The XQs (Ten Questions) series is a conversation with the authors of new and exciting works in South Asian Studies, whose aim is not to “review” but to contextualize, historicize, and promote new scholarship. We thank Mahdi Chowdhury for conducting this interview. Please see the archive of previous thirty-two XQs.
Mou Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first book, The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India was published in January 2025 from Harvard University Press. Her research was funded by the award of the 2013 SSRC-IDRF dissertation research fellowship and her dissertation received the Harold K. Gross award at the Dept. Of History at Harvard. Her research has appeared in multiple journals such as the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), the journal Political Theology, Perspectives on History of the AHA, etc. She has also written for newspapers and periodicals such as The Telegraph and the Anandabazar Patrika of India and The Daily Star of Bangladesh. At UW-Madison she also runs the Nonviolence Project, which highlights student research on civil rights and nonviolent movements across the world.
XQ: There are evocative allusions to this in The Disinherited and your Harvard dissertation but to ask directly about, how does your unique upbringing in West Bengal–in its prosaic, adventurous, but also traumatic valences–inform your scholarship?
When we are growing up, we don’t realize how ordinary or how extraordinary our lives are. It’s when we retrospect, when we think back–and I think I’m at the age when a midlife crisis happen–that I realized mine was not an ordinary girlhood in any measure. Partly because of the two women who brought me up. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had two M.A. degrees. One in History, one in English—before 1945, at a time when most girls didn’t go to school. She was an extraordinarily modern woman for her times. She was thrust into an ordinary marriage and an ordinary life in one of the most rural places in all of Bengal. She was a poet of local repute. She wrote a few novels. She was a daughter of an army officer and grew up all over colonial India. She spoke Farsi and Urdu far better than she spoke Bangla, even though she spoke incredibly beautiful Bangla. Her name was Bina Chattopadhay. My mother, Madhusree Chattopadhyay, was one of four girls–in a society that did not value women. My grandmother was fierce in her insistence that all her girls get an education and make something of themselves. That fierceness was instilled in my mother and she instilled it in us.
I am proud of being Bengali, but what that Bengaliness looks like is not quite in the shape of someone in Kolkata. You know that famous joke by Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak, that all the great subaltern studies professors of that particular period were born within the same 2.5 kilometer radius? As you can imagine, I was nowhere near the 2.5 km radius. My hometown Purulia used to be a part of the Manbhum-Singhbhum mining complex region. After the linguistic reorganization of states, all the mining areas shifted to Bihar. Purulia used to be the court where mining disputes were adjudicated and my grandfather’s livelihood as a lawyer was lost as a consequence. There is also a large tribal indigenous population, the Santals.
The violence across India did touch us in strong ways. One of my earliest memories is the 1991 bomb blasts. Our teachers told us to go home. But my mother was a working woman and my father was away for whatever reason. I sat and waited in school while a riot engulfed the town. I waited until 5:00 pm, when a neighbor came and picked me up and took me home on the back of his scooter. This was before cellphones. I saw people fighting each other bloody somewhere near the bus stand and every time I go by it even now, I remember that scene, and my neighbor telling me “close your eyes.”
The Staines murder happened when I was a teenager. I could immediately see a shift, a chilling effect, in the substantial Christian population of my hometown. My friends became distant, scared, and understandably so. I write about this in the conclusion of the book.
What was it like growing up a girl in this hinterland, this forgotten place? No one came to Purulia, no one who left Purulia ever came back either. I grew up in a place that was ostensibly Bengal but was Bengali in a way very different from Kolkata. Therefore, whenever I look at history, I think : I have looked at the history of Bengal from the eyes of an outsider. I do not have the certainty of someone at the center and the surety of their convictions that this is what Bengal looks like. Or that middle class Hindus alone constitute what is remarkable about Bengal. It has made me wary of some accepted theoretical and historiographical positions. I hope not to lessen the work of historians who have emerged from metropolitan centers, I just want to say we have a need for historians who are also provincial.
XQ: Could you describe the development of The Disinherited, namely how you transformed your dissertation into a book?
