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

Introduction

1 On 17 March 2009, the archbishop of Chennai (Dr. M. Chinnappa, SVD) stood before an audience of priests and theologians to proclaim passionately that the Catholic Church in Tamil Nadu had to make a public confession for the sin of caste committed historically. “We have done this injustice to thousands and thousands of our own people,” he proclaimed. “We have damaged a community.” The occasion was the launch of another two volumes in a new series of dalit commentaries on the books of the Bible at a Jesuit center of theology. Dalit is a word of Sanskrit origin meaning “broken” or “crushed” and stands for the identity of those inferiorized communities who are today struggling from the humiliation and oppression of untouchability, and who in significant numbers had earlier turned to Christianity in various moves to reject inferiority and build an alternative future for themselves.1 Indeed, in the Tamil country, a conversion history stretching over four centuries produced a dalit majority among the four million members of the Christian churches in the state. However, pressure to find institutional or theological expression for this demographic is only now gathering momentum. A few days before the event launching these dalit Bible commentaries, across his desk in Chennai’s prestigious Loyola College, Francis Xavier, the former head of the Jesuit Province of Madurai, was telling me that “being a dalit is more than original sin because baptismal water is able to wash original sin but cannot remove the stigma of being a dalit. You say all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, [but] is there a dalit God? You bury the dead separately ; is there going to be a dalit heaven and a non-dalit heaven? Or do we need a messiah who should be born as a dalit? . . . My question is, When a dalit priest Introduction 2 Introduction celebrates Mass, is a dalit Christ coming or a regular Christ? Because some people do not want to receive Communion from a dalit priest.” Both the archbishop and the Jesuit provincial are dalit Christians who despite senior ecclesiastical rank find themselves inescapably tied to the stigmatized identity of “untouchable,” but equally wedded to a project of social and self-emancipation. A year previously, in March 2008, dalit Catholics of Eraiyur village, seeking liberation from continuing discrimination in the life of the Church, had demanded a separate parish from their bishop. They had been refused the honor of reading scripture, serving at the altar, or joining the choir in the parish church. They had endured separate seating at Mass, separate funeral biers, and separate cemeteries, and were denied access to the church street for their funeral and wedding processions. They followed other dalit Catholics who had begun to withdraw to separate churches with their own festivals, often dedicated to St. Sebastian, whose tortured figure tied to a tree and pierced by arrows was a fitting image of dalit suffering. Their demand for the consecration of a parish church in their quarter triggered a headline-grabbing assault on dalit persons and property by upper-caste Catholics. Dalit priests in the diocese responded by locking their churches and replacing the Holy Week celebrations with black flags and hunger strikes. These events and the sentiments of the dalit clergy are symptomatic of an unresolved tension between Christianity and the culture of caste, which has been central to Tamil Catholicism for centuries. It dominated my conversations with clerics, bishops, and the religious more than ever in the spring of 2009, when I returned to Tamil Nadu to conduct a round of interviews twenty-seven years after first beginning this study of Tamil Catholicism. Anthropologists of Christianity are familiar with the strain between the universal demands of faith, including fidelity to the Bible, and the particularities of the cultural situation in which converts live and in which they have social investments (Robbins 2010). The particularities that are to be overcome may even be regarded as defining and animating the universal stance, making the Christian convert one who struggles against sin and the old order in an endless process of becoming a new subject (ibid.). Even those who regard Christian conversion in the most disjunctive terms (Joel Robbins and others who work on Pentecostal-charismatic forms) acknowledge that the break with the past is always incomplete. Christian self-making is an ongoing work inexorably tied to the past, to what is regarded as the propensity to sin, to the particular as the necessary ground...