Dramas of Estrangement: Christ and Krishna: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

It was a wondrous birth: Prophets had long foretold it; a halfbreed evil king rallied every resource to prevent it; the child was born in the humblest setting, but all heaven came to see; the father transported the baby over water to safety, but thousands of innocent infants were slaughtered. Who is the child? Christ, yes, but Krishna, too—and the discovery of these parallels was deeply troubling to certain missionaries, scholars, and administrators in nineteenth-century British India. There were other things, too. George Grierson, for example, the most eminent European student of spoken Indian languages, found it amazing that Vaishnava devotional religion shared with the Christianity he knew a theology of the efficacy of faith per se, a conviction about the power of the name of God, and a ritual life that centered around a common meal. What was one to make of it?