Indian Antiquary Vol 45

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 124

116
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[JULY, 1916
THE HISTORY OF THE NAIK KINGDOM OF MADURA.
BY V. RANGACHARI, M.A., L.T., MADRAS.
(Continued from p. 108.)
His method of work. The immediate and logical result of this view was the adoption of a different method of conversion. The predecessors of le Nobilis had appealed to the Paravas and the lower classes, and laboured for their elevation first. By doing this, they had had the satisfaction of bringing thousands of people into their fold; but this satisfaction had been, soon after, followed by a serious disappointment and despair. For all conversion ceased with the Paravas, who had everything to gain, and nothing to lose, by embracing Christianity. The higher castes refused to be moved by the sermons of the missionaries, whom they called Parangis (Frangi, Frank, European, not Indian) and held in horror. They feared the infamy of association with those who ate beef, drank wine, and lived in the company of outcaste Pariahs. The conversion of the Paravans thus proved an obstacle to the conversion of the higher castes. De Nobilis, therefore, separated himself entirely from his brother workers. He started the system of bringing round the higher classes first, and for this purpose, he had necessarily to keep himself aloof from the contact of the lower classes and of the missionaries who worked among them. In other words, while his predecessors had worked from below, he began the system of working from above. The one had begun with the elevation of the depressed, the other began with the pursuasion of the enlightened. The one influenced the lower classes and the other the Brahmans. They worked from the opposite poles, as it were, towards a common centre.
Its inherent difficulty. Such a circumstance could not bat raise discontent in the minds of the different Juarties. De Nobilis' stay in the midst of the Brahmans, his avoidance of the lower classes and of the company of his brother missionaries, the sanction he gave to the continued observance of Hindu castes and customs, made him an object of suspicion and hatred in the eyes of his brother workers. They believed him to be an insane man who, in order to gain nominally a larger number of Christians, demeaned himself and the Christian religion itself by his conduct and precept. By his separation from the depressed classes, he violated, thoy held, the fundamental principle of equality which Christianity boasted ; and by his concessions to Indian taste and manners, he demoralised, they said, Christianity itself, und sacrificed its simplicity and its truth. While De Nobilis thus incurred the odium of his co-religionists, he was not, in the long run, more successful in obtaining triumph over paganism or in his relations with the higher classes of the Hindus. In fact, circumstanced as he was, he could hardly succeed. From the first he placed himself in a wrong position. He began with deceit, with the adoption of a life which he in secret abhorred, with lies or at least equivocations on his lips as to his parentage, his aims, his views, and his ambitions. Calling himself a Brahman, he could hardly continue to deceive the Brahman. Capable of proving that he was not a Parangi in the moral sense, he could hardly hide long the fact that he was a Parangi' in birth. The result was that when the real facts became
* Cf. Hough, who says that his teachings were not consistent with Christian truth” and had " little relation to the doctrines and labours of the apostles." They "present so little of Christian character " that they are "scarcely entitled to be recorded in a history of Christianity in India." Taylor also condemns him. See O. H. MSS., II, p. 220.