Repainting Religious Landscape: Economics of Conversion and Making of Rice Christians in Colonial South India (1781-1880) by M. Christhu
The ‘rice Christian’ of the Orient goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice and the missionary is after him—Mark Twain
Missionaries believed that calamities and famines were opportunities to make more ‘believers’.
During the eighteenth century, few British writers and missionaries compared the economically-challenged Roman Catholics in England with that of rice Christians in India.
The colonial administrators noted that the Dutch missionaries in India, who established schools for religious instruction, denominated the converts as rice Christians.