In the contemporary political and public discourse of India, a persistent narrative continues to gain ground: the framing of Christianity as an inherently ‘outsider’ religion. It is frequently portrayed as a foreign, colonial import that remains fundamentally at odds with the indigenous, ancient traditions of the subcontinent. This popular historical imagination reinforces a stark binary, painting the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as an era defined by an inevitable clash between aggressive European Christian hegemony and a defensive, resurgent Hindu national identity.

Yet, if we look beyond the simplistic generalisations of popular history, a radically different and utterly fascinating counter-narrative emerges. Within the intellectual ferment of the 1890s to the 1920s, a group of European Catholic intellectuals—specifically, a cadre of highly educated Jesuits—did not seek to dismantle Hindu philosophy. Instead, they rigorously studied it, fell in awe of it, and actively championed it as the essential, inescapable ‘national culture’ of an awakening India. They argued that for Christianity to truly take root in Indian soil, it could not be a European transplant. It had to be built upon the profound philosophical genius of ancient Indian sages like Sankara and Ramanuja.

In doing so, these forgotten scholars of the ‘Calcutta School of Indology’ challenge our modern assumptions, offering a powerful historical corrective that demonstrates how Indian national identity and Christian theology have, at times, engaged in a deeply cosmopolitan and respectful embrace.

To understand why European Catholic priests took a deep interest in the Vedanta during the height of anti-colonial nationalism and Hindu revivalism in India, we must look at the dramatic shifts unfolding in global politics and the Roman Catholic Church.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution and its upheavals, the 19^th century was a period of profound political trauma for the Roman Catholic Church. Across Europe and Latin America, the Church found itself locked in fierce, existential clashes with secular, state-building nationalists who viewed the transnational Catholic Church as the primary enemy of modern progress and the nation-state.

By the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the myth of European moral and civilisational superiority was beginning to crack, eventually shattering completely in the blood-soaked trenches of World War I. Europe was ravaged not just by physical war, but by a perceived spiritual decay. The rise of industrial capitalism, secularism, and materialism left many conservative Catholic thinkers feeling that Europe had ‘lost its soul’.

In response, a distinct brand of ‘Conservative Catholic Orientalism’ began to emerge. When Catholic intellectuals looked to the ‘East’, particularly to India, they did not see a land of “pagan darkness” wanting to be civilised. Instead, they saw a vast reservoir of deep, surviving spiritual tradition. India was viewed as a civilisation that still understood the primacy of the divine, a place where religion permeated every aspect of daily life. For these Catholic thinkers, the ancient traditions of India were not the enemy; rather, they were a potential “fix” to the spiritual amnesia plaguing Europe.

Simultaneously, the Roman Catholic Church was navigating a world of crumbling empires and rising nationalisms. The Vatican realised that if Catholicism was to be truly universal, it had to disentangle itself from the cultural baggage of ‘Europe’ and find a way to resonate with the rising national consciousness across the world. In India, this meant coming to terms with Hindu revivalism and the broader anti-colonial struggle, which sought to reclaim Indian pride and heritage.

The pioneer of this radical shift in Christian engagement with India was William Wallace (1863-1922). Arriving in India in the late 19^th century, Wallace was an Anglican Evangelical missionary. Like many of his peers, he was expected to preach the Gospel and dismiss local religious traditions as idolatrous errors.

However, Wallace was an independent and rigorous thinker. He began a profound, immersive encounter with Hindu philosophy, particularly Yoga and the broader Vedantic traditions. The deeper he delved into the sacred texts of Hinduism, the more he realised that the Evangelical framework he brought from Britain was completely inadequate for understanding the spiritual depth of India. He did not find “absurdities” or “wickedness”—as many other European missionaries before him claimed; he found a highly sophisticated, rigorously logical philosophical system oriented toward the ultimate liberation of the soul.

Wallace’s intellectual journey led him to a startling conclusion: he could not remain an Evangelical. The rigid, text-bound Protestantism of his youth offered no theological space to accommodate the vast philosophical truths he was discovering in Hinduism. He turned instead to the Roman Catholic Church, eventually becoming a Jesuit.

Why? Because Catholicism, with its deep roots in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, possessed a long history of integrating “pagan” philosophy. Just as Aquinas had famously taken the philosophy of Aristotle and used it to build the intellectual cathedral of Catholic theology, Wallace believed the same must be done with Indian philosophy.

For Wallace, conversion was not about forcing an Indian to become culturally European. It was about recognising that God had already been working in India for millennia, preparing the intellectual soil through the rishis (sages). Wallace laid the crucial groundwork for the idea that a genuine Indian Christianity must pass “by way of the East”.

Wallace’s pioneering vision might have remained the eccentric pursuit of a lone scholar had it not been institutionalised by a brilliant generation of Belgian Jesuits who arrived in Calcutta in the early 20^th century. Based at St Xavier’s College, foremost among them were Pierre Johanns SJ (1882-1955) and Georges Dandoy SJ (1882-1962). Trained in Oxford, they were scholars of Sanskrit and Indology.

In 1922, Dandoy and Johanns launched a journal that would become the intellectual nerve centre for this movement: The Light of the East. Published out of Calcutta, the journal reached an audience of educated Indians, both Christian and Hindu, and sought to reframe the relationship between the two faiths.

