Religious Transformation in South Asia: The Meanings of Conversion in Colonial Punjab

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, urgent and unprecedented demands among oppressed peoples in colonial India drove what came to be called 'mass conversion movements' towards a range of Christian denominations, launching a revolution in South Asia's two thousand-year Christian history.
For all the scale, drama, and lasting controversy of a movement that approached half a million members in Punjab alone by the end of the 1930s, much actually depended upon a varied range of tempestuous local relationships between converts and mission personnel, based upon uncertain and constantly evolving terms. Making extensive use of Protestant Evangelical and newly-uncovered Catholic mission sources, Religious Transformation in South Asia explores those relationships to reveal what lay behind the great diversity of social and religious aspirations of converts and mission personnel.
In this accessible study, Christopher Harding overturns the one-dimensional Christian missions of popular imagination by analysing the way that social class, theological training, culture, motivation, and personality produced an extraordinary range of presentations of 'Christianity' in late colonial Punjab. Punjabi converts themselves were animated by a similarly broad spectrum of expectations and pressures, communicated through informal social networks and representing a brand of subaltern consciousness and resistance rarely considered by mainstream Indian historiography.

My research interests lie in that modern meeting and mingling of European and Asian religious cultures which has affected everything from philosophy and popular religious experience on both continents to social work and policy, political ideology, and ideas about mental and spiritual health. Following many months of archival research and field work in India, Europe, and the UK, and the successful examination of my thesis, I went to live in Japan from September 2004 on a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship to begin comparative South Asia - Japan research alongside intensive language and journalistic training. I returned to the UK two years later, towards the end of 2006, to begin my current post at Edinburgh University, where I teach a range of courses on South Asia and Japan.