The Crisis in Religion: Christianity and Conversion in the Marathi Nineteenth Century

The essay tries to understand how conversion to Christianity can transform language and its rhetorical possibilities inwardly. In the case of Jyotirao Phule, who was not a convert but was a critic of caste distinctions in nineteenth-century Western India, this meant that Marathi could now be used to uncover the link between Hindu apologetics and Brahmanism. Here I argue that the humble' Marathi used in missionary tracts made possible the emergence of the I' of the convert, and pushed religion' into the gap opened up in social life by a crisis of values, a crisis productively instrumentalised by Phule.