Dalit Theology In The 21st Century: Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways [UK ed.] 0198066910, 9780198066910

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Contents Introduction

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Section I: Dalit Theology: Introduction, Interrogation, and Imagination 1.

Dalit Theology: An Introductory and Interpretive Theological Exposition

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Sathianathan Clarke

2.

Expanding the Ambit: Dalit Theological Contribution to Ecumenical Social Thought

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Manchala Deenabandhu

3.

The Diversity and Dialectics of Dalit Dissent and Implications for a Dalit Theology of Liberation

4.

In the Beginning is also an End: Expounding and Exploring Theological Resourcefulness of Myths of Dalit Origins

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Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar

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Philip Vinod Peacock

5.

Envisioning a Postmodern Methodof Doing Dalit Theology

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Y.T. Vinayaraj

6.

TRANS-formative Possibilities: Tribal Formations in Conversation with Dalit Theology

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Lalruatkima

Section II: Foraging Dalit worlds, Freeing Theological Symbols, Forging Dalit Word Visions 7.

Jesus and Ambedkar: Exploring Common Loci for Dalit Theology and Dalit Movements

8.

Gonthemma Korika: Reimagining the Divine Feminine in Dalit Christian Theo/alogy

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L. Jayachitra

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Joseph Prabhakar Dayam

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Contents

Exploring New Facets of Dalit Christology in Critical Interaction with J.D. Crossan’s Portrayal of the Historical Jesus

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Anderson H.M. Jeremiah

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Dalit Theology and its Future Course

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Geevarghese Mor Coorilos Nalunnakkal

Section III: Dalit Hermeneutics: New Christian Vedas, Old Gospel, Different voices 11.

Dalits and Religious Conversion: Slippery Identities and Shrewd Identifications

174

Sathianathan Clarke and Philip Vinod Peacock

12.

Turning Bodies Inside Out: Contours of Womanist Theology

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Evangeline Anderson-Rajkumar

13.

Bama’s Critical–Constructive Narratives: Interweaving Resisting Visible Bodies and Emancipatory Audacious Voice as TEXTure for Dalit Women’s freedom

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Roja Singh

14.

The Servant in the Book of Judith: Interpreting her Silence, Telling her Story

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Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon

15.

Visibility of Her Sins: Reading the ‘Sinful Woman’ in Luke 7:36–50 from a Dalit Feminist Perspective

245

Surekha Nelavala

16.

Caste Branding, Bleeding Body, Building Dalit Womanhood: Touchability of Jesus

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Prasuna Gnana Nelavala

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Introduction SATHIANATHAN CLARKE, MANCHALA DEENABANDHU, AND PHILIP PEACOCK ENFLAMED WORDS, ENGAGING WORLDS, EMBRYONIC WORD-WORLDS Words it is that set aflame houses, homes, countries, Men [and women] as well. Words extinguish even the fire In men [and women] set aflame by words. Were it not for words, the sparks of fire1 Would not have fallen from men’s [and women’s] eyes, Great floods of tears would not have flowed. No one would have come near Nor have gone far away – Were it not for words. Waman Nimbalkar (Dalit Poet)1

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his edited volume is a compendium of words: flaming words, extinguishing words, flowing words, wailing words, faltering words, protesting words, faithful words, hopeful words, threatening words, freeing words, inviting words, expelling words, and healing words. Yet, this is not a collection of words spouted out by pure or empty minds. Rather it collates numerous words that arise from targeted bodies, heavy hearts, and imaginative minds in collaboration with the world of Dalits in general, and Christian Dalits in particular. Most of these words emanate from a prior covenant made with Dalit communities: to feel their pain and attest to their hope. More specifically, this collection of essays seeks to recognize and reflect upon the freedom and creativity with which such words are utilized within the domain of Christian theology. In the long history of being shut out from revelatory knowledge contained in the Hindu scriptures, and pushed out of collective deliberations on Indian theological matters, Christian theology offered Dalits an opportunity to exercise the mind and untangle the tongue. The advent of the Christian gospel, as it sought a dwelling place among Dalits, often freed them to be a people of praise and petition as well as lament and laughter before God and in front of all human beings. The Word that became flesh quickened and

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filled all human beings with the power of words to bring glory to the God, and grace to all human flesh.2 In one sense then, we can say that theology (literally meaning ‘words about God’) is a domain of free speech propitiously birthed from an encounter with God, and courageously testified to before all people. Dalit theology thus asserts the privilege of those thought of as being no people entrusted with the gift of new speech. It announces the birth of a new people as children of a loving God. From another angle, theology is also a discourse of contestation. Thus, it mediates between the many ways in which Christian communities speak about God. In this jockeying of worldviews, Dalit theology advocates for projections of God, human being, and world that reflect their communitarian historical experience of life. In a third sense, theology is also a discourse of configuration. Thus, in the workshop of theology, meaningful, life-giving possibilities of God and God-centred worlds are circulated with conviction and hope. Dalit theology is deeply and creatively expressive. Conscious of the fact that the Indian Christian community is predominantly Dalit and thus, historically, geographically, socially, economically, and culturally entwined with the lived reality of Dalits from other religious communities, this volume collects and promotes a Dalit-based, Dalit-focused, and Dalit-committed set of world visions that represent some features of twenty-first century theological optics and options. ASPIRATIONS FOR LIFE BECAUSE OF THE TOUCHABLE WORD-FLESH

Theology gathers words emitted by broken ones invited into a sense of wholeness communicated by the Word made flesh. The holiness of God touches down upon the brokenness of humanity in Jesus the Word, who shattered all barriers of divine and human separation. Dalit theology irrupts out of the historical consciousness of communities of ‘broken Men [and Women]’ smothered within the hierarchical world of caste debilitations. And yet, Dalit theology is sustained by the experience that God who sought all human beings in Jesus Christ is close at hand and will free and liberate such ‘crushed ones’ into fullness of reconciled life. In the words of Jesus, ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (John 10: 10). Thus, theology consciously brings together words and worlds for the sake of life. As a discursive space claiming to be centred in God, and liberating to Dalit communities, this view of theology is integrally related to the praxis of everyday living. This spawns the deliberate move that entwines the yearning for life with the promise of the enfleshed Word to heal the Dalit world of death and

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destruction. The substance of words and worlds arise from the common objective of God and human being for life. Life in this situation includes freeing all human beings to relate to God as children, and overcoming all barriers that prevent God’s children from living in the joy and freedom of this gift. Also, and more importantly, new configurations of Dalit theology offer needed rationale and energy for sustaining liberation praxis as envisioned and legitimated by Dalit-framed worlds and God-injected words of broken peoples on their journey towards wholeness of life—a life deeply at peace with God, broadly in just relationship with other human beings, and organically knit together with the cosmos. Realistically though we must admit that the discourse-generatingpraxis nature of all theology weds Dalit theology to a universe of symbols. No doubt symbols are more than words. Ritual, gestures, art, craft, performance, and architecture also are modes of symbolization. But let us accept the self-imposed constraint in this printed edition of the symbolic character of words. Even though terms like world, God, and Dalit are real things, theology tends to employ them as symbols. Symbols stand in for the real thing through a procedure of conventional association and co-efficient proxy. Thus, when talking about these symbols, theology is quite aware that the referent to such terms both appear and escape when they are invoked. For example, when one asserts that God is Dalit, one is affirming that the broken aspect of the reality of God is the God revealed to Dalit communities and yet, one is also conscious of the fact that this same God has to be whole enough to do something about the brokenness of Dalit communities. Already much has been written about the fluidity (slippage of the meaning from one symbol into many directions), or ambivalence (ability of a symbol to mean two seemingly different things), or plurivocity (nature of symbol to advocate for a plurality of meanings) of theological symbols. We will not rehearse the arguments in this essay. The point we want to stress is the manner in which Dalit theologians have exploited the constructive possibilities of theology to move communities away from an assumed fixity of meanings that can be ascribed to symbols such as God, human being, and world and insert other significations that these symbols can also take on when the words and worlds of Dalit communities are deliberately incorporated. The agency of Dalits in the area of theology has exploded the monopoly of caste interpretations in a significant manner. Apart from the fact that theology has taken on an inclusive nature, we might also say that symbols too have been democratized. Peoples have taken over the future potency of symbols in an innovative and egalitarian way. In the Indian historical context, where scriptures are

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still accessible mainly in the Brahmanic (priestly) language of Sanskrit, and Vedic scriptural interpretations is the province of a small minority of caste Hindus (again, mostly Brahmins with some help from a tiny number of other caste Hindus), the bottom-up initiative of seizing the privilege of interpreting symbols that ground and energize human life under God is of immense significance, having far-reaching consequences. CASTE (DOMINANT) AND OUTCASTE (DALIT) COMMUNITIES

In order to map out the communitarian configurations referenced through this collection, and to avoid unnecessary repetition, it is best to address the question of who Dalits are within the structure and functioning of the caste system in this introductory essay. The category of Dalit needs to be explicated within the context of the caste-ordered social pattern of India.3 In spite of its proud entry into the post-colonial, bafflingly modern, technologically savvy, and politically democratic twenty-first century world, modern India continues to straddle the structural inequalities and functional hierarchies based on its age old caste system. Satish Deshpande, a noted Indian sociologist, says, ‘As the evidence shows . . . caste inequality is a matter of contemporary fact. And the institution itself has thrived in post-independence India despite its absence from the Census and its Constitutional abolition.’4 Two distinct and distinguishable components of society emerge in any such caste-based social analysis: caste communities and outcaste communities. In general, these two components live, move, and operate within their respective geographical, cultural, social, political, and economic worlds. The interaction between these two parts of Indian society is determined by centuries of socio-economic and religio-political constraints and constrictions, which are deeply rooted in inequality. It must also not be overlooked that patriarchy was intimately knotted into the various dynamics of caste as a system. Despite ongoing attempts to reimagine and reinscribe these conventional patterns of intercourse, the privilege of being from the caste community and the disprivilege of belonging to the outcaste community lingers powerfully in so-called ‘new India’. Caste communities consist of four castes that are hierarchically ordered.5 The Brahmins (priests) are the preservers and protectors of the eternal laws of the universe (dharma). The Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors) are the defenders and the guarantors of the safety and security of the community. The Vaishyas (merchants) are the conservers and distributors of wealth. And the Shudras (the labourers) are the working majority involved in the production of essential commodities. Although there is a clear separation between the first three castes, which are ritually pure

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and socio-economically dominant (referred to as the twice-born), and the fourth labouring caste, which is ritually suspect and socio-economically dominated (referred to as the once-born), they together form the constituents of the Hindu human community. Obliged to, but outside of, this four-fold Indian caste society exist the outcaste communities. Even though this populace consists of about 16 per cent (the Dalit population, which was projected to be 16.20 per cent of the total Indian population in 2001, can be estimated to be between 160 and 180 million today) of the Indian society, they were thought of as being sub-human or non-human; thus, not included into its composition. This large group was ejected from the contours of Hindu society. Dalits continue to live outside the borders of the Hindu caste society with the labels ‘Outcaste’, ‘Untouchable’, ‘Exterior caste’, ‘Depressed class’, and ‘Pariah’. Dalits suffer multiple disabilities and extreme marginalization that are comprehensive in scope and concentrated in consequence. Even if traditional practices of untouchability are legislatively outlawed, the structural inequality and socio-economic discrimination experienced by Dalits as the functional effects of the disadvantages of the caste system are still devastating. James Massey makes us aware of the wide range of meanings associated with this word: ‘The term Dalit is derived from the Sanskrit root dal, which means burnt, split, broken or torn asunder, downtrodden, crushed, destroyed’.6 In this essay, somewhat in continuity with Ambedkar’s interpretation that Dalit ancestry is rooted in the ‘broken men’, we take this term to signify those communities that have been oppressed, broken, and crushed by the comprehensive negative effects of the caste system.7 Such oppression, brokenness, and crushing that have been experienced by Dalits result from the concerted action of the caste communities over centuries. Yet, this is also part of their plight today. The Human Rights Watch report has the following to say on the situation of the Dalits: More than one-sixth of India’s population, between 160 and 180 million people, live a precarious existence, shunned by much of society because of their rank as untouchables or Dalits—literally meaning ‘broken’ people—at the bottom of India’s caste system. Dalits are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and of higher-caste groups that enjoy the State’s protection. In what has been called ‘hidden apartheid’ entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste.8

It is critical, however, to note that even while claiming the label Dalit against the backdrop of the discriminatory system of caste, there is much aspiration and dynamism to forge a movement of anti-caste peoples. Thus,

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the term ‘Dalit’ endeavours not to signify another caste identity but rather aspires to name an anti-caste collective movement. Its objective to dismantle, not reinforce the caste system must constantly be reiterated.9 DALIT THEOLOGY: WHAT HAS CHANGED IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?

The discourse represented in this volume is in many ways a continuation of that which began three decades ago.10 It builds on the contribution of the earlier generation of Dalit theologians––A.P. Nirmal’s methodological formulations; James Massey’s historical reconstructions; V. Devasahayam’s biblical reinterpretations; M.E. Prabhakar’s Christological reflections; Abraham Ayrookuzhiel’s reappropriation of Dalit religion and culture; John Webster’s construction of Dalit Christian histories; and Theophilus Appavoo’s reclamation of Dalit folklore and liturgy. Yet, this work marks the beginning of a new way of thinking about God arising from a new Dalit self-understanding and a new appreciation for the changed landscape of our twenty-first century life world. It also receives some animation from the spirit of resistance and assertion for human dignity, and human rights manifest in various Dalit, women, tribal, and other subaltern movements that struggle against insidious forms of caste-, class-, ethnicity-, and religion-based violence and violation. The world in which Dalit communities find themselves today is vastly different from that in which Dalit theology was first conceived in the early 1980s. To begin with, the Dalit discourse did not share the same acceptance, either politically or within the context of the academy, as it does now. In the context of the political arena, the struggle of Dalit movements was directed against the hegemonic power of the state and its indifference to the Dalit question. The concept of a Dalit party as an assertive political entity was relatively unknown, whereas in today’s context, it cannot be denied that Dalit politics and the Dalit political parties are a powerful force to be reckoned with. The early 1980s were also the time when the seeds of globalization and the ideology of communalism, two issues Dalits today are grappling with, were sown. At the same time, the identity question was one that was just about beginning to be asked; in fact, it was the rise of the ‘new social movements’ in the 1980s such as the Dalit, feminist, and peasant struggles that showed us that there were questions that could not be answered using the traditional analysis of ‘class’ and an ‘economic-centred approach’.11 This raised newer questions on identity and community. Since then we find that the struggle for, and assertion of, identity has become a global phenomenon. As Amartya Sen says, ‘A sense of identity

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can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but also of strength and confidence.’12 Yet, as he also cautions, it can be destructive and divisive at the same time. India’s adventure into the free world of capital markets in the name of liberalization and the targeting of particular ethnic and religious communities (led by the United States [US] of America with some willing allies after 11 September 2001) have intensified the nature and scope of identity politics. While the earlier discourse on identity politics was about the marginalized seeking and asserting a sense of human identity in their struggles for justice and rights, in the past decade or so, identity has come to be dominated by the powerful legitimizing their own positions and the status quo by using their duel-mongering language, coercive structures, and hell-generating power. Globally, this was more than amply seen in the American ‘war on terror’, while nationally, the same mechanism was used by Hindu nationalism to further their hegemonic control.13 The violent response of caste Hindus to the government’s decision to extend reservation (affirmative action) for Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in institutions of higher learning is a case in point. The galvanizing of elitist and casteist forces to protest against a policy of historical correction and equal opportunity is also a strategy to undercut the forging of interrogative and assertive identities of the excluded and broken peoples on their journey towards justice and equality. Yet, the language of identity politics has not been wrested entirely from the control of the subalterns. Identity remains an important tool in the context of Dalit theology, albeit in newer ways. In the earlier phase of Dalit theology, identity was often seen within the framework of pain and pathos. This, of course, has offered a new way of doing theology in which God was conceived of as being in pain. No doubt the very term ‘Dalit’, which was signified with the meaning of ‘broken’, ‘pressed down’, ‘crushed’, and so on, gave easy vent to this kind of a theology. Certain difficulties, however, were identified along the path. More recently, Dalit theologians have begun to question this entire paradigm and ask whether a suffering God could actually come to the rescue of a suffering community. Some theologians now interpret the term ‘Dalit’ as a consciousness of being broken and hence, a mobilization against all that breaks. Still others question the idea of victimhood and search for the concrete contributions that Dalits have made to society. Others have initiated a process to recover the resources that Dalits use to protest as well as overcome their oppression. This also pertains to the rituals and modalities that Dalits utilize to celebrate life even in the midst of daily toil and suffering.

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This wrestling with Dalit identity has led to a radical rethinking of the concept of Dalit itself. There has been some amount of work in resignifying the term by a new generation. Bama, the Tamil Dalit author, for example, resignifies the concept of Dalit as meaning ‘rooted in the soil’.14 No doubt the concept of ‘rooted in the soil’ has problematic connotations in the sense of being too close to the ‘sons of the soil’ ideologies that are often exclusive, and used for parochial political ends. Yet, it is interesting that Bama does not speak about Dalit as being ‘broken’ and ‘crushed’. There are also attempts by some Dalit writers to reject the term ‘Dalit’ altogether and replace it with Mulnivasi, which means ‘original inhabitant’. Much of this discussion stems from questioning the psychological benefit of using a term like ‘Dalit’, particularly in a context where other identities are asserted with pride. Along with this newer understanding and interpretation of the concept of identity, we notice the intensification and broadening of civic expressions of Dalit assertion. These collective and creative Dalit assertions are widespread across most of India, taking on an amazing variety of forms, spheres, and modalities. The numerous celebrations all over India of various events associated with the birth, conversion, and death of the great Dalit reformer, leader, and hero, Dr B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the continuing public struggle for land rights in Chengara in Kerala, and the courageous exhibition of identity assertion through religious conversion to Christianity in Kandhamal in Orissa are some examples of this phenomenon. Besides these, there are also newer forms of Dalit assertion—in university campuses, government offices, and trade unions. This spirit of self-assertion has brought with it new alliances and partners for Dalits in their struggle for dignity and justice. In the world of electoral politics, the replacement of the earlier bahujan mass ideology with the sarvajan communitarian ideology gave political currency to concerted mobilizations based on justice and equality for all. Contrary to popular belief, the electoral victory of the Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, was more than just a Brahmin–Dalit alliance. It flagged a galvanization that cut across communities and castes in an altogether new political equation. The new sarvajan ideology facilitated alliances with Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Kayasthas as well as seventy-four of Uttar Pradesh’s seventy-nine so-called OBCs.15 Such mobilizations of Dalit identity, along with bold, collective, and concerted public assertiveness, even while producing new political equations, has also meant the resurgence of orchestrated violent onslaughts against Dalits. While on the one hand, there seems to be a greater Dalit

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presence across the country and several examples of Dalits having broken the traditional stereotype, on the other hand, or perhaps because of it, there is also growing violence against Dalits. According to the Indian government’s Ministry of Social Justice, in 2004, there were a total of 23,629 reported cases of atrocities against Dalits as against 22,603 cases in 2003.16 Here, it is to be remembered that the number of cases that are reported are abysmally low. Moreover, the number of cases booked under the Atrocities against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act is even lower. The under-reporting of caste atrocities may be foregrounded against the persistent structural opposition to Dalit and minority assertion, and consolidated in the form of fundamental Hindutva and right-wing rhetoric. The call by the right-wing parties for a Ram Rajya, and the latest equation of L.K. Advani and Narendra Modi with Ram, is nothing less than invoking an India when caste was at its strongest. ‘Ram Rajya’ or the rule of the God Ram conjures up notions of an ideal age of assumed peace and prosperity, and naturalizes the centrality of a dominant form of Hindu totalitarianism. Implicitly, caste and other minority communities occupy only the silent margins of this imagined political and cultural configuration. Hindutva though cannot be seen merely as the fallout of Dalit assertiveness. It is an expression of the nexus between some political and economic powers who seek to thrive by invoking religious identities and circulating religious myths to consolidate exclusive privileges. Since globalization benefits only those who already have assets, the proponents of Hindutva find globalization as a convenient ideological ally. Be that as it may, globalization has had its own impact. It has brought with it newer challenges and new opportunities as well. Speaking about the impact of globalization, Chandran Paul Martin writes, ‘The discernable shift towards privatization and the absence of alternative forms of “social protection against a caste-based market discrimination” make the Dalits more vulnerable and their situation more fearful.’17 Though Martin concurs with several other Dalit activists and theologians in his criticism of globalization, Dalit ideologues such as Chandra Bhan Prasad are more positive about the impact of globalization. For him, globalization is a break from the feudal trap that Dalits are caught in. S. Anand and Aditya Nigam map the changes, possibilities, and pitfalls that globalization has brought to rural Dalit communities, including facets such as migration.18 These ambivalent notions suggest the careful attention needed as one reenvisions Dalit theology in a violently partisan and yet globalized world that the twenty-first century is.

