Hence he retrieves both the explicit and the subtly continuous infiltration and dominance of the Western biblical scholarship and thereby unveils the dark sides of such methods and ideology even in the contemporary society of India and other Third World communities. Orientalism was the initial reaction to colonialism, appealing to the importance of the ancient Sanskrit texts for comparative hermeneutics toward Indian Christian biblical interpretation. In reaction to the orientalist movement arose anglicism, which was meant to inject the Western reading techniques, especially through various commentaries. Nativism then evolved as the reaction by those Christians who felt the need to revive the indigenous textual and cultural traditions, emphasizing, e.g., the experiential bhakti insights over against the elite classicism of the orientalist tendency and the vernacular mode of storytelling over against the so-called scientific anglicist tendency. Yet, this nativistic interpretation also has the tendency of particularism and isolationism.
Postcolonial interpretation defies the objectives of recovering the single meaning of the text.
Instead of objectivity or neutrality, it utilizes memories and experiences both to highlight the colonial hegemonic ideologies and to revitalize the voice of the voiceless, the colonized people. Likewise, postcolonial interpretation can and should not stop with the implications of the texts, but also account for the consequences thereupon, whether deliberately or inadvertently, especially for the past and potential marginalized. The next three chapters are new essays, which nicely delineate and recapitulate those hegemonic ideologies of colonialism defined in the previous chapter. In this chapter, the author reconsiders the missionary commentators who in many cases not only cooperated but also promoted the British dominance in a colonized India by means of theological, pastoral, and missiological supersessionism. Among those various means were exoticism, essentialism, and totalism.