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- Convenors:
-
Chad Bauman
(Butler University)
Richard Young (Princeton Theological Seminary)
Daniel Jeyaraj (Liverpool Hope University)
- Location:
- 44H05
- Start time:
- 25 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Featuring papers grounded in case studies and rigorously critical of extant scholarship, the panel will encourage the articulation of more nuanced understandings of the complex interplay of westernizing and Indianizing processes in the development of South Asian Christianity.
Long Abstract:
Recognizing that South Asian Christianities are distinct forms of Christianity and that due attention should be given to their interactions with other forms of Christianity, local and global, as well as with South Asian cultures and religions, we invite exchange among historians, social scientists, and religious studies scholars who address the diverse phenomena associated with such Christianities, either their historical emergence or contemporary character.
The theme for Zurich will be "Westernization and (or in) the process of acculturation" (acculturation being loosely defined as a process by which exogenous religious traditions begin to assimilate the worldview and socio-cultural character of locally dominant religions). Early scholarship often presupposed that conversion to missionary-initiated Christianity entailed a profound rupture with the convert or convert-community's pre-Christian past. From the early 20th century, proponents of religiously-inflected nationalism (whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic) have seized upon this (mis)understanding of conversion as a way of portraying Christianity as inherently deculturalizing and denationalizing. Endeavoring to counteract these trends, scholarship in recent years has been inclined to accentuate the Indianness of Indian Christianity by shifting the focus from foreignness to indigeneity, agency, and syncretism. Such a shift, however, may entail another kind of lopsidedness that overcompensates for earlier distortions and downplays or ignores important field-research evidence of South Asian Christianity's Westernization. From a rigorous critique (grounded in case studies) of historiographical, social science, and religious studies trajectories, past and present, we hope to see more nuanced approaches to theory and methodology emerge from our proceedings.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nikhila Kalra (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a case study of Bhil Christians in southern Rajasthan, this paper seeks to complicate existing narratives of acculturation by showing how Christians strive to assert their own difference in the context of endemic anti-Christian violence perpetrated by the Sangh Parivar.
Paper long abstract:
Ideas of acculturation and indigeneity have been heavily foregrounded in recent literature on adivasi Christianity in India. Scholarship on how adivasi worldviews and cultural practices have interacted with the religious and ritual universe of Christianity has largely focused on the processes of syncretism and assimilation that have taken place between adivasis and the Church. In this paper I examine the ways in which Hindu Nationalist anti-Christian activity has complicated these now-familiar narratives, based on fieldwork carried out amongst Bhil Pentecostal Christians in Udaipur district, Rajasthan. This area has seen the aggressive mobilisation of Hindu nationalist groups amongst tribal communities since the mid-1990s.
While the Hindu Nationalist portrayal of Christianity as a foreign religion has led scholars and others to emphasize its essential indigeneity, this is not necessarily the case when we look at the narratives of adivasi Christians in areas where the Sangh Parivar is active both socially and politically. Considering both the nature of the Pentecostal church in this region and the various types of violence enacted on Christians by Hindu nationalist groups, I argue that the experiences of Christians here have in fact played a role in reducing fluidity in group boundaries and behaviours. While they do not conceptualise their religion as foreign, Bhil Christians are actively expressing their own 'otherness' through their religious, social and political practices, and constructing and performing a Christian identity that actually serves to distance them from the dominant- and at times antagonistic- local religious culture.
Peter B. Andersen (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
Based on the history of the Lutheran mission to the Bodos in Assam the paper focus on the role of the Indian priests and catechists in the change of the Christian message from versions grown in Europe and the USA towards Indian interpretations relevant for Indians and Indian society.
Paper long abstract:
There may have been Christians in Assam since the Catholic Capuchins were expelled from Tibet in 1745, but most of the Christian missions started around the time when Burma was forced to cede the areas of Assam to the East India Company in 1823. Here the Lutheran Mission arrived around 1880 in order to create a new Eden on earth for Santals from central India. They extended their mission to the Bodos in the areas surrounding their teagarden at an early point of time and since 1887 when a group of Santals took the initiative they extended the mission towards the Bodos.
