Christianity and conversion among Adivasis: Vignettes of the Santal Experience in 19th-century Bengal

The advent of Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century brought about momentous changes in the lives of Adivasis in India. While missionary activities among the «tribal» people and their contribution in creating the category of «tribes» has been studied at length, much less has been written about the Adivasi perspective of missionary activities, largely because of the paucity of Adivasi writings on this issue. By reading missionary texts against the grain, and through an analysis of the autobiography of a Santal convert, this article aims to illustrate the varied responses of the Santal community to Christian missions in the Santal Parganas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to discern what was at stake in their engagement with Christianity.