Who Is the Other?: An Indian Christian Perspective

One way to address the question of the “other” is to begin with the tradition in its earliest form and then travel through history to see how our vision of the other has either changed or stayed constant. However, I have decided to start from how my ancestors and I defined the other in the Tamil Protestant Christian settings and then travel back to New Testament times.

Tamil Protestant Christianity is a vast, comprehensive, and misleading term. It includes the Church of South India (consisting of former Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists who came together in 1947 to form a united church), ¹ the Methodist Church of India (which has linkages with the United Methodist Church in the U.S.A.), ² the Lutheran churches (three separate denominations such as Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church, Arcot Lutheran Church, and the Indian Evangelical Lutheran Church), and other Protestant groups such as Seventh-day Adventists, the Assembly of God, the Pentecostal Church, the Church of Christ, the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints, and others. Here I am directing my attention to the South Tirunelveli area in Tamilnadu, focusing more on the Church of South India congregation in my home town, Nazareth, in India.

Nazareth is a small town whose original name was canpattu. During the period preceding 1800, eight persons had converted to Christianity, thanks to the work of the native evangelists, especially Satyanathan of Tanjore, under the leadership of the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England. ³ From 1800 to 1804, the number of converts increased to include the whole population of canpattu, through the work of native evangelists. These early Christians created a village of their own and named it Nazareth. Today, Nazareth is a booming town with several high schools and a liberal arts college, businesses, and factories. As one enters the town, one is impressed by the tall steeple of St. John’s Church, which stands at the center of town. It was built in the same architectural style as the Anglican churches in England during the nineteenth century. The steeple has clocks on all four sides announcing every hour of the day with the chiming of bells. As one enters the main sanctuary, one is impressed by the high altar with crosses and candles, adorned in the appropriate liturgical color, with three stained-glass windows above the altar. Today there are more than 1,500 households living in Nazareth, a great majority of them Christians.

The early converts to Christianity lived in the midst of multiple loyalties with regard to their identity formation. Who was the “other” to them in their attempt to define themselves? Before they embraced Christianity, two groups were considered the other—Muslims in that area, and those who belonged to other sub-castes within the caste structure. It is important to note that the other is defined either in communal terms or in sub-communal terms. To put it differently, one’s definition of the other can be in either intercommunal or intracommunal terms. The Muslims were the intercommunal other, and those who belonged to other castes were the intracommunal other. Once they became Christians, this picture of the other was made complex. Two other categories were introduced to the definition of the “other.” Now the Hindus as a whole became the other in intercommunal terms, and the European missionaries became the other in intracommunal terms. So there are now four categories of the other for Nazareth Christians. This leads to their self-definition in these terms: We are Christians and not Muslims or Hindus. We are Indian Christians and not other-caste Christians or European Christians.

It is clear that these Christians went through a tension between their identity as Indians and Tamils on the one hand and their identity as Christians on the other. The way they negotiated between these two loyalties was through a dynamics of difference, of claiming the otherness of...