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Richard Fox Young, ed., India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding-Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical-in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2009. Pp. xi + 283. $45.00.
Looming large in India and the Indianness of Christianity is University of Wisconsin professor of history (emeritus) Robert Eric Frykenberg. Editor Richard Fox Young notes that Frykenberg developed his historiography early in the "unrestrained freedom of thought" that he experienced at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His London research - published as Guntur District, 1788-1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (1965) - was Indo-centric, focused on the unit of a district rather than on villages or the whole of the sub-continent, and showed that British innovations in revenue collections had little effect on traditional systems. Practically speaking, the Raj, according to Frykenberg, was an Indian rather than a British institution (4-5). As Judith M. Brown shows ("Indian Christians and Nehru's Nation-State," 217-34), Frykenberg was one of the main historians to argue that Christianity had a major cultural as well as religious role in India almost since the beginning of the Christian era. The fourteen Frykenberg "heirs" (or Vamsalvali, as Young emphasizes) who have contributed to this festschrift together investigate Indian Christian empowerment through themes including interdependence, ecumenical movements, syncretism, and proselytism.
In investigating this empowerment, Daniel Jeyaraj ("Indian Participation in Promoting Christian Mission...