Abstract
In The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India, Mou Banerjee weaves an excellent historical narrative of apologetic debates on religious conversion in 19th and early 20th century Bengal. A central argument in the book is that evangelical attempts to convert the Bengalis sparked a conversion panic, especially among the region’s elite, which in turn played a crucial role in solidifying distinct Hindu and Muslim identities. Banerjee opens with a vivid vignette: the shraddha ceremony in 1882 of an unnamed dowager princess, the widow of the aristocrat Raja Kalikrishna Dev. This ceremony becomes the flashpoint for a heated exchange between the missionary Rev. William Hastie and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the famed Bengali novelist. This incident sets the tone for Banerjee’s larger project: to unravel sixty-five years of theological debates between Bengalis and evangelical British and native Christians to present an “alternative history of the origins of communal tensions and marginalization of minorities in India” (7).
The central figures in Chapter 1 are Raja Rammohan Roy and the Serampore Baptists, particularly Joshua Marshman and their debate. While Sebastian Kim also explored this debate in his monograph In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India (2003), Banerjee delves deeper and offers a fresh interpretation of the period from 1813 to 1829, when the Baptists were actively engaged in the mass production of Christian literature. The chapter focuses on how religious conversion threatened existing religious identities and led Hindu thinkers like Roy to formulate rationalist, monotheistic defenses of Hinduism. Central to this chapter is Roy’s critique of missionary activity and his enduring suspicion about the sincerity of early Christian converts in Bengal, a doubt that, as Banerjee argues, has continued to shape perceptions of conversion well into the present.
Chapter 2 portrays 1830 to 1865 as a period of mounting fear and anger among Bengali Hindus, sparked by the conversion of young boys influenced by Vivian Derozio’s radical ideas at Hindu College. The chapter explores Alexander Duff’s General Assembly Institution and Hindu College classrooms, the Young Bengal movement, Ishwar Gupta’s satirical critiques of Bengali modernity, the conversion of Krishnamohan Banerjee, and his polemical exchanges with Prosonnocoomar Tagore. These debates, centered in periodicals, newspapers, and journals, eventually spilled into Anglo-Indian courts, where missionaries and Hindu families contested the rights of minors to convert to Christianity. The author examines four habeas corpus cases to illustrate the fragile and contentious nature of the issue.
Chapter 3 anchors the book’s title in the story of Gyanendramohan Tagore, the disinherited son of Prosonnocoomar Tagore. Focusing on the high-profile legal dispute known as the Great Tagore Will Case, the chapter explores how inheritance claims by newly converted Christians came into conflict with Hindu inheritance law and the provisions of the Lex Loci Act. Banerjee dexterously illustrates how, in the post-1857 colonial climate, the British judiciary struggled to determine the legal rights of converts. Ultimately, the courts invalidated the protections of the Lex Loci Act and upheld Gyanendramohan’s disinheritance, deepening the legal and economic exclusion of Indian Christian converts.
Moving away from elite urban Bengal, Chapter 4 turns to the indigo plantations, with particular attention to the Baropakhya case involving British planters, Bengali peasants, and the colonial administration. From the lens of microhistory, Banerjee presents a detailed narration of events, the persecution inflicted upon new converts, and the subsequent political debate, reminding the reader that contemporary violence against Christian converts from marginalized economic and caste backgrounds is neither new nor unique.
Banerjee’s command of the archival sources perused is most evident in Chapter 5 on Munshi Meherulla. Drawing on obituaries, a few surviving pamphlets, and census data, Banerjee reconstructs the world in which the Munshi lived, highlighting the anxieties of the East Bengali Muslim population over Christian evangelism and the conversion of members within their community. Finally, in Chapter 6, Banerjee portrays Brahmabandhab Upadhyay in a different light from the traditional scholarship that has often emphasized his Christian theology. Here, Upadhyay emerges as a firebrand nationalist who employs Hindu imagery and symbolism to articulate Indian nationhood in public, while remaining a devout Catholic Christian in private. An epilogue summarizes the book, highlighting contemporary debates on religious conversion and the Freedom of Religion Acts promulgated in several states in India.
The Disinherited presumes familiarity with the history of British India and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal. This book will serve as an excellent resource for those interested in South Asia’s religions, for social historians of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British India, and for scholars working at the intersection of law, religion, and society. Banerjee offers a rich and original contribution to the growing literature on religious conversion debates in India. This work will be especially valuable for scholars of world Christianity who study mission history, the dynamics of conversion—continuity and rupture—among new Christian communities, indigenous agency and transnational connections, as well as modernity and empire. It charts a relatively underexplored terrain by drawing on unconventional sources such as court records, poems, and apologetic literature in India to construct an alternative history of the engagement between the religion of the empire and local religions. This historiographical approach offers useful methodological tools for scholars of world Christianity engaged in similar lines of inquiry.