Monday, April 26, 2010
Thursday, May 8, 2008
CASTE AND CHRISTIANITY IN TAMIL NADU, INDIA
CHRISTIANITY AND THE DALITS IN TAMIL NADU
Dr. R.Paul Mohan Roy
The caste clashes between two groups of Christians in Eraiyur[Tamil Nadu, India] on March 9,2008 and the subsequent peace processes initiated by the Church, political leaders and bureaucrats need clarification vis-à-vis caste and religion in Tamil Nadu. The first offshoot of this incident is the reconversion of Christian Dalits back to Hinduism on April 14,2008 in Thirunelveli. All religious riots in Tamil Nadu are the manifestation of a struggle to break the oppressive social systems rooted in the past.
Why the doctrine of Christ has not taken roots in the minds of Christian converts in secular India? Why the converts discriminate their own co-religionists on the basis of birth? What went wrong with the Christians in Tamil Nadu? Why they practice a system that runs against the very spirit of the religion they have embraced?
Hinduism defies definition. It meant one thing in one age and another in another age. It is an amalgam of ideas often contradictory to one another, but held together by a strong system of beliefs, customs and social regulations. It is from the sacred texts and Vedas the manifold aspects of Hinduism are derived and understood. None of them justify discrimination or violence.
Before the British rule, India had never been a nation. In the early days religion and ritual pervaded the lives of Indians. The Hindu way of life believes in karma and rebirth, and the Hindu looks inward for self realization. The Westerner on the other hand looks outward and is more concerned in improving the community in which he lives. Christianity practised in the West is the essence of the Good Samaritan portrayed in the Bible.
Caste in the early Hindu society, was more of a sociological, accepted by all sections of the society. What is surprising is the static nature of old social systems as they do not change or move parallel to economic and technological changes. In its developmental stage during the Vedic period there was some kind of mobility between the four castes. Later birth and parentage became the sole deciding factor to draw the lines.
What began as a simple division of the Hindu society into four functional groups locked itself into a rigid social system. When it acquired religious sanction the Indian society was polarized and became an easy prey to the invaders.
Once the social scientists believed that the system will wither away as soon as an economic development sets in. But it has not taken place in spite of India becoming a technologically advanced country. A horizontal division of Indians into caste groups, as enunciated in Manu, is still the water mark in social life. The nomenclature to designate the last group in the system has taken several avatars: Sudra, Harijan, Adi Dravida, Schedule Caste and now the nondescript Dalit.
Caste and casteism are in the Hindu psyche. It is so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of every Indian that even death can not shake it off, for one has to be buried or burned in the piece of land earmarked to his or her caste! [With the advent of the British there are three separate cemeteries in all the major cities, one for the Europeans, one for the Anglo Indians and one for the Native Christians.]
Even before the East India Company’s first entry into Tamil Nadu [1751] the European missionaries of the Jesuit order landed in Tuticorin in 1680. The Anglican Church of the Protestant order from Britain pitched their tent in Tinneveli around the year 1771. Both were appalled to note the ugly manifestation of the caste system in every walk of life. Lives of the people in the low caste were profiles in agony, indignity and humiliations. It was the time when slavery was practised in the erstwhile Travancore state, and Nagerkovil was part of the state. The most heinous one is the State’s legal right to call Dalits to perform free corvee labour (thondu ooliyam) to the society. Both men and women were expected not to wear upper clothes! The missionaries did come to their rescue. They offered education and a new religion along with the possibility of economic uplift and secular salvation. They petitioned the British Resident in Travancore(1812) who made a proclamation that Indian Christian women can wear upper clothes to cover their breasts.
The groups in the last rung of the so-called caste system, in their bid to climb upwards in the social scale naturally sought refuge in a foreign religion that promised equality. There is no denying that it was the temporal gains offered by the missionaries rather than the spiritual well-being that attracted the Indians, Dalits in particular, to Christianity. Conversion took place en masse during the eighteenth century. Some of the Hindu rituals associated with birth, death and marriage festivities were seamlessly absorbed into the life style of the converted Christians, much to the consternation of the missionaries.
