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

1. A Jesuit Mission in History

31 The experience of religious conversion is always caught within a “matrix of motives and representations” (Hanretta 2005, 490). Whatever the inner experience , conversion to Christianity in Tamil history was an irreducibly social process that involved change of allegiance given significance by prevailing social relations. Yet regardless of its political import, new Christian affiliation came to be narrated within missionary discourses that construed the change as a matter of spiritual transformation. Inevitably, then, the history of Christian conversion is an account of the incompatible logics and mutual effects of missionary intentions and the exigencies produced by the intentions of others (cf. Hefner 1993).1 The Tamil convert communities who are the subject of this book were brought into existence in such circumstances. The message of missionaries was assimilated into existing categories of understanding and relating (Robbins 2004a), although south Indian history shows just how diversely Christianity was communicated—and how different was its reception, for instance, by Brahman philosophers, warrior kings, and “untouchables.” There is also no doubt that Christian practices and agents altered existing arrangements, but since the social or religious disjunctures involved were defined by existing categories and sets of relations, it makes little sense to talk of Christian conversion as rupture per se. Christian conversion, as argued in the Introduction, is a long-term historical and institutional process of continuity and discontinuity. The aim of this chapter is to explain in broad terms the historical conditions that shaped Catholicism in a particular Tamil region up to the twentieth century, and so to set the scene for later chapters.2 I begin by returning to the circumstances —south Indian and European—of Roberto Nobili’s mission in the early 1 A Jesuit Mission in History 32 Chapter 1 seventeenth century, drawing a contrast between his Brahmanic perspective and the kingly politics through which Catholicism (mission, churches, affiliations) was actually drawn into Tamil society. The chapter shows how Christian centers were party to processes of precolonial state formation, and how Tamil sociopolitical relations became constitutive of the character of the Christian sacred. Indeed, while Nobili tried to separate Christianity from empire, the logics of mission and of rule were again intertwined, albeit in indigenous form within Tamil strategies of statecraft. I turn then to the external impacts on this politically and culturally assimilated Christianity: first, that of the Roman Church, which eventually suppressed the Jesuit order; and second, that of British rule in south India, which helped institutionalize religion apart from indigenous politics. It will become clear how the changed arrangements of power under colonialism brought new conflicts and new opportunities for a Jesuit mission reconsolidated in the mid–nineteenth century. Among the most significant conflicts were those with Hindu rulers and rival missions—Padroado and Protestant—which intersected in interesting ways with local caste politics. The chapter turns finally to what was the most dramatic turn of events for a mission that had sought Brahmanic emulation and eschewed the dishonor of association with inferior castes—namely, mass conversions to Christianity by subordinated dalits. We will see how the missionary response—Catholic and Protestant—to this social movement profoundly rearranged the language of caste and its position astride the social and the spiritual by putting in place the modern notion of caste as a Hindu religious institution and conversion as a religious rather than a politicaleconomic act. THE JESUIT MADUR AI MISSION When in 1606 young Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) settled in Madurai, center of the ancient Tamil Pandyan kingdom, as an “ambassador” under the protection of the Nayak ruler, he signaled a change in the course of Roman Catholicism in the region (Županov 2005, 233). As noted in the Introduction, Nobili imagined Christian mission to the Tamils less as a spiritual conquest than as the restoration of a lost truth—the fourth veda of salvation—and he viewed indigenous theological texts not as heathen religion but as a sort of defective Catholicism.3 His mission would “‘sacrilize’ Tamil society in the Augustinian sense of giving a visible form, the Catholic Church, to the invisible grace of God” (Županov 1999, 115, 133, 154). The Pandyan kingdom (fourth century b.c.e.–fifteenth century c.e.) had been the site of earlier Christian encounters, being the transit (“mahbar”) between the ancient Christian centers of Kottayam (Kerala) and the tomb of the Apostle Thomas at Mylapore (Chennai). But at the start of the seventeenth century, A Jesuit Mission in...