Buchanan was influential in introducing the Jagannath tradition and Hinduism to Western audiences in the early 19th-century. He called Jagannath "Juggernaut" and Hindu "Hindoo" in the letters he wrote from India. According to Michael J. Altman, a professor of Religious Studies, Buchanan presented Hinduism through "Juggernaut", as a "bloody, violent, superstitious and backward religious system" that needed to be eliminated and substituted with the Christian gospel. He described "Juggernaut" with Biblical terminology for his audience, called him the Moloch, and his shrine as Golgatha – the place where Jesus Christ was crucified – but with the difference that the "Juggernaut tradition" was of endless meaningless bloodshed, and fabricating allegations that children were sacrificed in the "valley of idolatrous blood shed to false gods". In his letters, states Altman, Buchanan "constructed an image of Juggernaut as the diametric opposite of Christianity". In his book Christian Researches in Asia, published in 1811, Buchanan built on this theme and added licentiousness to it. He called hymns in the language he did not comprehend as "obscene stanzas", artworks on temple walls as "indecent emblems", and described "Juggernaut" and Hinduism to his readers as the religion of disgusting Moloch and false gods. Buchanan's writings formed the "first images of Indian religions" to the evangelical audience in the early 19th century and were promoted by American magazines such as The Panoplist. His book on "Juggernaut" attracted enough reader demand that it went through numerous editions. Buchanan's pamphlets moved Christian missionaries and triggered a bitter debate between them and officials of the East India Company. His writings led to many emotional sermons and mission advocates lectured on the need to "combat immorality and convert the unsaved" Indians. The writings of Buchanan and other missionaries constructed and exploited cultural and religious differences, which had a profound and lasting effect on how Americans saw non-Christian peoples.
Works
An account of his travels in the south and west of India is given in his Christian Researches in Asia. After his return to the United Kingdom in 1808, he still took an active part in matters connected with India, and, by his book entitled Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment, he assisted in settling the controversy of 1813, which eventually ended in the establishment of an Anglican Indian episcopate in 1878 in the Travancore-Cochin states. This Church, known as CMS Church, merged with other Churches in South India on 27 September 1947 to form The Church of south India. A collection of 'Sermons on interesting subjects' by Buchanan was published by J Ogle in Edinburgh in 1812. It consists of the texts of eight sermons preached in the Britain between 26 February 1809 and 2 June 1811. The first sermon was entitled "The Star in the East". It was preached in the parish church of St James, Bristol, on the author's return from India.
