CCCW Talk “South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim” by Prof Chandra Mallampalli
28 May 2024, 16:00 - 28 May 2024, 17:30 Divinity Faculty, Room 7
Speaker
Professor Chandra Mallampalli
Chandra Mallampalli currently a research scholar at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College where he explores challenges facing India’s diverse democracy. In 2021-22 Professor he was an inaugural Yang Visiting Scholar of World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. His scholarship and teaching span the fields of modern South Asia, the British Empire, and Global Christianity. He is the author of four books and many articles, which examine the intersection of religion, law, and society in India. His first three books examine the evolution of Christian, Muslim and Hindu identities in relation to legal and political policies and print media. His most recent book with Oxford University Press (New York), South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, describes how the lives of Christians have been shaped by centuries of interactions with Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. His next project, “The Virtues of Mixture: Religion, Labor Migrants and Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean” examines the experiences of cultural and racial mixture among South Indian labor migrants to the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia, and whether their religious commitments either facilitated or impeded their capacity for inter-ethnic ties and world citizenship.
Abstract
South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia's Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In what ways does South Asian Christianity conform to wider patterns of World Christianity relating to translation and indigenous agency? In what ways does it deviate? This presentation addresses these questions by drawing attention to knowledge production, debate, and conversion as three sites of interfaith encounter and, ironically, as catalysts for majoritarian nationalisms which ultimately have marginalized Christians in postcolonial South Asia.
