When Critique Thinks Like an Empire: Christianity, indigeneity, and Decolonial Common Sense

In much postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, Christianity in South Asia appears to arrive on schedule with European empire: missionaries first, colonial governance close behind, violence never far away. This story is powerful, morally compelling, and by now something of a reflex. But it also produces a decolonial common sense in which precolonial Christian communities become difficult, if not impossible, to recognise. This paper turns to the Thomas Christians of South India, an ancient Christian tradition embedded in Syriac liturgical worlds, Indian Ocean networks, and regional political formations long before European rule, in order to ask what this reflex leaves out. By tracing how early modern ecclesiastical intervention, colonial knowledge practices, and contemporary critique together reclassified Christianity as European, the paper suggests that critique itself can end up thinking like an empire. It calls for a decolonial approach alert to the colonial afterlives of its own categories.