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DALIT THEOLOGY: NEW ORIENTATIONS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The essays in this volume display the creativity, courage, and determination of a new generation, who in spite of the overwhelming rhetoric that underplays and even denies the dehumanizing potential of caste in today’s globalized India, are determined to expose the underside, the otherside, and the innerside of the Indian society—otherwise marketed as a success story. Though this selection of essays predominantly represents the theological aspirations of those who belong to the Protestant traditions of the Indian church, they account for the ways in which refection on Dalit realities are noted, interpreted, and circulated in different ecclesial communities across the length and breadth of the country. The reader may observe that these explorations are grounded in, and engage with, the concrete historical realities of the Dalits, and do not consciously follow the theological method of the western academic theologies. Instead, they opt for contemporary, interdisciplinary, ethnographic, imaginative, hybrid, and negotiatory theological pathways. Each author was invited to work on a topic of their own choosing, and as such, they also displayed a certain sense of indiscipline: a subtle subversion of traditional disciplinary boundaries could not be prevented. Rather they operated with creative freedom to theologically articulate their conceptualizations of images, themes, concepts, and ideas. These always seemed to want to respond to the local needs while also addressing larger and more complex theological schemes and philosophical systems. While they strove to make sense of specific contexts, they were expectantly welcoming of new questions and fresh challenges. Even as these essayists present themselves as theological articulators, they validate themselves as action oriented, reflecting upon the contestations and challenges of Dalits. Their essays were presented at a symposium of Dalit activists, social scientists, biblical scholars, and Dalit and tribal theologians in Kolkata, India, in January 2008. The collective that gathered together in Kolkata represented a coming together of Dalit and Dalit-identified theological writers. We attempt to consciously ensure the overall majority of the Dalit composition of such an anti-caste community of critical and creative theological dialogue. But we have also welcomed the contributions of other Christians who profess to work alongside ‘broken men and women’ in their human right to live in freedom and liberty both within the church and in the world. It would not be wrong to say that it is not the goal posts that have shifted but that it is now a new playing field altogether for the twenty-first

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century Dalit theologians. This new generation of Dalit theologians has brought different experiences, and different and defiant ways of doing theology. The experience of being Dalit (Dalit identity) vastly differs with this generation. For some, Dalit experience is a remembering of stories told within families and generations. For others, it is a memory of a memory that reaches out to a past that was overcome, forgotten, and now revisited in the attempt to discover and uncover identity. For some others, it is a process of relocating and recollecting lost histories. The impact of globalization has meant migration out of traditional communities to urban centres, and the experiences of encountering caste discrimination in new ways—in workplaces, in university campuses—in the everyday interactions with caste communities, encountering sometimes even ‘high-tech discrimination’.19 Others have migrated beyond the borders of India for academic purposes or otherwise, still rooted in solidarity with Dalit aspirations for a new humanity. What joins this new generation of theologians with those who articulated a Dalit theology earlier is not a commonality of experience but rather a commonality of commitment to overcome, to root out, and even to annihilate the discriminatory caste system. While earlier Dalit theology was in dialogue with what, at that time, could be considered mainstream theology, today’s theologians have the opportunity, the privilege even, of being spokespersons of an acceptable mode of theological enquiry, not only within the context of India but also internationally. The difference that this has brought to Dalit theologians today is that while earlier Dalit theology would reach out to the Dalit movements, we now find the Dalit movements are reaching out to embrace Dalit theology as a valid vehicle for the articulation of Dalit experience. Also, we find that Dalit theology is no longer a reaction to mainstream theology but it has attained the stature of setting the trends itself. It is no longer obsessed with deconstructing ‘upper’ caste illusions of the world. It is now in a position to set the agenda. It is engaged in multiple dialogues, a ‘heterologue’ so to speak, with not only the theologies of the other oppressed people but also with other philosophies and ideologies. It has borrowed, plundered, and resourced tools and methodologies from across disciplines and boundaries, even those of the oppressors, to make itself into a ‘TRANS-formative’ theological expression. UNCHARTED PATHWAYS, UNFINISHED AGENDAS

There is a grandiose, even pretentious, assertion implied in professing to describe Dalit theology in the twenty-first century. We readily admit to the

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limitations of such a broad claim. We are also aware that this is still the first decade of the unfolding of the new century. Thus, it may be useful to conclude this introduction by pointing to some beginnings that may aid the continued expansion and enrichment of Dalit theology through the next phase of its expedition in the twenty-first century. First, we notice a symbiotic relationship between more action and less reflection-based Dalit social activists, and less action and more reflection-based Dalit academics and theologians. Both sets of collectives have much to learn from each other, and are increasingly open and respectful of each other. From our theological vantage point, we have always affirmed that theology must learn from Dalit liberation praxis and then find ways to systematically and continuously fund and fortify its objective of fullness of life in the world. The entrenchment of theology in the lives of struggling Dalit communities and their activist leaders will give us opportunities to do collaborative theology in a deliberative mode. It also invites theologians not to pose as though we are doing reflection from liberative praxis. It forces us to be more vulnerable to Dalit movements and their own leaders. It simultaneously offers Dalit social activists the opportunity to explore the links between the religion of their own peoples and its potential to both hinder and further freedom and liberation. Second, we infer that Dalit theology has reached the limits of its preoccupation with identity politics. The backdrop of discovering and expressing the similarity and difference of the future of OUR world must be rethought. Broken and crushed identities cannot be mobilized or healed by presuming and posturing of a fixed, essential, enduring, and common Dalit identity. The mediation between economic deformations and reformations of identity and social–cultural dismantling and reaffirmations of identity needs to be explored. The carnage of Dalit and tribal Christians in Kandhamal in December 2007, and again in September 2008, points to the complex interlocking of economic, ethnic, political, and religious signifiers as individuals and communities pursue the goals of human affirmation and religious affiliation. Incorporating the economic dimensions of identity formation without ignoring the weight dumped on Dalits because of the operations of the caste system is a work that must be taken on into the future from the bottom up. Such a move beyond parochial identity politics also invites broader identifications that are shaped by missiological commitments to bring God’s reign of freedom and justice among the poor and oppressed. A looser and broader conceptualizing of identity along these lines of being missional has interesting outcomes for Dalits. On the one hand, no longer

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do we construe ‘Dalit’ as a closely guarded marker of either an ontological or biological identity. Rather, ‘Dalit’ is projected as an open and dynamic affirmation of brokenness that invites solidarity from others who commit themselves to breaking down all forms of dehumanization based on the caste system. The statement of the Global Ecumenical Conference on Justice for Dalits that was held in Bangkok in March 2009, a meeting that brought together Dalit activists and theologians along with church leaders from all over the world, puts this succinctly: ‘Today, regardless of where we come from, which church we represent, we all become Dalits. Not only for today and during this conference, but also for our life until Dalits are liberated, we all become Dalits.’20 The new missiological commitment, on the other hand, not only invites the world into new identification with the Dalits but also frees Dalits joining other subjugated identities in various parts of the world. This presents Dalits with opportunities to reconfigure their own identity through forging global alliances in new and transforming ways. Thus, Dalits reimagine themselves along positive lines in the service of a new world that frees not just themselves but all those who are imprisoned within the present world disorder. The Bangkok Declaration, which also represents the voice of Christian Dalit self-assertion, foregrounds this sense of global agency to transform the world: ‘We look for a caste-free world, in which the human dignity and rights of everyone is affirmed irrespective of their social origin and identity.21 Dalit theology in the twenty-first century will involve Dalits, along with many other agents in transforming the whole world. In the past, it has often presented itself as a forum for Christian Dalits to eradicate the caste system from the church or to alleviate the social and economic circumstances of Christian Dalits in India. This, however, can only be a part of the struggle. Dalit theology can no longer ignore the large-scale atrocities faced by Dalits all over the subcontinent and other forms of oppression that dehumanize others around the world. The missiological challenge in our era is for the church to become liberatively involved at every site where human rights are violated. The task of Dalit theology then should be the conceintization of the local and global church of its responsibility towards the legitimate right of human beings to live with dignity and without discrimination anywhere and everywhere. In part, this global consciousness of Dalit theology was forefronted at the Bangkok. Thus, while the conference named the sin of caste-based discrimination as a concern for global church, at the same time, it also called Dalit attention to ‘discrimination based on birth and occupation’ in other parts of the world.22

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Third, we are convinced that Dalit theology must redefine its relationship with Dalit Christians who live both in fear and faith, despair and hope, contempt and love, and sorrow and joy. In general, Dalit theology tends to prescribe who God is, what human being ought to be, and how the world can reflect the design of the Creator. We assumed that such a theology would gift faith, hope, love, and joy to Dalit Christians. Thus, Good News was packaged for Dalits from the world of theologians. A different alignment is beginning to emerge and Dalit theologians are starting to note this opportunity. Whereas Dalit theology has struggled to grow, leave alone flourish, there is a new fervour exhibited in local Dalit congregations. They are living out some aspects of the Good News in ways that need to be studied and circulated for the nourishment of the Indian and global church. Embedded versions and variations of the Christian gospel in the individual and communitarian lives of Dalits have substantial value for the content of Dalit theology. To put it in provocative terms, Dalit Christians can save Dalit theologians, and cause theology to live more abundantly, for the glory of God, the well-being of humanity, and the wholeness of all God’s creations . . . So be it. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot (eds), 1992, An Anthology of Dalit Literature, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, p. 124. 2. Inspired by John 1: 14 and 16: ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth . . . From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.’ 3. The only category outside of this caste-based Indian society is the tribal or Adivasi community. Consisting of 8.1 per cent of the Indian population, according to the 2001 Census of India, this category of peoples is unobliged to the Hindu caste system and functions outside of its religious and social conventions. 4. Satish Deshpande, 2003, Contemporary India: A Sociological View, New Delhi: Viking, pp. 122–3. 5. We are using the most general category of caste (varna) since it is sufficient to place the Dalits outside of the Indian stratification of human community. We are well aware of the fact that these four castes are divided into numerous sub-castes ( jatis), which operate as the functional identities in the day-to-day life of the community. We are also aware that outcaste communities (Dalits), also, have within themselves certain sub-outcaste divisions, which consistently stand as an obstacle to on-the-ground Dalit solidarity. For a succinct essay on this distinction, see Simon R. Charsley, 1998, ‘Caste, Cultural Resources and Social Mobility’, in Simon R. Charsley and G.K. Karanth (eds), Dalits Initiatives and Experience from Karnataka, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 44–71. 6. James Massey, 2007, Dalit Bible Commentary: The Gospel According to Luke, Vol. 3, New Delhi: Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies, p. 17.

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7. John Webster notes that Ambedkar’s concept of ‘broken men’ is a precursor to the use of ‘Depressed classes’ or ‘Untouchables’ as references for Dalits. See John C.B. Webster, 2007, ‘Who is a Dalit?’,in S.M. Michael (ed.), Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values (2nd edition), New Delhi: Sage, pp. 76–88. 8. Human Rights Watch, 1999, Broken people: Caste Violence Against India’s ‘Untouchables’, New York: Human Rights Watch, pp. 1–2. 9. In a recent article, Clarke has explored the possibility of exchanging a narrow Dalit identity, which is manifesting signs of an essentialist caste mindset, with a broader subaltern consciousness, which is more capable of constructing a functionalist form of solidarity for accomplishing liberative ends. The challenge is how to set this in motion without sacrificing the centrality of the Dalit experience. See Sathianathan Clarke, 2008, ‘Subalterns, Identity Politics, and Christian Theology in India,’ in Sebastian C.H. Kim (ed.), Christian Theology in Asia, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–90. 10. The origins of Dalit theology are generally pinned down to an article written by Arvind P. Nirmal, which was presented at the valedictory gathering of the United Theological College in 1981. The ideas of that article were used in his publication, 1988, ‘Towards a Christian Dalit Theology’ that first appeared in the NCCI Review, February. 11. Surinder S. Jodhka, 2001, Community and Identities: Contemporary Discourses on Culture and Politics in India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, p. 15. 12. Amartya Sen, 2006, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, London: Allen Lane, p. 1. 13. It is significant that the 11 July 2006 train blasts in Mumbai came to be known as 7/11 in the Indian media parlance. 14. Manoj Nair, 2001, ‘Recognition for the Language of My People is the Biggest Award I Can Win’, Interview with Bama, OutlookIndia. Available at http://www. outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20010425&fname=Bama&sid=1&pn=1 (last accessed 10 September 2007). 15. Vivek Kumar, 2007,’Behind the BSP Victory’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(24): 2237–9. 16. Annual Report on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, Government of India, for the year 2004’, available at http://socialjustice.nic.in/ schedule/ar-poa.pdf (last accessed 16 November 2004). 17. Chandran Paul Martin, 2004, ‘Globalization and its Impact on Dalits: A Theological Response’, in James Massey (ed.), Globalization and its Impact on Dalits: A Theological Response, New Delhi: Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies, pp. 17–18. 18. S. Anand, 2008, ‘An Epitaph for the Bull-hull Economy’, Business Outlook, 28 June. Available at http://www.outlookbusiness.com/inner.aspx?articleid=177 4&editionid=47&catgid=84&subcatgid=845 (last accessed 5 July 2008). See also, Aditya Nigam, 2008, ‘Flight to Freedom: Travel through Dalit Villages’; available at http://kafila.org/2008/06/10/flight-to-freedom-travels-through-dalit-villages/ (last accessed 5 July 2008). 19. A term coined in the film, India Untouched, to address discrimination of Dalits in urban settings.

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20. ‘The Bangkok Declaration and Call’ Global Ecumenical Conference on Justice for Dalits, March 21-4, 2009, Bangkok, Thailand. Available at http://www.oikoumene. org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/unity-mission-evangelism-and-spirituality/just-and-inclusive-communities/dalits/03-09-the-bangkok-declaration-andcall.html (last accessed 16 July 2009). 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid.

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1 Dalit Theology An Introductory and Interpretive Theological Exposition SATHIANATHAN CLARKE

D

alit theology is a significant school of Indian contextual thinking that collectively reflects upon the ongoing Christian vocation of resisting oppression and advancing liberation. It emanates from communities that have been dehumanized under the comprehensive, though reprehensible, and contemporaneous, though cumulative, apartheid-like system of caste. Deeply affected by the person of Jesus and passionately aligned with the work of Christ, Christian Dalit theology is a specialized discipline. It documents the reflections of liberation-identified Dalits and Dalit-identified liberationists on the interlocking of divine and human matters that both generate life now, and reimagines future life for communities pushed towards physical, social, and economic death. Thus, Dalit theology is founded on the ‘pathetic’ experience of specific Dalit communities, filtered through the inspirational person and work of Jesus Christ, and entwined into the lives of oppressed peoples in India with the objective of funding and finding life in all its fullness for all human beings.1 Dalit theology emerged in the early 1980s. It is generally agreed that its advent can be attributed to an address delivered by Arvind P. Nirmal to the Carey Society of the United Theological College, Bangalore, in April 1981. In a paper incorrectly entitled, ‘Towards a Shudra Theology’,2 Nirmal courageously and incisively argued against the unhelpful and misdirected nationalist mood of unity and consensus that had steered Indian Christian theology thus far in the twentieth century. His call was cautionary. He urged Dalits not to contribute to this unitary theological project that represented an imagined integrated self-representation of the Indian Christian viewpoint. While this may have had some usefulness in promoting a systematic pan-Indian school of thought in defiance of the long and complex stream of colonial western theology, for Nirmal, the time was ripe for dismantling such a master narra-

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tive of Indian Christian theology. In this sense, there can be little doubt about the disruptive intentions of the initial rousing of Dalit theology. Accordingly, there was to be no more co-option of the oppressed majority, who consist of Shudras, Dalits, and tribals, into a theological system that stemmed from the imaginations of the elite dominant caste minority.3 But there was also a more constructive objective to this incipient theological voice. By dissecting the form and content of the existing body of Indian theological knowledge, the gaping holes that testify to the unrepresented voices would become obvious. It would become apparent that there were many constituencies among the Indian Christian community that were kept out or made silent by this traditional theological discourse. The acknowledgement of this theological vacuum, Nirmal envisioned, would galvanize the unrepresented communities, specifically Dalits and tribals, to begin to articulate their particular theological reflectivity and interject them into this spacious fissure. This would thus result in formulating a more wide-ranging, representative, and authentic theology from and for India.4 POLITICS OF METHODOLOGY: DIALECTICS OF METHODOLOGICAL EXCLUSIVISM AND THEOLOGICAL INCLUSIVENESS

The methodology of Dalit theology has exhibited unresolved ambiguity even as it purports to be dialectically both exclusive and theologically inclusive. Explicating what this means and demonstrating how this works has been a tough challenge. On the one hand, because of the inequality of power configurations that exist between dominant and subjugated discourse, Dalit theology assumes the challenge to guard itself against becoming co-opted by the homogenizing propensities of elite theology. A certain kind of exclusivism is, thus, needed to safeguard the distinctively counter-cultural (prophetic?) potentialities of Dalit theology. Nirmal’s assertion addresses this issue bluntly: I would say that a Christian Dalit Theology will be produced by dalits. It will be based on their own dalit experiences, their own sufferings, their own aspirations and their own hope. It will narrate the story of their pathos and protest against the socio-economic injustices they have been subjected to through history. It will anticipate liberation which is meaningful to them. It will represent a radical discontinuity with the classical Indian Christian Theology of the Brahminic tradition. This Brahminic tradition in the classical Indian Christian Theology needs to be challenged by the emerging Dalit theology. This also means that a Christian dalit theology will be counter theology. I submit that all people’s theologies are essentially countertheologies. In order that they should remain counter theologies, it is necessary that they are also exclusive in character. This will be a methodological exclusivism. This exclusivism is necessary because the tendency of all dominant traditions—cultural

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or theological—is to accommodate, include, assimilate and finally conquer others. Counter-theologies or people’s theologies, therefore, need to be on their guard and need to shut off the influences of the dominant theological tradition.5

I interpret this strident call for the necessity of ‘methodological exclusivism’ as a summons to conserve the distinguishing features of a Dalit countertheology. Dalit methodology needs to start by hardening the edges around Dalit reflectivity. In order to know oneself, one needs to block out the overbearing pressures that operate to make the self into the other. Methodological closures to blockade dominant worldviews are strategic openings into the particularities of subjugated Dalit resources. It creates an important decolonized space that provides for productive engenderment of Dalit theological reflection. This methodological exclusiveness occasions Dalit subjectivity. It envisions a reflective space of freedom to be Dalit; free from the fear of being judged, manipulated, and recreated by dominant identities and ideologies. On the other hand, because of the interrelatedness of theological knowledge and the inclusive character of the Christian community, Dalit theology recognizes that it must also be an encompassing discipline. All particular theological expressions ought also to offer trajectories towards the universality of God and the inclusiveness of all human beings in the purposes of this one creator. The conceptual conundrum between articulating a need for methodological exclusiveness and conceding an obligation for theological inclusiveness may be teased out of another article by Nirmal. In an article entitled, ‘Doing Theology from a Dalit Perspective’, he says: From the pathos perspective therefore, theological knowledge is a matter of different levels and different degree. Many people ask me if I rule out the possibility of dalit theology being done by non-dalits. The answer to such a question must be a complex one. I would maintain that there are three different modes of knowing. These are the pathetic knowing, the empathetic knowing and the sympathetic knowing.6

Nirmal then goes on to discuss these forms of knowing in, what I interpret to be, concentric circles. The core of Dalit theology arises from the pain–pathos of Dalits, which alone leads to pathetic knowledge. ‘This mode exclusively belongs to the dalits.’ And without this, there cannot be the making of Dalit theology. Around this nucleus of pathetic knowing is another circle. This represents the knowledge generated by the suffering of other oppressed peoples (the Schedule Tribes, Other Backward Castes [OBCs], low-ranking Shudras, and women crushed under the weight of patriarchy are examples). This knowledge can be useful to the process of overcoming Dalit suffering since it ‘is akin to dalit pain-pathos’. While empathetic knowledge is not ‘the first hand experience of dalit pathos’, it

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can be weaved into the theological agenda of Dalit theology in its march towards resistance and liberation. The outermost of the three concentric circles is sympathetic knowledge. This form of knowing is most removed from Dalit pain–pathos because there is no experience of suffering in this mode. However, there is commitment to ‘identify with the dalit cause’ and initiative to ‘help in the process of removal of dalit suffering’7. This conceptualization can be explained by using the analogy of the body under attack from outside forces. Imagine a woman screaming out in pain when she is struck by a powerful blow to the stomach. The site of the punch is the portion of the body that feels the pain and suffers the consequence of the brutal attack. One part of the body directly experiences the pain–pathos of the blow. It bears the signs of pathetic knowledge. It also reflexively acts with a sense of urgency to do whatever is possible to avert the direct impact of this brutal pain-causing blow. The brain is not close to the site of pain. But the brain registers pain that has come from various parts of the body at different times in the life of the woman. It synchronizes the elements of this experience in relationship with other experiences of pain. In this instance, it is able to alert the woman that this pain suffered by the stomach cannot be endured. The brain exhibits a kind of empathetic knowing. It knows indirectly but inter-relationally and, through this amalgamated knowledge, is able to devise ways of overcoming the situation of suffering. The scream that articulates the pain that is experienced from the blow, which has been processed by the brain as being brutal, is a cry of communicativeness that is quite removed from the stomach and the brain. It is a vocal response that is caused by the working of the lungs, the voice box, and the mouth, none of which have felt the impact of the blow to the stomach. A sympathetic awareness that does not share in the pain of the battered body and yet, wills to do something about the alleviation of such suffering is another mode that can be useful to Dalit theology. It is the most circuitous form of knowing where pain–pathos is the crux of experiential knowing. Now the logic of how Dalit theology’s methodological exclusivism is tenuously and dialectically linked with theological inclusivism may be somewhat clearer. The objective of retaining methodological exclusiveness is to demarcate the site of pain as the core of experiential knowing that must frame and fund Dalit theology. The intention of invoking theological inclusiveness of Dalit theology is to allow for Christian communitarian interrelatedness in the task of overcoming suffering for Dalits and all those who suffer the effects of oppression. Other communities can participate in doing Dalit theology but must recognize their respective distance and respectful relatedness to the distinctiveness of Dalit pain–pathos.

