While North India erupted in rebellion in 1857, South India was experiencing a range of cross-cultural contests between missionary Christianity and local converts, who protested against Indian culture being dismissed as a work of the devil. Converts in the emerging Christian communities, particularly in South India, made efforts to retain their indigenous cultural ethos as part of their lived experience. Early attempts to balance Indian identity with Christian beliefs and practices were later replicated in a second anti-hegemonic movement by claims of Indian Christians for respectful inclusion into the new composite nation of postcolonial India. This article brings out how these two processes of asserting hybridity and equity developed. The initial impact of hegemonising Christianity created a chasm between missionaries and converts, which especially the latter addressed constructively. After 1857, emboldened British hegemonic and missionary activities sparked further divisive identity politics, feeding fresh rebellious ambitions that needed to be pacified to maintain the empire. As more culturally conscious Indian Christians realised that missionary Christianity was antithetical to their lived experiences as part of an emerging Indian nation, they used educational strategies to strengthen the formation of India’s composite culture, so that India’s Christians could now (re)assert their rightful place within the postcolonial nationalist framework, despite contentions from majoritarian forces.

Religious accessions and conversions have been spawning a great deal of scholarly attention from various academic disciplines. Conversion to Christianity is defined within the social, cultural, political and philosophical contexts, and suggests that it is a consequence of persuasion, cognitive act, commitment of a free will or a change from one view to another. But the main difficulty with such arguments is that they often tend to ignore the distinct historical experiences of the converts, because the explanations offered for the relatively increased number of Christians among the economically-challenged communities during the study period largely centred around factors which were 'outside' the missionary politics. The converts' poor and denigrated economic conditions due to natural calamities and other reasons seemed to be chiefly responsible for the origin of the much-celebrated and much-maligned 'rice Christians' in the southern part of the subcontinent. From a pecuniary standpoint, the economics of conversion became a much-preferred option among the Protestant converts rather than their religiosity per se or the content of their religious belief. Therefore, the ways in which the idea of rice Christians emerged, studied and interpreted are worth a critical enquiry. This article argues that missionary Christianity as developed in colonial south India among both the affluent as well as the disadvantaged sections of the society had also created a parallel, monolithic and unclassified rice Christian class within the broader Christian discourse both in theory and practice and that they are distinctly different in terms of their socio-cultural and political as well as economic conditions elsewhere in the country.

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Colonial education and missionary discourse of modernity intensified struggles for continuity and change among the followers of Hinduism and Christianity in nineteenth century India. While missionary modernity was characterised by an emphasis on sociocultural changes among the marginalized women through Christian norms of decency, orthodox Hindus used traditional cultural practices to confront missionary modernization endeavours. This article posits that the discourse of missionary modernity needs to be understood through the principles of Western secular modernity that impelled missionaries to employ decent clothing as a symbol of Christian femininity. It argues that missionary modernity not only emboldened the marginalized women to challenge their ascribed sociocultural standing but also solidified communitarian consciousness among the followers of Hinduism and Christianity substantially. Even though Travancore state defended the entrenched customary practices, including women’s attire patterns, with all its potency through authoritative proclamations, it could not dissuade missionaries from converting the marginalized women to missionary modernity.

This article argues that despite some efforts by early missionaries, Christians in India have continued to practise various forms of caste prejudice. The multi-dimensional understanding of caste made this issue heavily contested, dividing the Christian communities into two major components of marginal Christians, later known as Dalit Christians, and elite Christians constituting largely Nadars and Vellalas in South India. Despite considerable missionary misgivings about caste identities and resultant discriminations, traditional differentiation carried on and took new forms. This article traces these debates and shows the challenges of opposing caste-based discriminations that continue today.