There have been in Christian history in India leading personalities like Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya, Narayan Vaman Tilak, Sadhu Sundar Singh and Paul Sudhakar, who all tried to find a synthesis between the religion they were born in and the religion they converted to, namely Christianity. Most lived in the early part of the twentieth century.

All these figures contributed immensely to India's spiritual history. Upadhyaya also played a significant part in its cultural and political history. It was he who helped Rabindranath Tagore found Shantiniketan and continued Swami Vivekananda's effortsto establish chairs of Hindu philosophy, both at Oxford and Cambridge. Through his paper, Sandhya, he also gave a clarion call to the masses to work for swaraj.

Upadhyaya, who became a Christian through his own study, was deeply attached to all that was good in the Hindu tradition and published a monthly, The Harmony, in which he tried to reconcile the best in pure Hinduism and pure Christianity.

He believed that, just as the Christian religion -- when it spread beyond the confines of Palestine and came face to face with the Graeco-Roman culture -- gave birth to theologians who established a synthesis between Greek thought and the Christian faith, there was need in India for a fresh synthesis between the Vedantic and the Catholic.

In Maharashtra, the great Marathi poet Narayan Vaman Tilak (whose love of prayer and devotion were formed by the great poet-saints of Maharashtra, specially the most popular of them all, Tukaram), realised that a Hindu-Christian synthesis was simply notpossible unless the Christian religion had deep roots in Indian culture.

Tilak's talent as a poet enabled him to give to the devotional life of the Marathi Christians a genuinely Indian expression. He trained the Marathi Christians to sing bhajans and kirtans. Others like Sadhu Sundar Singh, Paul Sudhakar, P.C. Mozoomdar, a friend and disciple of Keshub Chandra Sen, a missionary of the Brahmo Samaj, all in their different ways, attempted to travel along the same path of giving expression to their Christian faith in a genuinely Indian-cultural way.

In more recent times, there have been other theologians who have advocated the same cause. Among them was George Soares Prabhu, who died in a tragic accident in Pune about two years ago. Highly critical of what he called imitation of the West in the Catholic Church in India, he worked for a more rooted and inculturated mode of theologising, which would spring from the many cultures in the local church, such as the dalit culture, tribal culture andurbanised culture.

There is often a tussle in the church between those who believe that a universal church should have a uniform form of worship and expression and those who believe that the uniformity of beliefs should find different cultural expressions in different parts of the world.

In India, the church still has a very Western face, that has alienated many and created the impression that Christianity is a religion of the West. The Eastern origins of Christianity and its more oriental expressions have been lost sight of.

It will take a lot more of soul-searching, inter-religious dialogue and a quest for new methods of theologising, rooted not in the West but in local cultures, before a genuinely Indian Catholic Church is born.