This dissertation examines interactions and exchanges between Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and Hindus in the Banaras region of eastern Uttar Pradesh, in a study that is ethnographic, historical, and comparative. At the center of the study are the religious adherents known as Khrist Bhaktas, or devotees of Christ. The community, constituted by Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), are eighty-five percent women and are found mostly in the villages of the Banaras region. Matr&dotbelow; Dham asram (Abode of the Mother) is the movement's geographical locus, situated six kilometers from the Varan&dotbelow;asi Cantonment. Operating under the auspices of the indigenous Catholic Indian Missionary Society (IMS), since the 1970s the asram has been a center of indigenizing Indian Catholicism, and more recently, has served as an influential node in the charismatic Catholic movement in north India, which arrived in Banaras in the early 1990s. It is argued that the Khrist Bhaktas arise out of the historic encounters between Hindus and Christians in South Asia over the last two millennia. As such, their connection to that broader history is examined.

It is further argued that the Khrist Bhaktas are most fruitfully interpreted as a hybrid community constituted by the coalescing of Hindu bhakti (devotion), popular or vernacular Hinduism, and charismatic Catholicism. Each of these religious modes are explored in detail, by recourse to religious history, Hindu and Christian scriptures and theology, and social theory. Because the Khrist Bhaktas embody the community's status as "in-between" Catholics and Hindus, their examination allows us to interrogate fixed notions of religious identities.

For reasons both theological and political, the Khrist Bhaktas have yet to be baptized into full communion with the Catholic Church, thus they remain outside its traditional sacramental life and the so-called "means of grace." This has not stopped the communities in question from negotiating other means of encounter with Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. Negotiation, we find, is the through line for this study, but it is far from certain how or if these negotiations will continue. Four possible futures are envisioned for this emergent religious community.