The animating theological principle of The Light of the East was the concept of “fulfilment”. The Jesuits rejected the colonial missionary model of “replacement”—the idea that Hinduism had to be torn down so Christianity could be built in its place. Instead, they argued that Catholicism was the natural, logical “fulfilment” of the deepest yearnings of the Vedanta.

Johanns, in his masterwork serial To Christ Through the Vedanta, undertook an ambitious intellectual project. He engaged deeply with the great theologians of Hinduism—Sankara, Ramanuja, Vallabha, and Chaitanya. Johanns argued that these thinkers had discovered profound, isolated truths about the nature of God, the soul, and creation. Sankara, for instance, had brilliantly deduced the absolute, unchangeable unity of the divine (Brahman), while Ramanuja had beautifully articulated the personal, loving nature of God and the necessity of devotion (Bhakti).

Johanns posited that while these Hindu systems often contradicted each other, they could be synthesised and harmonised within the framework of Thomistic Catholic theology. For Johanns and Dandoy, Vedanta was not a rival to be defeated; it was the ‘Old Testament’ of India. They championed Hinduism as the undeniable ‘national culture’ of the subcontinent, insisting that an Indian who became a Christian should not have to abandon Sankara and Ramanuja, but rather read them in a new, fulfilled light.

This intellectual project was deeply intertwined with the volatile politics of the 1920s and 30s. The Jesuits at St Xavier’s were acutely aware of the nationalist fervour sweeping Bengal and the rest of India. Crucially, they did not view Indian nationalism as an inherent threat, provided it was uncoupled from a strict, exclusionary religious majoritarianism.

In fact, the global Church during this era was actively trying to cultivate what historians call “Catholic Nationalism”. Having been battered by secular nationalists in the 19^th century, the 20th-century Church sought to prove that one could be a fiercely loyal, patriotic nationalist while still belonging to the universal, transnational Catholic faith.

The pages of The Light of the East reveal a fascinating commentary on political change. In an editorial titled ‘The War on Traditions’, the journal addressed the massive social upheavals of the modern age. The Jesuits noted that a “war” was being waged globally against ancient traditions, driven by modern secular education, rapid communication, and scientific scepticism. However, rather than celebrating the destruction of orthodox Hinduism as a victory for Christian conversion, the Jesuits mourned it.

They recognised that all great religions are transmitted by tradition. The Protestant reliance on individual interpretation or the secularist reliance on pure rationalism was viewed as corrosive. The Jesuits found themselves in a bizarre but logical alliance with orthodox Hindus against the creeping tide of Western secular materialism. As different as they were, the Jesuits could relate to the devout spiritualism of Hindus seeking to defend their traditions. Both of them respected and placed the sacredness of the cosmos above the claims of ‘disenchanted science’, as opposed to westernised, secular Indian reformers who believed in nothing but material progress.

Furthermore, the Jesuits directly addressed the anxieties surrounding nationalism and religious identity. In an article titled ‘My Country Right or Wrong’, the journal tackled the accusation that adopting a “universal” religion like Catholicism would destroy an Indian’s patriotic spirit. The Jesuits fired back with historical precedent. They pointed to Ireland and Poland—two of the most fiercely nationalist and patriotic countries in the world at the time, both of which were overwhelmingly Catholic.

They argued that a truly universal religion does not obliterate local culture and time-honoured tradition; it protects and elevates it. The Catholic Church, they reminded their readers, had historically been the foremost champion of ancient cultures, preserving languages and classical literature when empires fell. “Render to your country what is your country’s and render to God what is God’s,” the journal argued, asserting that true faith respects national laws, arts, and languages.

By actively championing the preservation of Indian languages, classical texts, and philosophical frameworks, these European Jesuits were essentially declaring that one could be a fully patriotic, culturally rooted Indian nationalist while belonging to the Catholic faith. They were inspired by figures like Brahmabandhav Upadhyay, the fiery Bengali intellectual and participant in the Swadeshi movement, who famously declared himself a “Hindu-Catholic”—culturally and nationally Hindu, but theologically Catholic. Upadhyay’s vision of singing Vedic hymns to the Christian Trinity was the very embodiment of the synthesis the Jesuits were trying to institutionalise.

The vibrant intellectual experiment of the Calcutta School of Indology and The Light of the East eventually faded in the mid-20^th century. The geopolitical realities of post-independent India, changing dynamics within the Vatican, and the shifting priorities of the Jesuit order meant that this specific brand of rigorous, elite philosophical synthesis gave way to other forms of social and theological engagement.

However, the legacy of Wallace, Johanns, and Dandoy remains profoundly significant today. The prevailing myth relies on a neat, unbridgeable divide: ‘European’ equals the Christian coloniser; ‘Indian’ equals the colonised Hindu. Yet here were European Christian missionaries who rejected European cultural arrogance and spent their lives translating and elevating the sacred texts of Hinduism, declaring to the world that the spiritual genius of India was not a relic of the past, but a living treasure for all of humanity.

Today, as historical narratives are flattened into weapons for political posturing, the story of these European Jesuits serves as a vital antidote to historical amnesia.

Rohan Basu is a doctoral scholar at the Department of Historical Studies, Central European University, Vienna.