When the Dalits were not admitted in their own Hindu temples and worship their own Gods, Church entry was considered a boon, though they were asked to sit in the last row of pews. But they were disillusioned in the sense the Hindu caste hierarchy and social purity were still maintained in their social relationships with other castes. The Christian converts from the upper castes also discriminated them. Social justice and equal status which they specially longed for still remained beyond their reach. All that the Dalit ethos craved for was a simple social equality in their relationship with the Church, church administration and with worshipers of other castes. It was denied by the upper caste converts on the ground that by birth they are not entitled to social equality.
Converts from the third and second tier of the caste system risked none of the sufferings of becoming outcastes in their own community. For they could get converted to Christianity, enjoy the benefits of education and still keep their superior caste identity. This sense of caste superiority assumed by the upper caste Christians pushed the Dalits further below to a still lower status.
In the 1920s people of all caste groups from the southern districts, both Hindu and Christian, migrated to Indian cities and to countries like Ceylon, Malaysia and Singapore where their social solidarity was based purely on caste rather than on religion. And this trend still continues. Indian Christianity has spread, sadly enough it is on the unchristian basis of a caste system.
The European missionaries never sought official patronage from the rulers. Though they could do little to bring social equality among their congregation they were instrumental in eliminating slavery. The British Raj on their part successfully abolished Sati and Thugee by law, but not the caste system. The existence of distinct groups like castes and races in the Indian community was considered an advantage to further the British rule.
The Roman Catholic Church first over reacted in their efforts to abolish caste system. In 2002 the Catholic Bishop's Conference of India (CBCI) in its biennial meeting at Chennai, has admitted that the "Dalit Christians, forming the majority in the Christian community, suffer humiliation, discrimination and socio-educational disabilities even after conversion due to the traditional practice of untouchability in the Church and in society." Their involvement in Dalits’ social uplift was resented by the upper caste Christians. Now with the emergence of Dalit priests in considerable number, the scene changed. The discrimination hitherto felt by the Dalit congregation now permeated into the seminary and among the priests who took sides with the Dalit Christians. The Church heads argue that economic advancement among both groups in future will put an end to discriminations among Christians. But the ground realities turned the issue into the opposite direction.
In Eraiyur the fact of Christians being discriminated by Christians is brought to the open with one group building a separate church and another group threatening to abandon their faith and turn back to Hinduism. The Christian Dalits show their caste solidarity in open forum and keep their religious faith secondary. Recently, while conducting a Holy Communion Service in a theological seminary in Madurai, a priest described a Hindu Dalit Panchyat President as a martyr because his life was cut short in a caste clash in Melavalavu. On April 13, 2008 an Advisory Committee headed by a CSI Bishop in Madurai urged the Tamil Nadu Government to treat the Dalits on par with their Hindu brethren. Again it shows the Church’s dichotomy: preaching equality from the pulpit and stay claim to the reservation benefits on the basis of caste and not on the basis of economic need.
After Independence every successive census report comes with additions of new castes and hundreds of subdivisions of existing ones. The Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu which once stood for a complete emancipation of the caste system lost track of their manifestos. By dealing with castes in terms of vote banks they gave a new twist and dimension to caste politics. It is during the rule of the two Dravidian parties the AdiDravida is found divided into two major groups with one regional leader for each. One unwritten objective of all the political parties in Tamil Nadu is to encourage a strong and healthy disunity among the Dalits.
Tamils in every caste, including the Dalit Christians clamour to get enlisted as Most Backward Class(MBC) and want to slide down in the caste hierarchy only to get benefits in the communal quota.
