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The Emergence of Authenticity Talk and the Giving of Accounts: Conversion as Movement of the Soul in South India, ca. 1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2013

Rupa Viswanath
Rupa Viswanath*
Affiliation:
Center for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany
*
rviswan@uni-goettingen.de
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Abstract

In 2002, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu passed a law that illustrates the centrality of what may be called “authentic religious selves” to postcolonial Indian statecraft. It banned religious conversions brought about by what it termed “material allurement,” and it especially targeted those who might attempt to convert impoverished Dalits, descendants of unfree laborers who now constitute India's lowest castes. Conversion, thus conceived, is itself founded upon the idea that the self must be autonomous; religion ought to be freely chosen and not brought about by “allurement.” Philosophers like Charles Taylor have provided accounts of how selfhood of this kind became lodged in the Western imaginaire, but how was it able to take hold in very different social configurations, and to what effect? By attending to this more specific history, this essay brings a correlated but widely overlooked question to center stage: under what distinctive circumstances are particular selves called upon to actively demonstrate their autonomy and authenticity by divulging putatively secreted contents? In colonial South India, I will argue, the problem of authentic conversion only captured the public imagination when Dalit conversions to Christianity in colonial Madras threatened the stability of the agrarian labor regimes to which they were subject. And today, as in nineteenth-century Madras, it is Dalit selfhood that remains an object of intense public scrutiny and the target of legal interventions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 120 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013

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References

1 For instance, the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act 2003; the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Forcible Conversion Ordinance 2002; the Rajasthan Freedom of Religion Bill 2006; the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act 1967 (revamped in 2006); the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act 1968; the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act 1978; and the Chhattisgarh Freedom of Religion Act 1968. For criticism, see South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, “Anti-Conversion Laws: Challenges to Secularism and Fundamental Human Rights,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, 2 (2008): 63–73Google Scholar.

2 An excellent example of this kind of writing is the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre paper cited in note 1; for a review and analysis of arguments concerning conversion in postcolonial India, see Kim, Sebastian C. H., In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 and 2005)Google Scholar. In an important paper, Nathaniel Roberts adduces evidence to argue that India's anti-conversion laws are not adequately accounted for in the existing literature, which, focusing on the Hindu majoritarian politics that the laws overtly serve, conceives of these laws as abrogating secular principles. Against this, Roberts demonstrates that these laws in fact rest on arguments that are fundamentally secular in character; “Ethnographic Knowledge and the Government of Religion,” paper presented at the University of Virginia, 20 Mar. 2009.

3 See for instance, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

4 A touchstone of work in this vein is John and Jean Comaroff's sweeping two-volume study, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 and 1997)Google Scholar. A more recent and highly sophisticated account of similar transformations is Keane, Webb's Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and his “Sincerity, ‘Modernity’ and the Protestants,” Cultural Anthropology 17, 1 (2002): 65–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 My use of the generic term “Protestant missionary” requires explanation. First, Roman Catholics did not become actively involved in problematizing conversion in this way in the South Indian public sphere in the late nineteenth century, for this was, after all, primarily a Protestant conception of conversion. Thus they do not figure here despite their importance to a broader history of Christianity in South India. Second, the extent to which I differentiate among Protestant mission societies has been driven entirely by the question of how mission activity shaped the discourse on the authentic conversion of Pariahs in the 1890s in Madras. Although theological and missiological differences abound with respect to some matters, these differences had little impact on missions' theoretical or practical approach to the Pariah at this particular time, roughly 1880 to 1915, an approach which they developed in an ecumenical space. With respect to the Pariah and a number of other matters, Protestant missionaries, especially the Anglophone missionaries who comprised the largest subgroup, developed their concepts in concert at frequent interdenominational conferences and in shared periodicals, and they often acted in concert as well. Through interdenominational organizations they passed resolutions on pastoral policy to which all member missions were, in theory at least, pledged to adhere. With respect to the issue of Pariah conversion, the archives of the following societies between roughly 1870 and 1920 have proved most pertinent: The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (London), The American Arcot Mission (New Brunswick), The Free Church of Scotland (Edinburgh), and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (Oxford, UK).

6 Nate Roberts' Ph.D. dissertation, “The Power of Conversion and the Foreignness of Belonging: Domination and Moral Community in a Paraiyar Slum” (Columbia University 2008), in appendix I and especially on pages 263–69, contains a useful typology of what occasioned opposition to Christian conversion in India: (1) opposition to the rare conversion of high-caste students at mission-run schools in urban centers; such high-caste urban responses to Christianity in Madras are described in G. A. Oddie's “Constructing Hinduism: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding” (in Frykenberg, R. E. and Lowe, A. M., eds., Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500 [Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003])Google Scholar; (2) opposition concerned with the preservation of a Hindu majority in the context of political representation (see John Webster's discussion of “the politics of numbers” in Dalit Christians: A History [Delhi: ISPCK, 1992]); and (3) opposition to interference with labor relations in the countryside, which is the concern of this paper. What I examine in this essay is the predominant rural reaction to evangelization, since we are concerned here with the backdrop of Pariah conversion, an overwhelmingly rural phenomena.

