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Synopsis The play Sundardas recounts the activities of the first Christian missionaries in Orissa between 1826 and 1832, their meagre successes, their discouragement and defeats. But the play is more than a simple retelling of historical facts; rather, it gives reality to the underlying motivations of the individual actors, as well as to the conflicting world views in contact in this meeting of Christianity and Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent, in a context of empire, subjugation and colonisation. The real question dealt with in the play is, however, a more philosophical one, that is, the nature of the relationship between belief and the (religious) institutions whose role ostensibly is to further and protect it. The fundamental theme of the play is that truth cannot come through the denial of one’s identity and also that identity must not blind one to truth.