Nehemiah (Nilakantha) Goreh was a traditionally educated Chitpavan Brahmin,^[1]growing up outside the influence of British education and British-influenced Hindu reform movements. He is best known for how his initially staunch and public opposition to Christianity slowly gave way until he finally was baptised in 1848. 

Nilakantha Goreh was born in 1825 and grew up in a wealthy, orthodox family in Banaras. His grandfather had moved there from Ratnagiri (on the Konkan Coast- a narrow strip in west peninsular India between the Western ghats and the Arabian Sea) and became a counsellor to the nawab (governor) of Bundelkand.^[2] Due to his father's erudition and the family's wealth, Nilakantha received a private education at home rather than being sent to a British or missionary-run school. Following his scholarly father's lead, Nilakantha excelled.

His studies, earned him the title of pandit (Hindu religious scholar/priest) and shastri. While still a teenager-at age 19, Goreh broke from his Shaivite (worship of Shiva) upbringing and turned his devotion to Vishnu. He cited two explicit reasons for this. First, he says that Vishnu's supremacy was professed in the "more venerable and more ancient authorities of the Hindu religion as well as the rites and ceremonies of it" and second, "the great Shankaracharya and his immediate followers were plainly Vishnu worshippers, and Shiva is almost ignored in their systems".^[3] Local pandits disapproved of this change, as they in Goreh's words "could not enter into such criticism".^[4] One pandit, in heated argument with Goreh over immorality in Shiva's behavior, warned provocatively that if Goreh continued on his path of error, he might one day become a mleccha (Sanskrit for barbarian), that is a Christian.^[5]

History proved the pandit correct. Goreh's first contact with Christianity evoked in him fierce animosity, on account of his professed loyalty to Vishnu. As an act of devotion, Goreh vowed to drive out Christian street preachers who were becoming increasingly active and provocative in Banaras.^[6] To this end he approached William Smith, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, hoping to engage him in argument. Smith countered with a book recently published by the mission-minded Bengal Civil Servant, John Muir. Muir's Matapariksha, written in Sanskrit to appeal to Hindu intelligentsia, attempted to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over Hinduism on grounds that there is more and better evidence for the miracles in the Bible than those in the Vedas.

Goreh’s response, the Shastratattvavinirnaya^[7] argued that Muir's hermeneutical approach to Hindu texts was problematically predisposed toward doubt rather than belief. Christians who read the Vedas place their worldly reason (tarka) above faith.

He met Smith again in April 1845, and presented him a manuscript of this text. Smith later translated this document into English. The doubts raised by Goreh in the text include:^[8]

• Christian missionaries claim that only those who believe in Jesus can be saved. Then why did the God create so many nations who have never heard of Jesus, thus condemning several generations of people to hell?
   
• If God is just, loving and merciful, why did Jesus suffer, and why is he needed as a mediator between God and the believers?
   
• The stories of miracles performed by Jesus and his Apostles are doubtful, since such stories are found in all cultures, and learned men don't believe in them. The Christians don't believe the Hindu stories about miracles, so why should the Hindus believe the Christian ones?
   
• Why did the God create souls who he knows will eventually be miserable in hell forever?
   
• Hindus meditate upon idols to remember God, just as Christians do with the Bible. Then why do Christian missionaries condemn idolatry?
   
• According to Hindu belief, a person's sufferings are the result of sins in their past births; they have an opportunity to correct themselves. According to Christian belief, the sinful are condemned to eternal hell when they die: this punishment is useless, since they are not born again, and portrays God as cruel and unjust. Why does Christianity deny transmigration of souls?

Over the next three years Goreh continued to argue with Smith. Time and again in their early conversations Goreh demonstrated his intellectual. prowess, sometimes to the extent that Smith privately had to admit Goreh' s arguments felt superior to his own.^[9] However, Smith had no intention of out-arguing Goreh, just as he had no interest in learning the Hindu tradition that Goreh wanted to share. Smith resisted Goreh's requests to read the shastras and continued to insist that Goreh study the Bible.^[10] In November Of 1846, Goreh began showing obvious signs of personal struggle over religious questions. Sometime later, Goreh faced a spiritual crisis, and wrote to a pandit in Azamgarh, introduced to him by Muir expressing his doubts about Hinduism. Muir and Goreh continued to meet, and Muir gave Goreh a copy of his Sanskrit-language Glory of Jesus Christ (1848).^[11]

Goreh writes that he was first struck by the Sermon on the Mount while reading the Bible in order to refute Muir. Jesus' words surprised Goreh; they seemed to him too "holy" to be merely human, and shockingly located in a mleccha text!^[12] By the end of 1847, Goreh confessed his inclination to become a Christian. After several months of self-doubt and discouragement from relatives, on March 14, 1848, Goreh ultimately converted to Christianity, and was baptized with the name Nehemiah in March 1848.^[13] Immediately after Goreh’s family discovered his conversion, they performed his ghatasphot – a dishonourable social death as a Hindu. His young wife Lakshmibai was sent back to her father. Goreh however got her back with the help of the local British magistrate, and she converted to Christianity.^[14] She had been sick for a long time, and died two days after her baptism. 