7 Paul, Rev. J., “How to Awaken amongst Hindus a Consciousness of Sin,” Harvest Field (1881–1882): 210–12Google Scholar.

8 Rev. H. H., “At Work,” Harvest Field (1881–1882): 113–14 (my emphases).

9 I have discussed missionaries' attempts to refine this distinction on the basis of their Indian experiences, in “Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise: ‘Untouchables’ and Religious Neutrality in Colonial South India,” Historical Research, 83, 219 (Feb. 2010): 124–45. Later anthropologists would also aver that Indians made little of this distinction: see Marriott, McKim and Inden, Ronald, “Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems,” in Kenneth, David, ed., The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1977), 227–38Google Scholar. See also note 12, below.

10 The Tamil preacher G. D. Barnabas recorded with phonetic precision the following rustic retort in a village in North Arcot District: “Āmaiyyā, nīṅka colṟatu cari, [āṉā] kiṟistoṅka āyiṭṭāc cāti keṭṭupōvutē,” “What you're saying is indeed true, but we cannot convert to your religion—becoming a Christian means spoiling our caste.” Vētiyār Viḷakku, Mar. and Apr. 1917, Christian Literature Society Archives, Chennai.

11 There are some exceptions to this general characterization, though specifically doctrinal opposition in South India was very sporadic and occurred only in urban locales: Geoffrey Oddie, “Anti-Missionary Feeling and Hindu Revivalism in Madras: The Hindu Preaching and Hindu Tract Societies, 1886–1891,” in Clothey, Fred, ed., Images of Man: Essays on Religion and Historical Process in South Asia (Madras: New Era, 1982)Google Scholar; and Young, Richard Fox, Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Vienna: Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien, 1981)Google Scholar. Arguably the most important source of doctrinal opposition elsewhere in India was the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist organization founded in the 1880: see Jones, Kenneth, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab (Delhi: Manohar, 1976)Google Scholar. Indian touring preachers complained occasionally of “native sophists” who debated them on philosophical matters for sport, but an audience member who had been pulled into debate was far more likely to quickly eschew doctrinal issues in favor of an irrefragable observation: “Why listen to him? He's gone over to the Pariahs.”

12 This is of course not the same as saying such a distinction was entirely foreign. Something recognizably parallel, involving normative claims about how and why spiritual rewards are superior to material ones, can be found in Indian oral and written literature. But to posit purely spiritual motives as superior to material ones is not to deny the legitimacy of the latter, let alone to exclude them from the realm of genuine religiosity. A more detailed exploration is outside the scope of this paper, but a useful overview of the issue can be found in Fuller's, C. J.The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 70–72Google Scholar.

13 On the history of Protestant conceptions of caste, see Forrester, Duncan, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon, 1980)Google Scholar. For an account of what these conceptions meant in practice, and especially with respect to the pastoral care of the Pariah, see my, “Spiritual Slavery.”

14 This erasure results from over half a century of Dravidianist political ideology, which has been very successful in promulgating a vision of Tamil society as an undifferentiated non-Brahmin mass. On the interchangeable use of caste names and words for slave, see Kumar, Dharma, Land and Caste in South India (Delhi: Manohar, 1992 [1965])Google Scholar; and Viswanath, Rupa, The Pariah Problem: Religion, Caste and Welfare in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2013)Google Scholar.

15 Kumar, Land and Caste; Cassels, Nancy, “Social Legislation under the Company Raj: The Abolition of Slavery Act V of 1843,” South Asia, n.s. 11, 1 (1988): 59–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hjelje, Benedicte, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, 1 & 2 (1967): 77–87Google Scholar.

16 Board of Revenue Proceedings 617, 6 Sept. 1889, Tamil Nadu State Archives. On the fact that speaking of slavery post-abolition was strongly discouraged amongst officials, see also Chatterjee's, Indrani “Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence,” in Chatterjee, Indrani and Eaton, Richard, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 287–315Google Scholar; and Viswanath, Pariah Problem.

17 Pace historical accounts that have all too often uncritically accepted the new language of contract at face value: see, for instance, Prakash, Gyan, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Breman, Jan, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and his Beyond Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Both stress the transformations wrought by the colonial state's new legal enframing of bondage. I have argued, rather, that substantive change came slowly, and did not coincide with the official abolition of slavery; see The Pariah Problem, chs. 1 and 4.