The dissertation has almost nothing to do with the book. When you get to an academic publisher, they are going to ask you questions: how will this book sell? Why should we publish it? Why is it over 80,000 words? What is your overlying argument? You cannot refer to so-and-so thirty times in one chapter—can’t you put them into a footnote? The making of an academic book, in other words, is a different project. Any reputable US-based academic publisher is going to make you rehaul your work until your dissertation and your book are completely different from each other.
You see the shadow of your dissertation in your book. But the book is a much fuller engagement with the world than your dissertation often ever is. I had to rethink and refine my arguments to talk about how religious differences start emerging almost as soon as the idea of the Renaissance takes root in Bengal. And that it’s not merely a Kolkata story and not about the middle-class Bengali Hindu alone.
Unearthing stories of Bengali converts who are male is hard enough. Unearthing stories of Bengali converts who are women felt next to impossible. It is a herculean task because you realize the reason why the Bengali middle-class takes up so much space is because it is the Bengali middle-class who is deeply implicated in the bureaucracy of the nineteenth century. The stories they are interested in preserving are stories about themselves. There is no other good reason as to why Bengal, which was a Muslim majority region, is overwhelmingly represented in the historiography as one that is of the Bengali Hindu.
The dissertation and the book are different things. We get to know them at different parts of our careers. You grow with your dissertation. You learn how to be a historian with your dissertation. You go to your book as a historian.
XQ: The Disinherited paints a lucid portrait of colonial society and, at the risk of posing a rather large question, could you describe what impact the particularities of colonial rule had on the dynamics of Christian evangelism, conversion, and its reactions in India?
This is an important and complicated question. The history of Christianity and conversion in India is almost as old as Christianity itself. The story of the Syrian Christians, if we are to go by legends, begins somewhere in 52 AD, meaning it begins within twenty years of the end of Christ’s life. This is a longstanding, two millennia-long history. How do I differentiate the kind of history I am writing from other much more well-researched histories of southern India, for example, or the research that has come out of the Punjab or the Northeast?
Conversions in southern India are largely Catholic and coincide with a time in which the Portuguese Padroado held sway over the Indian Ocean. Some of those stories have been told eloquently by, for instance, Ananya Chakrabarty in her beautiful essay “Mapping Gabriel.” Susan Bayly writes about Catholicism with a fantastic description of how caste becomes a part of Catholicism in southern India. Divya Kannan has brilliantly written about German missionaries in Kerala—and the way in which missionary education brings out caste and class differences. These histories have certain features. One, conversions in these spaces are communitarian and singular conversions are fairly rare. Two, they are Catholic. Three, caste plays a huge role in these cases. Caste as a structure becomes a part of southern Catholic Christianity in ways that have vitiated the entire conversion apparatus. What was happening in Bengal is slightly different.
First, there was a mistrust by the British administration of open evangelical activity of the Christian missions, that is the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Baptists. This was because Bengal was the British bridgehead, because it was the capital, because there was a strong suspicion that interfering in the religious sphere was going to bring about a rebellion that the British didn’t think they were equipped to handle in ‘the early stage of our settlement in India.’ From the 1780s onwards, more strongly minded evangelical officials supported a Christianizing drive.
In the 1780s, the second rising of Protestantism occurred all over Europe with the call to essentially Christianize the world. Yet, they could not claim, as they claimed in the Americas and Africa, that Indians don’t have a “civilization.” They could claim, however, that India had a degraded civilization. The only way in which that degradation could be removed was to bring souls to enlightenment. That was the main pathway for evangelizing and for conversion. You cannot convert someone unless you have an argument about why your religion is better than their religion.
Who were the kinds of people who took part in this drive? The Baptists are by far the best known. Who were the first three Baptists who came to Bengal? William Carey, the father of modern missions—as he is rightly called—was actually a shoemaker, a cobbler. His printer, William Ward, who died very early, was a radical self-taught printer in Britain. Joshua Marshman was the only one with any kind of institutional learning, and he was a schoolteacher. They were certainly not Oxbridge products; they were not even a part of the Scottish Enlightenment. That set them up on a collision course with British administrators.
