AHC: Anglican India

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The challenge is to have an Anglican-Indian majority exist within India by the time of independence in 1947.

Bonus points if you can game out the political effects your PoD(s) would have on the Raj and subsequently the republic.
 
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A good start would be if the British gave Anglicans some sort of preferential treatment (e.g., lower taxes, the ability to hold high civil/political/military posts, that sort of thing), which would incentivise conversion. Initially this would be mostly among the upper classes who could most expect to benefit, although if enough of them converted, Anglicanism might end up being viewed as the most prestigious faith, leading to more people from lowlier backgrounds converting too. I doubt this would get the country to be majority Anglican by 1947 (it took over four hundred years for Egypt to become majority-Muslim, which is probably about the timescale we'd be looking at here), but Anglicanism would be more widespread, and the Anglican Church in India more influential, than IOTL.
 
Hindus withstood conquest after conquest and several attempted proselytizations, holding steadfast to their faith. Maybe ASB, but extremely hard.
 
You'd have to change how the British entered and started to gain control of India then since IIRC the Honourable East India Company quietly went out of their way to stop priests going out and proselytising as they felt it might annoy the natives and get in the way of trade and profit. Once the British government took over governance of India from Company rule and the Suez Canal opened making travel easier was when you saw more do-gooders starting to appear, even here however indirect rule and the Indian Civil Service only ever numbering around a thousand men making use of the traditional systems of government meant that they often left things mostly as they were.
 
If Buddhist , Muslim , Jewish, Parsee , Syrian Orthodox and Portuguese Catholic religious leaders had all failed to tip the balance of the populace from the homegrown Hinduism to their own faiths, what chance would Anglicanism have had?
 

Zachariah

Banned
This is basically either ASB or requires massive depopulation (i.e, mass export of the Indian population as slave labor on a scale which makes Africa IOTL pale in comparison, or outright genocide). And since genocide scenarios are typically frowned upon...
 
If Buddhist , Muslim , Jewish, Parsee , Syrian Orthodox and Portuguese Catholic religious leaders had all failed to tip the balance of the populace from the homegrown Hinduism to their own faiths, what chance would Anglicanism have had?

Islam converted a good chunk mostly through tax benefits, the Buddhists came very close to converting all of India at some points, and the others never really had much of a presence at all, or were actively discouraged by their home nations from converting India. So... I don't see how this is much of an argument. Sure, India would never be majority Anglican (what the OP is really asking for), but you would definitely be able to get a portion converted in the majority (probably a small section around the east coast) and/or a widespread minority throughout the continent. It would be *interesting* to see an Anglican-Muslim-Hindu-(maybe even more Buddhists?) divide and how that would play out at Indian independence.
 
If Buddhist , Muslim , Jewish, Parsee , Syrian Orthodox and Portuguese Catholic religious leaders had all failed to tip the balance of the populace from the homegrown Hinduism to their own faiths, what chance would Anglicanism have had?
This is basically either ASB or requires massive depopulation (i.e, mass export of the Indian population as slave labor on a scale which makes Africa IOTL pale in comparison, or outright genocide). And since genocide scenarios are typically frowned upon...
I'd hardly call it ASB, after all the Spanish seem to have done okay in South America. As I said in my previous post however it would require a major change of attitude in the British that has them seeing conversion of the 'heathen' and spread of Protestantism as a major goal.
 
Not only you are asking for a tremendously populated subcontinent to be converted, but to be converted to a specific denomination withing a large religion that explicitly excludes pre-English India Christian influence from counting, like the Syriac and the Portuguese influence, among others.
 
I'd hardly call it ASB, after all the Spanish seem to have done okay in South America. As I said in my previous post however it would require a major change of attitude in the British that has them seeing conversion of the 'heathen' and spread of Protestantism as a major goal.
The Spanish had the benefits of disease weeding out most of the population and dismantling the polities of South America to push for conversion over centuries. The British has had to deal with established rulers, priesthoods and realms of incredible size in population in a much shorter span of time.
 
Islam and Islamic rulers dominated the subcontinent for about five six centuries and many of the rulers were bent on suppressing Hinduism and spreading Islam. Still at the time of independence only one third of the population had converted to Islam. The British rule lasted for only two centuries. True that the British did not force or even encourage conversion to Christianity. Even if there was active support of the British, the scale of conversion to convert the majority of the natives was not likely to happen. In fact the conversion was more effective in the Northeastern states which were dominated by tribes who were cutoff from the mainland and Hindu cultural influences.
 
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