Christian appropriation of Hindu festivals like Pongal in Tamil Nadu exemplifies a strategic evangelism tactic: retaining familiar rituals while substituting core deities with Jesus and Mary, gradually eroding cultural roots. This method mirrors historical missionary approaches documented in Tamil Nadu’s Christian history, where converts maintained Hindu customs such as caste marks, festivals, and marriage rites around the fire god Agni even after baptism. Now, this playbook extends to Janjatiya regions in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, reshaping demographics and sparking conflicts by mimicking indigenous traditions.
Early Origins of Christian Appropriation of Hindu symbolism
Missionaries in colonial Tamil Nadu adopted a conciliatory stance toward Hindu practices to ease conversions, allowing early Christians to participate in Hindu festivals, wear caste marks on their foreheads, and perform partial marriage ceremonies in chapels followed by Hindu fire rituals at home. Figures like Fr. Jerome D’Souza noted Tamil Christians dressing like Hindus and observing social customs, while Protestant missions like Tranquebar initially tolerated caste distinctions as mere “rank” differences. This syncretism persisted despite later anti-caste pushes by leaders like Rev. John Wilson, creating hybrid communities where Hindu elements blended seamlessly with Christianity, as seen in Madurai and Tanjore.
Pongal, a harvest festival honoring the sun god, cows, and farm prosperity, sees Christian versions retain kolam designs, pongal cooking, and cattle reverence but replace invocations to Hindu deities with prayers to Jesus and Mary. Such adaptations make the faith appear indigenous, severing ties to ancestral worship over generations. Historical precedents reveal missionaries in Tinnevelly and Tanjore infusing caste spirit into churches, prioritizing ease of conversion over doctrinal purity.
DMK has been trying to secularise the Pongal festival every year. It rechristened it as “Samathuva (equality all religion) Pongal” and started calling the first day of the month (Thai) in the solar calendar as New Year. It seems as if the DMK is indeed implementing the agenda of missionaries by de-Hinduising Pongal and giving it a secular colour. Every church in the country participates in celebrating Pongal, and there are special masses that are conducted as well. But pious and common Muslims, in large numbers, refused to partake of the Prasad sweet Pongal or pre-Pongal rituals, saying it is haram to them. Churches in Tamil Nadu are trying to celebrate Pongal like other Hindu festivals. It has been saying all Hindu festivals, including Diwali, are northern festivals; Bhagwan Ram, Murugan, Siva, Ganesh are not Tamil Gods. But for them, Ramdan and Christmas are Indian festivals.
The inculturation of Pongal by Church is like mocking the true essence of harvest festival and converting it into a pan-world one, only to belittle its significance and to destroy Hindu and Tamil culture with a hidden agenda.
This same strategy now targets Janjatiya communities in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where evangelists appropriate Janjatiya Sarna rituals, dances, and harvest celebrations like Sarhul, inserting Christian icons while keeping rhythmic drums and nature reverence. Demographic shifts show Christian populations rising from 4.3% in Jharkhand (2011) to higher estimates amid conflicts, as Janjatiya youth abandon Sarna identity for “Christian tribal” labels to access benefits, fueling violence like the 2024 Sarna Code agitations. Churches mimic temple architecture with gopurams topped by crosses, and processions ape Hindu yatras with saffron-robed pilgrims wearing tulsi malas alongside crucifixes.
The playbook weakens foundations from within: learn local languages and granthas, replicate symbols like lamps and prasad distribution, then substitute theology. In Janjatiya belts, this erases centuries-old animist cultures tied to sacred groves (Sarna), creating fault lines exploited for conversions amid poverty and ST reservations. Awareness is crucial, as unchecked, it risks permanent cultural erasure, repeating Europe’s Pagan-to-Christian symbol usurpation now in Bharat’s heartland.
Rajiv Malhotra’s lens on Christian evangelism
Rajiv Malhotra’s digestion theory provides a precise framework for understanding Christian evangelism’s strategy in Tamil Nadu and Janjatiya India: weaker dharmic traditions are absorbed into the dominant history-centric Abrahamic framework, stripped of origins, and repackaged to strengthen Christianity while erasing the source.
