Ernest Forrester Paton (1891–1970), also known by the Tamil name Chinnannan, was a Scottish United Free Church medical missionary to Pune, part of then-Bombay Presidency.
They were a religiously devout family at Alloa, Scotland; Catherine Forrester Paton, his aunt, founded a women's missionary training college in Glasgow.
Ernest Forrester and S. Jesudasan were sent as missionaries by the United Free Church (UFC) to Bombay Presidency's Pune, presently in Maharashtra.
It also included like wearing the clothes of Indian Sannyasin as adopted by Robert de Nobili, and expressed their angst over the missionary emphasis on institutions like "Church".
However, the attempts of the Re-thinking group attracted only a particular section of the Christian community—non-denominational missionary organizations started by converts in both Bengal and Madras Presidency failed to compete with well-established Western churches with adequate local resources attached to it.
During this time, nationalist leaders like Gandhi and Rajaji gave an open call to the Indian christians to reform the institutional churches for allegedly having "impurities."
As a pursuit of achieving communion, mysticism was identified with "conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the divinity, the spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight."