Religious Transformation in South Asia

Focused on ‘mass movements’ of low-caste peoples to Christianity in Punjab during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special reference to a comparative analysis of ‘religious transformations’ as perceived within two very different missionary agencies—the larger British Evangelical (Anglican) Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the smaller Belgian Catholic Capuchin—this is a broad and complex study. It attempts a full and open-ended understanding of the many functions of religious impulses and ideas in human experience. What began modestly in the 1860s and 1870s, with small numbers of lowly and oppressed people looking to foreign as well as indigenous missionaries for help and liberation, rather than with missionaries striving to make converts by exploiting their pathetic thraldom (as has so commonly been the trope of fashionable nationalist and/or secularist historiography), gained momentum and grew until, by the late 1930s, Christianity embraced nearly half a million in Punjab alone. For all the controversy, drama, and scale of such movements in Punjab, much of what occurred depended upon constantly contested and evolving instances of collaboration, moving across a wide range of local relationships between communities of converts and missionary institutions

Archaeology · Art · Caste · Christianity · Colonialism · Drama · Historiography · Indigenous · Literature · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Trope (literature · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

• Conversion Narratives as Mirrors of Religious Encounters

  Philippe Bornet•Social Sciences and Missions•2024

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