Protestant missionary dilemmas about the ‘social’ in 19th and early twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala
Author(s): Anna Jacob
Abstract: This article examines the complex discourse on caste among Protestant missionaries and converts in the Princely state of Travancore, in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries South India. It argues that this discourse on caste needs to be understood in the context of tensions between individualism and radical social transformation that were an inherent part of evangelical theology and social thought. Even as evangelicalism stressed on social transformation, it insisted on the individual as the locus of gradual change in society. The Protestant missionaries were therefore wary of collective social and political mobilization. It shows how these tensions unfold in contradictory practices on caste within Travancore churches of the CMS. It argues that the struggle over caste is also part of a larger Protestant modern project of carving out the domain of the ‘social’ and the ‘religious’ but it was inherently unstable and incomplete. It shows how in the process of constructing bounded Christian community in the early 20th century, Pulaya Christian and Hindu groups increasingly found themselves unable to forge cross-religious solidarities. Elite Christians as well as lower caste converts deployed the language of social or civil rights in different ways, and this debate was largely framed by Protestant ideas.
Anna Jacob. Protestant missionary dilemmas about the ‘social’ in 19th and early twentieth-century Travancore/Kerala. Int J Hist 2025;7(11):88-97. DOI: 10.22271/27069109.2025.v7.i11b.567
