Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835.

Miller, Jon

By D. Dennis Hudson. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans; and Richmond, Surrey, U.K.: Curzon Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 220.$45.

Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pluetschau, pietist missionaries representing the Danish Lutheran Church, arrived in Tranquebar in July 1706 and baptized their first converts, five slaves, in May of the following year. A scant five years later, according to Dennis Hudson in Protestant Origins in India, their mission had 202 members. By 1732 the number had grown to 1,478. While numbers are not everything, in this case they are compelling. A far more familiar story in the early history of evangelical missions, after all, is the one in which for years the number of converts roughly tracks the number of missionaries who die in their assignments.

Hudson looks primarily through the lens of the Indian Christians in telling this story of growth and indigenization of Christianity, and that is where his very significant contribution lies. The pietists were willing to train and rely upon native catechists and pastors to carry the Gospel beyond the local mission church and outside the Danish colony. Perhaps of even greater consequence, they allowed traditional caste separations to be built into the division of labor in the emerging church, and they provided room for traditional language, music, and styles of public expression. The pietist message and strategy, in other words, were closely adapted to the social, cultural, and material circumstances of Indians of diverse backgrounds.

In the next century, however, that very willingness to tolerate indigenous social distinctions and practices within the Christian community brought the pietists into sharp conflict with the "new" missionaries (of the Church Missionary Society), who insisted that Indian Christians must stand outside traditional Indian culture, in particular outside the caste system.

Hudson makes effective use of rare and elusive primary materials and of the work of other scholars. The result is an economical and coherent narrative that I found both engaging and provocative.

Jon Miller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His current research explores the ways nineteenth-century evangelical missions dealt with social, political, and economic controversies.