18 Board of Revenue Proceedings 106, 29 May 1918, cited in Government Order (Revenue) (GOR) 2941, 12 Aug. 1918, 28, Tamil Nadu State Archives.

19 As Dharma Kumar shrewdly notes, “The issue [of the laborer's rights] would be raised presumably only when there was a failure of crops, and it would be precisely at times like these, when his rights were most needed, that they were most insecure”; Land and Caste, 191–92.

20 A terminological clarification: although Pariahs and other untouchable groups comprise castes in the sense of endogamous descent groups, it is also possible to refer to them as outcastes, in the sense that they are deemed outside the rankings of respectable castes. Therefore “caste people” means those other than Dalits. Like the English word “status,” then, which can mean both simply any condition whatsoever, but also an elevated condition, caste can refer to those people belonging to any endogamous group but also to those other than untouchables belonging to the respectable or “clean” castes. This ambiguity is present in Indian languages as well in the term which caste most often translates, jāti.

21 Goudie to Rev. G. W. Olver, Tiruvallur, 3 Mar. 1898, 3–4, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

22 Such views may be found in, for example, Sarkar, Tanika, “Bondage in the Colonial Context,” in Patnaik, U. and Dingwaney, M., eds., Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1985), 97–125Google Scholar; Prakash, Bonded Histories; Breman, Patronage and Exploitation.

23 This meaning of tamiḻaṉ was still openly acknowledged in the Tamil Lexicon published by the University of Madras in 1924–1936. Eighteenth-century examples of this usage can be found in Ananda Ranga Pillai's diary: The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph Francois Dupleix, Governor of Pondicherry: A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social and Personal, from 1736–1761, J. Frederick Price and K. Rangachari, eds. (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1984). Missionaries, too, record this form in many places in ways that make clear that the distinction between tamiḻaṉ and paraiyaṉ was a self-evident one to native speakers. One example appears in a series of transcribed interviews with native Christian mission workers: on the topic of caste, one catechist, defining himself as Paraiyar, speaks of sitting in the church separate from the “Tamils”: Inquiries Made by the Bishop of Madras Regarding the Removal of Caste Prejudices and Practices within the Native Church of South India; Together with the Replies of the Missionaries and Native Clergy Sent Thereto (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society, 1868). It is precisely against the dominant assumption of a mutually exclusive relationship between tamiḻaṉ and paraiyaṉ that the late-nineteenth-century Dalit intellectual Iyotheedas' historical reconstructions, which were designed to prove that Pariayars were not only Tamils but in fact the only genuine Tamils, assume their unique force as counter-memory; on the internal dynamics of Iyotheedas's discourse, see Gajendran Ayyathurai, “Foundations of Anti-Caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011.

24 Viswanath, Pariah Problem.

25 This theory of conversion, commonly associated with Jesuits, was widely adopted by Protestant missionaries in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, though it was later abandoned once mass conversions were in full swing. Among Jesuits, it was carried to its logical extreme in South India in seventeenth-century Madurai by Roberto de Nobili, who donned the garb and adopted the habits of local Brahmins. See Cronin, Vincent, A Pearl to India: The Life of Roberto de Nobili (New York: Dutton, 1959)Google Scholar.

26 Dick Kooiman convincingly makes this argument, analyzing data from mass movements in historical proximity to the Great Famine: “Mass Movement, Famine and Epidemic: A Study in Interrelationship,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 2 (May 1991): 281–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The following works provide detailed accounts of such movements in South India and elsewhere: Grafe, Hugald, History of Christianity in India, Vol. IV, Part 2: Tamil Nadu in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1990)Google Scholar; Manickam, Sundararaj, The Social Setting of Christian Conversion in South India (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1977)Google Scholar; Pickett, J. W., Christian Mass Movements in India: A Study with Recommendations (New York: Abingdon, 1933)Google Scholar; Webster, John, Dalit Christians: A History (Delhi: ISPCK, 1990)Google Scholar.

28 In this missionaries concurred with the views of Indian elites, for whom the Pariah's ignorance was legendary. Gandhi, some decades later, would lament the ignorance underlying untouchables' conversions to Christianity, asking the missionary Mott, Rev. John, “Would you, Dr. Mott, preach the Gospel to a cow? Well some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than can a cow” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 64 [New Delhi: Government of India, 1941], 240–41)Google Scholar. When some balked at the parallel, Gandhi stood by his analogy, retorting that Hindus viewed the cow as sacred.

29 Editor, In and Around Madras, Being a Report of the Mission Work of the United Free Church of Scotland in the City of Madras and in the Surrounding District of Chingleput for 1913–14. (Madras: Methodist Publishing House), 9.

