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While no 19th-century census tells us how many north Indian Christians came from the Brahman caste, they were surely few. Numbers aside, theirs was an influential elite. Of the many advantages they enjoyed, literacy was the greatest. As custodians of the sacred "word," Brahmans leaped ahead to acquire new languages and knowledge as times changed. Under the British Raj, Brahmans learned English; for a few, this was their entrée into Christianity. For others, European missionaries' use of Sanskrit to discuss Christian ideas proved more important. When the "language of the gods" was Christianized, a vigorous interreligious exchange occurred, bringing to faith some of Indian Christianity's most original theological thinkers.

"To eat and drink with the Christians!" a Hindu editorialist thundered. A young Brahman named Nilakantha Goreh, though learned in the Sanskritic wisdom of Indian antiquity, had just apostatized. Rumor had been rampant that devilry was afoot, inflamed by the disappearance of the allegedly hapless youth. Missionaries had had him whisked off to a faraway church, concerned that riots might erupt if their new Christian convert were to surrender his shoulder cord (emblematic of the "twice born") and be baptized in Varanasi, the sacred but volatile temple-city on the Ganges.

The year (1848) may have been long ago, but nowadays, too, Brahman conversions occur infrequently and always arouse consternation. Though the roles are only partly analogous, among Christians the apostasy of a pastor might seem comparable. Still, the social death a Brahman convert suffers makes all analogies farfetched. Individuals of such exalted status find the possibility of a new life, grounded in a different reality, difficult to envision. In converting to Christianity, they forfeit a status like unto that of "gods on earth" and a cornucopia of this-worldly and other-worldly prerogatives.

In the Hindu view, one is what one ingests. One prerogative forbidden to Brahmans is, accordingly, the consumption of polluting "impurities" such as meat and alcohol, or anything from the hand of an "untouchable." Since Christians partake of both, the irate editorialist argued in 1848, they must have enticed their young victim, or he had succumbed in "a fit of insanity" to the blandishments of Europeans. From today's perspective, this echoes a familiar refrain: the charge that a convert's change of identity lacks integrity, both moral and intellectual.

Back in Varanasi, Nehemiah (the Christian name of the baptized Nilakantha) found himself socially dead at 23 but spiritually transformed-and in most ways still culturally Hindu. "Becoming a Christian does not consist in eating and drinking," he answered his editorial critic, "but in worshiping the only God in spirit and humility." And to the accusation that missionaries had induced his apostasy, he gave a denial that sounds almost too insouciant, given the public drubbing he endured: "If my conversion was insane, blessed be insanity."

Like all conversions, Goreh's was an ongoing process. He certainly vacillated before his conversion and had continuing doubts afterwards. Still, as an intellectually gifted individual who had been trained in Varanasi's hallowed centers of Hindu learning, Goreh came to faith in a distinctly cognitive way. When Christianity first emerged on the horizon of his awareness, he marshaled his considerable erudition in a campaign to demolish its credibility and defend Vedanta. Goreh the saboteur, however, became Goreh the seeker, for reasons of the heart, about which we know little, and of the mind, about which we know much. But of beef and brandy there were none. As a young convert and later as an ordained Anglican priest, he maintained an ascetic lifestyle more in keeping with Hindu norms than with those of the more affluent European clergy.

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