In the history of this missionary enterprise the European missionaries felt that they fought with lapses among the Bodos as well as with other Christian missions as the Anglicans and the Catholics who fought approached their converts to join other churches than the onw which had converted them.
On the basis of the history of the Lutheran Mission and yet unpublished short autobiographies of three Bodos collected 1949-1950 (and deposited at The National Museum of Denmark) this paper will turn the view towards the Bodos' own view of the Christian missions and how they integrated them in their own understanding of life and social structure. The argument will focus on the role of the Indian priests and catechists who linked the European missionaries to the local community, hereby extending one argument earlier set forward by Frykenberg.
Massimo Bon (Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza")
Paper short abstract:
The purpose of this research is to delineate the history and development of the Catholic missions among Parkaris, with particular reference to the different stages and trends in the process of acculturation.
Paper long abstract:
The tribal communities of Sindh (Kohlis) represent by themselves a minority within a minority; they are non-nomadic communities with a bhakti-like background, settled in small villages, mostly in the Pakistani desert region of Thar. Those who converted to Christianity can be considered comparatively young Christians, having the first missions been started only in early 40's. Within "tribal" Christianity, the process of acculturation has obviously played a very central role; for instance, although an attempt to develop local iconography has been made, it has never been really implemented; on the contrary, local rites enforced by the clergy are greatly influenced by local customes and usances, which for many aspects highly differ from those of "mainstream" Church of the Country.
Through an analytic study of written and oral sources, mostly focused on the documents preserved in the diocesan archives of Hyderabad, in the archives of the Saint John the Baptist Custody of Pakistan of the Franciscan Order and to other minor written sources, and on a series of interviews based on qualitative method, the purpose of this research is to delineate the history and development of the Catholic missions among Parkaris, with particular reference to the different stages and trends in the process of acculturation.
Miriam Benteler
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the festivals and confraternities of the Latin Catholics of Kerala against the background of concepts of Westernisation and Indianisation, syncretism and hybridity, and explores the analytical usefulness of these concepts for the understanding of the church festivals.
Paper long abstract:
In 1599, the Synod of Diamper, held in Kerala by the Portuguese with the aim to wipe out 'Nestorian' influences and 'Hindu customs' among Christians, passed a decree that included the command to establish confraternities for the service of the church and especially for conducting festivities.
Indeed, confraternities founded in the Latin churches in Kerala and became an important part of church festivals and parish life. Today, the church festivals, celebrated in honour of particular saints, constitute in many Latin Catholic parishes the grandest celebrations of the church year and the confraternities play an important role in the organisation and sponsoring of the festivals.
The structure of the confraternities and many other elements in the festival context show obvious parallels to confraternities and church festivities in Europe. However, the specific form these church festivals developed in Kerala and other parts of South India - for example, their highly hierarchical structure and entanglement with caste distinctions - made anthropologists and religious studies scholars term them 'indigenized' or 'indogenized'.
Based on fieldwork in a village in coastal Kerala, the paper compares, on the one hand, the Latin Catholic church festivals and confraternities with those in Europe, on the other hand, with temple festivals in South India. It explores the festivals and confraternities against the background of the concepts of Westernisation and Indianisation, syncretism and hybridity, and examines the analytical usefulness and theoretical relevance of these concepts for the understanding of the church festivals of the Latin Catholics.
Roselle Gonsalves (University of Calgary)
Paper short abstract:
An ethnographic exploration of the religious and social culture of Mumbai’s Goan Catholic community.
Paper long abstract:
Tied to a past that is infused with vestiges of a Portuguese colonial heritage, the Goan Catholics of Mumbai, India are a community too western for the Indian cultural landscape. Yet, the Goans of Mumbai maintain their identities as fully Indian members of the city they live in. Their Indianness is an amalgam of their Catholic religious roots, their Goan cultural traditions, and their Indian nationality—a mélange in which the community sees no conflict or contradiction.