30 Kabis, J., “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” Harvest Field, Oct.–Nov. (1897): 361–73, 415–22Google Scholar; originally presented at the Madras Missionary Conference, Aug. 1897 (Bangalore, United Theological College Ecclesiastical Archives), 368. I discuss Protestant missionaries' analysis of the Pariah's condition, as well as the missiological limits on attending to it, in “Spiritual Slavery.”

31 Ibid.

32 It is noteworthy that although the epithet “rice Christian” in particular, and more generally the sentiment it expresses, are common features of the rhetoric of high-caste Hindu anti-conversion activists, it in fact originated amongst missionaries themselves as a term of abuse directed at rival missions.

33 Protestant missionaries concerned with the authenticity of conversion responded in practice in a variety of ways to the problem of Pariah poverty. Most adopted piecemeal measures of relief, putting in place, for instance, relief camps at famine times and providing medical care when funds from home societies made this possible. For some missionaries (Adam Andrew of the Free Church of Scotland and William Goudie of the Wesleyan Mission, for example) and in some missions, this evolved into a more systematic conception of “social Christianity.” The American Baptists' vision of this is recorded in Clough's, John. E.Social Christianity in the Orient: The Story of a Man, a Mission and a Movement (Macmillan: New York, 1914)Google Scholar. Andrew was instrumental in inaugurating a government scheme for the provision of wasteland to landless Dalits, though the scheme was relatively small in scope. See Viswanath, Pariah Problem, ch. 3.

34 Rev. E. C. Scudder, “Report of the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church of America, 1898, 7–8, United Theological College Ecclesiastical Archives, Bangalore.

35 Similar issues regarding caste and dress have been explored in Hardgrave's, Robert, “The Breast-Cloth Controversy: Caste Consciousness and Social Change in Southern Travancore,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 5, 2 (1968): 171–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He describes missionary efforts to make “low” caste Nadar women converts in Travancore (now Kerala), who traditionally went topless, cover their breasts as “high” caste women did.

36 Rev. J. M., “Our Native Christians,” Harvest Field, 1863–1864: 203.

37 Viswanath, Pariah Problem, ch. 2. My argument runs counter to the prevalent view that missionaries opposed caste on the basis of a commitment to equality. See, for example, Oddie, G. A., Hindu and Christian in Southeast India (London: Curzon, 1991), 161Google Scholar. The sympathy and kindness of ardent missionary social reformers should not be confused with a proposal to alter unequal labor relations.

38 Swadharma, 9 July 1922: 138 (Poem credited to The Madras Times, n.d.). The name of the neighborhood of swells, Padripet, is a snide reference to the luxurious lifestyle of European missionaries, most commonly referred to in Tamil as “padre” (pātiri).

39 On the link between the modern notion of authenticity and heritable social class, see Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

40 Thassar, Ayothee, Oru Paica Tamiḻaṉ 3, 41 (23 Mar. 1910)Google Scholar, republished in Ayōttitācar Cintaṉaikaḷ, Aloysius, G., ed. (Palayamkottai, TN, India: Folklore Resources and Research Centre, St. Xavier's College, 2003), 28Google Scholar.

41 See Keane, “Sincerity.”

42 Walker, Rev. T., “Spiritual Life in the Indian Church,” Harvest Field, 1901–1902: 452Google Scholar.

43 Goudie, Rev. W., “The Awakening of Spiritual Life in Infant Village Churches,” Harvest Field, 4th series, vol. 10 (1899): 209Google Scholar.

44 Viswanath, Pariah Problem, chs. 2 and 3.

45 Hindujanasamskarini, Madras Native Newspaper Reports, fortnight ending 15 Apr. 1894.

46 The Hindu, 23 Feb. 1903, cutting in D146, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives, Rhodes House Library, University of Oxford.

47 Ibid., my emphasis.

48 Ibid., first emphasis mine, second in original.

49 Adam Andrew, Letter to the Editor, Madras Mail, 26 Feb. 1903.

50 The Hindu, n.d. (ca. between 27 Feb. and 5 Mar. 1903), cutting in D146, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives, Rhodes House Library, University of Oxford.

51 Ibid., first emphasis mine, second in original.

52 Sasilekha, 27 Feb. 1903, Madras Native Newspaper Reports, week ending 7 Mar. 1903, Tamil Nadu State Archives.

53 Swadesamitran, 2 Apr. 1903, Madras Native Newspaper Reports, week ending 11 Apr. 1903, Tamil Nadu State Archives.

54 Three Rival Modes of Moral Inquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990)Google Scholar; After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1984])Google Scholar.