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RECONFIGURING RESISTANCE AND LIBERATION

There appears another kind of logic that arises from the dialectics operating in Dalit theology between methodological exclusiveness and theological inclusion which binds together the two-fold dynamics of resistance (counter-theology) and liberation (constructive theology). The way I see it, resistance requires a certain kind of exclusiveness in order to prevent co-option by the dominant communities and their ideologies. This mode or method sifts other theological contributions through the distinctiveness of Dalitness, which is rooted in the experience of pain–pathos generated from the effects of caste oppression. Correspondingly, liberation is the link that binds all communities together in a common mission that benefits, first, Dalits; next, other subjugated communities; and eventually, all human being as they seek to live together in security, justice, peace, and life in all its plenitude. This issue about the interconnection between resistance and liberation has perplexed theologians taking stock of Dalit theology. Popularly, it has been assumed that resistance is the first phase of activity indulged in by oppressed communities which then leads into the second phase of liberation. This linear understanding is somewhat misleading because the activity of resistance already presupposes the trajectory of liberation. Similarly, the dynamics of liberation contains the active rejection of all that is enslaving. I suggest that in the mirror of the one lies the shadow of the other, even if somewhat dimly. Thus, for conceptual reasons, it is best to talk of the resistance hyphenated liberation activity as the approach of Dalit theology. The concealed hyphen that links the two mediates through interpolation, which suggests that one part of the compound word trespasses into the other part. The imaginary hyphen indicates common dwelling space where both cognates of the compound term (resistance and liberation) coalesce. That which is chosen as the first element of the compound word (whether resistance or liberation) merely reflects the point of departure. The second element of the composite term (whether liberation or resistance) is never truncated. It is transported into the first element of the compound word via the hyphen. Thus, an ongoing dialectic between resistance and liberation is presupposed, which can be encountered through the substantial working out of Dalit theology. THEOLOGY OF REJECTION, REFUTATION, AND DECONSTRUCTION: WE RESIST AND REACT, THEREFORE WE ARE

Dalit theology is a counteractive discourse. It protects an oppressed community from expressing itself before God and other human beings in a mode and through materials that mimic other dominant agents. Dalit

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theology, thus, as a discourse about God intricately related to the world and human beings, assumes the freedom and integrity for Dalits to be subjects. To be subject only to God also implies not to be subjected by other human beings. Theology is speaking truthfully about oneself, the world, and God in the courage that one musters when in front of the Divine, even when what is being articulated (speaking truth to power) is in defiance against what dominant communities fabricate as veracity (conjuring truth for power). In this sense, truth is the way and the end of valid theological exercise. But, subjectivity for Dalits requires the ongoing work of rejecting dominant discourse of caste communities that aim to make them into objects that serve their vested interests. Refutation of the objectifying discourse of the caste communities, coupled with deconstructing its various strategies and schemata, become the weapons of rejection. This is a continuous modality adopted by Dalit theology to safeguard its objective to be theology of legitimate identity. In such a situation, Dalits endeavour to become outsiders, non-Hindus, outcaste Christians, heterodox, and defectors from traditional truth configurations. The following poem by V.L. Kalekar manifests the passionate and categorical nature of Dalit rejection of conventional Hindu world visions: No! No! No! A triple rejection To your economic, social, political, mental, religious, moral and cultural pollution. you ever-living, ever-luminous sun! your very touch brings a contagious disease. But I am a new sun: Independent, self-luminating, Possessed of a new spirit I reject your culture. I reject your Parameshwar-centered tradition. I reject your religion-based literature. My Bothers! I have proclaimed my hatred. My hate is unyielding. It is without end. I have taken into account the unceasing battles. I may bend but I won’t break.8

Even if not comprehensively and continuously expressed and elucidated, such a mood and modality symbolizes the Dalit stance in relation to forms of traditional Christian theology that have been circulated by dominant caste Christian communities. A hermeneutics of suspicion which fuels a counter-theology, characterized by a stance of rejection, a modality of refutation, and a stratagem of deconstruction, is indeed necessary to retain the distinctiveness of Dalit theology. A courageous stance of rejection is

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the first act of self-affirmation, even if expressed through the embrace of a negation. To state that we are not this and not that (neti neti) is an empowering act. It delegitimizes all efforts of the dominant caste communities to represent the identity of the Dalit self. However, mere rejection will not be potent enough to contain the infiltration of such dominant ‘truths’ into the life world of Dalit communities. There, also, must be a modality of refutation that proves the wrongness and unfairness of such ‘truths’ that are fabricated by the dominant communities to maintain and further their own power over Dalit communities. Dalits do not have the luxury of only refusing to give ear to the expanding ideologies, philosophies, and theologies of the dominant caste communities; they also bear the responsibility of refuting these native worldviews by calling their bluff. Finally, Dalit theology also adopts a stratagem of deconstruction to splinter and fragment the truth claims of such native worldviews. Governing ‘truths’ manufactured and presided over by the dominant communities may mask the deceptions of power configurations that work to legitimize and bolster unfair privilege. Dalit theology deconstructs the pretensions of knowledge/power in hands of the dominant caste communities. V. Devasahayam captures the multidimensionality of this counteractive responsibility well: Dalit theology as a counter ideology to caste ideology makes clear that the present situation under the caste system is an unacceptable situation. It incorporates strongly the element and means of protest. It seeks to change or overthrow the existing caste system. It accepts a reversal approach or is involved in revaluation of values because of the caste system’s perversion of falsehood as truth and injustice as justice.9 DALIT REJECTION, REFUTATION, AND DECONSTRUCTION OF DOMINATING GODS AND SUBSERVIENT HUMAN CLASSES

Two concrete examples of such a theology of rejection, rooted in the practice of refutation and deconstruction, can be observed in the writings of Dalit theologians. First, there is a strong denunciation of the dominant portrayal of God as a violent Lord who, as the ruling king, preserves the status quo for the sake of a righteous kingdom. A marked feature of Dalit theology is the dual rejection of the violence-prone gods of Hinduism who serve dharma impeccably by killing Dalits and Christian notions of a God who lauds it over creation to bring about subjection. Nirmal’s words are cryptic and fitting: ‘A non-dalit deity cannot be the god of dalits’.10 Devasahayam attempts a more concrete debunking of traditional interpretations of God: ‘God is imaged in the traditional formulations as the sovereign almighty and unmoved Mover. Moreover God is conceived of as

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a ruthless judge, a heavenly Shylock demanding an eye for an eye’.11 Clearly, within the framework of understanding God as the One who presides over the laws of dharma, which meticulously works out the rhythm of caste duties, Devasahayam is refuting a conception of God that is ‘unmoved Mover’ and executor of the eye for an eye principle. Rather, he wants to build on the foundation of another kind of God: God presents another vision of Godself when perceived in Jesus, as not almighty, sovereign Lord but as one who comes in weakness and humility and stands with those despised and suffering people. God is not seen as a ruthless judge demanding a pound of flesh from the sinner bit as one who is participating in the agony along with the agonizing people. The power of God is to be interpreted in the serenity of God, i.e. the capacity to share and bear the grief of suffering humanity.12

Another concrete example of such a theology of rejection, entwined within the dynamics of refutation and deconstruction, has to do with the notion that human beings are created unequal and unfree. On the one hand, this involves a robust and out-and-out attack on the Hindu idea that the caste system is divinely sanctioned because the different castes emanated from the various parts of the body of God. Hindu interpretations of the divinely ordered human community stem from the ‘Purusha Hymn’ in the Rig Veda that legitimizes the graded inequality of a four-fold social system: the most respected Brahmins came from the head of the deity; the somewhat respected Kshatriyas from His arms; the less respected Vaishyas from the deity’s stomach; and the least respectable Shudras from His feet. Of course, because Dalits were not considered members of the Hindu human community, they did not have a place in this theological myth of human origin. Dalit theology refuted this myth in its entirety in order to reclaim the anthropological status of Dalits in the world of God’s created order. On the other hand, Dalit theology also has to reject any vestige of inequality that such myths spawn in the Christian community. Devasahayam subtly pushes theology to tackle both these scenarios: outright rejection of the Hindu myth of human origins; and bold refutation of Christian appropriations of any such hierarchical discrimination. According to the Purusa Hymn of the Rig Veda, Dalits have no part in the Brahman from whose body the universe was created. Hence they also have no place among the upper caste people. They are outside the social order, forced to live outside the village. But this creator God has been revealed by Jesus as our Father (parent); the whole human race is conceived of as one family of God, called to a relationship of fraternity with equal access to God, our parent. In a situation where fellow humans are not accepted as our equals our addressing God as father is hypocritical.13

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This refutation of the dominant Hindu conception of human beings is fuelled by a notion of theology that is deeply committed to the welfare of human beings. There may not be an explicit claim that authentic Dalit theology must always comprise an accurately articulated anthropology. Yet, theology with radical commitment to Dalit resistance and liberation cannot be uncoupled from what human beings are designed to be before God and in front of other human beings in the world. Theology, thus, is not simply discourse about God. Rather it will have to also be discourse about God, human beings, and the world, and their proper interrelationship. K. Wilson makes this link explicit. Evidently, it is not the objective of the Christian gospel to make man a superman or a God or even a sub-human being. It is to provide man with those conditions under which he or she can live the best possible human life which included freedom, responsibility, rationality, etc. In this sense we find a corollary between the aspirations of dalits for a new humanity and the objective of the Christian gospel which is the humanization of man.14 THEOLOGY OF ASPIRATION, SELF-NARRATION, AND ALTERNATE DISCOURSE: WE IMAGINE AND ACT, THEREFORE WE ARE

Counter-theological postures are generally prone to the debilitations that characterize reactionary movements. The complex working out of a theology of rejection incorporates the modality of refutation with the stratagem of deconstruction and sets in motion a discursive process that is predominantly defensive. Such an oppositional mode for doing theology incessantly entices Dalits to jump into a self-effacing whirlpool that involves chasing the logic and agenda of the dominant discursive protagonist at the expense of claiming their own rich experiences. Rejection, refutation, and deconstruction are activities that are reacting to something that has been accepted as the substance and agenda of discourse. Counter-theology runs the risk of encasing itself in responding to preset questions and answers that primarily have to do with the subjectivity of the dominant communities. The object nature of Dalit theology is thus reinforced in such a project in as much as it is merely reacting to the subject of theological discourse that has been engendered and circulated by the dominant communities. While this resistive and oppositional tack must not be undervalued, one must be careful not to construct Dalit theology as essentially characterized by the prefix ‘counter’. After all, Dalit theology cannot be captured as a systematic and significant reaction to another primordial theological discourse that is accepted as a given. The problem with a counter approach is that it reinforces the Self–Other dichotomy. Thus, it accepts dominant

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caste theological discourse as the Self and then represents Dalit theology as the Other that actualizes itself through responding and reacting to the primary substantive reality of the former. Theology of aspiration, self-narration, and alternate discourse is a distinguishing marker of Dalit theology. Dalit theology’s call to retain methodological exclusiveness provides this necessary creative and selfactualizing space which generates Dalit self-reflectivity quite regardless of the governing discourse of the dominant caste communities. Even while Nirmal spoke of Dalit theology as counter-theology, he was also careful to carve a path for including the self-expressive character of such a contextual theological agenda. The diligent recovery and conscious integration of the distinctive identity of Dalit communities in their theologizing was an important dimension of Dalit theology, without which it would forfeit its authenticity: ‘Peoples’ theology then seeks to express the distinctive identities of their respective peoples. A search and expression of identity therefore characterizes all liberation theologies and peoples’ theologies.’15 Such a self-conscious and self-reflective theology will be inspired to reach out much beyond the reality that is given to Dalits. Although emerging from the Dalit historical consciousness, this will be a critical consciousness that reinterprets the past and reconfigures the future in accordance with Dalit lenses and for the objective of Dalit well-being. It, thus, simultaneously underplays the prevalent predilection of ongoing discourse to engrave the object character of Dalits and valorizes its less acceptable avocation to highlight the many facets of Dalit subjectivity. Theology, like any other field of human representation, provides a location for Dalits to become agents of their own subjectivity. ‘Dalits will get full treatment as “subject” of their history [and theology], only when they create their own literature themselves.’16 The element of aspiration in a theology based on self-narration with an eye towards formulating an alternate discourse must be explicated. This contains the imaginary dimension in theology. Of course, one always underplays the role of imagination in doing of theology. This is because theology is thought of as being description of Divine matters that have human consequences rather than projection of human matters having Divine significations. Yet, in the name of eschatology or theology of hope or reflections on the future, there is much theological rumination that is imagined. This does not mean that what is configured into the realm of future possibilities is untrue. Rather it means that theology has an emerging vision for the trajectories of possible worlds pledged to human beings by God. As contextual reflection towards an alternate discourse, Dalit theology hence contains the

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aspirations of Dalit self-narrations. This aspired theological God–world– human order is deeply vested in Dalit subjectivity and profoundly affected by Dalit hope. This creative aspect of Dalit theology allows subordinated communities the privilege of construing their own versions of God–world– human that would be profoundly biblical, genuinely theological, intensely experiential, and truly liberational. GOD OF CREATIVE DALIT CONSCIOUSNESS: SATURATED IN DALIT PAIN–PATHOS BUT STRONG ENOUGH TO SAVE

Let us examine what Dalit reflectivity has to say about the symbol of God that arises from the experiential knowledge of God, as revealed to Dalits through their own unfinished exodus experience. There is a claim for an ontological basis for expressing images of God for Dalit communities; it arises from the knowledge of God-with-us in Dalit historical consciousness. Allow Nirmal to speak once again: ‘Let Christian dalits also affirm their own exodus experience. What I mean is that as we should be aware of our historical dalit consciousness, so we should also be aware of our present Christian consciousness, so we are not just dalits, we are Christian dalits. Something has happened to us. Our status has changed.’17 The theological substance of Dalit reflection about God emanates from the experience of pathos that is represented by Dalits. At one level, one can say that in keeping with much of liberation theology of yesteryears, Dalit theology has accepted a restricted, simplistic, and abridged correlation between biblical images of God as suffering servant or co-suffering liberator and the serving or suffering role of Dalits. Consider the words of Nirmal concerning God as understood by Dalit theology: He is a servant God—a God who serves. Service has always been the privilege of dalit communities in India...Against this background the amazing claim of a Christian Dalit theology will be that the God of dalits, the self-existent, the svayambhu, does not create others to do service work, but does servile work himself. Servitude is innate in the God of dalits...Let us be prepared for a further shock. Are we prepared to say that my house-maid, my sweeper, my bhangi [scavenger] is my God? It is precisely in this sense that our God is a servant God. He is a waiter, a dhobi [washerman], a bhangi [scavenger]. Traditionally all such services have been the lot of dalits.18

The articulation of such a Dalit conception of God is surely contextual. Thus, it addressed the immediate and compelling need for Dalits to bridge the gap between the estranged Dalit communities and a remote God. The Divine initiates dangerous proximity to offer Dalits the kingdom of God close at hand. God would practice radical and unreserved touchability in a system that was build upon untouchability. Along the

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same lines, there is the desire of Dalit theology to reconceptualize God from a violent Dalit slayer to one who draws beside them as the one who serves. The deliberate reimagining of the Divine from being a killer-God to servant-God valorizes Dalits and repositions their subjectivity as replicating Divine agency in the world. Related to this reconstruction of a majestic and violent God into one who serves human society, there is also the resolve of Dalit theology to remove the distance and aloofness of God from toiling people and bring the Divine close to what was thought to be ‘polluting’ locations. God becomes so identified with polluting professions (that is, scavengers and the washerman, who epitomize polluting occupations, become images of the Divine in the world) that encountering God and embracing Dalits become synonymous. In the words of A. Maria Arul Raja, ‘The “polluted” Dalits have become the “sacred” channels communicating God’s grace. These sacraments are to be celebrated if we are to be liberated by God’s salvific will.’19 Nonetheless, such a direct and uncomplicated theological application is somewhat problematic: restrictive, simplistic, and fragmentary. It is restrictive because it presents a myopic view of the God. By adopting the politics of oblivion and the hermeneutics of neglect, this approach elides the dimensions of a majestic, jealous, arbitrary, monarchic, and proficient God of power and might. The highly selective reading of the Christian view of God that is correlated with the suffering and servile Dalit communities hides a significant and powerful face of the Divine. I shall return to this neglect with reasons to justify its qualified reinstitution into Dalit theology later when I talk about Christology. It is also simplistic because it literalizes the interpretation of biblical texts. Easy transfers from the realm of the Divine to the human ignore the metaphorical aspects of theological language. The agency of God is construed in unproblematic anthropomorphic terms. Finally, it is truncated because it does not take into consideration the rich religious world of the Dalits that sustained them as human beings before they became Christians. It correlates the experience of Dalits as victims with the experience of the Christian God who transforms them into subjects. Elements of the religious subjecthood of Dalits represented through various cultural and religious symbols are overlooked. If theology were to be understood as critical correlation between the Dalit historical consciousness and the Christian gospel, the Dalit pole is configured in terms of vacuous yearnings, while the Christian pole is configured in terms of substantive resolutions. Some of these limitations are overcome in another approach in Dalit theology to resymbolize the image of God in relationship to Dalit pathos.

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One foundational assumption guides such a direction in Dalit theology: Dalit subjectivity involves the cultural and religious world of this community that is its conscious and creative self-expression in the face of pain–pathos. This productive sphere of Dalits represents the storehouse of Dalit historical consciousness that can fund theology. Dalit representations of God become authentic when they draw from these sources even if they are not Christian. Given that the goddess and the drum represent Dalits’ particular and unique symbolization of the Divine, these manifestations need to be correlated with Christian conceptions of God.20 Correlation between two substantive and co-constitutive resource sites is inevitable in Dalit theology: the rich symbolic world of Dalit culture and religion which conserves the ‘pathetic’ historical consciousness of the Divine–human encounter and the equally fertile religious resources of the Judeo-Christian community that is interpretively preserved in the biblical documents. These sites must creatively and critically interact to engender Christian Dalit theology. Though there has been a long history of the harvesting and systematizing of the various facets of this religious and cultural world of Dalits, there has not, however, been much constructive theologizing on the Dalit Christian implications of these resourceful discoveries.21 This direction in Dalit theology, also, is deeply affected by the dissonances that characterize Dalit religion and culture. Instead of the literal interpretations of biblical texts to address the complex reality of Dalit pathos, more metaphorical and less literary hermeneutic conventions prevalent among such oral communities would need to be utilized for Dalit articulations on God. This is both unsettling and promising in reconstructing Godtalk in Dalit theology. The following implications express the complexity of this theological trajectory when dealing with reconfiguring notions of God in the face of Dalit pathos: The language of classical theism fails to capture the Dalit imagination. In place of the image of an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent Father God, a new blend of a plurality (apparently even contradictory) images of the vulnerablestrong, mother-father, suffering-enjoying, immanent-transcendent, material-spiritual diet is to be ushered in . . . After all, an ‘omnipotent’ God is required to redeem those who experience the complete ‘impotence’ of the helpless human deity crying out ‘Why have you forsaken me?’22

Systematic and concrete interpretations of this co-mingling of Dalit religious worldviews and Christian symbolic resources are yet to be worked out. In fact, my hunch is that the creative future of Dalit Christian theology in the twenty-first century will lie along this pathway.

