Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at subaltern notions of Christian belief and practice by focusing on conflicts that broke out between outcaste worshippers and European administrators in various Catholic churches in the colonial port city of Madras in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on a series of disputes that broke out in outcaste churches in the colonial port city of Madras in South India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Company records reveal that these protracted conflicts between Catholic "Paraiyar" worshippers and European church administrators were over diverse issues of Christian belief and practice that ranged from the election of church headmen to the legitimacy of Tamil versions of the Bible. The paper argues that the self articulation of these groups as Christians, as urban laboring communities, and as entitled subjects of the East India Company gives us an insight into the changing nature of subaltern religiosity, as well as into their relationship with the colonial state and emerging structures of urban rule. The East India Company was the arbitrator and mediator in these conflicts and indeed, the complex relationship between a Protestant government and outcaste Catholics is key to looking at the ways in which Catholic Paraiyars understood their own histories, and staked various social and political claims.