SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Seeking 'not so much to resolve the paradox as to explain how it came about', Lipner indicates the contemporary significance of his study: There is an ill-concealed prickliness about Upadhyay that makes him hard to evaluate and potentially unattractive to tackle.... This prickliness is to the point in an India beset today by various crises of identity. Hindus and Christians in particular must grasp the nettle Upadhyay represents.'
And at this point he poses the piquant question: 'What does it mean to be a Hindu, a Christian, an Indian today?' A question that, depending upon the specificities of a given individual or group in our multifariously plural land, changes form and yet remains the same. A question upon the handling of which could depend the very future of Indian polity.
There is already in this introduction awareness of an ongoing interaction between the past and the present, between the prickliness that was Brahmabandhab Upadhyay and his necessarily partial recovery by later day biographers and scholars. Lipner shows us that, given the shifting politics of collective identities, existing studies of this gifted Hindu Catholic have — in response to specific politico-emotional compulsions - tended, wittingly or otherwise, to so highlight certain aspects of Upadhyay's life and thought as to suppress certain others. For example, those concerned with his revolutionary politics and, therefore, uneasy about his Christianity, have belittled his conversion. A similar attempt, ironically enough, has been made by apologists of an intolerant Catholic hierarchy that persecuted Upadhyay no less than the colonial establishment did: they have laboured to prove that Upadhyay died an apostate. In contrast, burying all denominational rivalries, Indian Christians are today seeking in Upadhyay an icon for an indigenised Christianity.
Avoiding the selectivity, over-simplification and silence that have 'conspired' to reduce Upadhyay to 'a shadowy figure in the world of scholarship', Lipner seeks to encounter 'him face to face, "warts and all".'
For our part, as we follow Lipner's unfolding of the 'paradox' of Bhabanicharan Banerji (1861-1907), the Kulin Brahman who as a mature erudite of thirty became a Christian and Brahmabandhab (Theophilus) Upadhyay, we will do well to be alert on two scores. First, is the paradox presumed to exist entirely within Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, or is there an exploration of the very notion and location of paradox? What does the paradox consist in? Who constitutes it? Wherein does it lie? In the life and thought of the analysed subject, or