Conversion to Christianity did not empower the Dalits. Despite being a numerical majority in the Christian faith in India, the promise of equality is as distant as before. Of the 19.65 million Christians in India 3.6 million live in Tamil Nadu, of which 65% are Dalits. With such large numbers there is no power-sharing equation in the Christian Church hierarchy. Political vested interests have long misled the Hindu Dalits that they will suffer if the Christian Dalits get reservation benefits and that it would eat into their[Hindu Dalits’] cake. Setting a caste against a caste, be they Hindus or Christians, is the old British game of divide and rule still played by the political and religious leaders. It is largely due to the political parties and the religious heads caste system in India has taken stronger and deeper roots after Independence.
When the foreign missionaries left, properties in the form of land, buildings, and government approved educational institutions were transferred to the Dioceses. Financial irregularities, mismanagement and nepotism in administering the schools and colleges were responsible for the emergence of splinter groups in each diocese. The beating up of an ordained Bishop in a southern district in January this year is the direct outcome such lapses in the Church administration. [In Andhra Pradesh, according to a new law enacted by the present government properties bequeathed to the established churches by the erstwhile missionaries could not be sold or mortgaged].
Church has its own failings, several in number. The Church as a body of Christ never initiated a genuine dialogue to bring about social equality among its congregation. As followers of Christian faith no true forum was ever formed to discuss the evils of discrimination in terms of human rights. Church never came out encouraging intercaste marriage between couples professing Christianity.
It is outright Christian hypocrisy to let a section of its own congregation feel socially down, tell them they are spiritually equal and keep them grousing over their lot. Christ the Shepard is never said to have wielded his stave to divide His flock into Dalits and Non-Dalits
The last part of the twentieth Century saw a new a trend in Christianity. Freelance self-styled missionaries, called evangelists, both from the Catholic and the Protestant faith, have emerged. They have no church hierarchy in administration and they are bound by no main stream churches. Their litany, fine tuned to a simple worshiping order with long sermons, has great attraction to the Christian layman and the Hindu on the street. Here Castes or caste groups have no role to play. This redeeming future may one day lead to revival of Christianity as dreamt by the missionaries.
Buddhism was born on Indian soil and is widely practiced in other countries, but it cannot survive in India. Indians would embrace a new faith on their own terms.
Dr. R.Paul Mohan Roy
The caste clashes between two groups of Christians in Eraiyur[Tamil Nadu, India] on March 9,2008 and the subsequent peace processes initiated by the Church, political leaders and bureaucrats need clarification vis-à-vis caste and religion in Tamil Nadu. The first offshoot of this incident is the reconversion of Christian Dalits back to Hinduism on April 14,2008 in Thirunelveli. All religious riots in Tamil Nadu are the manifestation of a struggle to break the oppressive social systems rooted in the past.
Why the doctrine of Christ has not taken roots in the minds of Christian converts in secular India? Why the converts discriminate their own co-religionists on the basis of birth? What went wrong with the Christians in Tamil Nadu? Why they practice a system that runs against the very spirit of the religion they have embraced?
Hinduism defies definition. It meant one thing in one age and another in another age. It is an amalgam of ideas often contradictory to one another, but held together by a strong system of beliefs, customs and social regulations. It is from the sacred texts and Vedas the manifold aspects of Hinduism are derived and understood. None of them justify discrimination or violence.
Before the British rule, India had never been a nation. In the early days religion and ritual pervaded the lives of Indians. The Hindu way of life believes in karma and rebirth, and the Hindu looks inward for self realization. The Westerner on the other hand looks outward and is more concerned in improving the community in which he lives. Christianity practised in the West is the essence of the Good Samaritan portrayed in the Bible.
Caste in the early Hindu society, was more of a sociological, accepted by all sections of the society. What is surprising is the static nature of old social systems as they do not change or move parallel to economic and technological changes. In its developmental stage during the Vedic period there was some kind of mobility between the four castes. Later birth and parentage became the sole deciding factor to draw the lines.
What began as a simple division of the Hindu society into four functional groups locked itself into a rigid social system. When it acquired religious sanction the Indian society was polarized and became an easy prey to the invaders.
