Rebels and Outcasts: A Journey Through Christian India

I noticed that I shelved this travelogue in 2015. At that time it had one scathing review and to this day that is still the only review available on GR. One-star reviews are always memorable and having just finished Charlie Pye-Smiths religious travels and discovery of Christian India from the early 1990's I am not sure that that review is anything but partisan itself in my opinion.

Pye-Smith is a Christian sure, but be that as it may I did not find it a “partisan view of India, which is written for missionary purposes” as stated in that review. I personally found it an interesting research as to who Indian Christians are/were and their thoughts as a minority.

Including his travels, interviews and some history, this has made for a fascinating read. This reader was scurrying down rabbit holes to read up on the places and the cultures of various areas, that is what makes India astonishing for all those with a curious mind.

Pye-Smith has given us a useful map of India that references the places he travelled to. From Kerala in the south to Meghalaya in the north he made contact with many people from the disparate factions of the Christian religions that eah seemed to give a differing view of both how their specific version of Christianity was faring as a minor player in the everyday lives of the Indian people's religious life. Back in the early 90s Christianity was surviving. In places such as Meghalaya it was the dominant religion. For anyone interested, this is a subject delving deeper into. Meghalaya is very much a minority state in the scheme of India as a Hindu nation though. In some areas, the local Christians accounted for numbers hardly worth caring about.

Pye-Smith is actually very praiseworthy of Indians as a people who have been “...remarkably tolerant of other people's customs and ideas” and this also includes religion. He writes that Hinduism itself has an assimilatory nature and quotes a Hindu scholar saying tolerance is duty and not a concession. He adds that there has been criticism of Christian endeavour in that it has at times portrayed Hinduism “...in the worst possible light.” Pye-Smith did see the less than savoury side of the caste system within Christian India. He covers this often, I suppose millennia of what is in one's DNA is very hard to shift. Caste prejudice seemed more ingrained than religious prejudice.

Typical of books such as this that cast a view over many differing peoples it is impossible to even attempt to typecast Christian India, the entire gamut of Christianity's factions are covered from the adherents to the Catholic faiths of nearly 2 millennia past to the present inrush of the proselytising god botherers of modern born agains, Christianity covers the entire strata of Indian caste and demographics. Based on my reading of this book local versions of Christianity that are interlaced with the local culture; lets say the more tolerant versions of Christianity, survive.

Meghalaya Christians have a propensity towards unusual, by western traditions, Christian names. Pye-Smith meets Rev. Overland Snaitang who he asks about his Christian name. Snaitang says that the people of Meghalaya enjoy the sound of names. So we meet individuals called Memory and Forget, brothers called Shoulder and Moulder, young men called Milky Way and Mount Everest. One priest had to stop a lady calling her child Prostitute as she liked the sound though had no idea as to the meaning. The lucky baby was called Prosper in the end. Pye-Smith met a Rev Peace Arrow Challam, a name that struck him “...as an excellent choice for a Christian leader...” I was so enthralled by this that the rabbit hole threw up to me this delightful site.

https://www.nancy.cc/2014/01/06/colorful-names-meghalaya/

I have read the wiki on Indian Christianity, and it states that modern India has 26 million adherents in 2011 and that accounted for 2.3 percent of the then population. Hindu India has little to fear from other religions in my opinion, as that seemed to be a stable number over time. As one Indian of my acquaintance suggested when I was reading this book, the vast populace enjoys a good festival and Cricket far too much to listen to fire and brimstone evangelicals who are damning them to a permanent hell.

And as I write, big congrats to the Indian Cricket team on winning the T20 World Cup. I know how much joy that will bring to the nation and its peoples from all walks of life.

This is a solid read of Indian Christianity from the view of a western researcher in the 1990s and is a fine read for those looking at a past of recent times. Recommended.

Below is the last 2 pages of Rebels and Outcasts: A Journey Through Christian India. Maybe this is what offended some Hindus. As a non-believer I may not be able to see any offence as Pye-Smith never proselytised in any part of Rebels and Outcasts: A Journey Through Christian India that I recall and the final few lines are to me but a reason for his faith. Ernest Talibuddin was longing for the day when the established Church would collapse, when its institutions would wither away. In my memory, they have already begun to do so. I remember the cathedrals and churches as monuments to a certain tradition rather than as places of worship: In fact, I can scarcely recall a single word I heard from the pulpit, and the act of communion, the central unifying act of Christian worship, could equally well have been conducted in a forest or cattle shed. When I think of Christian India I see Father Sngi praying for a traumatised woman and the transcendental peace which descends upon her face, I hear a Hindu doctor in the slums of Delhi talking of his duty to go after the lost sheep, the lost sheep being both battered children and abusive parents; I hear the squabbling and laughter of the prostitutes children in the upper room of Bowbazar, and I see the serious faces of the Muslim women of Tiljala who were learning to sew and read. I remember the conversations I had with priests and nurses, with workers and historians, about everything from sex to salvation, from the price of whisky to whether St Thomas came to India. And as I listen to the voices of those I met, I can hear the sounds which went with the voices - of birds singing in the banyan tree outside the vicarage; of engines backfiring and a drunk swearing; of singing in a classroom and fishermen's chanting and I recall too the smells that went with the sounds: the stench of the sewers in Calcutta, the enticing smell of good spicy food in the Catholic seminaries, the tangy odour of fish and rotting vegetation in the harbour at Cochin. I have written much about the conflict between different denominations and different castes, but it is a triumph of sorts that the Christian religion is able to appeal to such an extraordinary diversity of people. The gulf between the Syrian Christian of Kottayam with his neatly tended feet and thriving gold business and the illiterate dalit who works as a coolie on the roads of Madras is as great as that between emperor and slave, and yet they are united by belief, by the message of the cross, with the half-starved fishermen of Vizhinjam and the down-at-heel Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, with the tribal Christians of Bihar and the wealthy Catholics of Bombay, with the recent convert who dares not admit to his new beliefs for fear of persecution and men and women who trace their Christianity back to a few years after the death of Christ. On Easter Day I was invited to lunch with the bishop. 'It will just be you and me and a very old priest,' he said as we came out of the service at All Saints Cathedral. I arrived at his residence at the same time as the old priest, who had doubtless seen the bishop kissing many of the women who had attended the service. As we entered the house he touched the Bengali servant lightly on the shoulder and carefully explained, in English, 'I am afraid I'm not the kissing type. I'm from a different generation, but I love you all the same. I don't think the girl understood a word of what he said, but she smiled broadly and was probably astonished to have been greeted at all. When we were having lunch the priest said he had recently met a Christian fundamentalist who told him that he would go to hell, presumably because he was not a born-again Christian: 'So I said to him, "You may have a greater faith than me, but I have love, and I love even you who condemns me." The priest added that one of the defining moments in his spiritual life occurred when he was a young man, a recent convert from high-caste Hinduism. C. F. Andrews, a leading Christian thinker, leaned over his shoulder and scratched on his notebook the famous words from St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (13:13). There are three things which last for ever: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.'I cannot think of a better creed.