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This chapter examines representations of conjugality produced in three different textual genres: the administrative records of the Madras Presidency; the literature produced by educated, urban, high-caste Indian Christians; and the tracts of the first independent Christian church in south India. Marriage was an outward sign of the quality of the inner transformations of Indian Christians, with different groups adopting different forms of marriage. While the elite Satthianadhans embraced a form of marriage modeled after Western forms, the founder of the Hindu Christian Church Rev. Arumai Nayakam Sattampillai advocated a martial form of marriage drawn from conservative elements of Indian tradition.

Explores how King Philip's War and debates over the halfway covenant contributed to the emergence of a racialized “tribalism” during the 1670s. This was a time when ordinary colonists manifested fear not only of enemy Indians but also of Christian Indian allies and military leaders. These leaders’ vested interest in frontier exchange was thought to have blinded them to the dangers of Indians, who only pretended to be Christian converts and allies. The chapter pays particular attention to the career of Daniel Gookin, who aided the efforts of the missionary, John Eliot. Additionally, Gookin's commitment to the integration of Indian peoples into colonial life was shaped by his family's experiences as colonizers of Ireland with ties to the family of Robert Boyle, president of the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.

The sartorial styles that Indian Christians adopted in the 19th and early 20th centuries reflected the new social identities that accompanied the conversion to Christianity. Sartorial style functioned an arena for displaying and contesting claims about the social and moral condition of individuals and communities. Men’s and women’s bodies served as vehicles for broadcasting new assertions of respectable community identity, an identity drawn from a pool of signifiers from both Western bourgeois and elite Indian culture.

This chapter introduces the material and historical basis of ‘marriage’ as an indissoluble and sacrosanct unit and its gradual progression towards divorce. It also demonstrates the connection between economic developments and the changing nature of marriage. The grounds for the annulment include bigamy, force/coercion, fraud/misrepresentation, impotency, insanity/mental disorder, pre-marriage pregnancy and marriage of minors. The basic premise of the breakdown theory is that if a marriage has broken down without any possibility of repair (or irretrievably), it should be dissolved without determining the ‘fault’ of either party. Some examples of economic settlements are discussed. The Special Marriage Act and the Indian Christian Marriage Act were the first enactments which provided for the registration of marriages. The humiliation and violence within marriage has been a major concern for Indian women down the ages. It is shown that traditional personal laws, customary laws as well as statutory law function from a patriarchal base.

This chapter details John Wompas's youth in the town of Roxbury. Although Roxbury was an English town, it had a decidedly Indian side. Because Roxbury was the home of John Eliot, the “apostle to the Indians,” the town was a destination as well as a way station. It stood at the heart of the English effort to bring “civility” and Christianity to the Indians, a project that would frame much of John Wompas's life. John Eliot, Daniel Gookin, and colleagues from surrounding towns used several different approaches to converting and “civilizing” the Indians. These approaches include establishing Christian Indian towns, preparing Indians to form their own Puritan congregations, recruiting Indian children to live and work within English families, and shepherding a small number of Indian children through English grammar school to enroll at Harvard College.

This chapter looks at the war between the colonists and many of the surrounding Native peoples in New England, which began in late June 1675. Initially, it involved only the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags under their sachem Philip Metacom—also known as King Philip—but the conflict quickly spread to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and northern New England, drawing in English and Indian combatants from all of those locales, including the Nipmucs of the central Massachusetts highlands. Few groups suffered more during King Philip's War than the Christian Indians, caught as they were between the distrust of their Indian kin and the English to whom they had pledged their loyalty. Their treatment by the English during and after King Philip's War fueled John Wompas's growing anger against the Massachusetts government, which would explode on his return to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677.

This chapter aims to trace the complex legal history of the Indian Christian community and their attempts at reform in the post-independence period and recent judicial intervention. The process of tracing the developments within the Christian personal law is complex because the laws governing Christians are shaped by two distinct colonial influences, and because the post-independence attempts of reform are marked by the conflict between the conservative Roman Catholic doctrine and the reformist Protestant theology which has its roots within European politics. In conclusion, it must be emphasized that to unravel the legal maze within which the Christian family laws are ensnared, a whole range of legal reforms are necessary and imperative. Unfortunately, even though the community is ready and willing, the political will to legislate for them is sadly lacking.

Christianity, the third largest religion in India, is the focus of this interview. According to Peter de Souza, one should understand Christianity historically in terms of waves. In the course of his interview, he discusses the Indian debate on religious conversion and the trends circulating among the Indian Christians. He also talks about conflicts, issues, and violence surrounding the conversion of Hindus to Christianity.

References to the famous 137th Psalm (“by the rivers of Babylon”) by colonial captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Isaac Jogues, John Williams, and Elizabeth Hanson are different from those of other Christian writers. Elements of the psalm were recapitulated in the ethnohistorical context of Indian captivity. These include the riverine landscape and pagan captors (verse 1), the compulsion to sing “songs of Zion” (verse 3), and infanticidal violence (verses 8-9). The question posed by verse 4 – “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” – may have been as relevant to the Christian Indians who were confined and persecuted by settlers during King Philip’s War as for any other Christian community.

This chapter is entirely given over to a study of Kumarappa’s views on Christianity. Kumarappa emerged as the most important Indian Christian nationalist involved in the struggle for swaraj. Although a layman, Kumarappa had a sound theological understanding which he deployed to great effect in countering criticism of the nationalist campaigns during the Civil Disobedience period. The chapter also presents Kumarappa’s novel and creative interpretation of the teachings of Jesus in light of Gandhi’s philosophy of Sarvodaya.

This is a highly critical chapter that joins the twin issues of how Chaitanya was perceived in his own life time and thereafter. Of particular interest here is how Chaitanya was invoked in post-Chaitanya Bengal for a wide variety of reasons and purposes. Dissenting and non-conformist religious cults in post-Chaitanya Bengal cited his life and work to register their protest against Brahmanical and upper-caste excesses; the educated and upper-caste followers, on the other hand, converted him into a symbol of political resistance in a manner that strengthened their own political ambitions under a colonial regime. This chapter brings back the issue of just how the lay reader and the scholar alike need to be clearer about the use of nomenclatures such as ‘Bengal Vaishnavism’ or Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The author argues how in modern Bengal, there were major cultural figures who were Vaishnava by persuasion and yet not affiliated to the Chaitanya camp. This chapter also includes interesting and original studies of Chaitanya’s religion, his approach to the question of women and sexuality, and also how Chaitanya was perceived by the most prominent religious groups in colonial Bengal such as the Brahmos.