Thus, conversion in Bengal in that early period was different. First, it did not have overt institutional support. Second, it was happening piecemeal by people who were not even legally allowed to be within Kolkata or within the British domains before 1813. It was only after the Charter was renewed, after William Wilberforce rammed in the Pious Clause at the end, that this legal restriction was annulled. It was a fragmented project from the beginning. It was influential because of the linguistic efforts undertaken by the Baptists and because of the strong reaction that Indian intellectuals, beginning with Ram Mohan Roy, started taking against Christianity and its perceived threat against their identities.
Religious differentiation has been the bane of Indian politics. The question of “who belongs” within that nationalist discourse begins not with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, but with this discussion about evangelism in the second decade of the nineteenth century. We can already see the submerged figure of the horrible Christian behind the apparent figure of the horrible Muslim that Bankim made infamous in his Anandamath.
XQ: You have an evocative line in your chapter on Ram Mohan Roy—“the dark side of the mirror to the more widely known narrative of enlightenment and renaissance in nineteenth-century Bengal.” What was the ‘dark side’ of the Bengali Renaissance?
In C.A. Bayly’s Recovering Liberties, every Indian figure from Ram Mohan Roy onward is a liberal. It seemed as if all Indians were born liberal and have upheld a particular form of liberalism, which somehow failed and we careened into the Partition. If we look carefully at all the figures that we discuss as the mainstays of this idea of a Renaissance, first and foremost, Muslim figures do not really appear. This erasure helps a particular kind of narrative which says ‘they didn’t do anything for the Bengal or Indian Renaissance; therefore, they are not Indian.’
Why was it a Renaissance? Much like the original one, the Bengalis simply decided that they had a Renaissance. Because we decided that our religions needed a particular kind of reform after we came in contact with the long shadow of the Enlightenment.
As much as we like to vilify missionaries these days, these people were well-versed in Indian theology. That is why they were in a position to debate Indian intellectuals on their own religious leanings. The criticism against Hinduism or Hindu customs being superstitious first came from the missionaries, which then prompted a particular look inwards. At the same time, we has self-reformatory tendencies sweeping across the nineteenth century and the rise of a more monolithic Hinduism and Islam. Anglo-Indian law, for instance, becomes more rigid in this period as Julia Stephens has shown. Customary practices, which were varied across Bengal, were essentially clumped together and codified an upper caste understanding of such practices.
We must also ask Joan Kelly-Gadol’s old question: ‘did the women have a Renaissance?’ Much has been written about the bhadro-mohila, but what about all those who were not upper-class Hindu or refined Brahmo women? What happened to the so-called obhadro-mohila?
We cannot keep talking about what Bengal thinks tomorrow, India thinks tomorrow without also saying, yes, then so does the way in which we think about who belongs to the nation. This inclusion-exclusion is something Bengal perfected, given that you know we tend to talk about a vocal and proud minorities centered in Kolkata whose histories are taught to matter, whereas the history of the large majority, the Muslim peasantry of Bengal, really does not matter because they are not reflected as centrally in the archives.
XQ: There is a lot of heartbreak in The Disinherited. How did conversion affect social and familial bonds? How does your titular metaphor of disinheritance operate?
I’ll focus on one example of how this happens.
A believing Hindu is someone whose entire life has been spent performing merits so that the afterlife is as smooth as possible, as meritorious as possible. Conversion estrangeda son from his parents but also the parents from heaven. It took away their merits, their ‘retirement planning.’ It broke apart every bond of familial, religious, and social norms that held a particular family within the matrix of a community. In this light, what conversion did was a cosmological devastation, an estrangement from God. It wasnot merely the child whose soul had now gone to hell. They were deracinated. They were spiritually dead. They forced their parents too into a particular kind of sin that excluded them from heaven.
What do you do in such a case? Well, one way was to disown that child. You carried out a ritual of exclusion, known as a tyajjo-putro. Every sign in the family genealogical chart, in the familial histories of that child, was going to be wiped out. It was not merely at the moment in which they become Christian, but it was as if they did not exist from birth. The second thing you could do was hand over the charges of your life and the next life to someone who came next in the degree of closeness to a son and that was a nephew.
What was conversion, then, within this worldview? It was a spiritual crime that was inscribed in the body of the convert. But it was a spiritual crime that was so overwhelming in its scope that it wiped out any merits that a parent might have gained through their own efforts, and barred their parents’ way to heaven.
What did this do in terms of the Hindu family or the Hindu community within which conversion happened? It made them ultra-vigilant about any such events happening after that point. It made them even more rigid in terms of defining who was an orthodox Hindu and who wasn’t. It madethe those ritual gestures cementing one’s identification as an orthodox Hindu even more clear. In some ways, it made communities look even more inward and build stronger walls around themselves in terms of identity. Instead of disordering that society further, the second reaction was to create an even stronger monolithic identity. That is what I saw happening within Hindu society and, to an extent, around Muslim society, which I look at in my chapter on Munshi Meherullah.
XQ: There are many painful stories in your book, but I thought the Meherullah chapter had a different emotional ambience. I was drawn to his humour and levity. Why did Meherullah make jokes in theological debates and what insights do we glean from the study of a mofussil Muslim figure in this historical landscape?
I am a mofussil figure myself and I think that was Meherullah’s draw for me. Meherullah was a relief in many ways. He was deeply serious about the threat that he saw evangelism pose to rural Muslim society. But, from the beginning, he got onto something important. He got onto the genuine, I think, hilarity in missionaries coming to rural Bengal and saying: listen to me, your God is not a good God but my God is and therefore you should switch over to my God and that’s going to be wonderful for you. There’s a distinct element of farce in the way in which this form of debate was being carried on.
The other thing was the he was a learned man but he was a man of his milieu. He was not someone from the outside. He was not a Bengali intellectual who came from Kolkata and tried to understand the lived world of a Muslim peasant of eastern Bengal through study. Meherullah was a tailor. He waswell-read theologically but he was also someone who had a particular bent towards laughter. You know, if someone is being very serious in front of you—people say the most astonishingly strange things and they are doing it so seriously that you cannot even laugh. You know what they are saying is blatantly strange but it is being said in such a serious way! But the moment you laugh, the seriousness of that entire venture collapses. And this is what Meherullah did to the missionaries, he laughed at them.
The fact is that Meherullah was willing to fight. If you read his published pieces, they are serious theological attacks. But when he was talking to his own milieu, he knew that it was far more important to get them to listen—and the only way in which he could do that was by talking to them in the language of their experiences. Meherullah saidthat you may not know how to read the English words written on your ticket but in riverine Bengal, someone on the steamer-boat will to tell you where you want to go, where to be, and where to get off. If you can’t read the Quran in its original Arabic, there is similarly going to be an alim somewhere, who will transmute this message for you; that God is looking out for you in this journey of life and you’ll get down and end your journey wherever He wants you to, and it’s all going to be perfectly okay.
And to me, writing this chapter was a relief because the book has a lot about trauma. The laughter Meherullah brings disrupts that trauma. It is a trauma to be told over and over again that your religion is not the religion you should be faithful to. It is a trauma to seek medical help or to get subsistence during famine months in exchange for saying your religion is untrue, which Meherullah protested against because food was being given to converts during moments of famine. But he cut through this in a way that added levity to day-to-day life. I think that it was important for me to present as well that the conversations always did not have to be about trauma. But, if they were about trauma, they could disrupt that seriousness of the missionary initiative by wrapping it within that wonderful veil of laughter as well.
XQ: I would like to turn to another figure in your book: the patriotic yet elusive Indian Christian, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay. Who was Upadhyay and how did he negotiate his identity in the age of mass nationalism? What does his disappearance from collective memory tell us about the place of the minority in the postcolonial state?
This is again another figure who was trying to negotiate many different identities at once. He was born Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, in an upper caste Kulin Brahmin family.
Being a Christian was not his first conversion. He converted first to Brahmoism, then to Protestantism and, finally, to Catholicism wherein he found spiritual purchase. His idol, however, was Vivekananda, the neo-Hindu revivalist figure with whom he was apparently college classmates at a Scottish Church College (set up by Alexander Duff, the Great Converter). When Vivekananda died, he had this realization that he must do something for India. As I mention in that chapter, just to be called a “Christian” was to be called a traitor to the national cause.
In this context, for a man like Brahmabandhab to step fully within the swadeshi movement, he had to negotiate his identity in some way. He did this in an interesting manner: he said, culturally, that he wasa Hindu Brahmin, but his spiritual faith was that of a Catholic. So, he was, he claimed, a “Hindu-Catholic” with a hyphen in the middle—and somehow that hyphen is supposed to encapsulate all the complexity of that particular identity. The other thing that he started doing, I think in imitation of Vivekananda, was to start wearing the robes of a Brahmin sanyasi.
He was inspired by Faà di Bruno, a Catholic theologian, and the idea of holding one’s innermost faith deeply, personally, almost inside the closet. This is where the problem began because everyone around him believed that he gave up his Catholic faith. They said he committed a ritual of repentance, or prayoshchitto, and became fully Hindu again. But he also has a group of people including his first biographer Brahmachari Rewachand Animananda, who was also his student, and his most recent biographer Julius Lipner who say that was only a part of the way in which he was carrying out his faith in strict mental reservation. No one outside knew that, inside, he was still a practicing Catholic because he had to put on the performance of a Hindu sage.
After his death, this contestation continued. Bipin Chandra Pal called him someone who brought about a new homegrown idea of swadeshikata and compared him to Rabindranath Tagore on that matter. Tagore said he was both a Vedantic and a devout Catholic. But he added that the last time he met him, Brahmabandhab said: “Robi Babu, I have fallen perilously.” The Bangla he used was amar khub poton hoiache. If you are conversant with Christian theology in Bangla, you will know the word poton is synonymous with ‘the fall.’ There is a religious valence to the term implying one has fallen from faith. Tagore said this in the preface to his novel Char Adhyay and ignited a firestorm of anger from both older and younger revolutionaries, and he retracted his original preface. Brahmabandhab was remembered as a Christian Catholic and also a patriotic revolutionary in a particular way by Tagore, who was interested in this tension between inner faith and outward patriotism. And he was is remembered as a great Hindu sage by Bipin Chandra Pal, who himself was a Brahmo, but also a devout believer in extremist revolutionary action. I think this contestation tells us something about the way in which Indian nationalism, and the question of who can be a patriot, has operated in this country from an early period. This chapter where my most urgent questions about what it means to belong to a minority faith in South Asia are debated.
Do you have to be Hindu to be a patriot? And if you are not a Hindu, does it exclude you from the register of patriotism? Mussulman hole, Christian hole, ki deshatwabodh thake na? Can we be patriots if our religion is different from the majoritarian religion? Just because someone is a Hindu does that automatically mean that they are an Indian patriot? This is a negotiation that Christians, Muslims, and all minority faiths have had to engage with in India, endlessly since and after Brahmabandhab. They have found that within the particular ways in which Indian nationalism developed, their patriotism had to be forefront. They would always have to say we are Indian patriots and, in a far off move, could own and profess their Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh faiths. Whereas for someone like me, who belongs to the majority religion, I could say I am Hindu and that would automatically imply patriotism.
XQ: The enduring nature of the anti-conversion tropes you document is remarkable and depressing. Can you discuss some of the continuities and discontinuities you see between the past and the present?
The idea that conversion to Christianity, or conversion itself, is something that is superficial, motivated by gain, something that is not spiritually-sanctioned, but driven by material desires, has remained a strong pillar of narrative discourse within South Asia. The idea of “ricebag Christians,” for example, the notion that missionaries give material benefits to people who convert, has expanded. Then, you look at the ways in which let’s say an organization like the RSS operates, for example, the entire ghar-wapsi movement, says that people who have other religious identities, were at some distant point in the past—a past that is always receding further and further backwards—were Hindus who were forcibly converted under the sword. But all other non-Hindu faiths exist through coercion or were led by the hand under false pretenses into another religion—and they have to be brought ‘back home.’ You see, I show in my research that even people like Ram Mohan Roy talked about such suspicions as early as the 1810s. These tropes of suspicion have lingered on and on and have become a mainstay of the dialogue against any kind of evangelical activity in India.
