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AN IMPERIAL APOSTLE? ST PAUL, PROTESTANT CONVERSION, AND SOUTH ASIAN CHRISTIANITY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2017
Abstract
This article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
Footnotes
The research for this article was supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 295463. I would like to thank Simon Goldhill, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Gareth Atkins, Brian Murray, and other members of the ERC project ‘Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’ at the University of Cambridge for their critical engagement with drafts of this article. I also thank Joel Cabrita and Rajarshi Ghose for their input, as well as Rohan Deb Roy for his helpful feedback.
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131 Ibid., p. 7.
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