Christianity and the Tamil: The Early Days of the Community
In the later nineteenth century, throughout south India and across all denominations, a new form of Christian conversion was occurring: large scale, group rather than individual, and by members of “low” and especially “untouchable” castes (or dalits). Between 1851 and 1871 the number of Protestant Christians in the Madras Presidency increased from 74,000 to 300,000 largely as a result of group conversions from these groups (Richter 1908, 201), and Roman Catholic missions experienced similar increases with the Jesuit Madurai mission — for example, growing from 169,000 to 260,000 members from 1880 to 1901 (Bugge 1994, 143). Between 1871 and 1901 the population of the Madras Presidency rose by 22.2 percent, but that of Christians by 90.6 percent, largely as a result of dalit rural “mass” conversions. As Oddie notes, “[W]hat had been a multicaste [Christian] community in 1800 had become increasingly Paraiyar dominated by the 1890s” (1991, 153, 155). Such large-scale conversions continued in all Tamil districts and throughout India until Independence, such that of the 11 million Christians given in the 1961 census, over 62 percent were dalits from the southern states. The nature of these conversion movements is a matter of unresolved historical debate, but there is some consensus that, regardless of the particular doctrines of the various denominations, for the low-caste converts themselves becoming Christian had something to do with the rejection of social inferiority and the affirmation of a positive social and religious identity. It involved self-betterment and self-respect through affiliation to missionary religion that gave previously denied access to sacred rites and texts, places of worship of their own — brick mission chapels standing amid crowded thatched huts — and eventually schooling. The dominant caste-class attacks against low-caste neophytes suggest that Christian conversion was indeed taken as a challenge to servitude, if not a mark of upward mobility. As Terry Eagleton (2009) says of faith in general, Christian conversion was performative rather than propositional; it was not a matter of signing up to new belief or an alternative description of reality, but of new allegiance and commitment that might make a difference to a desperate situation. Christian conversion was the hope for better patrons and protection at a time of crisis — particularly the crises brought on by the complex effects of British rule and the rupture and contradictions this produced within existing political and economic systems. These included deepening insecurity associated with agrestic servitude, manifest most acutely in widespread famine that targeted assetless dalits (Washbrook 1993; Hjejle 1967). Christianity might offer alliance with powerful people who alluded racially to the ruling government and had better access to power and resources. But mass conversion could be other things, too.
This is an excerpt from “The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India” by the anthropologist and professor Dr. David Mosse.
As Henrietta Bugge (1994) demonstrates, mass conversions were localized social movements that occurred in quite different ways in different contexts. Bugge compares the mass conversion to the Danish Missionary Society (DMS) of enslaved laboring Paraiyar communities in highly polarized wet-zone villages of Arcot with the similarly large-scale conversion of independent cultivating Paraiyars in the adjacent dryland area, this time to the French Catholic Société des Missions Etrangeres de Paris (MEP). In the first case, the conversion of indebted (or bonded) laborers bereft of the partial protection of the old “moral economy” involved a transfer of allegiance to the missionaries as their new material and spiritual masters. Conversion did not express desired independence or upward mobility, even if through education this was the eventual outcome. In the second case, by contrast, dryland-cultivating Paraiyars with increased bargaining power from expanding groundnut cash-cropping did not convert to Christianity within an existing order of patronage, but as part of a modernizing means to get out of this order. These divergent responses to missions were amplified by opposed missionary styles. While the Danish Protestant missionaries’ spiritual view of conversion made them poor patrons, unwilling to interfere in the social system and resistant to demands for temporal aid (famine relief, seed, loans, legal support), the MEP Catholic missionaries encouraged such support via their catechists. These French Catholic missionaries also fulfilled their raja dharma, the duty of royal personages, through ritual and ceremonial honor or the grandeur of the bishop’s visit, offering opportunities for social mobility to new Christians who could see themselves as belonging to “a larger network of spiritual authority” (Bugge 1994, 174).
Albeit in opposed ways, both Danish and French, Protestant and Catholic missionaries catalyzed mass conversions within rather than against existing moral and social orders, producing Christian identities that were both part of, and yet separate from, the old village order (Bugge 1994, 171). In the villages of the southern plains region of Ramnad, low-caste group conversions had in fact taken place as early as the seventeenth century. Some converted as part of the retinue and dependents of upper-caste Catholics; others were missionized through fringe and clandestine engagements that reinscribed “low born” Pariahs as an exteriorized and subordinated category. Rather than invoking new relationships, dalit Catholics found their servitude ritualized in the church order. Protestant missions were slower to penetrate this heartland of Catholic mission, but by the early twentieth century many Ramnad villages contained small communities of new Protestant dalit converts alongside ancient Catholic ones. The different ways in which Christianity was incorporated into projects of self-respect by these two groups, and the complex interaction of caste and denominational (Caplan 1980b) and interreligious (Christian–Hindu) rivalry underpinning strategies of social mobility, is the subject of chapter 5. The mass conversions of dalits also brought about a broader “conversion of caste” (Dirks 2001) that has to be explained. They had the effect of stabilizing a policy view of caste, not as a condition of socioeconomic servitude, but as a form of spiritual slavery — a Hindu religious system that Christian conversion would cut at its roots.