The second is a question of belonging. If all of us, again, in some distant past were Hindus and, therefore, were the original inheritors of this land, then anyone who professes a different religious identity essentially is someone who does not belong within this land. Christianity has existed in India for almost as long as Christianity has itself existed. Islam came to India within a fifty-year period of Islam’s origins—with Muslims arriving on the coast of Gwadar in 712. I don’t know how much more belonging than almost two millennia anyone needs in any place on earth.
A narrative of coercion and betrayed promises, that is so recognizable to people like us who study the subcontinent, emerges from Bengal in this contest with evangelical Christianity. I see that line very clearly. That to me is also the dark side of the mirror of the Bengal Renaissance. Those debates survive even in the Freedom of Religion Bills that were propagated in postcolonial India and which were actually laws against propagation of conversion or any kind of evangelical Christian activity. They have moved out of nineteenth century Bengal and have penetrated elsewhere across India.
But what is the discontinuity? That is a good question as well. While there was sporadic violence against Christians in the sixty-year period before the Staines murder, there was not a nationwide legal framework which sought to deracinate people belonging to minority faiths in the way in which it has taken shape in the last ten years or so. That is a major discontinuity from the past. But it too, I think, takes some of its inspiration from colonial ideas about citizenship, subjecthood, and belonging – the question of true patriotism and who can be a true patriot in India is one of constant tension and negotiation of both systemic and actual violence. It surprises me how much the colonial past keeps living on in the postcolonial present.
XQ: Could you share five books that have inspired your work, and with whom you are most in conversation with?
I have to say though the first book that I read which pushed me to think about the infinite variety of religious thought and the ways in which religion was intertwined with political identity is Ayesha Jalal’s Self and Sovereignty.
Let’s say the second grand text would be Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India on how to read archives and how to understand what the language of the archives hides.
The third book is Christopher Bayly’s Empire and Information. I think this book is for anyone who’s beginning to think about history in a serious manner.
More recently, I read Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. This is when I was trying to write the Meherullah chapter and the work she did on framing ‘waywardness’ as a historical category of analysis was absolutely wonderful for me to think through.
Tariq Omar Ali and Julia Stephens. The way in which Tariq talks about Bengal and the way in which Julia talks about the framing of Islam has had a strong impact on my own work.
I’ve learned so much about legal history from Mitra Sharafi’s work. Her essay on abortion that came out in Modern Asian Studies a few years back is a fantastic piecing together of a legal story from rather fragmentary evidence in Indian law reports. You can see direct evidence of Mitra’s influence and of that kind of historical detective work in the Gyanendramohan chapter.
Sugata Bose is everywhere in this book. If anyone taught me how to be a historian, it’s him. I cannot mention one book because his influence is everywhere: the way I think about politics, the way I think about religion, the way I think about India.
XQ: What are you working on next?
I am working on Syed Mujtaba Ali at the moment. He is another figure who stands at the crossroads of many different identities; someone in search of a particular kind of home and that home always sort of eludes him. He is both diasporic and deeply rooted in Bengal.
Through him, I am trying to reimagine what it means to be a part of a Bengal that is wider than what our understanding of Bengal has turned out to be post-colonially. I want to think of a Bengal that officially, administratively, stretched from Kabul to Singapore. I want to think about what liminal places, frontiers, and borders mean for Indians and Bengalis.
What does it mean for a Bengali like Mujtaba Ali–who’s actually born within Assam in Sylhet, but calls himself a proud Bengali–to traverse to Kabul, then to Hitler’s Germany, and then around the world, and then to come back to India, and then be called a spy for the Pakistani government after Partition, and then to have a difficult life trying to balance family in East Pakistan and his career in India?
I also want to think through what it might mean for Afghanistan and Burma both to be linked so intrinsically with the idea of frontiers for a state that was functionally being administered from Kolkata for the longest period of time? What does the world look like, what does the frontier look like, from the surety of the metropole?
Mahdi Chowdhury is a writer and historian of the modern Indian Ocean, with a particular interest in British imperialism and connected histories of South Asia and the Middle East. He is presently a PhD candidate at Harvard University where he is writing a dissertation on the relationship between Islamic modernism and imperial infrastructure from the Suez Canal to the ports of the Bay of Bengal. In addition to historical research, he has written pieces of art criticism, film history, and theory for The New Inquiry, *Jadaliyya, and Asia Art Archive.