jati). The historical and theological dimensions of this problem remain to this day. Unity and diversity, polarities and contradictions, acceptance of a common humanity without repudiation of lineage distinctions, have persisted everywhere—before, during, and after Empire.
Christians in India suffer a double dependency, a dual identity that seems indelible. On the other hand, often hovering over Indian Christians was the obvious ‘foreignness’ of missionaries—aliens, agents of change, disturbers of the status quo. Clashes between alien and indigenous, foreign and native, were more than religious or theological. They were cultural, political, and psychological. When Christians, both alien and native, were opposed by political regimes, they found common ground and mutual support. But when alien Christians, whether missionaries or officials, found common ground, Indian Christians suffered colonial domination. Yet, the work of missionaries—agents belonging to hundreds of missionary societies from overseas—rarely benefited from colonialism. Pre-colonial, non-colonial, and anti-colonial missionaries, taken together, outnumbered colonial missionaries.
British missionaries who strove for an Anglican establishment were the least successful of all. British missionaries from Nonconformist missionary societies suffered from being identified as part of this same ‘alien’ shadow of colonial rule (whose minions often despised them). Among British missionaries who were anti-colonial, none were less acceptable in the colonial establishment than the Salvation Army. The position of Catholic missionaries, being predominantly non-British (French, Italian, Irish, etc.), and of non-British evangelical (or Protestant) missionaries, whether from North America or northern Europe, remained ambivalent. Ambivalence towards the Raj persisted among missionary recruits from lower classes. Faith missions, operating mostly beyond ordinary systems of ecclesiastical control, could also be ambivalent. (See pp. 55-56.) To sum up, from the first Portuguese Catholics to the late colonial missionary friends of Gandhi there were always prominent missionaries prepared to challenge or ignore the imperial system and their own ecclesiastical authorities.
Thus there can be no easy summary of the relations between missions and colonialism. Hitherto there has been too much emphasis on linkages and too little attention paid to indigenous agency, impacts of conversion, reactions to conversion (or to counter-conversion), and indigenous movements. Much of what really happened still lies hidden from the gaze of historians. Social forces straining against each other in historical silence, due to our ignorance, were no less (nor more) implacable for hitherto lying beyond that gaze. Furthermore, profound tensions existed between the imperial system and established religions of any sort. In India ‘secularism’ has always meant ‘noninterference’ and ‘neutrality’. It never resembled secularism in the West, nor did it ever imply separation of Church and State. Rather, it denoted evenhanded acceptance of all religions. This rendered an Anglican establishment impossible. While India’s peoples, Hindu and Muslim, accepted the existence of an Ecclesiastical Department, they most certainly resented favouritism or discrimination. The imperial Mahachakra, or great Wheel of State, could not remain balanced for long if some supporting spokes were broken or missing. The anomaly of missions and Empire lay in the fact that each religious system had to be, in some measure, as ‘free’ from imperial control or favour as every other system.