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JESUS OF CREATIVE DALIT CONSCIOUSNESS: THE BROKEN ONE WHO DRAWS ALL BROKEN PEOPLES TOWARDS GOD TO BE MADE WHOLE

It must also be noted that Christian Dalit articulations on the concept of God has tended to be unabashedly Jesus-centric. Jesus is the theological eye of the needle through which all proverbial divine camels must pass. Nirmal puts it thus: ‘Our exodus from Hinduism, which was imposed upon us, to Christianity or rather to Jesus Christ is a valuable experience. It has enabled us to recognize our dalitness and also the dalitness of Jesus of Nazareth and the dalitness of his Father and our Father, our God.’23 The entirety of God appears to be captured through the lens of Jesus who is equated with Christianity. The connectivity between God and Dalits is Jesus. All knowledge about God is distilled though this figure. In their common disfigurement lies the ‘pathos’ that binds God and human beings: the pathos of Jesus, the crushed/broken Son of God, and the pathos of Dalits, the oppressed/broken children of this same God, pave a pathway into the heart of the Divine. In a similar vein, Massey contends that ‘The climax of God’s solidarity with the human beings, particularly with the oppressed people of this world can be seen in His incarnational act.’24 I am deliberate about making the claim that Dalit reflection on God is Jesus-centric rather than christo-centric. This arises from the fact that the identity of Jesus of Nazareth becomes the decisive focus of Dalit theology. The human One (Jesus) in his identity with the pain–pathos of Dalits reveals the fullness of the Divine. There was not much divergence in Christ (the Divine One) apart from what is manifest in the serving and suffering Jesus of Nazareth. Along with God, Christ, too, is emptied into Jesus. The exalted and cosmic dimensions of Christ are not explored; instead, the quite mundane suffering and serving Jesus becomes more than sufficient for explicating Dalit Christology. Prabhakar makes this assertion boldly: To say that we are Christian Dalits and not just Dalits has Christological implications . . . It means first of all that we proclaim and affirm that Jesus, whose followers we are, was himself a Dalit, despite his being a Jew. It further means that both his humanity and his divinity are to be understood in terms of his dalitness. His dalitness is the key to the mystery of his divine-human unity.25

Dalit theology, thus, presents a mostly human and fully humane historical Jesus. This exceedingly modest Jesus as co-sufferer with afflicted collectives becomes the model for human living as ordained and acceptable to God. While there is much truth in such a human and humane focus on Jesus of Nazareth, one wonders if this figure is sufficient and efficient to save suffering Dalit communities. Can the assurance of co-suffering bring about a transformed

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reality where suffering can be overcome with the help of Jesus as the Christ? Must not the exalted and cosmic face of Jesus as Christ be exploited to actualize liberation from suffering for Dalits? It is because of the cosmic dimensions of the Christ that suffering is not hopeless and final. This power is needed if Jesus Christ must be thought of as able, trustworthy, and relevant to aid suffering Dalits to move towards freedom and liberation. My research into Dalit religion has been instructive in this regard. Ellaiyamman, a principal Dalit goddess in south India, does not merely suffer with her people. No doubt she lives among the outcaste and works constantly for their welfare. But her powers are also imposing and incredible. Her shakti (energy or power) is cosmic: she controls nature, demons, spirits, human beings, and, at times, even gods. The issue of highlighting the Christic dimension of Jesus needs to be revisited from the point of view of sustaining and nurturing suffering peoples to become agents with God in overcoming such subjugation. Dalit Christian theology, thus, needs continued confidence to experience and testify to Jesus as the one in solidarity with the suffering and serving communities of Dalits; renewed audacity to discover and announce Christ as the exalted and cosmic one in cooperation with the agency of oppressed Dalits in the march towards liberation; and imagination and discernment to hold both these dimensions together in composite proclamations of Jesus the Christ.26 ANTHROPOLOGY FROM THE WOUNDS OF CREATIVE DALIT CONSCIOUSNESS

Let me also say a few words on what Dalit reflectivity has to say about what can be affirmed about human beings in Christian theology in spite of the centuries of being treated as sub-humans. Dalit theology sets human beings free from the ruthless and mechanical operation of the principle of karma. This idea that one’s present historical situation, either of sufferings or enjoyment, is predetermined by one’s actions in previous births is the core justification of the unequal and unjust hierarchical system of human categorization. Brahmins have earned and thus, deserve the privileges of being high caste; whereas Dalits have secured and thus, must serve out the displeasure of being outcaste. Living as human beings means performing one’s appointed caste role and duty with collaborative dignity and respectful compliance, trusting that such karmic cooperation will enhance one’s position in the caste hierarchy in a future birthing. This system is detrimental to Dalits. ‘The karma theory robs humans of any impulse for questioning or radical change; it prevents the hungry from becoming angry. In fact it makes the slaves to enjoy slavery as a religious duty.’27

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For Dalit Christian theology, human beings are created by God in love and for freedom. This is the basis of Dalit theological anthropology. All forms of enslavement, inequality, and dalitness were invented by human beings and not by God. The following retelling of the Christian myth of origins reconfigures the source of inequality among human beings that leads to dalitness. It stresses that all human beings are created to mirror the work of God’s creative hands and loving heart. It further attests that human beings created dalitness, oppression, and brokenness by ejecting God from the world. Finally, it states that because Dalits were identified as friends of God, they became the target of domination and oppression by the strong. The inequality of human beings, thus, is hurtful to God and contrary to God’s design. Moreover, it is the calculating work of human beings in contravention to God’s desire and human welfare. Let me quote Samuel Rayan: Dalitness is a human creation. Its first victim was God; its most remarkable historical victim was Jesus Christ. The Bible tells of its origins and the way God dealt with it. In the beginning there was no dalitness, no oppression, no brokenness. All creation, including women and men, proceeded from the heart and the hands of God, bearing on them the imprint of his creative hands and the image of his loving heart . . . Then one day woman and man made a weighty decision all by themselves and without God. They made God a dalit . . . Dalitness then invaded the human world. One cannot make others untouchable without becoming untouchable oneself. Having Dalitised God, woman and man found themselves naked; their sense of self-worth declined; they began to shift blame. And finally brother killed brother, the stronger destroyed the weaker because the latter was perceived as a friend of God.28

In spite of such a powerful rendition of human beings as being created equally in the image of God, there also exists in Dalit theology a tendency to construe the existence of a reversal in the hierarchy carved out by the caste system. In such a rearranged constellation, Dalit communities are easily identifiable as democratic, earth and nature loving, non-aggressive, and helpful within a hierarchical, exploitative, violent, and hurtful world, engineered and administered by the caste communities. Even while an empathetic interpretation of such a Dalit retheorizing of theological anthropology may attribute this move as strategic, in order to valorize Dalit identity in an otherwise debased world of outcaste representation, maintaining such native binary human identities in a realistic and complex worldview is unfeasible and impractical. Affirming the full humanness and gifted dignity of Dalits and all other subjugated peoples without denying the same fullness and giftedness to other human collective is an ongoing challenge for Dalit theology. The healing of the self cannot take place

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without the healing of the other in an intimately interrelated and mutually interconnected web of human community. If pain–pathos can be the way to overcome suffering and oppression, then Dalit theology may have the key to open new doors of becoming human from the confines of our increasingly exploitative and dehumanizing world. CONCLUSION

Dalit theology, even while emerging as a counter-theology through its constructive moves, has substantially contributed to Christian theology in India. It arose in the early 1980s, to scuttle the unproblematic unitary march of Indian Christian theology towards possible Brahmanic captivity. Constructively, Dalit theology provided necessary space to interject the desperate and disparate subjugated reflections of a majority of dispossessed peoples that had been made silent in the discourse on matters having to do with God–world–humans. This essay explicates the methodological assertion of Dalit theology. It attempts to make contextual and conceptual sense of its methodological need to be exclusive without giving up its vision to be theologically inclusive. The politics of such a dialectic theological method both discerningly preserves the particularity of Dalit reflectivity and dialogically distributes its contribution to the rest of the Christian community. The essay, then, discusses the contributions of Dalit theology under two sub-themes. In the first cluster, I described the trajectories of a theology of rejection, rooted in the practice of refutation and deconstruction. Two concrete examples of such a theology involving the symbols of God and human being are examined. Dalit theology expresses strong denunciation of the dominant portrayal of God as a violent Lord who, as the ruling king, preserves the status quo for the sake of a righteous kingdom. Also, Dalit theology rejects any suggestions that human beings are created unequal and unfree. Both of these facets of Dalit theology reveal a forceful and concerted attack on the Hindu idea that God presides violently over the divinely ordered caste system to maintain the hierarchical arrangement of human beings. In the second cluster, I describe a theology of subjectivity that imaginatively spins out God–world–human symbolic configurations that depict the particularity of Dalit critical and constructive historical consciousness. I discuss renditions of the symbols of God, Jesus, and human being that arise from Dalit constructive theology and risk a sympathetic critique of these formulations with an eye towards providing possible directions for ongoing contextual theology in the twenty-first century.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. This is an expanded and revised version of an earlier article by Sathianathan Clarke, published in Italian: ‘La telogia dalit’, in M. Amaladoss and R. Gibellini (eds), 2006, Teologia in Asia, Brescia, Italy: Editrice Queriniana, pp. 42–75. 2. In this lecture, Nirmal assumed that there was a fluid line that distinguished the Shudra from the Dalit. He thus intended to capture all the marginalized, symbolized by the Untouchables/Depressed classes/Dalits, under the label ‘Shudra’. Based on the discussion that followed this presentation, and a more careful analysis on the structure and functioning of the caste system, Nirmal retitled this essay, ‘Towards a Christian Dalit Theology’, before publication. Clearly, by the time of its publication, Dalit identity seeking and Dalit theological articulation had become more concrete and better defined. 3. For a detailed discussion on this aspect of Dalit theology, see Sathianathan Clarke, 1998, Dalit and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–57. 4. For a well-documented article on Nirmal’s contribution to Dalit theology, see J. Jayakiran Sebastian, 1999, ‘Creative Exploration: Arvind P. Nirmal’s Ongoing Contribution to Christian Theology’, Bangalore Theological Forum, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 44–52. 5. Arvind P. Nirmal, 1991, ‘Towards a Christian Dalit Theology’, in Arvind P. Nirmal (ed.), A Reader in Dalit Theology, Madras: Gurukul, pp. 58–9. 6. Arvind P. Nirmal, 1991, ‘Doing Theology from a Dalit Perspective’, in Nirmal (ed.), A Reader in Dalit Theology, pp. 141–2. Emphasis in text. 7. Nirmal, “Doing Theology from a Dalit Perspective,” p. 142. 8. V.L. Kalekar, 1986, ‘Rejection’, in Barbara R. Joshi (ed.), Untouchable: Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement, London: Zed Books, p. 77. 9. V. Devasahayam, 1997, ‘Doing Dalit Theology: Basic Assumptions’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, Madras: ISPCK/Gurukul, pp. 281–2. 10. Arvind P. Nirmal, 1988, ‘A Dialogue with Dalit Literature’, in M.E. Prabhakar (ed.), Towards a Dalit Theology, Delhi: ISPCK, p. 80. 11. V. Devasahayam, 1997, ‘The Nature of Dalit theology as Counter Ideology’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 53. 12. Ibid., p. 54. 13. V. Devasahayam, 1992, ‘Recovering the Biblical Vision’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Dalits and Women: Quest for Humanity, Madras: Gurukul, p. 214. 14. K. Wilson, 1988, ‘An Approach to Christian Theology’, in Prabhakar (ed.), Towards a Dalit Theology, p. 50. 15. Nirmal, ‘Doing Theology from a Dalit Perspective’, p. 143. 16. James Massey, 1994, Towards Dalit Hermeneutics: Re-reading the Text, the History and the Literature, Delhi: ISPCK, p. 106. 17. Nirmal, ‘A Dialogue with Dalit Literature’, p. 80. 18. Nirmal, ‘Towards A Christian Dalit Theology’, p. 64. 19. A. Maria Arul Raja, 2001, ‘Christian Leadership and Dalit Issues and Concerns’, in James Massey and S. Lourduswamy (eds), A Theology from Dalit Perspective, New Delhi: Centre for Dalit Studies, p. 61. 20. See Clarke, Dalits and Christianity.

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21. The efforts of A.M. Abraham Ayrookuzhiel, A. Maria Arul Raja, and Sathianathan Clarke must be mentioned in such an ethnographic venture to ferret out the cultural and religious myths, symbols, and ritual practices of Dalits. 22. A. Maria Arul Raja, 1997, ‘Some Reflections on a Dalit Reading of the Bible’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 340. 23. Nirmal, ‘A Dialogue with Dalit Literature’, p. 80. 24. James Massey, 2001, ‘Vision and Role of Dalit Theology’, in Massey and Lourduswamy (eds), A Theology from Dalit Perspective, p. 74. 25. M.E. Prabhakar, 1997, ‘Christology in Dalit Perspective’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 414. 26. I have made a similar argument with regard to Indian Christian theology in ‘The Jesus of Nineteenth Century Indian Christian Theology: An Indian Inculturation with Continuing Problems and Prospects’, Studies in World Christianity, vol. 5, no. 1, 1999, pp. 32–46. 27. V. Devasahayam, 1992, ‘Job: Demythologization of Karma Theory’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Dalits and Women, p. 228. 28. Samuel Rayan, 1992, ‘The Challenge of the Dalit Issue: Some Theological Perspectives’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Dalits and Women, p. 127.

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2 Expanding the Ambit Dalit Theological Contribution to Ecumenical Social Thought MANCHALA DEENABANDHU

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his reflection begins against the backdrop of certain questions which I believe are valid at this moment in time as we discern the content and purposes of Dalit theology in the twenty-first century: if Dalit theology is rooted in the specific experience of being Dalit, making sense only to the Dalits, how is it relevant to those with different identities and experiences, and in different contexts? If Dalit experience and reality are the subject matter, how does Dalit theology itself evolve in response to the changing dynamics of these empirical realities? If the ultimate purpose of theology is to effect positive changes in the larger socio-political realties of life, which is what the Dalit struggle claims to be about, how does Dalit theology go about reaching that objective? There are, of course, a few more fundamental questions. Do the Dalits need a theology at all for their liberation? If the primary addressees of theology are the members of the church, how many Dalit Christians really want a theology that reminds them of an identity that they have always wanted to shed? How many non-Dalit Indian Christians know or want to know what Dalit theology is all about? Perhaps the array of questions can be pointedly summarized in the following two theologically poignant ones: can Dalit theology ever be a theology for all?; and can it challenge and enrich other theological articulations, within India and elsewhere? If an affirmative stance is taken to the above two questions, a third will become obvious: what is the future of Dalit theology in the twenty-first century? The purpose of this essay is to see how Dalit theology, an identity- and context-specific theological reflection, could present itself as relevant to a wider audience. One of the claims made when Dalit theology was initially attempted is that it was a counter-theology, an alternative theological discourse that has the potential to deconstruct the redundant and the cumbersome pathways of theological discourse and to reconstruct theology so

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that it becomes an agent of progressive change. A.P. Nirmal, in his lecture that sowed the seeds of Dalit theology three decades ago, said: [Christian Dalit Theology]...will narrate the story of their pathos and their protest against the socio-economic injustices they have been subjected to throughout history. It will anticipate liberation which is meaningful to them. It will represent a radical discontinuity with the classical Indian Christian theology of the Brahminic tradition...This also means that a Christian Dalit theology will be a counter theology.1

It also proposed the necessity and possibility of a post-denominational Christian presence in India through a self-discovery of the Indian church in engagement with the Dalit struggles for justice and dignity and a new and just Indian society. It also claimed that since Dalits form the majority of the Indian church, it was only appropriate that the Dalit Indian church opt for a theological orientation that augured well with the experiences and aspirations of those who form the church. During the past three decades, there have been significant gains: a good quantum of creative and substantial Dalit theological literature, the recognition of being a valid theological discourse worldwide, and its incorporation as a discipline into theological curriculum resulting in several postgraduate and doctoral dissertations both in India and abroad. It is also heartening to note that quite a number of churches have launched departments and programmes addressing the concerns of the Dalits. However, while acknowledging the general tendency of most Indian churches not to be rooted in any specific theological orientation but be swayed by popular trends, Dalit theology remains and is seen only as a theological perspective of and relevant to the marginalized. In theological seminaries, with a few exceptions, Dalit theology seems a viable choice only for Dalit students.2 It has so far remained an academic discipline and its future depends on the persistence and adaptability of those concerned with the new and changing realties of the Dalit life world and their commitment to do theology that addresses the whole church community. It is true that nothing much has changed as far as Dalit reality is concerned. Violence against them goes unabated with impunity. At the session on India during the recent Universal Periodic Review of the UN Human Rights’ Council in India, the Indian government was asked to account for the impunity that certain people in power enjoy for their crimes they commit against the Dalits and other vulnerable communities.3 According to official Indian crime statistics, averaged over the period 2001–5, twentyseven atrocities against Dalits are committed everyday; thirteen Dalits are murdered every week; five Dalit homes are burnt every week; six Dalits are kidnapped or abducted every week; three Dalit women are raped every

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day, eleven Dalits are beaten every day; and a crime committed against a Dalit every 18 minutes.4 These reveal that Dalit oppression and victimization is an issue that needs to be constantly stressed, particularly amidst the euphoria of India’s recent economic successes through human resource development. Poverty and unemployment among the Dalits are also on the rise on account of the monopoly of big business and industry. Even in the face of these realities of violence, discrimination and exclusion continuing, the Dalit mood certainly has changed. Dalits are no more passive but are active and aware—asserting their rights, aspiring for participation and leadership, willing to take risks, and resisting abuse and oppression even if it provokes violent repression. Today, many of them are aware that their suffering is unjust and are also ready to confront the forces. In fact, most of the cases of atrocities are reactions to Dalit resistance. Besides economic pressures induced by an increasingly commercialized agricultural activity in the rural areas, the Dalits are also making deliberate choices to move out of oppressive social contexts. Also, one cannot ignore the reality of the horizontal struggles for power and privileges among Dalit sub-castes, even as they remain at the bottom rung of the social ladder. Increased access to information and communication technology has helped them to be better informed and to become more connected with Dalits in other parts of India and the world. As such, Dalit movements and Dalit literature have become more visible and have become a force to reckon with. The concerted way the Dalit movements have brought the issue of Dalit human rights to international forums ever since the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, in spite of the Indian government’s counter moves, is remarkable.5 Today, the Dalit issue remains on the agenda of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the European Parliament, and of several other European governments. Since 2001, the World Social Forum, too, has become a space for many Dalit movements to rally together and to earn new partners and allies in their struggle; however, this has not meant that the movements are not faced with their own inner disunities, co-option from dominant groups, and leadership issues,6 yet what is being noticed are broader alliances and new attitudes. Meanwhile, there has also been greater mobilization among the victims of caste system. The backward castes, often referred to as Bahujans, and the Dalits find themselves in increased collaboration for achieving social emancipation and political empowerment. Uttar Pradesh, one of the most politically decisive states in India, now has a Dalit woman as its chief minister. This new-found attitude can also be noticed among Dalit Christians, especially in matters of seeking and fighting for their constitutional rights.

