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A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares
1868 · 63 pages
A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares
by Nehemiah Goreh
Why our edition. In the free scan at least 1 word in 31 is garbled. Ours corrects the damage. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
An open letter from Nehemiah Goreh — born Nilakantha Goreh, once a celebrated Hindu pandit of Benares — addressed to the Brahmo reformers. With the same rigour he had once used to defend Hinduism, he sets out why he came to believe the Christian faith true.
The changed life
He was a Chitpavan Brahmin and renowned Hindu apologist, author of a Sanskrit treatise against Christianity; baptized "Nehemiah" in 1848, he became an Anglican priest, a leading Indian Christian theologian, and finally a member of the Cowley Fathers.
Summary
A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares is an open letter by Nehemiah Goreh — born Nilakantha Goreh — one of nineteenth-century India's most formidable Hindu scholars before his conversion. Addressed to the reformers of the Brahmo Samaj, it sets out, with a pandit's rigor, why he came to hold the Christian faith to be true.
Goreh had once been a defender of orthodox Hinduism who wrote a Sanskrit treatise against Christianity. In this letter he turns that same trained, argumentative mind to the case for Christ, engaging the Brahmos — Hindu reformers who admired Jesus's ethics while rejecting his divinity — on their own philosophical ground.
The result is less a memoir than a reasoned apologetic from inside Indian religious debate: a converted Brahmin explaining, to fellow Indian intellectuals, the steps by which he was persuaded. It is a primary document of the encounter between Hindu reform movements and Christianity in colonial Bengal.
Who was Nehemiah Goreh?
Nehemiah (Nilakantha) Goreh (1825–1895) was a Chitpavan Brahmin from Benares (Varanasi), celebrated as a learned Hindu pandit and the author of a Sanskrit work refuting Christian doctrine. He came to Christianity through prolonged study and debate and was baptized in 1848, taking the name Nehemiah.
After his conversion he became an Anglican priest and one of the leading Indian Christian theologians of his era, later joining the Cowley Fathers (the Society of St. John the Evangelist). He is also remembered as a spiritual influence on other converts, including Pandita Ramabai — his life a costly, permanent break with the caste and community he had once championed.
Which edition of A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares is this?
Our edition is re-OCRed from the original page images rather than taken from the scan's own text layer, which is poor: we more than halved the error rate and keyed the damaged page-feet by eye against the images. Goreh's dated demonyms — Hindoo, Hindooism, Mahommedan — are updated to Hindu, Hinduism and Muslim, while Brahman, Brahmin and Brahmo are left alone; his Sanskrit and Marathi footnotes are set as pop-up notes. A note at the front says exactly what was changed and what the scan has lost.
Common questions
- Who was Nehemiah Goreh?
- Nehemiah Goreh (1825–1895), born Nilakantha Goreh, was a renowned Brahmin pandit of Benares who had written against Christianity before converting. Baptized in 1848, he became an Anglican priest and a leading Indian Christian theologian.
- Who were the Brahmos he wrote to?
- The Brahmos were members of the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that admired the moral teaching of Jesus while rejecting Christian doctrine. Goreh's letter addresses them directly, arguing the case for the faith he had come to accept.
A note on the text. A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan runs about 13.0 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
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