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.

Shankar Nana, Parubai, and the Author, Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar

This chapter presents the life story of the first converts Shankar Nana, his wife Parubai, and the author of the novel, Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, their son. The life stories are based on Christian witnesses, Church Missionary Society archival records, and the Marathi Christian literature of the time that provided protagonists in the novel human agency. This chapter is important for its narrative that lies outside missionary discourse and the native Christian interest that seeks to justify conversion. Based on archival records, this chapter then constitutes the ‘other’ of the translated text.

Multiple Narratives in the Novel

The politics of a multilayered text like The Subhedar’s Son does not lie in its strong statement of ideological issues but in its silences and its emotional representations. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, the author of The Subhedar’s Son, deliberately connected Christian morality with specific social groups, according them relative political significance, while disregarding others as morally and spiritually bankrupt. This chapter discusses the various narrative strategies employed by Sawakar in the Marathi novel. It explores how The Subhedar’s Son is simultaneously a Christian narrative and a Brahmin narrative that makes an important case for the Brahmin-Christian contribution to vernacular nativism and nationalism, against colonialism. The chapter describes how the novel stages religious conversion to Christianity as a modern and individualist Brahmin and upper-caste decision, the analysis of which cannot be afforded within structural explorations, but personal motivations and life stories.

The Subhedar’s Son (Subhedārāchā Putra)

The annotated translation of the novel The Subhedar’s Son constitutes the main bulk of this book. The translation consists of fifteen chapters describing Rev. Shankar Balwant and his wife’s religious conversion to Christianity from a conservative Hindu Brahmin clan in 1849 at Nasik. These chapters closely explain the nature of the first Church Missionary Society mission in Nasik. The translation also describes the close interaction between the defeat of the Maratha Empire at British hands and the emotions of individual Brahmins, who converted to Christianity out of the feelings of frustration. While the first chapters discuss the Maratha defeat and the loss of Hindu grandeur, the latter part of the book unravels individual Brahmin expectations and the persecution faced by converts, despite intellectual ferment and conviction.

The Context of The Subhedar’s Son

This chapter discusses different social questions that were important for Brahmin conversion in the nineteenth-century Marathi mission. It begins with the racialization of religion at the mission, highlighting the question of rescued African slaves and the importance of retaining caste status among upper-caste converts. The chapter explores how caste identity among Brahmin converts in Nasik was produced from experiences of ostracism and oppression. While European missionaries oppressed native converts, Hindu Brahmins from Nasik ostracized Christians, who were disallowed from entering Nasik and lived in a Christian inhabitation called Sharanpur. The Subhedar’s Son is a perfect example of a conversion biography that simultaneously highlights Brahmin-Christian ancestry and the discrimination meted out to converts by Hindus. The book also demonstrates how writing about conversion and Christianity utilized borrowed emotions and experience from an entire vernacular literary domain that inscribed religious modernity and individual emancipation.