This paper, borne of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2013 amongst the Goan Catholic communities of Mumbai, India, utilizes in-depth interviews and observational research to gain insight into the concepts of culture, identity, and what it means to be "Indian" to the Goan Catholics of Mumbai. This data yields intriguing insight into the mechanisms that the Goan Catholics of Mumbai—with their western clothes and Portuguese names— undertake in order fit into the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural landscape that is the bustling cosmopolis of Mumbai.
Maria-Magdalena Fuchs (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper looks at a Christian convert from Shia Islam and traces issues of identity and belonging in late colonial North India through his Urdu writings.
Paper long abstract:
Even though Muslim high-caste converts to Christianity remained an exception throughout British colonial rule in India, they played an important role in spreading their newly adopted faith. However, the position of converts within their community of choice was often ambivalent and marked by tensions.
In my paper, I will look at the life and work of a convert from Shia Islam, Barakat Ullah (1891-1972). After his baptism in 1907, he became associated with the Anglican Church Missionary Society and remained in their service for more than fourty years. During his life time, he authored more than fifty books and pamphlets in Urdu. In his writings, Barakat Ullah focused on Christian apologetics and polemic attacks against Islamic teachings. Despite his association with the CMS, he also appeared as a sharp critic of foreign missions in India. Barakat Ullah felt closely connected to other Muslim converts in the Christian community whom he regarded as the leadership elite of India's indigenous church.
Another narrative that resurfaces repeatedly in his writings is the struggle to reconcile different identities: after having left his community of birth, Barakat Ullah assumed an uncomfortable position within the nascent North Indian church. His negotiation of sometimes contradicting identities exemplifies the complexity of conversion as a religious, social, and cultural phenomenon which touches upon questions of identity and belonging in early twentieth century India.
Chandra Mallampalli (Westmont College)
Paper short abstract:
An examination of discursive practices within 19th century missionary and legal contexts, which laid foundations for the exclusion of Dalit Christians from state affirmative action benefits in India.
Paper long abstract:
Today, Dalits who convert to Christianity are denied "Scheduled Caste" (SC) status and quotas in employment and education that such status ensures. Many trace this policy to the Constitutional Order of 1950, which precluded non-Hindu Dalits from being considered SC. While this is technically correct it misses a deeper history, anchored in liberal imperial ideology of the 19th century, which laid conceptual foundations for the 1950 Order. Ironically, it was in the very efforts to secure the civil rights of converts within the Hindu joint family, and to further the liberal transformation of India that two key principles were established that underlay the 1950 Order, namely, the comparative social mobility of Christian converts, and their official exit from Hindu caste society. Having left Hinduism, Dalits were presumed to gain access to the infrastructure of a 'foreign religion.' No longer can they qualify for benefits aimed at rectifying the historical abuses of Hinduism. Drawing from 19th century Indian case law, missionary reports, and colonial ethnography concerning the status of converts, the paper delineates discursive practices within legal and missionary contexts centered on the social trajectories of converts. It then identifies their structural similarity to current rationales for excluding Dalit Christians from affirmative action benefits. From this, we gain a sense of how the knowledge production of the 19th century shaped identity politics and policies concerning Dalit Christian affirmative action. What is lost in this debate is awareness of both the heterogeneity and the indigenous character of Dalit Christians.