This theory outlines three phases—delinking, digestion, and appropriation—mirroring Pongal’s Christianization. First, delinking severs Hindu elements from their roots: Pongal’s rituals persist, but invocations to Surya or farm deities are detached and replaced by Jesus, as early Tamil Christians retained fire-walks and caste marks sans Hindu theology. Digestion follows, breaking down these into “molecular” basics—harvest joy, community feasts—reassembled as Christian events without crediting Hindu origins, much like “Christian Yoga” or Bharata Natyam mudras for the Cross and Mary.
Appropriation completes the cycle, with the host (Christianity) emerging robust, claiming universality: Tamil “Pongal Masses” now normalize Jesus in harvest worship, naive Hindus viewing it as synthesis, but Malhotra warns the reverse occurs—Hinduism shrinks as a subset. Historical missionaries in Madurai and Tinnevelly tolerated such hybrids to “make caste friend rather than enemy,” sowing seeds of pride and division that persist.
In Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, digestion targets Sarna groves and Sarhul dances: Janjatiya youth learn “Christian tribal” hymns mimicking folk rhythms, delinked from animist spirits, digested into Bible narratives, and appropriated as indigenous church growth amid demographic shifts. Malhotra likens this to a tiger digesting a deer—distinct DNA rejects foreign cells, so the source is pulverized into raw material fueling the predator’s strength, not mutual blending.
History-centrism bolsters Christianity’s resilience: unlike dharma’s timeless truths, it posits Jesus’ singular intervention demanding erasure of priors, falsifying pagan pasts as in Europe’s conversions. Janjatiya cultures risk vanishing, their sacred sites becoming cross-topped “prayer hills,” fueling conflicts like Sarna demands. Vigilance against sameness myths preserves roots, countering this existential threat.
Various interacting ideologies follow the same natural patterns that we see in interspecific interactions ( i.e. interactions between different species). I would call it “inter-ideological intraspecific interactions”. Rajiv Malhotra’s digestion theory explains his perspective on the relationships between Christian and Hindus referring explicitly in terms of predator and prey but described in terms of parasitic coevolution and implicit carnivores-herbivores trophic relationship between these missionary Christians vs. Hindus. Author Jamadagnya calls it Rajiv Malhotra’s “digestion theory” and claims that it provides a precise framework for understanding Christian evangelism’s strategy in Tamil Nadu and Janjatiya India.
Inter-deological interactions are inevitable. Sometimes gruesome, like Shaivite Sambandar impalement of Shamanars in 7th-8th century. Rajiv Malhotra’s “digestion theory” does give his description of Christian-Hindu interactions with a morality sense of Christian/Western perpretators vs Hindu victims, but fails to provide any real helpful understanding to victims. Nor it helps perpetrators and victims to evolve into “more moral” interaction. In fact, a perpetrator may come out feeling as “victor” and victim as “loser” and so not worthy of any “respect” and even less worthy of following its “loser” ideology. He did not provide a single counter strategy, so his “theory” has no solution to either party.
It is not just Rajiv Malhotra, but also HinduPost and other Hindu sites that focus overwhelmingly in such analysis. To our much appreciation and gratitude, they do a good job in documenting incidents and patterns of injustice and oppression that Hindus are being subjected to by radicalized religion inspired inimical entities. Reliability and verifiability of such incidents is critical when we present our case to world and to fellow religionists. However, I think, we also need to discuss things from the point of resulting strategies and also from the point of view of altering mental state of Hindu samaaj to act in a organised state and to a facultative dominant state.
So, to start with, on every such one-sided Malhotra framework, what about a “precise framework” to understand the preyed victim wretchedness of these suffering Hindus and other nonchalant neighbouring Hindus? Why do only Hindus (even educated Hindus) numerically overwhelmingly get convinced by Christianity and Mohammadanism and why even torturing, raping perpetrators are able to act without any fear amongst the sea of Hindus?