The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India

Conclusion

267 Let me recall and draw together some of the main themes from this social history of Catholicism in Tamil south India. This will return to the recurring question of the relationship between the Christian faith and its cultural setting, to the manner in which the very categories of “religion” and “culture” were themselves formed and negotiated in missionary encounters, and to the mediating role of caste. THE PRODUCTION OF CATHOLIC R ELIGION IN SOUTH INDIA In common with several other early modern European missionary encounters overseas, the Jesuit Madurai mission in the seventeenth-century Tamil country involved, first, a conception of Christian truth apart from the cultures and languages in which it would be expressed; and second, engagement with people, the Tamils, on the basis of a separation of their social world into the “idolatrous” and the purely “civil” (long before colonial rulers and reformers in the nineteenth century set about describing aspects of indigenous life as “religion” in the sense equivalent to Protestant Christianity). Given the cultural vilification of Christianity by elite groups as “Parangi” practice, Nobili’s mission tried to clothe the faith in what he regarded as the hegemonic semiotic forms of the time, which would signal wisdom, cultural acceptability, and above all caste rank to the benefit of the mission. Early Jesuits required a particular contingent idea of “culture” to “de-Parangify Christianity,” to “de-paganise Indian customs,” and to “Indianise Christianity” (Pelkmans 2007, 885). The initial secularizing of Brahmanic caste Conclusion 268 Conclusion practice was necessary so that it could accommodate Christian faith rather than be rejected as paganism, effectively Brahmanizing Christianity. Tamil Catholicism would become embedded in distinctions, discriminations, and public orderings of caste, which were accepted as morally indifferent things—adiaphora. This, at least, was the one aspect of Jesuit “accommodation” that survived the transition of the Jesuit mission from the Tamil cultural “center,” where it mostly failed to recruit converts, to the peripheral plains (such as Ramnad) where its following grew significantly in the eighteenth century. Here adopting Christian “religion” (mārkkam—path; camayam—faith or sect) never marked converts out as socially separate, nor did it involve a break with full participation in Tamil society. While missions had limited success in the strategic appropriation of local “culture” (often a “folklorized” version [cf. Pelkmans 2007]), Catholic religion was itself culturally appropriated in locally varied ways. The key to mission success in the Tamil countryside lay in the way in which Catholic churches became the target of political-economic investments, along with temples and other pilgrim centers, and especially as the object of royal patronage within a particular indigenous mode of statecraft. Christian affiliation was thus an element in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political relations. Systems of rights, services, and schemes of honor were elaborated at Catholic churches as kovils so as to assemble and integrate communities of Christians and Hindus through the shared worship of protector-saints whose powerful shrines had acquired recognition within the existing pantheon and sacred geography. As heads of such religious centers, Jesuit missionaries found themselves unwittingly playing a critical part in local ritual-political systems, especially through their control of access to festival honors. These represented political power and a wider bundle of graded socioeconomic rights. Such Tamil forms of Catholic worship were elaborated not as a matter of theologically rationalized design but through contingent adaptations by Jesuit missionaries to the caste-political exigencies of the kovil. Initially, the circumstances of British rule, especially the intersection of competition between missionary groups for jurisdiction and between castes for honor, involved further elaboration of ranked caste orders around Catholic worship so as to secure for the Jesuit mission the affiliation of upper-caste members of Tamil society. This affiliation was won at the expense of the exclusion or systematic subordination of others, specifically “Pariahs”—that is, the dalits. Honors disputes were unleashed by new economic opportunities under colonial arrangements of property and market, but the caste orders they described were increasingly reified . Subsequently, British rule supported missionary ambitions by facilitating the institutionalization of religion apart from politics, which, paradoxically, allowed Jesuits to transition from spiritual teachers and ritualists to become overlords and “kings” of the newly separate domain of Catholic religion. Missionary efforts Conclusion 269 to put this domain of Christian religion in place underpin a particular villagelevel social dynamic unfolding over a hundred years (c. 1850–1950). Among the aspects of this that have been...