Democratization of Indian Christianity: Hegemony, Accessibility, and Resistance

by Ashok Kumar Mocherla (Editor), James Ponniah (Editor)

Overview

This book highlights the transformative potential of democratic Church and Christian community in India. In the light of both ongoing and, also to some extent, foregone sociopolitical and theological challenges confronting Indian Christianity, this book invokes the need to democratize Indian Christianity in terms of its theology, liturgy, teachings, practices, resources, leadership roles, and institutional power relations/sharing by keeping contemporary “social realities” of Indian Christians at the core of its approach and discourse. It explores internal challenges – of caste, class, gender, and regional contestations – and external forces of communalism and majoritarianism confronting Indian Christianity today. Further, it underlines the importance of dignity, equality, fraternity, freedom, and responsibility emerging at an organizational level through strong mechanisms of deliberation, decision-making, and execution. A major contribution to religious studies in India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of religion, especially Christian theology, South Asian studies, politics, and sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032546612
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ashok Kumar Mocherla is a Yang Scholar (2022-23) in World Christianity at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA. He is Associate professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore. His academic interests include sociology of religion, caste, Indian Christianity, missionary medicine, public health, and minority studies. He is the author of Dalit Christians in South India: Caste, Ideology and Lived Religion (Routledge 2020). His research has been funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), UK; ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research); and INSA (Indian National Science Academy), New Delhi.

James Ponniah is Assistant Professor and Head i/c of Christian Studies at the University of Madras, India. He was formerly the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Jnana Deepa, Pontifical Institute of Philosophy and Religion, Pune. He has authored, edited, or coedited several books: The Dynamics of Folk Religion in Society: Pericentralisation as Deconstruction of Sanskritisation (2011), Dancing Peacock: Indian Insight into Religion and Redevelopment (2010), Identity, Difference and Conflict: Postcolonial Critique (2013), Committed to the Church and the Country (2013), Psycho-Spiritual Mentoring of Adolescents (2019), and Culture, Religion and Home-Making in and beyond South Asia (2020).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Indian Christianity, Categorical Inequalities, and the Need for Democratization 1. Bound by Legacies of Hierarchy: Struggles for a Participatory and Democratic Indian Catholic Church 2. Indian Christianity and the Political: Tracking the Traces 3. The Caste Among the ‘Outcaste’ Christians 4. The Khrist Bhaktas of Banaras and Indian Catholicism Thirty Years On: What They Might Mean and Why They Matter to Indian Catholics 5. The Link between Autonomy and Democracy: A Study of Catholic Nuns in India 6. Christianity and Democracy: Perspectives from Political Theology 7. The Christian Church, Democratic Rights and People at the Margins: Narratives from Odisha and Rajasthan 8. The Institutionalization of Democractic Mechanisms in the Protestant Church in India: Questions of Resistance, Representation and Women’s Leadership 9. Democratization of the Indian Churches through BCCS 10. Changing Power Equations for Women in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Goa 11. Food, hierarchy, equality: The Latin Catholics of coastal Kerala, their diet and the idea of democratization 12. Indigenising Democracy, Customizing Religion: Contending Hegemonic Practices and Lived Christianity in Contemporary Nagaland 13. Naming the Unspoken: Domestic Violence and the Church 14. Walls of Discrimination and the Divided Churchyards: Narratives of Domination, Resistance, and Democratic Rights in Tamil Churches 15. Prayers and Everyday Life of Dalit Christians in Kerala

Editorial Reviews

"Essays in this volume skillfully contextualize complex challenges, both internal and external, that confront India's Christian institutions' journey in democracy . With penetrating insight and sophistication, each author interrogates issues being faced in a different cultural region or on a different societal level.  Readers soon become acutely aware of threats and challenges coming from within and without Indian Christianity to engage in democratic practices and processes. In short, this work makes a remarkable contribution to our understandings of Christianity in India."  — Prof. Robert Eric Frykenberg, University of Wisconsin - Madison

“At a time when political democracy appears to be in grave crisis across the world this volume makes a case for democracy as a way of life that could foster what Dr Ambedkar described as 'social endosmosis'. Comprising studies of everyday Christian endeavors as these are undertaken by women and Dalit and Adivasi Christians in India, as well as thoughtful and self critical reflections on doctrine, faith and the church structures, the essays in this book point to both productive changes that have taken place in subaltern Christian communities as well as to conflicts and questions to do with hierarchy and authority which remain unresolved. Importantly, the book makes a case for rendering lived democracy a measure of the good and just Christian life. The point is made that it is not enough to bear witness to the truth of the cross and gospel but realise its meaning in and through everyday practices of equality and fraternity.” — V Geetha, Independent Scholar, Chennai.

“It is to the credit of the co-editors and contributors to this impressive book that taken-for-granted and over-simplified terms are problematized, interrogated, and evaluated from a variety of perspectives, including the terms “democracy” and “Christianity”, not to say anything about the understandings of religion in India. Is there anything particularly democratic in the way Indian Christianity is practiced and how do adherents of various Christian traditions negotiate this? How has the long-convoluted history of Christianity in India been shaped by various missions down the centuries, and what about indigenous agency? Has the seemingly secular nature of the Indian Constitution impacted issues that continue to bedevil Indian Christianity like pervasive patriarchy, unproblematized acceptance of hierarchy, and interfaith interactions which are lived out in the places where people live, work, and worship? What about the persistence of caste oppression within the framework of a religion that prides itself on equality? Can certain forms of worship and prayer be seen as a protest against all manner of injustice and oppression? All these questions and more are thoroughly and frankly addressed in this splendid volume that will be a touchstone in understanding Christianity in India for decades to come.” — Rev. Dr. J. Jayakiran Sebastian, Dean and H. George Anderson Professor of Mission and Cultures, United Lutheran Seminary | Gettysburg + Philadelphia

                                          

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