In the next nine years, Goreh. traveled widely around India and also spent sixteen months in England, primarily as the personal tutor of the recently deposed young maharaja of Lahore, Duleep Singh. Goreh met Queen Victoria and was also introduced to the Orientalist, Max Mueller. Goreh’s illusions about an idyllic Christian England was dispelled then. "If what I have seen in London is Christianity, I want to go back to India; if that is Christianity, I am not a Christian”.^[15] Goreh returned to India in 1855 to translate texts and teach native languages to CMS missionaries in Banaras. Characteristically Goreh eventually became restless with his faith and had doubts about the divinity of Jesus.

Goreh travelled to Calcutta in 1857, to consult Dr. William Kay, Principal at Bishop's College, about the orthodoxy of doctrines regarding Jesus' divinity.

Goreh’s grappling for the truth found expression in his published work Shad-darshana Darpana (1860) a critique of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy.^[16]

Kay introduced Goreh to the writings of Oxford Movement theologian, Edward Pusey, and Goreh began discerning fundamental theological disagreements between the evangelical CMS and more ecclesiocentric Anglicans. Goreh's discontent with the doctrinal position of the CMS grew until in October of 1864 Goreh finally withdrew his services from them.

Goreh joined J.R.Hill, a missionary affiliated with the theologically centrist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), in Kanpur. Hill introduced Goreh to Keshab Chandra Sen, who was giving public lectures in the town then in 1866. This meeting changed Goreh's apologist focus away from refuting classical Hindu philosophy and towards engaging with contemporary Hindu reformist ideas.

A further step came in his move to Calcutta, where he studied to become ordained and work for the Church of England in India. After one and a half years of studying at Bishop's College and debating publicly with Sen and the Brahmo Samaj, Goreh was ordained as a deacon of the Church of England.

A perpetual seeker, Goreh' s relationship with an Anglican monastic order, the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE) became another inquiry. After several years of admiring them from afar, he approached the SSJE mission in Bombay in 1875 and took the requisite steps to enter the order. While Goreh's longing for an ascetic, spiritual -lifestyle attracted him to the SSJE, the spiritual praxis of the order left Goreh unfulfilled and even more confused. Ten years later, under the weight of a new load of doubts about his beliefs and worthiness, Goreh withdrew from the order (never having gone beyond the status of novice) to live out the remaining nine years of his life. However, Goreh spent his last years in the Society's house in Poona (Pune).^[17] Goreh died on October 29, 1895. His daughter Ellen Lakshmi Goreh was also a Christian missionary.

Monier-Williams (with whom Goreh corresponded) writes of Goreh, "He does not attribute his own conversion to any human instrumentality, although there was a certain Mr. Smith at Banaras with whom he was in the habit of arguing. He traces his conversion entirely to his own reading and the grace of God.^[18] Goreh describes his own conversion as almost exclusively text-based.

At Goreh's deathbed, his caretaker recorded a statement by him: I have made one request to God for forty-two years, and He has not granted it me." This prayer was for joy in religion. He had been converted by those who lay great stress on this feeling, and he longed for it with no common desire, but God never seemed to hear him. He was very saintly, but utterly joyless.^[19]

Goreh himself attests to his conflict in personal letters: “When I have doubts about certain things, it seldom happens that they are removed by others. I myself get out of them. It was not by the persuasion of any missionaries that I was led to embrace Christianity. After I became a Christian, I was troubled and tried very severely by these doubts”.^[20]

He writes: When my mind became inclined to embrace Christianity I was kept for a long time in the state of doubts and perplexity, and it was not by coming to an unquestioning and clear decision that I at last was resolved to receive baptism, but from the consideration that I could not forever go on questioning, but must decide one way or the other, and that as I could not make up my mind not to become Christian, so I must make up my mind to become a Christian. But though I took the. step and received baptism, yet doubts and perplexities have never left me.^[21]

Goreh recognized that his discontent originated in a tension between reason and trust, with reason being undeniably dominant for him. In a revealing note to a Father Page (SSJE), Goreh warns against converting on rational grounds alone. Since Goreh had done just that, he felt his own Christian faith was consequently weak.^[22]

Although Goreh spent a great deal of his time associating with British missionaries and clergy, he retained a strong Indian identity. He discerned the futility of particular missionary strategies, especially the critique of Hindu "idolatry”. His conversion to Christianity, while changing his perspective on Hindu tradition, did not bring him to denounce it as exclusively evil. Rather, Goreh opined that of all the ancient sages in the world prior to Jesus Christ, Indian rishis had the most knowledge of true religion. As a Christian he mentioned briefly that the language of the Shrimadbhagavata "charms me even now”. Furthermore he asserted, "Christianity is oriental, though Westemers have converted to it. Goreh never ceased to engage the religious and cultural tradition of his early life and ancestors.^[23]