Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835.
Young, Richard Fox
Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians,
1706-1835. By D. Dennis Hudson. Studies in the History of Christian
Missions 2. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2000. xii + 220.
$45.00 cloth.
It was not long after Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, a German Lutheran
Pietist, established India's first Protestant mission at Tranquebar
on the southeast coast of India in 1706 that the English-speaking world
heard of his endeavors. From 1709 until his death in 1719,
Ziegenbalg's letters were frequently translated. To keep abreast
after that, one had to read the berichte in German. Few were analyzed
(in any language), and--understandably--Ziegenbalg's garnered the
most attention. So interesting was his epoch and so prodigious his
writing that the scholarship based on it, mostly German, has
unintentionally discouraged the quest for indigenous materials to offset
the Eurocentric biases symptomatic of archival research.
Hudson, a specialist in South Indian religions, imbues his volume
with helpful Indic perspectives. As the title indicates, the focus is
Tamil, not European, Evangelicalism; while the Halle prototype is well
handled, the central questions are: "How did indigenous
predispositions affect the appropriation of Pietism and how were Tamils
the agents of their own self-transformation?" The Tamil berichte
Hudson adduces derive mainly from the post-Ziegenbalg correspondence of
Vedanayaga Sastri. Coming from a Christian who defended the older
Pietism against the cultural rigidity of later, more Calvinistic
missionaries, Vedanayaga's writings are for Hudson an authentically
Tamil articulation of the gospel. For cross-cultural hermeneutics, one
does not find better than this.
Although the book sets a hard-to-reach standard, German scholarship
has not been entirely superseded. Some of the best being done is by a
Tamil, Daniel Jeyaraj. Because Hudson cites him frequently, the
misspelling "Jeyeraj" should be noted.
Richard Fox Young
Princeton Theological Seminary
