Rice Bag Christian: Wear It With Pride

Nov 4, 2026: This year marks the 100th World Missionary Sunday. Pope Leo, in his message One in Christ, United in Mission, invites the whole Church to continue its missionary journey with joy and zeal as we emerge from the Jubilee Year. It is a call to return to the heart of what we are — a people sent, a people united in Christ, a people whose unity exists not for its own sake but so that, as the Gospel puts it, the world may believe.

Here in the Archdiocese of Bombay, Mission Sunday has always been a moment to gather, to give, and to recommit. We know the stalls, the collections, the small and faithful acts of solidarity that make mission possible for communities far beyond our own shores. All of that remains important and beautiful.

But this year, on this centenary Sunday, I want to reflect on something that cuts a little deeper. I want to reflect on a term many of us have heard hurled as a taunt or an insult — rice bag Christian — and I want to suggest that perhaps it is time we stopped flinching at it, and started wearing it with pride.

Let me explain. But first, let me introduce you to a word you may never have heard. The word is gobarha.

Landless labourers — most of them Dalits — would spend long days threshing grain on the harvest floor, driving oxen in endless circles under the sun. When wage time came, the landlord did not pay them in clean grain. He paid them in what had been sifted from cattle dung — grain that had passed through the digestive tract of the very animals they had worked alongside all day. That was gobarha. That was their wage. That was what the system said they were worth.

This is not folklore. Dr B.R. Ambedkar documented it precisely in his Writings and Speeches as emblematic of the dehumanisation built into caste labour relations. Men and women doing the backbreaking work of the harvest, paid in what the oxen had trampled and defecated on. The message was not merely economic. It was theological, in the darkest sense of the word: this is what you are.

Into that world came Christian missionaries. And they gave people something the system had withheld from them their entire lives — dignity, respect, and clean rice.

I am aware that in certain quarters — particularly among certain groups who have made it a weapon of choice — the term rice bag Christian is meant as a slur. A derogatory label for someone alleged to have converted not out of genuine faith but out of hunger, out of weakness, out of a desire for food, medicine, or a school education. Merriam-Webster defines the older form, rice Christian, as a convert who accepts baptism not from personal conviction but from a desire for material benefit.

It is meant to wound. It is meant to suggest that the faith of millions — most of them Dalit, most of them from the communities that first received that clean rice — was never really faith at all. Just a transaction.

My response is simple: I think we should wear it as a badge of honour.

What the missionaries who gave clean rice were doing was not, at its heart, a feeding programme. It was a theological statement — the proclamation, in the most concrete possible terms, that the person standing in front of them was made in the image and likeness of God, and that a human being made in the image of God does not eat gobarha.

The rice was not the point. The dignity was the point. The act of being seen, being fed as a human being rather than an afterthought, being welcomed to a table rather than handed the leavings from the floor — that was the Gospel made flesh. When people encountered that and followed Jesus, they were not converting for a bag of rice. They were responding to something they had perhaps never encountered before in their lives: the experience of being treated as fully human.

That is not a weak foundation for faith. It is, if anything, the most Christocentric foundation imaginable. Jesus himself makes no distinction between feeding the hungry and encountering him personally. I was hungry, and you gave me food. The missionaries who understood that were not corrupting the Gospel with social work. They were living it.

And yet — because honesty demands it — we cannot tell this story without also telling the other half of it.

The early missionaries, in many cases, were genuinely motivated by love and a desire to restore dignity to the most broken members of society. But intention and outcome are not always the same thing. Dalit Christians who gave testimony before the Simon Commission in 1929 said something that should stop every one of us in our tracks. They said, plainly: we remain today what we were before we became Christians — untouchables. Conversion had not, in practice, erased the caste discrimination they faced. They had been welcomed into the faith and found that the Church itself had not fully dismantled the very hierarchies it claimed to have overcome.

That wound has not healed. Caste discrimination remains alive and urgent concern within the Church in India today, and it demands direct and honest address — something I intend to return to in these pages. But it would be dishonest to celebrate the missionary response to caste oppression without acknowledging how often the Church's own internal life failed to match the radicalism of that response.

The rice was real. The welcome was real. The faith of those who came was real. And the betrayal that sometimes followed was also real.

So where does all of this leave us, on this hundredth World Missionary Sunday?

It leaves us, I think, with a vocation. If the rice bag accusation is meant to suggest that Christianity in India spread because missionaries responded to human suffering with compassion, dignity, and practical love — then yes. Guilty as charged. That is exactly what happened, and it is something to be profoundly proud of.

But it also leaves us with an unfinished task. If the Gospel we preach is one of dignity and full humanity for every person, then the Church in India must be ruthlessly honest about the places where its own practice has fallen short of that proclamation. We cannot celebrate the missionaries who gave clean rice to the Dalits while quietly tolerating a Church culture that still, in too many ways, treats some of its own members as less than fully equal.

Pope Leo calls us this year to be one in Christ, united in mission. Unity, he reminds us, is not uniformity. It is the convergence of diverse gifts around a common calling. And that calling, at its most elemental, is the one the missionaries carried into the threshing floors and the margins — the conviction that every human being, however the world has treated them, deserves to be received as a child of God.

The next time someone calls you a rice bag Christian, smile. Not because the history is simple — it is not. But because at the heart of that history, beneath the complexity and the failures and the legitimate criticisms, is something true and worth defending.

That is not a slur. That is the Gospel.

By Fr. Nigel Barrett

PRO, CCBI