Afterword and Concluding Thoughts

The concluding chapter summarizes all the conceptual questions raised while analysing the topic of religious conversion in nineteenth-century Maharashtra. Using personal experience, the author explores whether Marathi Brahmin Christians could be considered an ethnic group in the early colonial period. Using arguments from the preface of this book, the author discusses how social stigma created family life and family associations among early Christian converts who converted and intermarried within and across colonial missions to form a separate social group that was outside both Marathi and Brahmin identity, and colonial identity. While this intellectual burgeoning group of Brahmin Christians did not survive after independence, their vernacular expressions of Christian piety constituted important notions about religious modernity in the colonial period. Finally, the author discusses how conversion became a mode of communication within Christian families that becomes inherent expressions of articulating dissent.