A dwelling place for Hindu-background believers to gather, grow, and remain rooted among their own people — built around AFII's New Creation Book for Hindus.
Every ashram needs a text at its center. This is ours — offered here in place of what once stood on our landing page, so the whole of our Hindu-background outreach now radiates from a single source.
AFII's New Creation Book for Hindus stands in the same family as our New Creation Bible for Muslims — Scripture and testimony framed in the vocabulary and longing of its readers, built to be handed to a seeker rather than shelved by a scholar.
It is the document this exhibit exists to surround: the missions partners, the translation gaps, the tribal-language frontier, and the small tract ministries below are the field this book is meant to be planted in.
Not a church building borrowed from the West, and not a break from family or caste community — an ashram in the way a Hindu seeker already understands the word: a household gathered around a teacher and a text, open to the ordinary rhythms of festival, family, and daily devotion.
Hindu-background believers who come to faith in Christ are far more likely to remain rooted — and to bring others — when they are walked alongside inside their existing family and community, rather than pulled out of it into a foreign institutional shape.
Many Hindu seekers approach Christ in stages — praying to Him among other devotion, then as chief deity, then as their chosen and exclusive Lord (Ishta Devata), and finally as Lord over all. An ashram makes room for that journey rather than demanding a single decisive break.
Hindu culture runs on honor and shame more than guilt and innocence. Discipleship in this context needs to keep returning to the truth that the crucified and risen Messiah bore the shame as well as the guilt of sin — and was honored by the Father in it.
New believers often keep caste identity by default, not by decision. A healthy ashram teaches, gently but plainly, that caste distinction has no place among those made in God's image — while walking with people through the real social cost of letting it go.
Rather than stripping believers of every cultural festival, a wise ashram helps them find what can be redeemed and celebrated in Christ — following the pattern of researchers like Dr. Herb Hoefer among Hindu-background disciples in Chennai.
Every ashram gathers around a book. For ours, that book is the New Creation Book for Hindus above — read aloud, discussed, and returned to as the household's shared reference point.
Organizations already laboring specifically in Hindu communities and in discipling Hindu-background believers — natural partners for anyone starting an ashram.
This is where AFII's 7,000-language goal touches Hindu ministry most directly.
Source: Bible Society of India, indian.bible/language-bibles
Among India's tribal languages, the four the Indian government has chosen to prioritize for AI tooling are the same four where Scripture itself is furthest from complete — the clearest intersection with AFII's 7,000-language goal.
| Language | Scripture Status | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Santali (~7.6M speakers) | Complete | Full Bible and the JESUS Film both available. Roots go back to the first Santali Bible, published in 1895 by Norwegian missionary Lars Olsen Skrefsrud. |
| Bhili (Gujarat / MP / Rajasthan border) | Near Complete | New Testament ("Sarvoccha Parameshwar") published 2012. As of 2024 the Old Testament and full Bhili Bible were in final preparation for publication — likely complete or nearly so by now. |
| Mundari (Munda language family) | In Progress | BSI's full-Bible project began 2018, with the New Testament draft nearing completion by mid-2023 and publication targeted for 2025 — the most active current gap among the four. |
| Gondi (~3M speakers, endangered) | Open | Only about one-fifth of Gonds still speak the language. An audio Bible / partial text exists in the Adilabad dialect (2018, via the Bible.is app) — no complete printed Bible in any dialect yet. |
Adi Vaani is India's first government-built AI translator for tribal languages, launched in beta on September 1, 2025 by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs under the Janjatiya Gaurav Varsh banner. It is not a one-off app but the foundation for a future large language model dedicated to tribal languages, built by a consortium led by IIT Delhi together with BITS Pilani, IIIT Hyderabad, and IIIT Naya Raipur, working alongside Tribal Research Institutes in Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Meghalaya.
Under the hood it runs on AI translation models including No Language Left Behind (NLLB) and IndicTrans2, adapted for low-resource tribal languages, and it leans heavily on community involvement — native speakers and tribal institutes shaping the training data rather than the models being built from outside sources alone.
Its first phase covers exactly the four languages in the table above — Santali, Mundari, Bhili, and Gondi — with Kui and Garo in development. It offers real-time translation between Hindi, English, and these tribal languages, bilingual dictionaries, and subtitled government and health content, and it exists to digitize folklore, oral tradition, and cultural heritage before it is lost. Of India's 461 recognized tribal languages, 81 are considered vulnerable and 42 critically endangered — which is the scale of the emergency Adi Vaani is a first, partial answer to.
For AFII's purposes, Adi Vaani is not itself a Bible translation tool — but a working, community-vetted machine-translation layer for Gondi and Mundari is exactly the kind of infrastructure that could accelerate a Scripture translation effort in either language, the same way translation technology has accelerated AFII's own work elsewhere.
Alongside the major missions boards, a handful of smaller, focused ministries produce the literature and research an ashram actually uses day to day.
Foundational reading for any HBB ashram's shelf: Timothy Shultz's Disciple Making Among Hindus: Making Authentic Relationships Grow (William Carey Library, 2016), grounded in over thirty years of the author's own discipleship among Hindus in India, the UK, and North America.