"Mission, Religion, and Caste"

THIS IS AN EXPLORATORY WORK MAKING FORAYS INTO ASPECTS OF
caste, religion and the history of Christian missions in India. These three elements were historically enmeshed in
the discourse of the leading exponents of Indian Reform and Nationalism as they were in the proselytizing literature of the
Missionaries. They were implicated in the very logic of the thematic that prevailed as a result of the encounter between them and the 'civilizational' arguments that ensued. The logic of two civilizations espousing opposed cosmological
and theological perspectives located in the conjuncture of colonized space and territory was a reductionist exercise par
excellence. The oppositions of modernity and medievalism were but the essentialist concepts derived from the oppositions of Science and Superstition. The constructions of eastern religions and societies were no less reductively adduced from the Occidental and Oriental narratives. The din of battle between the monotheistic and idolatrous-polytheistic faiths was part of the bigger picture - the war of conquest and domination over the mind and soul as much over territory and economy.
In the process of this encounter the colonized were pushed into slots - the concepts and categories - that were imbedded
in the thought and methodologies of the dominant power. Was the proliferation of scriptural thought and cultural practice ofthe Hindu a religion or a world-view? Was the societal phenomenon of caste an inseparable product of this thought or a social arrangement that evolved over time as the result of struggles for political and cultural control? Was the agenda of Reform to be the Nationalist rectification of distortions and accretions in society or the substitution of Christian reform for a heathen society? The meta-theories of occidentalism and orientalism, modernity and primitivism, the light of revelation and the dark of ignorance were to be decisive for answers to such questions. From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century Europe's confidence in its military prowess, scientific knowledge and technical accomplishments, vindicated by the swathe of conquests and territorial expansion reached its zenith. Correspondingly, the onslaught of political and cultural criticism was a foregone occurrence. Nevertheless, the self-flattering narratives of supremacy and civilizational greatness of the European which, were disseminated among their own people did encounter some dissent. It was, however, too marginal to the trajectory of power to dent their complacency and disparagement of the culture ana
civilization of the other.