Sarbeswar Sahoo, Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India

The work under review is a rich and well written examination into the historical and contemporary worlds of Pentecostals in Rajasthan, a state in the western part of North India.These Pentecostals are part of the Bhil people, one of India's tribal groups.Most of the population of Rajasthan has a very strong "Rajput Hindu(tva) ideology" and so Christianity has flourished among tribal people who have found themselves on the fringes of mainstream Hindu society.The study takes as its guiding themes two salient realities of Pentecostalism in much of India today: conversion and religious violence.It shows how the two are linked, not in some facile causal way, but through the minds, motivations, and behaviors of Indian Christian missionaries, Christian converts, and their religious and political opponents.The monograph consists of an Introduction, four chapters dealing with different aspects of Pentecostalism, conversion and anti-Christian violence, and a Conclusion.The Introduction lays out the study's fundamental ideas.It locates anti-Christian violence in a larger historical context of religious or communal violence in India and shows how the former is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning in 1997 and increasing since then.Pentecostals bear a disproportionate share of the violence meted out upon Christians-primarily by Hindu nationalists.Perhaps not coincidentally, Pentecostals are also known to be very active in conversion activities in many parts of the nation and the Introduction helpfully articulates the main issues regarding conversion in India.It then moves on to matters of methodology and field work, undertaken in Udaipur district.Chapter 2 delves into the doctrines of Pentecostalism, which emphasizes the power of God the Holy Spirit.Then follows a brief history of the movement worldwide, in India, and finally in Rajasthan, where it was first introduced in the 1930s or 1940s, but really was planted on a permanent basis in the early 1960s by K. V. Phillip and T. V. Mathews, who were Pentecostal missionaries from Kerala.Mathews formed the Native Missionary Movement (NMM) in 1964, which recruited local Rajasthani tribal persons to be missionaries to their own people.Today there are over a dozen Pentecostal organizations and independent congregations working in the state, one of them being the Calvary Covenant Fellowship Mission (CFFM), which greatly assisted the author in his fieldwork.Pentecostalism among Bhils of Rajasthan (as in other parts of the world) emphasizes spirit worship; divine healings and miracles in the material, social and spiritual realms; strict rules of belief and practice; and social ministries such as education, counselling, medical assistance, and development and relief work.In India, conversion to Christianity by Dalit and Tribal groups has deep political ramifications, since a public declaration of a change of faith would deprive such converts of the benefits which come to them as members of traditionally oppressed classes of society.