Arun Jones (Emory University)
Paper short abstract:
Westernizing practices by North Indian Christian converts in the middle of the 19th century will be examined from the perspective of Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, which will then be critiqued, and then from the perspective of Michel de Certeau’s concept of re-employment.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine debates about the appropriateness of westernization among North Indian Protestant Christian converts in the middle third of the 19th century, drawing on primary material from missionary archives. Indian converts were part of a larger Christian community in North India, which included Europeans and Eurasians. By converting to Christianity, Indians thus knew they were joining a community that was heavily influenced by European society. Ironically, it was not unusual for missionaries to criticize Indians for being too Europeanized. Native adoption of western culture, norms and mores, especially in light of European Christian critiques of such practices, will first be viewed from the perspective of Homi Bhabha's ideas on mimicry. For Bhabha, underlying the practice of mimicry was a desire for control on the part of Europeans, and a challenge to that control on the part of Indians. Bhabha's concept of mimicry will then be critiqued, because it gives no space for strictly religious motivations, and because it views Indian Christian actions as permanently reacting to European ones. Finally, the paper will argue that Michel de Certeau's notion of re-employment provides a better explanation of Indian Christian motives for adopting various aspects of western society and culture. Re-employment, according to Certeau, is the practice of taking elements from one (cultural) system and using them quite differently in another system. While Certeau sees re-employment as a tool of the historian, this paper will argue that it can be fruitfully used to explain westernizing impulses among Indian Christian converts.
Chad Bauman (Butler University)
Paper short abstract:
An analysis of the westernization/acculturation debates, grounded in fieldwork among Pentecostals in contemporary India, and promoting a very local, context-specific approach to the question.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will draw upon recent fieldwork among Pentecostals in North and South India in order to highlight at least two observations: 1) No determination regarding whether "Westernization" or "acculturation" is the predominating trend among India's Christians can be made in general. Rather, each context, each denomination, each era, each congregation, even each aspect of religious life and practice (e.g., music, preaching, or sartorial trends) within a single Christian community yields data supporting different conclusions. In juxtaposition, the data may therefore seem contradictory. But in reality it is contradictory only if the scholar insists on promoting general hypotheses. 2) Certain religious ideas and practices (e.g., exorcism) are polygenetic, and confound conversations about "Westernization" versus "acculturation," suggesting, perhaps, that these conversations remain overly dependent upon long-derided understandings of religions as hermetic, monolithic, and mutually exclusive entities.
Richard Young (Princeton Theological Seminary)
Paper short abstract:
Through an un-erasing of the primary documents (under)utilized in Homi Bhabha’s classic postcolonial essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” I rectify a much-perpetuated and now-prevalent (mis)reading, thus restoring history to its proper significance in theorizing Indian Christianity’s “Indianness.”
Paper long abstract:
As observed already by Bill Bell of Homi Bhabha's "Signs Taken for Wonders," the historiographical flaws of this classic of the postcolonial studies canon have largely gone unnoticed. Based upon "an anecdote taken from history" (that is, out of context; New Literary History 43 [2012]: 325), the gap between the evidence adduced and the author's macrotheoretical claims seems almost impossible to bridge. That "anecdote," truncated in Bhabha's retelling, was originally told by one Anand Masih, a CMS (Anglican) catechist, about the marginal-caste adherents of a non-Brahmanical 'Hindu' sect—the Sadhs—and their eventual 'conversion' to Christianity. Drained of their particularity, "Signs and Wonders" tells us almost nothing about the Sadhs, either before or after their encounter with Anand Masih "under a tree outside Delhi, [in] May 1817" (as the subtitle of Bhabha's essay reads). Most troublingly, much of the plausibility of the argument for two of the author's most distinctive and durable concepts—"hybridity" and "mimicry"—hinges, counterfactually, upon the Sadhs' resistance to Anand Masih's missionary overtures. Overall, the subjectivity of the Sadhs never really emerges; instead of being allowed to speak, they are spoken for, being of mainly instrumental value for a theory-driven argument with a pre-determined outcome. Similarly, Anand Masih, the CMS catechist, portrayed as having capitulated to Christianity's "colonial authority," assumes an emblematic status as the quintessentially "Indian" Christian. Through an un-erasing of the primary documents, I hope to rectify a (mis)reading, thus restoring history to its proper significance in theorizing Indian Christianity's "Indianness."