Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India GLOBAL PENTECOSTAL AND CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY Series Editor Donald E. Miller Executive Director, Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California PENTECOSTALS, PROSELYTIZATION, AND ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA Chad M. Bauman Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India chad m. bauman 3 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–020209–5 (hbk); ISBN 978–0–19–020210–1 (pbk) 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations xi Map xiii Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1 Who Are India’s Pentecostals?: History, Definitions, Deliberations 24 CHAPTER 2 Pentecostalism in the Context of Indian History and Politics 42 CHAPTER 3 Where the Spirit (of Violence) Leads: The Disproportionate Targeting of Indian Pentecostals 70 CHAPTER 4 Force, Fraud, and Inducement?: Recuperative Conversions and the Growth of Indian Christianity 94 CHAPTER 5 Missions and the Pentecostalization of Indian Christianity 131 Conclusion: Conversion Activities, Metaphorical Cockroaches, and the Question of Culpability 173 Works Cited 195 Index 205 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book, like nearly every other, is the textual manifestation of mani- fold collaborations, large and small. Most of them will, unfortunately, go unacknowledged in the short paragraphs that follow, but I am grateful, nonetheless, for every single one. The majority of the research for the book was conducted during a year- long sabbatical in 2011‒12. Butler University, where I work, funded half of that sabbatical, and to the university I am grateful for the opportunity to engage in the kind of sustained scholarly reflection that sabbaticals allow. Financial support for the other half of the sabbatical, as well as for a good deal of research and travel support, came in the form of a grant from the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI) at the Center for Religion & Civic Culture (CRCC) housed at the University of Southern California, and from the John Templeton Foundation, which funded it. Aside from the material support provided by PCRI, I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to the CRCC staff for planning two utterly stimulating workshops that brought together all of the PCRI grantees in Quito, Ecuador, and Nairobi, Kenya. To all of the grantees I am indebted for helping me grasp the global dimensions of the Pentecostal movement. But I am particularly grateful to Donald E. Miller, Executive Director of CRCC and Editor of the series in which this volume appears, and to Brie “Aguardiente” Loskota and Richard “Fireball” Flory (Managing Director and Director of Research, respectively, at CRCC), for their wit, wisdom, and ongoing friendship and scholarly guidance. In the collection of data, and in the arranging, conducting, translating, and transcribing of interviews, I was aided by a small army of research assistants, both at Butler University (Ariel Tyring, Katie Kilgore, Matt Miller, Douglas Manuel, and Stephanie Cheuvront) and in India (Naveen John, Yehova Das, and Abel Raj). Without them this project might have never come to fruition. For scholarly support, I am indebted to participants at conferences sponsored by the American Academy of Religion, the Conference on the Study of Religions of India, the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS), and the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies, who pro- vided feedback on some of the material that appears in the volume. Among EASAS colleagues, I would like to single out Eva Ambos and Davide Torri for their scholarly friendship and support, and for their endearingly “mind-buckling” polylinguistic abilities. Similarly, I am grateful to fel- low scholars of Indian religions, Jacob Cherian, Joseph Prabhakar Dayam, Satish Gyan, Paul Parathazham, Gyanapragasam Patrick, James Ponniah, and Nandini Ramaswamy, who influenced my thinking on the issues dis- cussed in this book in various ways, and who provided me with valuable contacts and guidance throughout North and South India. Similarly, while I was at work on the project, Sarah Claerhout, Richard Fox Young, Robert Frykenberg, Brian Hatcher, Roger Hedlund, Arun Jones, Tamara Leech, Reid Locklin, Brian Pennington, Nathaniel Roberts, Charles Ryerson, and Kerry San Chirico stimulated my thinking, filled in gaps in my knowledge, critiqued my presentations, and read first drafts of sections of the book. A reviewer at Oxford University Press provided invaluable comment on the entire manuscript, as did Corinne Dempsey, who regularly embodies the best of scholarly collegiality by combining thoughtful, informed, and careful critique with equally thoughtful and effusive encouragement. I am additionally grateful to Theo Calderara, editor at OUP, for his reasonable, calming, and thoughtful work with me on this project, and to OUP’s edi- torial assistant, Glenn Ramirez (and his team), for their help in seeing it through to publication. Engaging in research on this controversial subject required an attempt to sympathetically apprehend the views of prominent critics of Christianity in India, and in this regard, I am particularly grateful for the assistance of Koenraad Elst and Mihir Meghani, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). The latter helped me refine my understanding of HAF’s positions on these matters (though I don’t discuss them much in the book), and also put me in touch with R. Venkatanarayanan, former Secretary of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha. I owe Venkatanarayanan himself a debt of thanks for a series of thoughtful and engaging conversations in Delhi, and for elucidating the statements of his close associate, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who makes several appearances in these pages. viii | Acknowledgments A number of pro-Christian and pro-Dalit leaders and activists in India spent time with me, corresponded with me, and helped me understand the topic from their perspective, and among them I would like to express particular appreciation for John Dayal, Richard Howell, and Asha Kowtal. Similarly, the data and analysis appearing in c hapter 5 is better and more complete because of the assistance and advice of several Christian mission scholars and practitioners, among them Jonathan Bonk, William Burrows, Darrell Guder, Wilbert Shenk, and Erica Johnson. I am particularly grateful to Cambridge University Press, for allowing me to republish material in chapter 2 that first appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, and to Brill, for permission to reprint parts of my chap- ter that appeared in Richard Fox Young and Jonathan Seitz’s Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity, 1600s to the Present (Boston: Brill, 2013). I am, additionally, indebted to a number of friends and colleagues at Butler University. Members of my department, including our departmental administrative specialist, Mary Proffitt, helped maintain my sanity through professional collaboration, intellectual stimulation, and scholarly commis- eration. I would also like to express my gratitude to Travis Ryan, for help with (metaphorical) breeding, and to Terri Carney, for regularly reminding me to keep my priorities straight, and for encouraging me—borrowing the words of another—to practice at failure. Speaking of priorities, my first monograph ended with an acknowledg- ment of the “sisters B,” who accompanied me through the often lonely hours of writing, and who just happened to be canine. Those sisters, sadly, have since then passed on. But my life now is perpetually enriched by the presence of a new pair of sisters, our (human) daughters, Annika Priya and Nadya Sonali, who surely made sacrifices for this book in ways they couldn’t possibly know or understand. To borrow and adapt a line from a character in George Saunders’s Tenth of December: Stories, all I want from my life is to feel, at the end, like I did right by those magnificent little creatures. And finally, both to and for Jodi, my wife, who may have known the many sacrifices she had to make, but who nevertheless made them with characteristic grace and poise, I am, as always, grateful. Acknowledgments | ix