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Today, more Dalit Christians are able to assert their Dalit identity than they did three decades ago. There are also some non-Dalit Christians and theologians who look at the Dalit issue not as an issue that concerns only the Dalits but as one that seriously challenges the credibility of the faith claims of any Christian in India. These developments make it necessary to revisit the methodological assumptions and tools that have guided theological trends so far. If Dalit theology is to have a future, it needs to open itself up to these moods and options of the Dalits in their struggle for an egalitarian, just, and humane Indian society. These changed moods also reveal that there is an urge to expand the horizons of Dalit theology in order to include allies, to expand its ambit and relevance to wider realties, to affirm their identity of protest against an oppressive social system, and to move beyond a victim mindset. Therefore, it is not suffering, Dalit pathos, alone but also their experience of struggle to overcome suffering and their determination to risk themselves for the sake of liberation and justice that now needs to be considered as the subject matter of theological reflection. Taking note of these changed moods, and in response to the earlier questions about the scope of Dalit theology, I propose to reflect on the future directions for Dalit theology in dialogue with the theological reflections of the ecumenical movement. In so doing, I shall also identify areas for mutual challenge and enrichment. The reasons for this attempt are the following: ecumenical theology, as an instrument of the ecumenical movement, by advocating and fostering Christian unity, has also been an instrument of prophetic witness that constantly upheld the need of churches to be engaged with the realities of the world in response to their calling to participate in God’s ongoing mission. Through a process of critical interpretation of the traditions of its member churches, the ecumenical movement furthers the search for relevance and authenticity in the ever-changing contexts of time and space. To some extent, one can say that ecumenical theology too, like Dalit theology, has been a counter-theological discourse, an alternative to the dominant ways of theological reflection that is often grounded in western denominational/confessional ecclesial settings. Likewise, it is also faced with the need to make itself relevant to the changed realities of the twenty-first century as it is cast in and remains in the methodological mould of the twentieth century western ecclesial reality.7 The twenty-first century world is not any more an ideologically divided, bipolar, predominantly economically and politically powerful Christian world. Instead, it is a pluralistic world, overwhelmed by a complex interplay of exclusive and excluding powers and interests. Our contemporaneous world appears to further consolidate the structures and cultures of injustice

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with people opting for narrow and self-oriented community formations in spite of the claims of an emerging world without barriers and borders. Life in this twenty-first century world faces threats of abuse and destruction because of the cultures of consumerism and commodification, violence and terror, global warming and the impending catastrophe. Furthermore, Christianity today is predominantly a religion of the people in the South. There are more Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America than in Europe and North America. These Christians and churches are constantly exposed to the realities of poverty, ill health, disease, disasters, and economic and political exploitation by the hegemonic powers, both local and global. Such a geo-political ethos, besides offering itself as fertile soil for some of the most ultra conservative and fundamentalist Christian theologies from the West, has also been the home ground for some very creative and significant theological articulations that have exposed the irrelevance of western, dogmatic, and denominational theologies. The theological articulations of the poor in situations of intense misery and oppression in Latin America, which inspired similar attempts in many parts of North America, Africa, and Asia, have posed an inevitable challenge for any theological activity to be grounded in and relevant to context and experience of the people on whose behalf it is done. By critiquing the ideological orientations of the western Christian edifices and expressions, these theologies articulate alternative ways of being church and human communities. Unfortunately, these theologies are often referred to as peripheral perspectives by those who claim ownership of the mainstream, which for them are western, traditional, denominational theologies. Therefore, ecumenical theology needs to open itself up to these theological discourses from the underside of this globalized world for its own agility and credibility. Likewise, if these theological reflections are to be relevant and challenge the larger body of the church to join these struggles for life, they need to become more adaptable and expansive. It is perhaps necessary at this stage to mention about a historic event that has attempted to make a difference, particularly in an attempt to bring these two streams together.8 The Dalit struggles for justice and dignity became not only ethical but faith reasons for the churches and organizations from many parts of the world that participated in the Global Ecumenical Conference in Solidarity with the Dalits in Bangkok from 21–4 March 2009. This conference, convened by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation in partnership with the Christian Conference of Asia, had a two-fold agenda: one to encourage and enable the global ecumenical community to renew its solidarity with the Dalits in South Asia and elsewhere in their struggles

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for justice and dignity which have intensified in the present complex world of the twenty-first century. And two, to encourage the churches to address the failure of the international community at the 2001 Word Conference against Racism in Durban in addressing caste-based discrimination in spite of the best efforts of over 200 Dalit activists present there, because of the collusion of other governments with the Indian government which did not want caste-based discrimination to be addressed by the conference, and to support the efforts of the Dalit movements to reconsider at the Follow-up Durban Review Conference in Geneva in April 2009. Those who were in Bangkok, having heard the ghastly stories of discrimination, violence, abuse, and human rights violations, issued a statement which has now come to be widely known as ‘The Bangkok Declaration and Call, in which they said in unambiguous terms, ‘Caste discrimination is a crime and casteism is sin because it contradicts the Christian teaching that all are created in the image of God’. It is with this intention of finding further possibilities for mutual challenge and enrichment that I chose to reflect on three areas of major concern for churches and the ecumenical movement: unity, mission, and identity of the church. UNITY AND INCLUSIVITY THROUGH THE EYES OF THE EXCLUDED

The ecumenical movement, in its relentless pursuit of unity, has enabled churches to be open for dialogue, partnership, convergence, and even organic forms of unity. There are a variety of structural expressions of the ecumenical movement, both global and local. For the sake of this discussion, this essay will draw on the theological reflections facilitated by the WCC, particularly as it brings together resources of diverse church traditions from around the world into conversation. The experience of the Dalit communities, on the other hand, is local. Reflecting on the theological reflections of the ecumenical movement, which have wider focus and concerns, on the basis of the localized Dalit life world may seem out of place. Nevertheless, the Dalit experiential questions and answers, as emerging from the faith of the hitherto objects of history and of the victims of a culture of exclusion, certainly have much to offer to the ecumenical movement in its search for newer and more authentic forms of affirmation and practice of Christian faith.9 Moreover, all macro-level conceptualizations must begin with, and be relevant to, the micro and existential levels, and be enriched by the same. What began as a response to the reality of the scandalous division of the church, against the backdrop of war and a divided world and as a response to Jesus’ prayer that ‘they all may be one’ ( Jn 17: 21), soon

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assumed a larger purpose of the unity of humankind (Eph 1.8 -10) within the ecumenical movement.10 Since the Uppsala Assembly in 1968, with the active participation of the churches from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the issues of justice, peace, development, and realities of poverty, violence, and environmental destruction became the perspectives through which ecumenical theological and ethical reflection took place. Since then, there have been significant breakthroughs in the ecumenical journey. One only need mention the following key events and documents: the 1966 Geneva Conference; the World Convocation on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC) in Seoul in 1990; Faith and Order and JPIC joint study during the 1990s entitled, Ecclesiology and Ethics; the Faith and Order’s study on Nature and Purpose of the Church; and the various programmes and studies undertaken by the Decade to Overcome Violence (2001–10). In this search for Christian unity, seeking doctrinal convergence was seen as the first step and, accordingly, considerable time and effort were, and continue to be, invested towards this goal. Along the journey, it also became evident that certain non-theological factors such as national and ethnic identities, notions of the Self and Other, etc., also play a role in keeping the churches away from each other.11 In recent times, the options of churches on certain ethical issues have also been identified as a potential area for disunity.12 Reiterating the limitations in linking global reflection processes with the specific challenges of the local situations, a couple of major questions remain to be addressed. If the purpose of Christian unity is to witness together the ‘one hope, one lord, one faith and one baptism’, how is it that there are such rampant practices of discrimination and exclusion within churches; of women and others deemed unimportant by the dominant cultures and structures of society? How do we account for the shameful reality of churches organized along racial and ethnic identities, the practice of caste discrimination and the exclusion of the Dalits, and the insensitivity towards and rejection of people living with disabilities? Churches cannot continue to explain away their blatant non-compliance with the values of the gospel in the name of tradition and culture. The reality of these abhorrent practices exposes the shallowness of our concepts of and efforts towards interchurch unity. This is where Dalit theological and ecclesiological reflections, with their strong accent on justice, equality, and human dignity, can contribute to the discourse on Christian unity. Any church which attempts to seek partnership and to be in communion with others while not being just and inclusive within, and while not doing anything about the same, is not only deceptive but also an embarrassment to the faith that it claims to affirm

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and live out in the world. Inclusivity within is necessary for the credibility of the church’s pursuits and propagations of unity. Furthermore, in a predominantly pluralistic world, and in India too, where other religious communities do not have organized institutional expressions like churches and their councils and where attempts towards unity among these are virtually non-existent, the Christian agenda of seeking unity can even be a dangerous pursuit, one that can evoke fear and hostility. A broader and inclusive moral agenda and larger social vision and openness to new realities are necessary in the pursuits of Christian unity. This is, again, another area where Dalit theology can enrich the reflections and actions towards unity. The Dalit movements too are unity movements. Values such as the aspirations for justice, equality, and dignity for all bring the Dalits together and they seek to align themselves with all who are committed to this social vision. Such an understanding would imply seeking non-institutional forms of unity and being open to people of other faiths and no-faiths for the sake of life and its integrity in today’s world. The Bangkok Declaration identified casteism as an ecumenical issue not only for common action but for the ideological visions of the Dalits in their struggles against injustice and discrimination. Thus, ecumenism itself assumes a new character and purpose, proposing radical changes to church’s self-understanding and its understanding of unity itself. On the other hand, Dalit theology must also propose new visions of church and society that are just and inclusive, new concepts of community, a more people-based unity for justice and life for all, helping the Dalit sub-castes and other victims of caste to overcome their caste mindset, and on forms of trans-denominational ecclesial existence that are committed to churches calling to be agents of change in the world. MISSION: BROKEN PEOPLE MOVING TOWARDS SHALOM

Within the broader ambit of ecumenical theology, reflection on the churches’ engagement with the world is often referred to as ecumenical social thought. Although traditional missiological reflections always seemed reluctant to identify with it, substantively, these reflections have consistently upheld the inevitable interrelation between the church’s being and doing, the importance of their transformative character, and the imperative to be committed to justice for all. Out of the enormous amount of insights from a rich and long tradition, three major contributions concerning mission may be mentioned. The first is the link forged between nature and mission of the church. A recent and ongoing study on the nature and purpose of the church

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needs special mention.13 Several of the past conferences on mission too upheld that the church, although a human and social institution, exists and believes that it is called into being for a purpose; and if the church cannot do what it is called for, it ceases to be a church. This is an issue that churches need to explore, particularly discerning their faithfulness to the gospel in each context. Besides the assertion of this intrinsic link between the nature and mission of the church, one other combination within the ecumenical movement that has stood out prominently has been that of ecclesiology and ethics which upholds the link between the search for the visible unity of the church and the churches’ calling to prophetic witness and service.14 This has resulted in the Faith and Order and the JPIC movements embarking on a collaborative venture of study and reflection which affirmed the ethical character of the church: ‘the Church not only has, but is, a social ethic, a koinonia ethic’,15 the inevitable relation of the unity of Christ’s Church with ethics, and warned of the danger of malformation within the church on account of it only wanting to remain as a human institution reflecting the brokenness of World. The second involves the expansion of the ambit of mission from a church-centred Christian agenda to the whole world, highlighting the essential link between church and the reign of God. From the 1953 Faith and Order’s Montreal Conference onwards, there has been a conscious thrust in this direction resulting in the well-known theme, ‘The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community’.16 The collective wisdom of the ecumenical movement has emphasized that the ultimate point of reference for the Christian faith is not the church but the kingdom of God. Because the kingdom is the criterion for the authenticity and credibility of the church, it shapes the purpose of the church. The mission of God is ongoing, irrespective of whether the church participates in it or not. In fact, it would be the church’s loss if it fails to be a part of this kingdom process. A third pronouncement reaffirms the interconnection between church and its calling to seek justice. The world conference of Faith and Order in Santiago de Compostella emphasized this link in clear terms: ‘To move towards true koinonia, two things are simultaneously necessary. First, we must continue to struggle towards a clearer understanding of the missionary nature of the Church. Second, we must seek new ways to cooperate in shared services, proclamation and action for justice.’17 It also attempted a new definition of the church using the new combination as the criterion: ‘The Church is the community of people called by God who, through the Holy Spirit, are united with Jesus Christ and sent as his disciples to witness

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to and participate in God’s reconciliation.’18 In other words, diakonia is not another function of this koinonia. Rather, being koinonia in Christ is a way of doing diakonia. The kingdom is not only a vision and a hope; it is a practice. The church is a sign through which this divine promise is made present. This calls for an internalization of the values of the kingdom within the church. Therefore, the practice of justice becomes the defining mark of credibility in the church. By emphasizing mission as a constitutive element besides an essential function of the church, and by upholding the need to witness to the hope of God’s reign, ecumenical discussions have certainly challenged the churches to be more than mere religious communities, but as communities witnessing through resistance and hope. Yet, two questions need to be addressed in this context, the first one being, if mission is essentially the realization of the coming reign of God of justice, peace, and life for all, then to what extent are the churches truly committed to these values? An overview of the concepts and models of mission would reveal that churches’ concepts of mission are, by and large, driven by Christian and institutional interests and considerations. Justice is often seen as outside the ambit of mission and more as an ethical challenge that requires diakonal response. But justice is the will of God; it is relational, eschatological, the missio dei, and the validating feature of the coming reign of God. Isn’t justice then the goal of Christian unity, mission, and service? Ironically, in spite of its repeated and overwhelming assertion in ecumenical conversations, justice has not yet become the perspective through which these goals of the ecumenical movement are pursued. The Bangkok Declaration called upon the churches, to take up Dalit liberation and solidarity and accompanying the Dalit movements as a central mission objective’. It said, ‘We reaffirm our commitment to Dalits and all other marginalized and exploited communities. This is the preferential option for the poor. We invite all . . . to join with us in actions of solidarity to render human dignity and justice to all Dalits and to combat a injustice and inequality, in order to live up to our calling as ‘the beloved community’, the people of God.’

Then the second question is: is it then possible to see the Dalit struggle as an effort towards the realization of God’s mission? The Dalits struggle against a culture of exclusion and oppression in hope for a new India that is inclusive and just. There are many movements and individuals in India who are involved in these movements of Dalits and other marginalized communities for justice, peace, and human rights not because of any religious motivation but because of their sheer commitment to these values. The Bangkok Conference too wanted interfaith dialogue to confront casteism and uphold human dignity, especially Dalit liberation.19

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The fact that a majority of Christians and churches in India are absent in many of these expressions points to the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way they understand the gospel and its implications. The reality of caste discrimination right within the churches and the indifference of the rest of the community to the plight of the Dalits, reveal that many churches and Christians cherish and operate with concepts of mission formulated from locations of power and privilege, holding forth mission as actions of charity and service to the outside world. When Christians were attacked in Orissa and Gujarat some years ago, Christians (Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, etc.) came together, took to the streets, and worked diligently to sensitize the world of their threatened safety and privileges. Sadly, there has never been such coming together or demonstration of outrage when Dalits are massacred, women gang-raped, and tribals displaced elsewhere in many parts of India. In other words, this attitude exposes not only their skewed expressions of unity but also their indifference to unjust suffering. The struggles of the Dalits for justice offer new possibilities for the Indian churches and Christians to rediscover themselves afresh in God’s movement towards a new world of justice, peace, and life for all. This underscores the need for Dalit theology to reassert justice as a validating principle for church’s mission. Another related question is also relevant: if mission is an essential function of the church, then to what extent do the traditional models of mission, which are essentially paternalistic in spirit and rely a great deal on resources, infrastructure, and expertise, view the poor, rural, and excluded Dalit communities as involved in mission? There is a need to find alternative criteria for mission. First, the Dalit resistance of oppression and exploitation itself is an important form of mission. In spite of their disabilities, they are finding ways to live as human beings with dignity and justice. Second, if the mission of God is the liberation of the oppressed and the affirmation of life, then the locale of that mission is the Dalit communities where people struggle to uphold the will of God. Mission is where people join together to respond to the purposes of God. Third, the Dalit communities, with their new Dalit consciousness, are moving beyond denominational and religious boundaries. The grass roots Dalit movements are joining hands with the other oppressed people of the Indian society, namely, backward castes, tribals, women, and the urban poor, to counter caste and the institutions that have become infested with caste. Churches which exist in such contexts of intense suffering caused by cultures of oppression and of struggle for justice and life cannot but be on the side of these oppressed communities, living through their shame and rejection

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and marching along with them sharing in their hopes and aspirations. The ecumenical movement, on the other hand, needs to recognize these actions of resistance and transformation as important forms of mission. Speaking truth to powers, confronting structures and cultures that oppress and kill, and resisting oppression and injustice have been the most important divine-led actions in the biblical story. The Bangkok Conference was specific in urging the churches in the ecumenical community to: ‘Address your governments in relation to their trade and development policies, their role at the UN and related bodies, the European Union or other appropriate institutions, to contribute to international recognition of and cooperation to eradicate caste based discrimination.’ KINGDOM-NEGOTIATED IDENTITIES AND INTER-LOCATIONS

Universal theological discourses tend to indulge in generalizations about people, their realities, and the socio-political contexts within which they live. Contextual or experiential theologies, on the other hand, tend to lose sight of the larger realities and the need to make sense to the wider matrix of life. This is yet another area that seems to offer possibilities for ecumenical theology and Dalit theology to benefit through mutual challenge in their pursuits of effecting change. Much of the ecumenical social thought has evolved in response to the dominant local and global trends. Marxist analyses of society, the pre- and post-cold war ideologies, the neo-liberal ideologies, and so on, besides others have been the points of engagement for its critical reflection. Consequently, discussion around the challenges of economic injustice, environmental destruction, the phenomenon of violence, and so on, tended to rely more on the conclusions drawn with the analytical tools of social sciences. However, there are a few problems with this approach. First of all, theological formulations for churches’ engagement with the world, arrived at without taking into account the distinct geo-political realities and social locations of people, fail to evoke appropriate actions and responses among those to whom these are addressed. Such formulations done in predominantly powerful, Christian, western contexts have been found not only irrelevant but also counterproductive in situations that are the exact opposite. Theologies from the South have constantly exposed this problem of the absolutizing tendency of western theological activity. Second, theology is about the meaning and presence of God in the complex web of life. Life is lived out within distinct geo-political and socio-cultural milieu. Social identities and locations of people play a decisive role in the way values, cultures, and traditions bestow or deprive

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opportunities for life to be lived out in its fullest potential. These also influence patterns of behaviour and structures of relationships. Theology, therefore, is about views and understanding, about feelings and experiences of persons and communities in each given context. Theology, if it claims to be a theology of life, then has to be conscious of these dynamics of life. The third problem is that such an approach does not augur well with the distinct nature and purpose of the church. Churches and the ecumenical movement are neither non-governmental organizations (NGOs) nor governments but faith communities that understand themselves as having a distinct calling and purpose to participate in God’s mission of transformation of the world. If furthering this cause is the sole objective of church’s mission, then it has to be pursued from the vantage point of people, their contexts and experiences, their identities and locations, as well as their visions and aspirations. Therefore, it is against this backdrop of imperatives that the church opts for the poor. Option for the poor is not a paternalistic response but a solid expression of its determination to transform situations and people, to end injustice that is embedded in our structures and cultures. Such an understanding also brings us to recognize that the poor—the victims—have names and faces and most of them belong to those sections of society that have been unjustly treated by the dominant structures and cultures. They have identities—imposed and often derisive—that allow and perpetuate their continued victimization. As such, these identities are packed with prejudices. In the Indian context, caste identities operate as instruments of injustice as well as of social distance among people. These determine as well as point to one’s power and position in society, either of respect or of derision, and accordingly influence his or her social behaviour, perceptions, worldview, and goals. So much so that decades of democratic political life with an egalitarian constitution have not been able to make much of a dent on the structural inequalities of the Indian society. India’s poverty is most felt by the people from the lower castes. The most illiterate, the most unemployed, the most unorganized labourers, the most vulnerable to epidemics and diseases, the most who die young and untimely, and the most exploited by the politicians are the Dalits, the worst victims of caste system who, numbering around 160 million, exist by various names all over the country. Along with them are the tribals and the backward caste communities. It is this derisive identity imposed by the caste system that also inhibits many a Christian convert from other castes to hide their new Christian identity and several others from openly associating themselves with the majority of the Indian Christian community.

