Christian Mission and Service in Western India: Contribution of Bombay-Poona Jesuit Mission (1914-1962)

Late Cornelius Ekka (1969-2017) hailed from Jashpur, Chhattisgarh and was a member of the Madhya Pradesh Province of the Society of Jesus. After his ecclesiastical studies in Philosophy (B. Ph) and Theology (B. Th), he was ordained a priest in 2004. He did his Masters in Theology (M.Th.) from Vidyajyoti College of Theology, Delhi, and pursued his doctoral studies in Christian History at the Faculty of Theology, Leopold-Franzens-University, Innsbruck, Austria. He was awarded Ph. D in 2017. He was a faculty member of Vidyajyoti College of Theology, Delhi (2010-17) where he taught Church History. A student of Christian History, he has published a few articles and attended Christian History conferences. A very promising scholar, his life was sadly cut short by a massive heart attack on October 17, 2017 shortly after he resumed his full teaching career at Vidyajyoti College of Theology, Delhi.

When an Indian Jesuit companion introduced Fr. Cornelius to me eight years ago in order to write a dissertation on Church History with me, I presented him with two possible topics to choose from. One topic was relatively easy to work on, since all the sources were in print and could have been easily ordered from the Innsbruck University Library. The topic was of course not very relevant. The trouble of archival work and handling of handwritten source material would have been omitted and the dissertation could have been completed significantly faster.
It is characteristic of Fr. Ekka that he did not choose this simple subject, but the much more difficult one, namely the story of the Jesuit mission in the Poona province. There was no preliminary work on this topic, and most of the work had to be collected and processed from different archives in Rome, Zurich and Munich. Among them were numerous documents that were difficult to read and were written in different languages that the author had to learn for this purpose, apart from German. Nonetheless, and although I pointed out these difficulties to Fr. Ekka right from the start, he decided to work on this topic and wrote his dissertation with flying colours. After initial difficulties, which are not atypical at the beginning of doctoral thesis, he got along better and better with the work.
I was particularly amazed by the breadth of his interest, which led him to ever new questions that I hadn't expected and that surprised me again and again. Especially he made efforts to be more objective, when he needed to make judgements from his findings about people. He did not allow his ethnic or social cultural background to affect them. In striving for the greatest possible objectivity, Fr. Ekka also did not spare the Society of Jesus, whose mistakes and inadequacies in missionary activity, he does not cover up or deny.
only those who do nothing make no mistakes, everyone else has to look for ways and means, whereby mistakes are inevitable. Cornelius was a happy and a hearty Jesuit. He loved his vocation and was committed to all that was entrusted to him by the Society of Jesus. He was good companion and a joyful person. All through the study, he maintained a good disposition towards his work, and that makes this book more balanced and meaningful.
To be precise, the author presents a special chapter in the history of Mission in India in 20 century. It's about the Jesuit mission which founded the Poona Province, soon after the end of the first World War. This history covers up to second Vatican Council, which marks a remarkable period of mission engagement of the Catholic Church in the western part of India. It is also noteworthy, that this part of the history of Catholic mission of Poona Province is written, not by a foreigner, but by an Indian himself and hence the Indian cultural and religious nuances are retained well and receive a higher quality description.