Once the social scientists believed that the system will wither away as soon as an economic development sets in. But it has not taken place in spite of India becoming a technologically advanced country. A horizontal division of Indians into caste groups, as enunciated in Manu, is still the water mark in social life. The nomenclature to designate the last group in the system has taken several avatars: Sudra, Harijan, Adi Dravida, Schedule Caste and now the nondescript Dalit.
Caste and casteism are in the Hindu psyche. It is so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of every Indian that even death can not shake it off, for one has to be buried or burned in the piece of land earmarked to his or her caste! [With the advent of the British there are three separate cemeteries in all the major cities, one for the Europeans, one for the Anglo Indians and one for the Native Christians.]
Even before the East India Company’s first entry into Tamil Nadu [1751] the European missionaries of the Jesuit order landed in Tuticorin in 1680. The Anglican Church of the Protestant order from Britain pitched their tent in Tinneveli around the year 1771. Both were appalled to note the ugly manifestation of the caste system in every walk of life. Lives of the people in the low caste were profiles in agony, indignity and humiliations. It was the time when slavery was practised in the erstwhile Travancore state, and Nagerkovil was part of the state. The most heinous one is the State’s legal right to call Dalits to perform free corvee labour (thondu ooliyam) to the society. Both men and women were expected not to wear upper clothes! The missionaries did come to their rescue. They offered education and a new religion along with the possibility of economic uplift and secular salvation. They petitioned the British Resident in Travancore(1812) who made a proclamation that Indian Christian women can wear upper clothes to cover their breasts.
The groups in the last rung of the so-called caste system, in their bid to climb upwards in the social scale naturally sought refuge in a foreign religion that promised equality. There is no denying that it was the temporal gains offered by the missionaries rather than the spiritual well-being that attracted the Indians, Dalits in particular, to Christianity. Conversion took place en masse during the eighteenth century. Some of the Hindu rituals associated with birth, death and marriage festivities were seamlessly absorbed into the life style of the converted Christians, much to the consternation of the missionaries.
When the Dalits were not admitted in their own Hindu temples and worship their own Gods, Church entry was considered a boon, though they were asked to sit in the last row of pews. But they were disillusioned in the sense the Hindu caste hierarchy and social purity were still maintained in their social relationships with other castes. The Christian converts from the upper castes also discriminated them. Social justice and equal status which they specially longed for still remained beyond their reach. All that the Dalit ethos craved for was a simple social equality in their relationship with the Church, church administration and with worshipers of other castes. It was denied by the upper caste converts on the ground that by birth they are not entitled to social equality.
Converts from the third and second tier of the caste system risked none of the sufferings of becoming outcastes in their own community. For they could get converted to Christianity, enjoy the benefits of education and still keep their superior caste identity. This sense of caste superiority assumed by the upper caste Christians pushed the Dalits further below to a still lower status.
In the 1920s people of all caste groups from the southern districts, both Hindu and Christian, migrated to Indian cities and to countries like Ceylon, Malaysia and Singapore where their social solidarity was based purely on caste rather than on religion. And this trend still continues. Indian Christianity has spread, sadly enough it is on the unchristian basis of a caste system.
The European missionaries never sought official patronage from the rulers. Though they could do little to bring social equality among their congregation they were instrumental in eliminating slavery. The British Raj on their part successfully abolished Sati and Thugee by law, but not the caste system. The existence of distinct groups like castes and races in the Indian community was considered an advantage to further the British rule.
The Roman Catholic Church first over reacted in their efforts to abolish caste system. In 2002 the Catholic Bishop's Conference of India (CBCI) in its biennial meeting at Chennai, has admitted that the "Dalit Christians, forming the majority in the Christian community, suffer humiliation, discrimination and socio-educational disabilities even after conversion due to the traditional practice of untouchability in the Church and in society." Their involvement in Dalits’ social uplift was resented by the upper caste Christians. Now with the emergence of Dalit priests in considerable number, the scene changed. The discrimination hitherto felt by the Dalit congregation now permeated into the seminary and among the priests who took sides with the Dalit Christians. The Church heads argue that economic advancement among both groups in future will put an end to discriminations among Christians. But the ground realities turned the issue into the opposite direction.