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This tendency to denigrate the humanity of certain people and communities can also be seen in the phenomenon of the commodification of the human person in our increasingly economics-driven world. Human beings are treated as mere agents and consumers of production and are dispensed with if they fail to be such. Human trafficking, plight of the migrant workers, refugees and displaced people, xenophobia, and racist violence, too, flourish on similar notions of the other that many people cherish. Therefore, identities and locations are the important vantage points that could make our reflections on ecumenical vocation creative and distinct. The Dalit struggle for human dignity offers these possibilities for the churches and the ecumenical movement. In spite of the derisive connotations attributed, I would like to assert that Dalit identity is liberative, dignified, and progressive. While other identities based on caste, race, language, region, religion, and similar associations are sociological in nature, the Dalit identity is based on their shared vision of an ethically transformed Indian society. By acknowledging their predicament of unjust suffering and oppression, they expose, confront, and counter the injustice that lies at the foundations of India’s social, religious, economic, and political structures. Hence, Dalit identity is countercultural and ideological in nature and purpose. It affirms the dignity of every human being and promotes alternative values of justice and equality that are absent in the dominant cultural traditions of the Indian society. This assertion of the ‘Dalit identity’, therefore, is the key ideological tool in their struggle for the birth of a new social order. It is committed to the destruction of caste system. The numerous grass roots Dalit movements all over India, and the growing solidarity among them and with other backward castes who also experience caste discrimination and economic impoverishment to a substantial degree, testify to the determination of the excluded millions of India to usher in a new social order that does not discriminate, exclude, and dehumanize. Therefore, owning the Dalit identity should be seen as a liberating factor for the Indian church. In so doing, the Indian church has the possibility of discovering itself afresh as that alternative community that witnessed through being and doing. It is both a rejection of all forces of discrimination and exclusion within and around as well as an affirmation of the hope in the vision of God’s reign. Such an identity, from a Christian point of view, implies a life of faithfulness in obedience to the Lord who showed the way by taking upon himself rejection, suffering, and death. It implies a radical reorientation of the Church’s internal life, priorities, and vocation and giving up the privileges that the social and institutional churches and their leaders have enjoyed.

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To sum up, Dalit theological articulations need to take the new Dalit moods seriously and be driven by a determination to destroy caste system rather than continue to build and elaborate on the experience of violation and victimization. This is not to minimize its importance but to recognize the inspiring and empowering potential of the spirit of resistance and determination to effect change. After all, the Dalit struggle is an anti-caste struggle. A Dalit is one who is opposed to the very logic and ideology of human division on the basis of caste. While proposing Dalit identity as a liberating identity, it is perhaps appropriate to consider expanding the meaning of Dalit to include all those who oppose, reject, and strive to eradicate caste. Their accents on social visions are helpful not only to strengthen and find partnerships but also to be a ferment of change in contexts where social hegemonies overwhelm commonsense. Dalit missiological reflections, to that extent, must set life-affirming and life-enhancing standards for Christian mission in India, particularly by proposing the agenda of resisting and transforming cultures and structures that oppress and kill. Its ecclesiological reflections need to propose the necessity of seeking unity based on values and visions rather than merely on seeking convergence on dogma, doctrine, and tradition and at the level of institutions. The ecumenical theology, on the other hand, needs to recognize the necessity of reorienting itself as a prophetic instrument advocating for and speaking truth to powers on behalf of the disempowered and disenfranchised. In a world where abuse of power and injustice, though various manifestations, are destroying the beautiful and complex web of life, mission cannot continue to revolve around Christian interests. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. This lecture was further developed in Arvind P. Nirmal, 1991, ‘Towards a Christian Dalit Theology’, in Arvind P. Nirmal (ed.), A Reader in Dalit Theology, Madras: Gurukul, pp. 58–9. For more on this, see also, M.E. Prabhakar (ed.), 1988, Towards a Dalit Theology, Delhi: Indian Society for Pormoting Christian Knowledge (ISPCK). 2. Other creative theological articulations such as Feminist theology, Black theology, tribal theology, among others, seem to be the options of those who belong to these identities. 3. UN Human Rights Council, 2008, Universal Periodic Review, No. A/HRC/WG.6/1/ IND/4, 14 April. 4. For more on this, visit: www.idsn.org. Also Human Rights Watch, 1999, Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s Untouchables, New York; Aloysius Irudayam S.J., Jayashree P. Mangubhai, and Joel G. Lee, 2006, Dalit Women Speak Out: Violence against Dalit Women in India, Study Report, Vols I and II, New Delhi: NCDHR, NFDW & IDEAS. 5. Sukhadeo Thorat and Umakanth (eds), 2004, Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, New Delhi: Rawat Publications.

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6. Cf. John C.B. Webster, 1997, The Pastor to Dalits, Delhi: ISPCK, p. 118. 7. Building on the earlier process on ‘Towards a Common Understanding and Vision’, the WCC has launched another process of discerning the shape and features of ‘Ecumenism in the 21st Century’ in 2004. 8. It must be mentioned that the churches in the World Council of Churches (WCC) first became aware of the Dalit issue with the passionate appeals by Bishop Masilamani Azariah of the Church of South India at its VI Assembly in Vancouver, Canada, in 1983. Following its VII Assembly in Canberra, Australia, in 1991, the WCC launched its Dalit Solidarity Programme under the leadership of Dr James Massey of the Church of North India. 9. Konrad Raiser’s comment on the Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) in Latin America and their challenges to the ecumenical movement is worth mentioning here: ‘The controversy in Latin America over the Church of the people and the emergence of the Church (ecclesiogenesis) out of the life of the people has in particular reverberated beyond that continent. It is a debate of vital importance for the future of the ecumenical movement. Ultimately, it is a question of whether the ecumenical movement is an affair of the whole people of God, an integral part of the spiritual vocation of every Christian through baptism, or simply a matter of interchurch relations’ (Konrad Raiser, 1991, Ecumenism in Transition: A Paradigm Shift in the Ecumenical Movement, Geneva: World Council of Churches, p. 29). 10. The unity of humankind became an explicit theme since the early 1960s. Two major processes of reflection that need to be mentioned here are: the Faith and Order studies on ‘The Unity of the Church and the Unity of Mankind’ launched in 1971; and ‘The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of the Human Community’ in Lima in 1982. For more on this, see John Deschner, 2002, ‘Unity of Humankind’, in Nicholas Lossky et al. (eds), Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (2nd edition), Geneva, WCC, pp. 1178–9. 11. Some recent studies of the Faith and Order such as Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Unity of the Church and Theological Anthropology have attempted to address some of these questions. These have resulted in the following publication respectively: 2006,’Participating in God’s Mission of Reconciliation: A Resource for Churches in Situations in Conflict’, Faith and Order, Paper 201, Geneva, WCC, and 2005, ‘Christian Perspectives on Theological Anthropology’, Faith and Order, Paper 199, Geneva, WCC. 12. Faith and Order has recently launched a study process (2008–13) called, ‘Moral Discernment in the Churches’, in an attempt to address certain ethical questions that seem to divide the churches. 13. 2005, ‘The Nature and Mission of the Church—A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement’, Faith and Order Paper No. 198, Geneva, WCC. This text is the latest result from Faith and Order’s study on ecclesiology. It seeks to express common convictions about the church, its nature and mission, and to identify the ecclesiological issues which continue to divide the churches today. 14. It must be said that this new emphasis on the link between ecclesiology and ethics has also been the concern of the earlier study process on ‘Church and World’: ‘The Church is that part of humanity which has been led to accept, affirm and acknowledge ever more fully the liberating truth of the kingdom for all people. It is the community of those who are experiencing the presence of the kingdom and actively awaiting its

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final fulfilment. The Church is, therefore, called to live as that force within humanity through which God’s will for the renewal, justice, community and salvation of all people is witnessed’ (1990, ‘Church and World: The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of the Human Community’, Faith and Order Paper 151, p. 23 Geneva, WCC). 15. Also see Thomas Best and Martin Robra, 1997, Ecclesiology and Ethics, Geneva: WCC. 16. The famous 1966 conference on ‘Christians in the Technical and Social Revolutions of our Time’, the report of which is published as, 1967, World Conference on Church and Society: Official Report, Geneva, WCC, and the Faith and Order study process on ‘The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community:1984–1992’, published as 1990, ‘Church and World: The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of the Human community’, Faith and Order Paper 151, Geneva, WCC.. 17. 1994, ‘Report of Section IV: Called to a Common Witness for a Renewed World’, in Thomas Best and Gunther Gassmann (eds), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, Faith and Order Paper No. 166, Geneva, WCC, p. 256. 18. Ibid., p. 259. 19. http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=6729

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3 The Diversity and Dialectics of Dalit Dissent and Implications for a Dalit Theology of Liberation PENIEL JESUDASON RUFUS RAJKUMAR

R

esistance in the form of dissent is symptomatic of, if not synonymous with, Dalit struggles for emancipation. Dissent in this essay refers to the resilient vitality which threatens hegemony by maintaining a persistent presence in the very forms of life which hegemony seeks to thwart. Accepting the argument that ‘there can be no relations of power without resistance’, the latter being ‘all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised’,1 this essay argues for adopting a nuanced approach for understanding Dalit dissent because the transcript of Dalit dissent is not only diverse but also mutually conflictual and, thus, complex. The essay analyses the dialectics of Dalit dissent in order to understand its complexity, and proceeds further to analyse the epistemic implications of this complexity in evolving an appropriate methodology for the (re)articulation of Dalit theology for the twenty-first century. MAPPING DALIT DISSENT: DIVERSE

The possibility of resistance is inherent in any power relation. ‘We can never be ensnared by power; we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy.’2 However, the strategies of modification differ. In this section, we seek to trawl through some strategies of dissent adopted by Dalit communities using the categories of survival, sub-alteration, and subversion in order to understand the nature of Dalit dissent. Survival

Survival is a form of dissent which manifests usually in the form of accommodative strategies. In the words of Gerald West, ‘Oppressed people’s alleged accommodation to the logic of domination is an elaborate

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act, a show that they practice and perform in order to survive, while they wait for an opportunity to transform their reality.’3 In its more acquiescent form, the strategy of survival believes in attaining benefits through the patronage of the upper castes.4 Here, submission is adopted as a means for a further goal. The Chamars of Maharashtra, a Dalit community of leather workers who gained modern education through upper caste patronage, are a good example of the survivalist strategy.5 Though manifest as submission, dissent is latent in this strategy in their discontentment with their present status and aspiration for betterment which is codified when acted out as submission. Another defining character of the survivalist modes of Dalit dissent is that they are enacted within the templates of conventionally accepted behaviour. A robust expression of this can be seen in the harvest practices in Andhra Pradesh where Madigas play specific ritualistic roles for the landlords. One common harvest practice is sacrificing a cock after the reaping of the harvest and before the sheaves are gathered.6 Conventionally, a Madiga priest has to perform this ritual which involves spilling the blood of the cock over the sheaves while invoking the names of different local goddesses. The priest is entitled to receive all the sheaves upon which the blood has been spilled. Therefore, Madiga priests use this ritual to claim for themselves as many sheaves as possible. Though their actions are carried out within entirely acceptable frameworks, even as obedience to the landlord, Dalits give it an emancipatory meaning through their deft and materialistic appropriation of the concomitant privileges, risking neither confrontation nor disapproval. Survival is disguised as compliance. It is non-confrontational and is also manifest as immigration to escape discrimination, ritualistic possession, vote-based politics, or inchoate forms of theodicy. Sub-alterations

Sub-alterations are ‘disguised discourses’ of non-compliance by the discriminated-against. There is an active, though disguised, rebuttal of the ideologies behind their discrimination. G.K. Karanth and Simon R. Charsley point to a quiet though active withdrawal from old humiliations being practised when Dalits in Rajapura village of Karnataka avoided both the acceptance of offers of leftover food from the houses of patrons (without explicitly rebuffing the offer) as well as contexts where food was served in discriminatory ways.7 Dalit sub-alteration is not always translated to actions and can be confined to oral expressions. Pauline Kolenda, in her study of the Chuhras

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(sweeper caste in north India), brings out how their myths of origin reflect a refusal to accept the doctrine of karma which maintains that being born as a Chuhra is the result of one’s actions in the previous birth.8 According to a particular myth, the original Dalit was a Brahmin who upon seeing a cow caught in mire, pulled it by its tail intending to help it, which was a meritorious intent by itself. Unfortunately, the cow died and by virtue of having been in contact with a dead cow, a polluting contact, the Brahmin was outcast by his brothers, thus becoming the first ‘Untouchable’.9 Kolenda argues that such myths function not only to protect Dalits from the anxiety of a karmic explanation for their present status but also confer on them a positive pride of having been much higher once.10 Such re-mythologization is a domain of specific meaning making for the Dalits through which they tactfully contest the inferior identity ascribed to them. Subversion

Subversion here is used in reference to the most radical and overt forms of Dalit dissent. In this mode of dissent, old templates are overtly debunked and entirely new templates of identity and meaning are validated. Subversion is varied and can range from embracing symbols of Dalit identity to polemic public actions which invalidate upper caste symbols. Demystification through invalidation and counter-validation is quintessential to subversion. In its moderate forms, an example of subversive revalidation is when motifs of a different and non-Dalit origin are reinterpreted from a Dalit epistemological premise to valorize signifiers of Dalit identity. For instance, the myth of Manteswamy in Karnataka11 facilitates a deft recovery of Dalit symbols from their status of humiliation and revalidates them into images of self-respect. Embracing symbols of Dalit identity has been manifested even in Christian contexts. Maliekal mentions how Ebenezer, a Madiga village elder, presented the ‘software-chip of a potential Madiga identity theology’ when he boasted, on the basis of the narrative of Thomas’ encounter with the risen Christ, that St Thomas the Apostle was a Madiga because he had dared to place his fingers into the raw and wounded flesh of Jesus. According to Maliekal, Ebenezer, ‘was trying to assert his pride in his traditional trade, the identity-marker of his caste, by tracing an etiology for it and taking the stigma attached to it.’12 Subversion has assumed assertive forms in the Dalit struggles for traditional land like the Mahar watan lands in Maharashtra and panchami lands in Tamil Nadu;13 the campaigns by Sikh Dalits and neo-Buddhists for Scheduled Caste status; the Dalit Panther Movement’s willingness to adopt radical and violent means of retaliation; the giving up of traditional

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occupations in protest; renaming educational institutions after Ambedkar; public burning of the Manusmriti and defamation of Hindu Gods; contesting in local elections; and mass conversions from Hinduism. In conclusion, it needs stating that survival, sub-alteration, and subversion are not mutually exclusive. However, at the risk of oversimplification, it can be stated that the differences between the three is: (a) one of degree; and (b) the nature of the axis of medium and message (acceptable medium and message [survival], non-offensive medium but latent message of noncompliance [sub-alteration], unacceptable medium and/or unacceptable message [subversion]). MAPPING DALIT DISSENT: CONFLICTUAL

Dalit dissent is rendered problematic when considered vis-à-vis certain salient issues at the heart of Dalit resistance (conversions, Hinduism, Sanskritization, cultural memory, and attitudes to symbols of Dalit culture and identity) because what emerges is the mutually conflictual nature of the various modes of dissent. Though an exhaustive treatment is impossible here, this argument nevertheless needs fleshing out. One area of conflict has been the issue of conversions from Hinduism. As a proposition strongly advocated by Ambedkar14 and, later, exemplified by Ambedkar’s own conversion in Nagpur on 14 October 1956, Dalit conversions from Hinduism has been an important form of Dalit dissent. The conversion weapon has been dexterously used by Dalits against the upper castes ‘whenever they have been subjected to limits of their endurance in the area of social discrimination as well as economic exploitation’.15 Nevertheless, Dalit voices have not been in consensus regarding conversions from Hinduism. Ghanshyam Shah records the retaliation of a Dalit leader from Gujarat as follows: ‘You are Hindus. Your ancestors were Hindus… Nevertheless, your opposition to Hindus is understandable, but should you for this reason leave the religion? You have as much right on Hindu religion as Savarnas have…It would be a cowardly act if you leave the heritage of your ancestors.’16 Two interesting features which emerge here are: (a) the ‘owning of Hinduism’ by Dalits as a form of dissent, which subverts the exclusive monopolizing of Hinduism by dominant castes; and (b) the recognition of an almost nostalgic relationship with Hinduism. Though reluctant to sever their continuity with Hinduism, such Dalits nevertheless sought social transformation. Bhimsen Kardak, a close associate of Ambedkar who considered himself to be a follower of Ambedkar and yet did not agree with Ambedkar’s call for conversion, says: ‘What’s wrong with our

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staying Hindus and continuing our struggle for equality? If not tomorrow, eventually, we will surely get our rights…We must keep our social movement alive, and together with caste-Hindus, fight for our human rights.’17 The ironical nature of this relationship to Hinduism in a different form is portrayed vividly by Shah as follows: A Dalit who sings Ram and Krishna bhajans in the morning, who reads Ramayana and Mahabharata in the evening, observes fast on ekadashi (11th day of a month) and goes to pilgrimages and worships God from a distance, no longer subscribes to the karmic theory. Whenever possible, he (sic) asserts his right to an equal status with others and, if necessary, faces its consequences—loss of life, occupation and property. Quest of a bhakta for equality before God has now extended to demanding justice and equality in social and economic spheres without losing the roots and traditional identity of a devoted Hindu.18

This is in complete contrast with strands of Dalit dissent which recognized Hinduism to be the cause of Dalit oppression and advocated dissociation from Hinduism, as in Ambedkar’s theory of a pre-Hindu original people subjugated by invaders and Jyotirao Phule’s reinterpretation of Brahmanical scriptures, reading Vishnu’s nine avataras (incarnations) as the various stages of the Aryan invasion.19 This strand of Dalit dissent also sought to demystify Hinduism through invalidation of the Hindu scriptures. Ambedkar recognized in Hinduism the foundation for untouchability and thought that the only way to breach the system was, ‘to apply the dynamite to the Vedas and Shastras’.20 He publicly burnt copies of the Manusmriti at the Mahad Conference in 1928, a practice followed even today. Such attacks derive from the notion that these scriptures reinforce untouchability through their symbolic potency ‘to define reality and represent the squalid conditions of “polluted” groups as natural and consistent with a dharmic order’.21 Thus, we can argue that expressions of Dalit dissent vis-à-vis conversions and Hinduism are fraught with mutual inconsistencies. Perhaps one issue which needs to be analysed in juxtaposition with the aforementioned tendency to own Hinduism is the issue of Sanskritization. Dalits have appropriated Sanskritization both as an escape from the dominant perceptions of pollution associated with Dalitness as well as a reclamation of Hinduism. Research on the Sanskritizing tendencies of Dalits in Rajapura in Karnataka has revealed that the adoption of Sanskritic practices by Dalits is ‘more as a defiance of previous high-caste exclusivity and protest against former restrictions, than it is as an acknowledgement of their superiority or an appeal to be re-evaluated according to their values’.22 This understanding contradicts predominant notions of Sanskritization, which are

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practised even today. A dexterously nuanced variation of Sanskritization is the example of the Chamars in central India, who have sought to reduce the despised cultural disjunction between themselves and the other castes, through their appropriation of the Satnampanth,23 in a way that it is now difficult to differentiate the Sanskritic traits from the non-Sanskritic.24 Sanskritization needs to be analysed in juxtaposition with the lifestyle changes Dalits make as a social strategy, ceasing to work in polluting occupations in order to ‘remove some of the obvious reasons for anti-Dalit prejudice’.25 But such tendencies seem conflictual with the tendency of ‘affirmative appropriation’ of the signifiers of Dalit identity where Dalit symbols are embraced rather than veiled. Today, the picture of a large bloody piece of beef hanging at a butcher’s stall on the cover of Kurusu Sacratis’ Navval, or the image of a rotten mummy in a fetal position in Puttaikappatta Pirathikalum Ezhuthapatta Manitharkalum (buried copies and the people they were written about) are powerful expressions of the affirmative reappropriation of symbols of pollution that the purity criteria of Hinduism derogatorily associate with Dalits.26 These images send out a new message: ‘Dalits are not to be ashamed of the “polluted” images traditionally ascribed to them.’27 Also, as has already been mentioned, this strand of Dalit dissent when seen against the varied discursive landscape of Dalit dissent posits more problems than solutions. While, on the one hand, what is implied by the reappropriation of Dalit symbols is that Dalits will not succumb to the ideological notions of pure and impure imposed by casteism, on the other hand, such reappropriation leaves open the possibility of sanitizing certain Dalit professions considered dehumanizing by Dalits themselves, such as manual scavenging and funeral drumming. What would the reclamations of symbols mean to those Dalits who are seeking to move out of professions like scavenging and funeral drumming? Moreover, research has shown that Dalits have not abandoned traditional occupations which others consider polluting whenever these traditionally devalued occupations have been economically profitable and are not carried as a ‘part of a pattern of village-based discrimination’.28 ‘Profitability undermines concern with pollution.’29 For the Mazhabhi Sikhs of Punjab, the recent contractual commercialization of scavenging meant that they preferred to work in the neighbouring towns ‘to avoid any element of familiarity or patronage of the traditional variety being invoked by the households they served’.30 Further, in traditional caste-based occupations like drum beating, there is an intertwining of perceptions of impurity and the indispensability of Dalits and there are instances where Dalits have negotiated this indispensability for monetary

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benefits. This economic dimension problematizes the contested weave of social, economic, and psychological factors further. On a different side, we see the strengthening of Dalit identity serving the grievance addressal needs of Dalits employed in the non-traditional sectors. Dalits have formed separate unions preferring, however, to foster a middle-class identity in their collective struggles to protect reservations, after being deliberately ignored by upper caste dominated trade unions.31 Dalits’ relationship to their identity is an arena where the cultural, the economic, and the social intersect and determine the dialectics of Dalit responses. All this impels us ask as to what determines Dalit identity. Is it the social, economic, or the psychological? Can a person retain a Dalit identity even when seeking to escape all the signifiers of ‘Dalitness’? The economic dimension leads us to a discussion on modernization and the problem of cultural memory for Dalits. In D.R. Nagaraj’s The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement, the following words of Dodanna, the leader of a group of Dalit activists in Chennapura village, reflect a common attitude that prevails among Dalits towards development: ‘ . . . the real situation is different now. We have been ideal Bhangis right from the beginning. Let us enjoy the fruits of development, you call them illusory but for us they are real’.32 This rhetoric of enjoying the fruits of development resonates with the materialistic hope of emancipation from subservient dependency upon the high castes. It also resonates in subsequent appropriations of Ambedkar’s call to ‘educate, organize, and agitate’. Modernization has rendered the boundaries limiting caste interaction more porous through increased access to education, reservations, and urbanization.33 One approach adopted by Dalits towards modernization has been what is called the pragmatist mode, which conceived Dalit upward mobility in economic, social, and political terms and granting these factors precedence over cultural memory. This meant the absence of any creative dialogue with radical Dalit culture and led to deculturation.34 Hence, modernization as a form of dissent cannot be divorced from the complex issue of erasure of cultural memory. But, pertinent questions emerge: does who Dalits were/are culturally matter? Moreover, how have Dalits experienced their culture; as derogatory, defiling, and detrimental to their upward mobility or as affirmative, enabling, and catalytic? From our survey of the modes of dissent, we have seen that there is evidence for disparateness rather than consensus on the issue of Dalit ‘cultural ownership’. For example, the idea of the ‘fall’ in their myths of origin implies that their present status is ‘low’. There is a tacit inclination towards according superior value to their former status, which invariably is the present status of their oppressors.

