A Book Review
An Indian Church in an Alien Land: The Contribution of the Tinnevelly Mission of CMS towards the Ceylon Tamil Missions, Napoleon Pathmanathan, Kirubai Publication, Madurai. India. 2022.
This book is a doctoral research of Dr. Napoleon Pathmanathan with meticulous accuracy in documenting and applying the findings for missiological, ministerial and historical studies and praxis. This works talks about 19th century Tinnevelly mission of CMS and its missionary expansion in Sri Lanka among Tamil communities. The author’s sincere efforts to reach out to the primary sources of the missionary reports in University of Birmingham, Lambeth palace archives in UK and many other secondary resources related to the subject and careful analysis and evaluation are to be highly appreciated and valued. It is the heritage of the author in both Tinnevelly Christianity and its mission expansion in Sri Lanka lead him to do a thorough research to know about the communities he belongs to. As an experienced theological teacher for decades in Colombo Theological Seminary and a sincere lay minister in Anglican Church in Sri Lanka, through this seminal work, Napoleon Pathmanathan has immensely contributed to the contemporary Tamil Christianity and for the global Church in the following ways:
1. Author’s primary concern in the book is to combat the false propaganda that Christianity is a foreign religion which came along with British colonizers to subjugate native people of the colonized territories. Author highlights the fact that missionaries are to be distinguished from the colonizers because they fought for the cause of the freedom of the people through emancipation and liberation of the oppressed and downtrodden of the colonized societies. And Particularly in the case of Sri Lanka, it was not the foreign missionaries who brought Christian Faith to the Tamil people but it was the same Tamil native community from Tinnevelly who brought their new found life of freedom, dignity and power through Gospel to their own counterpart in Sri Lanka.
2. Another defame made upon Christianity is that it is ‘rice Christianity’. It means that people joined Churches only for their material benefits. Author combats this idea by his careful analysis of mass movement theory and falsification of it. What happened in 19th century in Tinnevelly was not mass movement of conversion of groups by the decisions of leaders of the large communities; rather it was a revival movement which produced enormous amount of individual conversions carefully verified by missionaries with high spiritual values. Therefore, conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit. Today anti Christian fundamentalists in India and Sri Lanka are strongly advocate against conversions to Christianity, but they do not really know the fact that conversion is not coercion, enticed or forced but Holy Spirit brought which they won’t be able to stop.
3. While doing apologetics against the false accusations the author is mercilessly self-critical about the past and present blind spots of Christian Church. With careful attention given to the missionary methods of Tinnelvelly model which was Pietistic German Lutheran one, authors calls for evaluation and correction of the contemporary mission practices of the Church to that of using indigenous people and methods for the expansion of the kingdom of God.
4. As the author proudly announces that this history is a subaltern one. It is written from the perspective of the native people of the Tamil communities from below bringing about the real forces behind the success of great missionaries like Rhenius, all the while without downplaying the importance of the contributions of those missionaries. Thus, the author pays the way for the historians to start writing history from below to bring about unknown and undocumented stories of indigenous missionaries, movements and practices in order to document, learn, educate and transform.
5. There are five chapters in the book which give us the contemporary approaches to historiography, the characteristics of Tinnevelly mission, Tamil Coolie Mission and Colombo Tamil Mission and the final chapter is full of applications of the lesions learned. Author’s extensive knowledge of the materials on the subject and critique of certain author like Pieris are illuminating and challenging.
My only critism about the author is that he lightly passes on the issue of Tamil coolies being brought in an inhumane way by British government for working in tea estates as if it is a cooked up story, whereas there are various authors discussed about this inhumane treatment of Tamil people by British colonizers. For example, we may cite works like that of Mu. Si. Muthaiah’s Chithaikapatta Malayga Tamizharhal, published by Vidiyal Pathipagam, in which we have number of other references to the authenticity of the theory.
Albeit, this work is to be widely read by all pastors, leaders, theologians and lay Christians to understand one of the powerful missionary revival movements in Christian history and apply the lesions for our contemporary Christianity, particularly in anti-Christian fundamentalist context today.
L. Sridharan Kalistas (9677577342)
Seeder Theological Institute