The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India
February 27, 2025 | 12:00 PM CT
206 Ingraham Hall
Presentation Details
In 1813, the British Crown adopted a policy officially permitting Protestant missionaries to evangelize among the empire’s Indian subjects. The ramifications proved enormous and long-lasting. While the number of conversions was small—Christian converts never represented more than 1.5 percent of India’s population during the nineteenth century—Bengal’s majority faith communities responded in ways that sharply politicized religious identity, leading to the permanent ejection of religious minorities from Indian ideals of nationhood. Mou Banerjee details what happened as Hindus and Muslims grew increasingly suspicious of converts, missionaries, and evangelically minded British authorities. The meaning of conversion was passionately debated in the burgeoning sphere of print media, and individual converts were accused of betrayal and ostracized by their neighbors. Recovering the perspectives of Indian Christian converts as well as their detractors, Banerjee’s research is an eloquent account of religious marginalization that helps to explain the shape of Indian nationalist politics in today’s era of Hindu majoritarianism.
About the Speaker
Mou Banerjee is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first book, “The Disinherited” 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.