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India 1954-1982

Church Growth in South Asia

Frequently over the decades since the early East India Mission was closed in the 1850s, General Authorities of the Church have expressed their hope that the restored gospel could be established in India and other nations of South Asia. The local political, social, cultural, and religious frameworks, however, have made open, straightforward missionary work very difficult. With the exception of Pakistan, a Muslim nation that does not fear Christian missionaries, all of the countries of South Asia have laws or immigration policies that inhibit new missionary churches from entering their borders. (Pakistan allows proselyting among Christians only.) Such anti-missionary attitudes have restricted the work of spreading the restored gospel to the 1.28 billion people who live in this geographical realm.

Unlike Singapore and Hong Kong, which are small and somewhat describable, India is large, its land mass covering slightly more than one-third the size of the United States. A populous nation, India was home to more than 900 million people in 1995. India is also ethnically and linguistically diverse. Indo-Aryans in northern India represent 72 percent of the total population; Dravidians, mostly in southern India, 25 percent; and Mongoloids and others, 3 percent. Official languages include Hindi and English, as well as fourteen other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit. Hindi is spoken by 30 percent of the populous. Throughout the country, English is the most important language for higher education, government, commerce, and communication. Literacy remains a problem, with an average rate of 48 percent (62 percent for males, 34 percent for females).1 The Holy Bible has been translated into all of the primary languages of India-the entire Bible is available in forty-six languages, the New Testament in thirty-five, and portions of the Old and New Testaments in sixty.

The religious situation in India is more complex than in any other nation in the world, as the following figures for the distribution of religions in India indicate: Hinduism, 82 percent (78.8 percent if some tribal groups are not automatically included); Muslim, 12 percent (Muslims claim 14 percent); Sikhs, 1.92 percent (the majority lives in the Punjab); tribal religions, 1.5 percent; Buddhists, Jains, Baha'i, and Parsi combined, 1.39 percent. Christianity officially accounts for 2.61 percent of the total population, but the figure may be as high as 4 percent (Protestant, 1.91 percent; Roman Catholic, 1.76 percent; other Christian groups, 0.33 percent). Although these Protestant and Roman Catholic numbers appear small, they reflect as many as 16.2 million and 15 million adherents, respectively. The gross figures are not as useful as the statistics for each individual state. For example, in the south, where the Latter-day Saints have had the greatest success, the states of Andhra Pradesh (3.5 percent Christian), Tamil Nadu (6 percent Christian), and Kerala (20 percent Christian) have higher numbers of Christians than most of the northern Indian states.2 Because the LDS Church has imposed voluntary restrictions on proselyting among Muslims, and because most Hindus are so tolerant of all religious beliefs that they see little need to restrict themselves by declaring one religion true among all the possibilities, the Christians are the most probable target population for successful teaching of the restored gospel. To date these three southern states have proved most hospitable to the Mormon message-Bangalore (in Karnataka state), where the mission is headquartered, being the exception.