Conversations in Tarangambadi: Caring for the Self in Early Eighteenth Century South India

In their commentary about the Tswana, John and Jean Comaroff have questioned the usefulness of conversion as an analytical category. In their work, they note that Protestant conversion activities were "decided by a serendipitous and superficial overlap of two very different orders of meaning and value." They also believe that "Given the mounting evidence of the 'shallow-rootedness' of the new faith, the meaning of conversion itself became debatable."² In this article I want to re-introduce the notion of conversion as a much more wide-ranging set of activities that questions the one-way orientation usually associated with conversion. In this narrative I want to respond to what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the "more affective narratives of human belonging."³ In the account that follows I wish to show that conversion is a process of examining one's life and physical body and changing it for both the missionary and for the target of conversion. The goal of this religious conversion, that is to say the conversion that the Christian missionaries wanted to bring about, was ultimately transformed not into converting the "heathen," but was a mechanism where the missionary was himself converted to a local way of thinking. The main project in the article is the way in which this conversion made the thinking of the locals and the missionary into a homogenous entity, where the missionary discovered in the local terms and thinking about health a fulfillment of his own religious conversion goals.

The major argument of the article is that a part of the chemistry of this conversion process involved the mutual invocation by the missionary and the local individuals of certain ways of thinking that were implicit in the local Tamil world. These ways of thinking or knowledges were available to be used, and could be relatively easily invoked, and therefore later became the central element in the way by which this conversion of both the missionary and the locals expressed itself.

The health project that was implicit in this mutual conversion process ultimately was enhanced by many other forces and agents. It is of some interest that the Tamil cultural area where the missionary arrived in the early eighteenth century, by the twentieth century becomes one of the most modern in India and achieves zero population in the 1990's.

The long conversation between the missionary and the focus of his interest takes place on the Tamil coast in the southeastern part of the Indian sub-continent in the early years of the eighteenth century in a seaport called Tranquebar or Tarangambadi controlled by the Danish East India Company.

Arriving in the Middle of Things

Tranquebar or Tarangambadi, which means "the singing of the waves" in Tamil, was a Danish colonial port that lay on the Tanjavur coast of Tamil south India that was also on the edge of the Tanjore Maratha kingdom that lay centered to its west. The Tanjavur area was a deltaic area that had been a site for commercial rice agriculture for many hundreds of years. Since the time of the Chola kingdom at the turn of the second millennium C.E., the Kaveri or Cauvery River valley had been subject to settlement by brahmans who had been granted villages whose irrigated rice lands had been serviced by Dalit, formerly "untouchable," agricultural slaves. The Chola kingdom was also characterized by many urban settlements.

In the eleventh century the Tanjavur Chola rajas started to create a state, one of whose goals was to assure that the security of both the agriculture and its population was not at risk. In late Chola times, therefore, the king had a very large masonry dam "1,080 feet in length, 40 to 60 in breadth, and 15 to 18 in depth" constructed.⁴ NaaTTaars or local heads of territorial units called naaTus, the periynaaTTaar, and the brahmans played a critical custodial function in villages prior to the coming of the Telugus or VaTukas from the north.⁵ VaTukas or Vadugas came to play an important cultural and economic function on the Tanjavur coast. By the late eighteenth century...