Mark Twain is not a good authority to quote. He spent 3 months in India as a tourist in 1897. That’s the very limited viewpoint he can give. It may be good travel writing, but it’s not a good source for real knowledge or understanding.
It would be better to quote the work of real historians. There are plenty of Indian historians writing about the British Raj today, as well as British historians.
The English church had structural as well as cultural difficulties with evangelism in India. As a church /defined/ as ‘that section of the catholic church which derives it’s canon law from the English civil authority and it’s membership from the UK’, it had no obvious role in place with a different civil authority and community.
Really?
A History of the Church of England in India, by Eyre Chatterton (1924)
From Chapter XXVIII. Conclusion:
In 1815, when Bishop Middleton arrived in Calcutta, there were seven hundred thousand Christians in India, of all denominations and races; now there are over four millions, of whom between five and six hundred thousand belong to the Anglican Communion. Then there was one Anglican Bishop in the whole of the Eastern Hemisphere; now there are thirteen dioceses in the Province of India, Burma, and Ceylon. Then there were forty Anglican Clergy and no Indian Clergy; now there are about a thousand Clergy, of whom one-third are Indians. Of these Indians one has been raised to the Episcopate and two are Archdeacons. Then there were only fifteen Churches in the whole country; and now there are well over twelve hundred. Then there was no vernacular Prayer-book, and now the Church of England Prayer-book has been translated into at least fourteen Indian languages. Then the vernacular versions of the English Bible could be counted on the fingers of one hand, now there are translations of the Scriptures into seventy-six Indian languages and dialects, including eighteen translations of the whole Bible. Nineteen million copies of these have been distributed by the Bible Society alone in India, besides the enormous number issued by the S.P.C.K.
And the Anglican Communion also hasn’t had any trouble expanding to other lands outside of the British Isles.
Yes, really, the Anglican church in India is mostly the result of Swiss/German missions.
That’s a strange claim. Cite?
I had never heard of this before, but I just now searched on the phrase “the Anglican church in India is mostly the result of Swiss/German missions” and found this Wikipedia entry:
This says that a denomination called the Church of South India is the second largest Christian denomination in India. It has 1.55 million members. Another search says that the Catholic Church is the largest Christian denomination in India. It has 20 million members:
Together that’s 21.55 million members. The population of India is 1,352,642,280 as of 2018. That means those two denominations together are about 1.6% of the population of India. The percentage of Christians in India is about 2.3%. So together those two denominations constitute about 70% of the Christians in India. I don’t know what Melbourne means by “the result of Swiss/German missions”. Is Melbourne claiming that the Church of South India is the result of Swiss/German missions? It doesn’t seem to say that in the Wikipedia entry on the Church of South India. I’m now lost. What’s going on here?
My father grew up on the gulf coast of Mississippi and he told me the story of an influx of Czech migrants in the area. When they arrived, they separated them in to 3 groups and told them if you are in group 1, you’re last name is Saucier, group 2, you’re last name is Gaspard, and I forget group 3, but you get the idea. Obviously, Cajun Americans there were in charge at the time. Whenever I meet someone with one of those last names, I’ll ask them where they’re from and they always say the gulf coast of Mississippi.
Still is, though an extremely small one. Many are descended from more recent Jewish immigrants from the 16th century onward, but there are probably still some Cochin Jews with ancestors going back to the Malabari Jewish community of a couple millennia ago.