Christian Conversion and the Racialisation of Religion in Colonial India

Abstract

Building on the work of scholars like Geraldine Heng (2003, 2018), Maria Elena Martinez (2008, 2009), Katharine Kerbner (2018), and Judith Weisenfeld (2017), this article argues that religious conversion, particularly its perceived failure, is a key site for analysing race-making in action. Insofar as it is based on the expectation of substantial change, religious conversion brings into relief those aspects of a people or a person that are resistant to change, and thus spurs informal or formal theorizing about a fundamental or absolute essence and the qualities associated with it. In colonial India, the process of change that accompanied conversion to Protestant Christianity was hotly contested. What was mere culture, custom and tradition, and what was a necessary observable index of invisible moral and spiritual transformation? Out of a decades-long conversation about change and its limits among missionaries and converts, a racialised understanding of caste came to be seen as an aspect of the self and the community that was fundamental, absolute and essential and thus impervious to change. As I demonstrate through a close examination of texts by and about two influential Christians in India – Robert Caldwell (1814-1891) and Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) – people could and did debate the value ascribed to caste differences, but the fact that caste identity constituted a part of the self that could not change was increasingly asserted as axiomatic.