In Eraiyur the fact of Christians being discriminated by Christians is brought to the open with one group building a separate church and another group threatening to abandon their faith and turn back to Hinduism. The Christian Dalits show their caste solidarity in open forum and keep their religious faith secondary. Recently, while conducting a Holy Communion Service in a theological seminary in Madurai, a priest described a Hindu Dalit Panchyat President as a martyr because his life was cut short in a caste clash in Melavalavu. On April 13, 2008 an Advisory Committee headed by a CSI Bishop in Madurai urged the Tamil Nadu Government to treat the Dalits on par with their Hindu brethren. Again it shows the Church’s dichotomy: preaching equality from the pulpit and stay claim to the reservation benefits on the basis of caste and not on the basis of economic need.
After Independence every successive census report comes with additions of new castes and hundreds of subdivisions of existing ones. The Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu which once stood for a complete emancipation of the caste system lost track of their manifestos. By dealing with castes in terms of vote banks they gave a new twist and dimension to caste politics. It is during the rule of the two Dravidian parties the AdiDravida is found divided into two major groups with one regional leader for each. One unwritten objective of all the political parties in Tamil Nadu is to encourage a strong and healthy disunity among the Dalits.
Tamils in every caste, including the Dalit Christians clamour to get enlisted as Most Backward Class(MBC) and want to slide down in the caste hierarchy only to get benefits in the communal quota.
Conversion to Christianity did not empower the Dalits. Despite being a numerical majority in the Christian faith in India, the promise of equality is as distant as before. Of the 19.65 million Christians in India 3.6 million live in Tamil Nadu, of which 65% are Dalits. With such large numbers there is no power-sharing equation in the Christian Church hierarchy. Political vested interests have long misled the Hindu Dalits that they will suffer if the Christian Dalits get reservation benefits and that it would eat into their[Hindu Dalits’] cake. Setting a caste against a caste, be they Hindus or Christians, is the old British game of divide and rule still played by the political and religious leaders. It is largely due to the political parties and the religious heads caste system in India has taken stronger and deeper roots after Independence.
When the foreign missionaries left, properties in the form of land, buildings, and government approved educational institutions were transferred to the Dioceses. Financial irregularities, mismanagement and nepotism in administering the schools and colleges were responsible for the emergence of splinter groups in each diocese. The beating up of an ordained Bishop in a southern district in January this year is the direct outcome such lapses in the Church administration. [In Andhra Pradesh, according to a new law enacted by the present government properties bequeathed to the established churches by the erstwhile missionaries could not be sold or mortgaged].
Church has its own failings, several in number. The Church as a body of Christ never initiated a genuine dialogue to bring about social equality among its congregation. As followers of Christian faith no true forum was ever formed to discuss the evils of discrimination in terms of human rights. Church never came out encouraging intercaste marriage between couples professing Christianity.
It is outright Christian hypocrisy to let a section of its own congregation feel socially down, tell them they are spiritually equal and keep them grousing over their lot. Christ the Shepard is never said to have wielded his stave to divide His flock into Dalits and Non-Dalits
The last part of the twentieth Century saw a new a trend in Christianity. Freelance self-styled missionaries, called evangelists, both from the Catholic and the Protestant faith, have emerged. They have no church hierarchy in administration and they are bound by no main stream churches. Their litany, fine tuned to a simple worshiping order with long sermons, has great attraction to the Christian layman and the Hindu on the street. Here Castes or caste groups have no role to play. This redeeming future may one day lead to revival of Christianity as dreamt by the missionaries.
Buddhism was born on Indian soil and is widely practiced in other countries, but it cannot survive in India. Indians would embrace a new faith on their own terms.
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