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Their present status is not ideal or desired. On the other hand, the fact that the rising middle-class Dalit bourgeoisie have accepted a Dalit identity expresses how such identity can be catalytic and enabling in the context of reservations and positive discrimination. How do some Dalits derive this strength to accept what is a debilitating identity factor for their co-Dalits? Moreover, can the wedding together of a modernist symptom (upward mobility through access to education and jobs) to a positivist approach to self-identity for a pragmatic end sustain holistic liberation? Can one identity valorize other identity markers? All this disparateness of Dalit dissent prompts pertinent questions relating to Dalit identity: how do we make sense of Dalit identity at all today? Is it static or/and evolving? THEORIZING AND THEOLOGIZING WITH DALIT DISSENT

Theorizing Dalit dissent is a precarious venture given both the diversity and the consistently conflictual nature of the interplay between economic, social, contextual, psychological, religious, and political factors of Dalit communities. However, in analysing the dialectics (the logic of the rules and modes of discursive reasoning) of the various forms of Dalit dissent discussed earlier, a pattern which can be identified is that Dalit dissent emerges in a context of polyvalence, where the Dalit struggle is concurrently against multiple factors: social stigma, economic dependence, cultural devaluation, and regional discrimination. Though sometimes inchoate, Dalit dissent emerges as a selective and conscientious engagement with only certain and not all of the above-mentioned factors. This process of selecting the pertinent factor/s and the mode of engagement are conceived and negotiated through a form of experiential hermeneutics. Therefore, while some Dalits give up traditional occupations, others do not, and while some embrace their Dalit identity, others veil them. Invariably, certain factors are paid additional attention at the expense of others, depending upon contextual constraints. What implications does this have for the articulation of Dalit theology? This needs to be asked in conjunction with another question asked earlier. In the light of all the conflictual disparateness, what then signifies the category of the ‘Dalit’? To problematize this further, are those who tacitly veil their caste identity and avoid cultural ownership ‘as equally Dalit as’ those who openly accept their Scheduled Caste identity and Dalit symbols for pragmatic reasons? Are those who leave their traditional occupations for social mobility, those who continue in their occupations for monetary reasons, those who have converted to other religions, and those who assimilate aspects of Hinduism and yet struggle for Dalit rights on par with each other? All this

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leads us to the contentious issue of the subject position of Dalit theology. Who then is the ‘Dalit’ of Dalit theology? In the light of all the mutually conflicting responses to revalidate self-identity, can we speak of ‘Dalit’ as well as a ‘Dalit other’? What place does the category ‘Dalit’ have in shaping Dalit theology? These are just the starting points of several problems which may arise from our analysis of Dalit identity vis-à-vis Dalit dissent and may well be the topic of a different essay. However, on the basis of our analysis of dissent, which is intrinsically related to the question of Dalit identity, my contention in this essay is that ‘Dalit’ is fluid and a hybrid category. Returning to the question concerning implications, the heterogeneity which characterizes Dalit dissent and Dalit identity itself points to an experiential–expressive axis. This implies that expressions are concomitant to experiences. Hence, a suitable methodology for appropriating dissent is ethological or the study of (adaptive) behaviour in relation to its contexts.35 An ethological methodology has epistemic value not only for understanding Dalit dissent but also as a critical constructive methodology for Dalit theology. Given the complexity of Dalit existence, an authentic Dalit methodology is one which holds in creative tension the heterogeneity of the experiential–expressive axis of the Dalits with the need for distinctive and unifying Dalit category/s. In other contexts, I have argued for a more generic understanding of the ‘ethological’ vis-à-vis ‘ethos’, which led to proposing the use of the concept of Dalithos.36 Dalithos or Dalit ethos is understood in a systemic sense as a worldview: ‘the “philosophy” as well as the system of values of Dalit life and culture’.37 My contention is that Dalithos as a heuristic category can perform a critical function as a template and as a cursor holding together the generic and the specifics of Dalit identity in judicious balance. Dalithos, as a heuristic category, helps arrive at identity parameters for identifying the category ‘Dalit’, holding both the generic and the specifics in creative tension so that the methodology of Dalit theology becomes reflective of the Dalit situation itself. So far, the basis for theology in contemporary circles has been varied: orthodoxy (doctrine as the basis); orthopraxis (practice as key); and orthopathy (pathos or affection as objective). We are now looking at a new basis for the methodology of Dalit theology, that is, ‘orthoethos’ (location, context, and orientation as primary elements),38 where the experiential–expressive axis assumes primacy. THE PARAMETERS OF DALITHOS

At this stage, it would be helpful to map out certain dimensions of Dalithos which can be helpful in anchoring the category of ‘Dalit’ in a way that can be appropriated by Dalit theology. Three aspects or dimensions of Dalithos

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which are reflective of the experiential–expressive axis of Dalithos need to be fleshed out at this point, namely, Dalit(ele)os, Dalit(myth)os, and Dalit(the)os. Dalit(ele)os

Dalit(ele)os refers to the teleological dimension of Dalit existence where epistemological primacy is given to telos (goal or purpose). Dalit(ele)os refers to purposiveness which characterizes Dalit view of life. Purposiveness constitutes the philosophical hub around which several aspects of Dalit existence are clustered, not least their interrelation with nature and fellow human beings. Speaking of this purposiveness in relation to the interaction of Dalit–Bahujans (Dalits and Other Backward Communities) with nature, Kancha Ilaiah speaks of ‘their own theory of knowledge which produces and reproduces itself in the day-to-day interaction with prakruti (nature).’39 According to Ilaiah, this purposive interrelation with nature is carried out either through a careful correlation of the svabhava (nature in the sense of character/disposition) of nature with the svabhava of the human body, or through viruddha pariseelana (examination of contradictions) of two different svabhavas which are then intermixed to undergo a parinama (transformation) or marpu to become something kotha (new). According to Ilaiah, ‘the svabhava or kotha is examined in relation to its upayogam (usefulness) to human beings, animals and so on. If the kotha vasthuvu (new material) serves the existential purpose of the Dalit-Bahujans, they begin to reproduce it again and again.’40 The point of Dalit interaction with nature is, thus, to create resources which have the potential to enhance and sustain life. This, however, should not be misunderstood as exploitation of nature, but as an enlisting of nature as a valuable ally in the process of affirming the life of the Dalits. This resourcefulness of the Dalits also extends to their interrelations with fellow human beings. Purposiveness or pragmatism characterizes Dalit solidarity; a symbiotic relationship between various Dalit communities41 which has the potential to act as a cushion for the Dalits ‘in the face of repeated suffering imposed by the dominant’.42 According to Clarke, ‘Because of their deliberate marginalization from caste Hindu village and Hindu socio-cultural and religious world, Dalits, whether Christian or not share in a togetherness that is imposed on them by the dominant caste Hindu world view and constructed by them in solidarity over against all forces that continuously seek to demean and disrupt their communal life.’43 Dalit(ele)os, therefore, has to be understood as that element of Dalithos where Dalit agency finds expression as an intuitive and resourceful appropriation of interrelationality to further Dalit flourishing and thus,

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enhance the wholeness of Dalits in a context where possibilities for Dalit flourishing are seriously threatened. The significance of Dalit(ele)os lies in its ability to accord intrinsic worth to both nature and fellow human beings in a non-exploitative sense by recognizing in them resources which are vital for the well-being of the Dalits. Dalit(ele)os is, thus, the epistemology which activates within the Dalits the creative urge to envisage the life-enhancing potential of the other—be it nature or fellow human beings. As such, it reworks worth, accords value in an enhancing manner, and sets in motion a process of striving towards the condition of ‘being-in-wholeness’ where the agency of the marginalized is celebrated. Dali(myth)os

Dali(myth)os refers to that aspect of Dalithos where re-mythologization is employed as surrogate space for the articulation of Dalit self-understandings and aspirations of wholeness for all. Myths are creatively utilized by the Dalits to critique caste domination, revalidate Dalit identity, and rework Dalit subjectivity. Dali(myth)os also seeks to purge the Dalits of whatever hinders their potential for human flourishing. A good example is the one cited from Pauline Kolenda earlier about the Chuhras using re-mythologization to protect themselves from the anxiety of a karmic explanation for their oppressed state. In a world with limited opportunities for finding ‘real’ space for the articulation of Dalit aspirations and Dalit critique of societal structures, Dali(myth)os implies the creation of alternative space that has the potential to imaginatively impinge upon the real world in a subtle and satirical manner. Thus, Dali(myth)os refers to what Maria Arul Raja calls the spirit of ‘re-creation’, the matrix of Dalit hermeneutics, which can be ‘understood as both the “re-creation” of the Dalit identity from the debris of the battered self and the recreation of any reality into a new reality by Dalit intervention’.44 Dalit myths can be considered the ideological counterpart to the folk archetypes of African Americans which ‘have served as surrogate space and mythic identities enabling an African American marginalised self and corporate selves to transcend their immediate predicament in order to venture, at least metaphorically, into a “what if ” reality of freedom’.45 Dali(myth)os offers a ‘what it was meant to be’ glimpse of human living and shows Dalits as the agents of such human living. For example, the Ellaiyamman myth portrays Paraiyar (a Dalit community in Tamil Nadu) as people who protect a caste woman, Renuka, when her life is under threat from her own son, Parashurama. Here, Dalit re-mythologizing seeks to reinterpret and revalidate the identity of the Paraiyars in an affirmative manner. As Clarke says, ‘In the context of the caste communities’ lengthy, extensive,

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and calculating effort to dehumanize the Dalits, this version, quite movingly (perhaps in a satirical vein) demonstrates that the Paraiyar are human to such a degree that they manifest this humaneness even when confronted with the distress of caste persons.’46 By embodying the elements of critique (of caste domination) and revalidation (of Dalit collective identity and subjectivity), Dali(myth)os denotes the reconciliatory potential of the Dalits which, while addressing the undue oppression of the Dalits, yet, clearly communicates the urge of the Dalits to work towards a humane world. Dali(myth)os is reconciliatory by virtue of the nuanced nature of its satire and resistance to the dominant worldview. Polemic and antagonism are sought to be ‘exorcised’ through the subtlety of the criticism, while at the same time, the audience are called to ‘rhetorical listening’ and become spec-actors—those who are collectively part of the plot—and thus, transformed or unsettled by the myths. This is characteristic of the non-violent resistance of the Dalit communities, who seek to retain a negotiatory posture with the caste communities without subverting the interrelational processes between them with the hope that ‘the violating will react differently at some point, and reconstruct the relational pattern between them towards more just ends’, and that the violating and violent caste forces will turn their ‘stone hearts’ into ‘hearts of compassion’ by recognizing the harm they have inflicted on Dalits.47 Dalit(the)os

One way of anchoring Dalithos is to reflect upon the Dalit concept of God. The Dalit concept of God is of one who is intimately involved in the material world of the Dalits and hence, for Christian Dalit theology, ‘Immanuel’ in the most intimate sense. There is an existential pragmatism to the Dalit concept of God. According to Kancha Illaiah, it is important that the god/goddess images of Dalits find their centre in human existence and in relations between the productive forces and nature. In this sense the philosophical paradigm in which goddess/god images are developed among the Dalit Bahujan Masses is different. Deities do not function as means to subdue a section of society; they are not designed to exploit a section within a community; they function to create a common cultural ethic, one that reenergises the masses so that they can engage in productive activity.48

Divine agency for Dalits is intrinsically interlinked with their quest to further life and to strive for fuller humanity. As Maria Arul Raja points out, ‘Dalits respond to only that brand of the divine which seeks to transform their vulnerabilities into empowerment.’49 For the Dalit communities, the Divine is also the indwelling spirit who energizes and empowers Dalits

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through voluntary possession. Both Christian and Hindu Dalits share a common ideology of possession.50 Possession in the Dalit communities is understood as a visitation of the deity in which a particular human being ‘operates as the agent of the deity’ because the person ‘participates in the power of the deity and mediates this divine power to people who come to them’.51 Thus, the image of God which exists among the Dalits is of one who works with them in the creation of life in all its fullness. God is that divine agency which inspires, protects, and participates in the Dalit in their quest for ‘being-in-wholeness’. Dali(the)os is about the interrelationality between Dalits and the Divine. On the basis of our analysis of Dalit(ele)os, Dali(myth)os, and Dali(the)os, we can say that Dalithos is constituted by an epistemology of interrelationality. This interrelationality extends between Dalits and nature (Dalit(ele)os), Dalits and fellow human beings (Dali(myth)os), and Dalits and the Divine (Dali(the)os), and has as its goal the purposive functions of enhancing the flourishing of all, reclaiming identity and reinstating worth of the marginalized, and effecting transformation. Thus, we can say that the epistemology of Dalithos is to employ biblical language, a ‘ploughshare epistemology’ rather than a ‘sword epistemology’, where human efforts towards fruitful interaction and interrelations in cooperation with the Divine are celebrated over and against human power seeking dominance. This is done with the view to restore wholeness and purposefulness through the purgation of all that seek to demean life, as well as through the creative, affirmative, and purposive forging of interrelationships with nature, fellow human beings, and the Divine. It is this ethological dimension of Dalitness which needs to inform and reform Dalit theology. DALIT THEOLOGY APPROPRIATING DALITHOS

The logic behind appropriating an ethological methodology is simple: that existential models that have proved serviceable to Dalit life so far should shape Dalit theology. The category ‘Dalit’ should (re)shape Dalit theology. The implications of this basis for the articulation of Dalit theology need to be delineated but I will confine myself to the discussion of one pertinent issue relating to Dalit theological articulation. By paying careful attention to Dalithos—understood as that intrinsic generic quality of Dalits which seeks fruitful interrelationality—and in creative tension with the diversity within Dalits, both in the modes of selfidentification as well as their different ways of expressing dissent against caste discrimination, an ethological methodology has the potential to offer a way out of the impasse of thinking of Dalit identity as monolithic and

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homogenous, an impasse that has rendered Dalit identity inflexible. Dalithos allows for a new position, which allows the heterogeneity and the hybridity of Dalit identities to be privileged over traditional perceptions of a paradoxical ambiguous-yet-a priori Dalit identity, which operates as a homogenous, unconflicting ‘Other’ in the wider discipline of liberation theology. Dalithos enables us to attend to the inventiveness of Dalits, while not disavowing the ‘given/s’ of traditional Dalit identity. The concept of the heterogeneity of Dalit identity has not been a theme addressed in Dalit theology so far. It is not surprising then that issues concomitant to the heterogeneity of Dalit identities have been precluded from Dalit theological discussions. If the heterogeneity, fluidity, and the hybridity of Dalit identity and modes of living are brought to shape Dalit theology, old binary models of relating to Hinduism/Brahmanism can become redundant. Bipolarization which resorts to stereotypical polarization is not only empirically untenable as it glosses over the soft and fluid boundaries that exist between the Dalit and non-Dalit worlds but it also hinders interrelationality. Though the binary structure of opposition of ‘Hindu–Dalit’ is useful as an analytical tool, it seldom does ‘justice to the complexity of the relationship between caste Hindu and Dalit religion’.52 Dalithos will enable us to be critical about theories of binary polarity. The fluidity with which Dalits have related to Hinduism as evidenced by the Dalits in Karnataka (who through Sanskritizing their pantheon defiantly sought to reclaim Hinduism from exclusive upper caste monopoly) and the example of the Chamars of Chatthisgarh (who by creatively assimilating the Satnampanth have negotiated their identity) point to the creative ways in which Dalits have related to aspects of Hinduism/ Brahmanism. In such a situation, an ethological methodology challenges Dalit theology to follow Dalits in creatively appropriating the possibilities which such interrelationality can hold for Dalits in their quest for liberation. Dalit theology has not followed this path so far. Rather it has resorted to precaution in relation to Hindu philosophical ideas. Eric Lott draws attention to how Hindu theologies, in particular the Vedantic systems which have been ‘explored earlier by a few Christian Theologians (especially Catholics) as possibly providing an appropriate framework for Indian Christian reflection’, are now seen as forms of dangerous Brahmanic hegemony with the emergence of Dalit consciousness.53 According to Lott, ‘anything Vedic is now seen as irrevocably linked with Brahmanical hierarchical dominance.’54 In this context of ‘the struggle between the indigenity of the “little tradition” and the powerful hegemonic norms of a dominant culture and its social embodiment’,55 Lott reminds us of the

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arbitrariness of homogenizing as follows: ‘But the homogenising process is never completely successful. Cultural impact is never merely one-way, and along with the unexpected outposts of resistance and urgency that remain, there are also surprising insights to be found within the larger systems. The task remains, therefore of uncovering these struggles and thereby countering all our cultural assumptions.’56 Lott’s statement has to be analysed in juxtaposition with A.P. Nirmal’s call for ‘methodological exclusivism’, which emerges from the acknowledgement that opening Dalit theology to non-Dalit influences is fraught with its own risks, not the least being the fear of ideological co-option. However, it would be better to understand Nirmal in the wider context of his other writings. Upon an analysis of the different strands of Nirmal’s writings, J. Jayakiran Sebastian locates Nirmal’s desire for methodological exclusivism within Nirmal’s quest for relationality, which called for a movement ‘away from the idea of imperial unity . . . to relationality that will respect the integrity and differences of many and yet keep them related to each other’.57 Sebastian raises important questions regarding the contours of this proposal: This raises the question as to whether Nirmal meant that one ought to move in the direction of some kind of reconciliatory theology, or whether Nirmal was setting forth yet another challenge before us—that of creatively exploring the interrelationship and interaction between Dalit theology and other forms of theologizing, as well as between Dalit and other communities, including those communities whose present ‘status’ was achieved, at least in part, through the use and abuse of Dalit peoples.58

Sebastian’s conclusion is that Nirmal’s call is for ‘a recognition of the ambivalence of all inter-relationality, where the process of creative exploration is not content to set attainable goals, but rather to recognise that the ongoing quest for informed relationality is itself the goal.’59 This conclusion is disappointing as it presents an impasse when it comes to the practical liberation of the Dalits. The setting of concrete and liberative agendas is important for a Dalit theology of liberation. Otherwise, it can succumb to the sin of sloth, which is, according to Dorothy Sayers, the sin ‘that believes in nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.’60 Not setting liberative agendas can act as corrosives for Dalit commitment to liberation as it creates the illusion that there is nothing to work towards. However, in the light of our analysis, we can see that Dalits have managed to set their own agenda in contexts of practical interrelationality. Even

