'The Christian Patriot. A Journal of Social and Religious Progress' (CP) was founded in Madras (Chennai) in 1890 and existed until 1929. It was pubished by a small, but influential elite of South Indian Protestant Christians. This group included lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats and other socially high ranking and financially independent persons. The Christian Patriot was started as a “purely indigenous venture” from its very beginnings (CP 10.01.1903 p. 4) and saw itself as the mouthpiece of the “Native Christian Community” in colonial India. “Owned and conducted entirely by members of the Native Christian Community the Christian Patriot will give expression to the sentiments and aspirations of Native Christians” (CP 01.02.1896 p. 4). The weekly commented critically on the religious, social and political development of the country and sought to contribute to India's “moral and social regeneration”. It criticized the denominational “sectarianism” and paternalism of the Western missionaries as well as Hindu fundamentalist tendencies in parts of the Indian national movement. Particular attention was paid to the issue of female education.

Despite its wide distribution - in India, South Asia, South Africa, UK and US - only a few (mostly very fragmentary) copies of the CP have survived. The present edition is based on two sets of microfilms from the ‘Day Missions Collection’ (Yale Divinity School Library New Haven, CT 06511 - Film S613). Most of them were digitized in the 1990s in Munich at the Chair for Early and Global History of World Christianity (Prof. Dr. Klaus Koschorke) as part of a research project on “Indigenous Christian elites from Asia and Africa around 1900 and their journals and periodicals”. The particular significance of this journal lies in the fact that the history of Christianity in India at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries now can be studied not only from the perspective of Western missionary sources, but from that of indigenous actors. At the same time, it reveals the growing interconnectedness of indigenous Christian elites on the subcontinent with those in other colonial societies in the global South.

This digital edition of the 'Christian Patriot' has been initiated and arranged by Klaus Koschorke (Munich), in close cooperation with the team of Digital Services at Munich University Library (LMU). Part of this digital edition are three appendices containing I. An Extended Introduction; II. A Selected Bibliography; III. Reprint of Selected Transcribed Texts from the Christian Patriot. As Appendix IV will be added by the end of 2025: the monograph by Klaus Koschorke (English version): “Owned and Conducted entirely by the Native Christian Community”. The 'Christian Patriot' and the Indigenous Christian Press in Colonial India around 1900 (Munich 2025, ISBN 978-3-99181-922-6, https://doi.org/10.5282/ubm/epub.128595).