In 1960, when Dr Rudra of Allahabad was a small girl, she was introduced to Bishop Lesslie Newbigin. Bewildered, she asked him what a bishop was: ‘A bishop, my dear, is a waste paper basket.’ We think he meant that a bishop is the repository for all the problems no-one else can deal with. In this second volume Muthuraj rightly draws quite heavily on Newbigin's writings on ministry as he was among the first generation of Church of South India bishops consecrated on 27 September 1947, and one of few to write on the subject of episcopacy and its pastoral and evangelistic purpose. For his laudable aim is, it seems, to stimulate a debate about the nature and theology of episcopal ministry because he thinks that the absence of any defining doctrine means that there is no yardstick by which to measure the performance of the present bishops or even to justify their office. It is very true that while many Indian Christians complain about the allegedly unethical conduct of CSI and Lutheran bishops, they rarely question the constitution of the CSI, or indeed, even mention it.

Muthuraj's response is to explore the historical role of Anglican bishops in India since 1813 and the intentions of the founding fathers of the CSI from 1919 to 1947. He is particularly good on the complex legal situation which made it so difficult to organize the Anglican Church in India appropriately before the passing of the India Churches Act in 1929 which made the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon independent of the Church of England's control. He also tackles the debates on episcopal governance which formed a crucial part of the negotiations to create the Church of South India in 1947, but fails to realize that the decision to have a ‘historic’ episcopate and make belief in apostolic succession compulsory was a typical Anglican fudge similar to that over what lies behind the words of administration in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. He is right to demand, however, that what worked in 1947 to enable the churches to unite should be re-visited now.

This second volume is better than the first, in that there are fewer mistakes of spelling, vocabulary and grammar. An exception is p. 76 where ‘virulent’ should be ‘vigorous’. Typographical errors, which were such an irritating feature of the first volume, are reduced, and there are only a handful of unfinished sentences. The argument is much more focused. Again, the strength of the work is the way in which archive sources and obscure books are made accessible to the ordinary reader, and complex documents and legal processes usefully analysed, with an excellent interweaving of mission and church sources with those of the secular authorities. There is still a surfeit of gratuitous epithets, with, for example, documents being described as ‘famous’, of which I, relatively speaking an expert in the field, have never heard. Nevertheless, Muthuraj's enthusiasm for his subject makes this volume a pleasant read and the breadth and depth of his sources and his pertinent comments make it an indispensable tool for students and clergy alike. Unfortunately, he makes no reference to a number of important biographies and autobiographies, such as Amelia Heber's ground-breaking 1830 Life of her husband, Bishop Reginald Heber (1824–26), Constance Millington's Led by the Spirit: A Biography of Bishop Arthur Michael Hollis (Bangalore, 1996) or Bishop Sundar Clarke's autobiography, Lead Us On! Autobiography of a Bishop (ISPCK, 2004). All contain important reflections on the role of a bishop. Muthuraj's Barthian theology is interesting, for he insists that the 1947 CSI ordinal for the consecration of bishops is right, that it is God who consecrates, not, as in the 2006 revised ordinal, the bishops present at the service. Lesslie Newbigin had an old friend, Chaturvedi Badrinath ICS, whose hobby was church history. His argument was that the conduct of Anglican bishops in nineteenth-century India proved that Christianity was bogus. Newbigin would retort that just because a bishop in Madras was an idiot, it did not mean Christianity was untrue. Nevertheless, the alleged corruption within the institution, and the very public court cases over property and position, do undermine the credibility of the Church, and hence the Gospel in Indian eyes. Muthuraj draws the reader back to Jesus’ prayer: ‘that they may all be one’ (Jn 17.21). Without this emphasis on unity, there may be a splintering of the Church in India akin to that in Western Europe at the time of the Reformation, and both its ecumenical nature and its apostolic witness may be lost. Strangely, although about a fifth of the book is dedicated to the bishops’ attitudes to caste, from Bishop Middleton (1814–21) onwards, Muthuraj does not then apply these insights to the present situation in the CSI episcopate with sufficient depth, nor analyse the reasons why groups marginalized in Hindu society should behave in this way.

There is a third volume to be written, on the role of ‘Bishop Amma’, the important work of bishops’ wives, from Amelia Heber, a great ambassador for the Christian faith in Calcutta in the 1820s, to Mrs Doraiswamy and Mrs Clara Clarke in the 1980s and 1990s building up the Women's Fellowship. To this might be added the work of the redoubtable sister of Bishop Gell in raising money for and directing women's literacy projects for more than thirty years. Generally it is to be regretted that women's voices are so little heard in this work. It is also surprising that there is no mention of the Revd John Devasahayam (1786–1864), first Indian Anglican priest in South India, who became a CMS district missionary in Tirunelveli in 1846 and was regarded by his missionary colleagues as having equivalent responsibilities to a bishop, or his son-in-law, Revd W.T. Satthianadhan (1829–92) who was expected to be consecrated Bishop in Tirunelveli in 1878 but was debarred partly because of colonial racism and partly because he would not make his wife give up her ministry in Chennai. It is important for the theological issues raised by Muthuraj in this excellent work to be addressed – and soon.