The Politics of Theo-Colonial Encounter: Observations from South India

The temptation here is to invert the paradigm and understand missionaries as unwitting participants in local power dynamics. However, this idea is no less problematic than its foil. Both Caldwell and de Nobili came to South India with a certain amount of baggage. The former was a member of the London Missionary Society who had been denied a place at Oxford due to his Irish ancestry, while the latter was an Italian noble, and nephew to a cardinal—facts which very likely mapped on to the almost opposing styles of missionary work which the two utilized.

Precious little is known about De Nobili’s life before arriving in India in 1608; thus, even his purpose in coming to South India remains unclear. He was, as mentioned earlier, a well-placed nobleman with a sufficient number of connections not only in the Catholic Church, but also among the Italian noble families. For such a privileged individual to abandon his homeland and set out to foreign shores just to juggle alien customs and religions would have been difficult to say the least. Notwithstanding the Portuguese settlements he would have encountered, de Nobili’s first impulse seems to have been to construct a mini-Italy in his new home.

From this point, the records become much clearer: de Nobili tried and, by all accounts, failed, to produce as many converts as he would have liked, with most of those who did convert coming from the lower castes. Some commentators, like Manu Pillai have argued that it was only after this initial failure (in de Nobili’s mind) that he learnt about the caste barriers that existed in the region, impelling him towards reimagining himself within the theo-aristocracy of the Tamil Brahmins, adopting their manners and a good degree of their customs (especially ones that reinforce hierarchical divides). It is not surprising, then, that historians and scholars over the centuries from Francis Ellis to Arun Shourie have given him various appellations to unify the two facets of his identity as a European and one trying to integrate into the upper echelon of South Asian religious hierarchy; names like the “White Brahmin” or the “Roman Brahmin”. In effect, de Nobili’s approach to conversion was a socio-cultural push to re-create a certain form of Italiana within the hierarchical systems of South India which placed the priestly Brahmanical caste (and the Brahmanized de Nobili) at the top.

While this did work for a time, and indeed many Catholic communities in South India quite proudly trace their ancestry to the Brahmins of yore, de Nobili ultimately had no theological or intellectual descendants. His peculiar methods, which included dressing in sanyasi style orange garb and often speaking of the Bible as a lost “Fifth Veda,” earned him the ire of the Jesuit establishment in South India. The turmoil that ensued put him in conflict with the Archbishop of Goa, and was only resolved by the intervention of Pope Gregory XV, who effectively ended his methods of proselytizing. One could further argue that his own brahmanized converts found no real benefit in putting their own lives or good standing with the Portuguese at risk by trying to defend the increasingly unfavorable Roman Brahmin. When push came to shove, both his high and low caste followers found no good reason to follow him. In 1656, he died in Mylapore as nothing more than a fascinating footnote in the history of Catholicism in South Asia.

In Marina Beach, a few kilometers away from de Nobili’s final resting place, a proud statue stands as a gift from the Church of South India to the Government of Tamil Nadu — a memorial to Robert Caldwell, who is sometimes thought of as a founding father of that Church. At first glance, one might wager that if a well-connected and culturally sophisticated missionary like de Nobili could not manage to lay a sound foundation for Christianity in South India, another outsider like Caldwell would be even less likely. By the time he arrived in South India, the British Raj was quickly moving towards the orientalist mode of engagement according to which the Indian population ought to be left to practice their religions without interference from missionaries, making his Christianizing mission that much harder. Caldwell’s early successes in conversion were comparable to de Nobili’s, since both of them relied heavily on conversion from one particular caste, and they both experienced some big setbacks in their work — de Nobili running up against the Jesuit establishment, and Caldwell having to come to terms with the orientalist stance of the British Government, especially post-1857.

However, the Victorian world of utility and industrial efficiency had created a man who was a near dichotomic opposite to de Nobili in terms of approach. Where the Roman Brahmin attempted to insert himself into a cultural milieu and adapt it to his own interests, plain Caldwell was content to leave cultural norms alone and focus on practical questions like living conditions and work ethic. In 1844, Caldwell arrived in Madras and was assigned the Tinnevelly district (modern day Thirunelveli). He was quick to take note of the people’s “pleasant” mannerisms, but most impressed by their hard lifestyle which was a prophylactic to laziness (the “fount of all vices”, as he put it), and their “inclination towards spiritual matters”. His insistence on mapping Christianity onto labor was different from de Nobili’s proto-cultural appropriation-based approach to conversion, as can be seen in the opening quote, given that toddy-tapping from palmyra trees was the major profession of the caste he worked with, the Shanars.

I would suggest that the answer to the conundrum in the opening section of this piece, that Caldwell’s mission succeeded in producing a lasting intellectual and social impact while de Nobili’s did not, lies in their modus operandi. While de Nobili attempted to create a cultural dialectic between the Brahmins and the Catholics, effectively relegating religion to the realm of culture, Caldwell subverted such classification altogether and produced a socially and economically grounded religion. It also appears probable that his own experiences of identity-based discrimination would have led him to have a much more sympathetic view of the Shanars, who were themselves a marginalized group at the time. He certainly favored a business-like demeanor in his approach to his work, following in the Victorian way. In his works, he constantly praised the work ethic of the Shanars and implicitly made an economic argument in their favor, aiming to persuade the British government to stop the traditional discrimination against this caste. This extra layer of economic advocacy from Caldwell takes the place of cultural synthesis in de Nobili’s work. Vishwanath’s argument that caste groups picked and chose what they took from their missionaries as much as their missionaries tried to turn them into ideal objects for conversion rings true. As Robert Hardgrave points out, it was in the Shanar’s (now rechristened ‘Nadars’) best economic interest to do so convert.

Thus, Caldwell’s success was not simply an exercise in colonial proselytism. Rather, it represents an idea that only recently received serious academic consideration—that Christianity in South Asia was as much a matter of politico-economic negotiation as a social, cultural, or spiritual change. In Caldwell’s case, conversion constituted a unique form of socio-economic negotiation wherein the simple paradigm of “colonizer vs. colonized” was problematized and, to a certain degree, inverted: a theo-colonial encounter where salvation was a good bargain.

David Martin graduated from the University of Cambridge with an M.Phil in Modern South Asian Studies and is currently an independent researcher and lecturer at Christ University, Bangalore. His interests lie in intellectual and global history, and the intersection of religion, politics, and economics.

Featured Image: Illustration from Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, QUARTERLY PAPER, No. LVIII.–April, 1851. Courtesy of Project Canterbury.