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under the most potent of oppression, distinctive aspects of Dalit identity have survived and become an integral part of new formations. This interrelationality, in fact, allows for a means of both evading the duplication of binary categories of the past as well as constructing new anti-monolithic models of exchange which promote new and affirmative versions of existence. This demands a new approach aimed at exploring interrelationality as a possible methodological premise for Dalit theology. Proceeding from the pragmatic viability of interrelationality as an agenda-setting exercise by Dalits there are several challenges, first of which is the need to ask ourselves whether Dalit theology is on the threshold of a post-Nirmal, post-exclusive model of theologizing? Apart from challenging us to rethink Dalit theology in continuity with the vicissitudes characterizing Dalit identity, the ethological method also enables us to be perceptive to the tension between emic (intrinsic/insider) and etic (extrinsic/outsider) conceptualizations of Dalit theology and be attendant to problems which emerge from a theology estranged from the experiential–expressive axis of its subjects. I have analysed the counterproductivity of certain dominant images of God and Jesus articulated by Dalit theology for the overall liberative agenda of Dalit theology, from an ethological perspective in a different context.61 An ethological methodology also helps us to avoid the danger of tacit ‘recruitism’, where the objective of theologians who operate with a priori concepts and homogenous categorizations of ‘Dalit’ is to makeover Dalit identity to fit their own agendas. ‘Recruitism’ produces power relations between Dalits and theologians in which the theologian is seen to have the expertise and the prerogative to stipulate what constitutes the remits of ‘Dalit interests’. Instead, when Dalit theology follows the ethological methodology, it ceases reducing Dalits and their lived experiences into mere inert objects of Dalit theological makeover; it, in fact, recognizes Dalits, their experiences, and the concomitant complexity of their identities as crucial methodological tools which can in fact makeover both Dalit theologians and Dalit theology itself. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Michel Foucault, 1980, Power/Knowledge—Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977 (edited by Colin Gordon), Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, p. 142. 2. Michel Foucault, 1988, Politics Philosophy and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984 (edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman; translated by Alan Sheridan), New York: Routledge, p. 123. 3. Gerald West, 2002, ‘Disguising Defiance in Ritualisms of Subordination: Literary and Community-based Resources for Recovering Resistance Discourse within the Dominant

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Discourses of the Bible’, in Gary A. Philips and Nicole Wilkinson Duran (eds), Reading Communities Reading Scripture, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, p. 198. 4. K.P. Singh, 1999, ‘Liberation Movements in Comparative Perspective: Dalit Indians and Black Americans’, in S.M. Michael (ed.), Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, New Delhi: Vistaar, p. 150. 5. Ibid. 6. See James Elisha, 2002, ‘Liberative Motifs in the Dalit Religion’, Bangalore Theological Forum, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 78–88. 7. G.K. Karanth and Simon R. Charsley, 1998, ‘Beyond Untouchability? Local Experience and Society-wide Implications’, in Simon R. Charsley and G.K. Karanth (eds), Challenging Untouchability: Dalit Initiative and Experience from Karnataka, New Delhi: Sage, p. 285. 8. Pauline Kolenda, 1964, ‘Religious Anxiety and the Hindu Fate’, in E.B. Harper (ed.), Religion in South Asia, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 71–81. 9. Bernard Cohn, 1954, ‘The Camars of Senapur: A Study of the Changing Status of a Depressed Caste’, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, p. 113, cited in Kolenda, ‘Religious Anxiety and the Hindu Fate’. 10. Kolenda, ‘Religious Anxiety and the Hindu Fate’, pp. 74–6. 11. According to Nagaraj, this myth is a significant example of how motifs and symbols associated with the Veerashaiva movement are accorded new meaning: The life of Manteswamy stands out as one major way of privileging the reality of the vocations and life styles of untouchables in a symbolic manner. He is also seen with a dead buffalo on his shoulders, a pot of toddy in his hands. Followers of Basavanna, the great leader of the Veerashaiva Movement, would not let him in (into the Great Hall—Anubhava Mantapa). Disgusted by the treatment Manteswamy comes back and sits on the filthy heap in front of another Dalit Saint’s house. Basavanna himself comes running to apologise, and Manteswamy does not budge. While pleading with the Dalit Saint to return to the Great Hall, Anubhava Mantapa, Basavanna touches his feet and his (Manteswamy’s) limbs come apart. Basavanna and his wife carry the dead buffalo, the toddy pot and Manteswamy’s limbs to the Great Hall for worshipping. Thus the story goes. Finally, Manteswamy comes back to life. The significance of this tradition lies in its efforts to bring dignity to the much detested things that are usually associated with Dalits in Rural India. (D.R. Nagaraj, 1993, The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement, Bangalore: South Forum Press, p. 54) 12. Jose D. Maliekal, 2001, ‘Identity-Consciousness of the Christian Madigas: Story of a People in Emergence’, Jeevadhara, vol. 31, no. 181, p. 25. 13. Gabriele Dietrich, 1998, ‘Dalit Feminism and Environment’, Religion and Society, vol. 45, no. 4, p. 94. 14. Ambedkar rejected Hinduism claiming it to be ‘a veritable chamber of horrors’, and the ‘iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and senseless law of status by birth’, as being ‘veritable instruments of torture’ forged against the Dalits. See D.C. Ahir, 1991, The Legacy of Dr. Ambedkar, Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1991,p. 293. 15. Lancy Lobo, 2001, ‘Visions, Illusions and Dilemmas of Dalit Christians in India’, in Ghanshyam Shah (ed.), Dalit Identity and Politics: Cultural Subordination and the Dalit Challenge, New Delhi: Sage, p. 249.

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16. Ghanshyam Shah, 2001, ‘Dalit Movements and the Search for Identity’, in Shah (ed.), Dalit Identity and Politics, pp. 195–213, especially 200, 201. 17. Ibid., p. 201. 18. Ibid., p. 203. 19. S.M. Michael, 1999, ‘Dalit Vision for a Just Society in India’, in S.M. Michael (ed.), Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values, New Delhi: Vistaar, p. 103. 20. B.R. Ambedkar,1945, Annihilation of Caste, Bangalore: Dalit Sahitya Academy, p. 70. 21. Michael B. Schwartz, 1997, ‘Indian Untouchable Texts of Resistance: Symbolic Domination and Historical Knowledge’, in H.L. Seneviratne (ed.), Identity, Consciousness and the Past: Forging of Caste and Community in India and Srilanka, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 182. 22. Karanth and Charsley, ‘Beyond Untouchability?’, p. 289. 23. See also, S.C. Dube, 1998, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950, Albany: State University of New York. 24. See Cohn’s ‘The Camars of Senapur’; and Bernard Cohn, 1955, ‘The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste’, in McKim Marriot (ed.), Village India, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 53–77. 25. John C.B. Webster, 2001, ‘The Dalit Situation in India Today’, International Journal of Frontier Missions, vol. 18, no. 1, p. 16. 26. Jean-Luc Racine and Josiane Racine, 1998, ‘Dalit Identities and The Dialectics of Oppression and Emancipation in a Changing India: The Tamil Case and Beyond’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and The Middle East, vol. 18, no. 1, p. 10. 27. Ibid. 28. Karanth and Charsley, ‘Beyond Untouchability?’, p. 290. 29. Ibid. 30. Surinder S. Jodhka, 2004, ‘Dissociation, Distancing and Autonomy: Caste and Untouchability in Rural Punjab’, in Harish K. Puri (ed.), Dalits in Regional Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publishers, pp. 71–3. 31. Shah, ‘Dalit Movements and the Search for Identity’, p. 202. 32. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet, p. 48. 33. Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar, 2007, ‘Castes and Outcastes’, in Developments: One World A Million Stories—India Emerges But is Everyone Included?, London: Department for International Development, n.d., pp. 6–7. 34. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet, p. 50. 35. See R.A. Hinde, 1989, ‘Ethological and Relationship Approaches’, in R. Vatsa (ed.), Annals of Child Development, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 251–85. 36. See Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar, 2006, ‘The Problem of “Methodological Fidelity” in Identity-specific Hermeneutics and the Pertinence of “Ethological” Hermeneutics’, Bangalore Theological Forum, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 120–44 and Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar, 2007, ‘A Dalithos Reading of a Markan Exorcism: Mark 5:1-20’, The Expository Times, vol. 118, no. 9, pp. 428–35. 37. Rajkumar, ‘The Problem of “Methodological Fidelity” in Identity-specific Hermeneutics’, p. 122. 38. I am grateful to Professor Sathianathan Clarke for pointing this out to me.

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39. Kancha Ilaiah, 2001, ‘Dalitism vs Brahmanism: The Epistemological Conflict in History’, in Ghanshyam Shah (ed.), Dalit Identity and Politics: Cultural Subordination and the Dalit Challenge, London and New Delhi: Sage, 2001, p. 110. 40. Ibid., pp. 111–12. 41. Robert Deliege, 1997, The World of the Untouchable: Paraiyars of Tamil Nadu, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 301. 42. A. Maria Arul Raja, 2001, ‘Living Through Conflicts: The Spirit of Subaltern Resurgence’, Vidyajyothi Journal of Theological Review, vol. 65, June, pp. 471–2. 43. Sathianathan Clarke, 2002, ‘Hindutva, Religious and Ethnocultural Minorities and Indian-Christian Theology’, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 95, no. 2, p. 211. 44. A. Maria Arul Raja, 1999, ‘Harmony in the Midst of Anarchy: The Anatomy of the Spirit of Dalit Liberation’, Vidyajyothi Journal of Theological Review, vol. 63, pp. 416–28. 45. Dwight N. Hopkins, 2005, Being Human: Race, Culture and Religion, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, p. 171. 46. Sathianathan Clarke, 1998, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 107. 47. Sathianathan Clarke, 2002, ‘Dalits Overcoming Violation and Violence: A Contest between Overpowering and Empowering Identities in Changing India’, The Ecumenical Review, vol. 54, no. 3, p. 285. 48. Kancha Ilaiah, 2005, Why I am not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (2nd edition), Calcutta: Samya, p. 91. 49. A. Maria Arul Raja,2004, ‘Living Streams across the Parched Land: Some Tenets of Dalit Spirituality’, in CTC Bulletin, pp. 1–8. 50. L. Caplan, 1985, ‘The Popular Cult of Evil in Urban South India’, in D. Parkin (ed.), The Anthropology of Evil, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 122. 51. Clarke, Dalits and Christianity, p. 76. 52. Ibid., p. 126. 53. Eric J. Lott, 2002, ‘Hindu Theology’s Forgotten Struggles’, in Israel Selvanayagam (ed.), Moving Forms of Theology: Faith Talk’s Changing Contexts, Delhi: ISPCK, p. 76. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., p.83. 56. Ibid. 57. J. Jayakiran Sebastian, 1999, ‘Creative Exploration: Arvind P. Nirmal’s Ongoing Contribution to Christian Theology’, Bangalore Theological Forum, vol. 31, no. 2, p. 48. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Dorothy L. Sayers, 1969, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World: a Selection of Essays, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, p. 152. 61. Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar, 2007, ‘Beyond the Umbilical Stranglehold: An Ethological Critique of Indian Dalit Theology’s Espousal of Liberation Paradigm’, Paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Theology, Girton College, Cambridge, March 26–9.

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4 In the Beginning is also an End Expounding and Exploring Theological Resourcefulness of Myths of Dalit Origins PHILIP VINOD PEACOCK

T

he study of the origins of the caste system and untouchability is important for Dalit theology, for if one is to understand that caste and untouchability have a historical origin, it is implicit that these are not eternal institutions and practices but rather must also have an end. This essay shows that there is an ‘end’ in each of the theories of the origin of the caste system. To state that there is more than one theory regarding the origins of the caste system would be to state the obvious. The fact is that we are dealing with an institution whose origins are lost in antiquity and there is little or no direct evidence regarding the origins of the caste system. Whatever little evidence we do have is fraught with a plethora of contradictory interpretations. Rather, what we have is a host of theories which, because of a lack of tangible evidence, only offer speculative solutions to the origins of the caste system. B.R. Ambedkar himself, confronted with the lack of evidence surrounding the origins of untouchability argues that the task requires a ‘reconstruction of history where there are no texts, and if they are, they have no direct bearing on the question.’1 He continues to argue that it is therefore necessary to use imagination, intuition,2 and hypothesis3 to move forward in determining the origins of untouchability and that it would be vanity on his part to ‘claim the finality of his thesis’.4 This is, of course, true not only for the theory that Ambedkar proposes but all theories regarding the origins of the caste system. The question of the theories of origins lies not only in the difficulty of ascertaining their historical cogency but also the role that the question of origins plays in the determination of identity and self-image. It is of particular interest that John Webster begins his book on the history of

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Dalit Christians by speaking about the socio-psychological role that the questions of origins play. He argues that ‘One’s personal or group origins can thus be a source of self-confidence, self-respect, even pride on the one hand, or of insecurity, shame, even guilt on the other. In situations of social conflict, differing definitions of origins can be used to manipulate the emotions in order to inspire or to suppress political action.’5 The question of the various theories of the origin of the caste system is, therefore, not just a question of determining with certitude a matter of origins located in antiquity but a question of ideological and political struggle in the present context. This being the case, one would then have to conclude that the multitude of explanations regarding the origins of the caste system that exist, and their acceptance at a particular moment of history, have little to do with their historical veracity but are grounded in who proposes the particular theory, in what context, and with what purpose. It is a question of power and control, of politics and ideology. Though there are various theories about the origins of caste, each with their own ideological and political interests, only one has found general acceptability within the context of Dalit theology, namely, the Aryan invasion theory. This is in spite of the fact that the Aryan invasion theory has come under sustained scrutiny in the academic community with regard to its historical accuracy. The purpose of this essay is to question the social, historical, political, ideological, and theological reasons why the Aryan invasion theory has become the most popular theory within the context of Dalit theology. This essay also indicates the theological difficulties that arise from the continuance with such a theory within the context of doing Dalit theology in the twenty-first century and presenting it as a theology of life for all. The final section explores the theological possibilities of some of the other theories. THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY

Simply stated, the Aryan invasion theory, as the title suggests, connects the origins of the caste system in India to the invasion of the Aryan tribes who entered the subcontinent from the northwest. The theory was first published by Herbert Risely, a British administrator and an ethnographer and anthropologist, whose works were very influential.6 Proponents of the theory argue that this invasion or series of invasions took place around 1500 BCE, during which time the Aryans conquered and subjugated the local inhabitants and initiated a process which ultimately led to the crystallization of the caste system and untouchability. It is suggested that the conquering men took wives from the conquered

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community, thus creating a new caste group by this process of conquest and intermarriage. It is also argued that the Rig Vedic texts that speak of a war-like situation between the Aryans and Dasyus offer us evidence of this invasion and conquest, as does the Indus valley civilization, or rather its end. A variant of the Aryan invasion theory is the same theory explained with racial language. This theory states that at one point in history, a distinctly Aryan race invaded and subjugated the local population of the Indian subcontinent that was made largely of people belonging to the Dravidian race. The subjugated Dravidians became the lower castes and untouchables, while it was the upper castes who are the descendants of the Aryans.7 Anthropometric indicators such as nasal indexing and skin colour were and are still used to legitimize the racial version. Both the versions are to be found in contemporary Dalit discourse. Interrogating the Aryan Invasion Theory

Our first task in interrogating the Aryan invasion theory is to point out its racial roots. Although there are two variants of the Aryan invasion theory, it is the racial theory that first held sway. It is my inkling that the non-racial variant developed only after the theory of race was itself debunked. That apart, what one must note is that the theory of the Aryan race itself has its roots in Europe’s anti-Semitic search for an alternative to its Jewish heritage in the nineteenth century. Romila Thapar points out that this resulted from Europe’s desire to trace the formation of separate nation states to a common European ancestry.8 At the same time, William Jones, the Calcutta High Court judge in the late 1800s, demonstrated that there was a similarity between Sanskrit and Greek and this, then, became the basis of the number of theories that spoke of a common origin between European and Indian culture that circumvented the Jewish complex. One of these theories was, of course, the theory of a common race, namely, the Aryan race. The idea of an Aryan race was first proposed in European scholarship by Arthur de Gobineau. The racial theory itself claimed that the world was divided into various races, each having their own specific characteristics and abilities that were natural to them. Gobineau’s theory further claimed that among all the various races of the world, it was the ‘White’ or ‘Aryan’ race that had the greatest propensity for civilization. It was the Aryans, he argued, who brought ‘the blessings of civilization to the known world through conquest, from Europe through Southwest Asia to India.’9 Gobineau further argued that this propensity for civilization was reduced through a process of intermarriage with other races, the amount

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of reduction depending on the degree of intermarriage and the distance from the original race. The theory of Gobineau had disastrous consequences in twentieth century Germany that culminated in the Holocaust. Gobineau’s theory was also influential on the work of Indologists working in nineteenth century India. Max Müller, for example, was quick to equate the term ‘Aryans’ that they found in the Vedic texts with race.10 In India, the racial theory was more than welcomed by the dominant castes because it offered them an ideology that justified their dominant position. If the so-called descendents of the Aryans were the ruling castes, it was their imagined racial propensity for civilization and order that not only legitimized their dominance but actually required it. The equation of caste with varna, which essentially means ‘colour’, was quickly associated with skin colour in popular imagination and the racial theory found its roots in India. The effects of conflating colour and race are experienced at several levels, both in the academy as well as in popular culture. Theories of race and racial difference have been questioned and are no longer considered to be acceptable the world over and therefore, a theory that has its basis in such a dubious and dangerous foundation must indeed be questioned. The second step in interrogating the Aryan invasion theory is to point out its colonial underpinnings. Colonial theorists have played a significant role in determining not only what the origins of caste are but also what caste is. It is significant that we use the European term ‘caste’ to define a social institution found exclusively in the Indian subcontinent. Morton Klass, in his book on the origins of the caste system, points out that what the Europeans wrote about caste and how they understood it was often a projection of how they understood themselves and their society.11 In a similar vein, Romila Thapar points out that the Indian present that the colonialist encountered was seen as reflecting the past of Europe.12 In this sense, it legitimated the transposition of certain social institutions and ideologies operating in Europe as a way of claiming that such institutions and ideologies were natural to the human community at large. Romila Thapar argues that the ‘history of early India therefore became a channel for propagating European views on the origins of peoples and cultures and even the culture of the non-European societies was conditioned by the prevailing debates in Europe.’13 She further argues that the intent of this transposition was to recreate and resignify the culture of the colonized in terms of the culture of the colonial power, and that the critiques of the Orientalist schools have shown us that this was the part of the means of control of the colonialists.14 The

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Aryan invasion theory and its racial roots have, therefore, to be read as part of this larger colonial enterprise of imposing their understanding of society and its institutions on the colonized. Further, it should be understood that the theory of the Aryan invasion was part of the larger project of reading the history of India as a series of invasions by various groups of people: first, the Aryans; then, the Mughals; and finally, the British, which gave rise to the view of Indian history as a continuous struggle among religious forces—the Hindus, the Muslims, and the Christians—the spectre of which continues to haunt communal India. For the British, to show that there was a continuous series of invasions by various cultures only served to legitimize their colonial invasion. Invasion of India was then seen to be the normal course of history and justified the violence of the colonizer. The Aryan invasion theory was also attractive to the upper caste Indians not only because it enabled them to claim a racial superiority over the rest of the Indians but also because, as Romila Thapar points, it ‘suggested that Sanskritic Indian culture sprang from the same roots as that of the colonizing power’.15 Our third contention with the Aryan invasion theory is that it is based on a dubious reading of history. The version of the destruction of the Indus valley civilization by an act of invasion is no longer acceptable. For one, the archaeological evidence does not point to a simultaneous collapse which indicates the lack of an invasion.16 Second, newer research points out that there was no invasion by an Aryan race so to speak, but there is the likelihood of a migration of Indo-European language speakers into the Indian subcontinent. There is little or no evidence for the marriage patterns of this group and how they intermingled with the native population of the time.17 Essentially, it has to be argued that the theory of an Aryan invasion raises more questions than answers and fails to present a cogent theory. The question that we have to ask then is: why does such a theory, which is historically moot and has its roots in racism and colonialism, continue to hold sway over the Dalit discourse in general, and in Dalit theology in particular? The following section is an attempt to outline the possible reasons. ARYAN INVASION AND DALIT THEOLOGY

There is probably no student of Dalit theology that has escaped the Aryan invasion theory. It has been written about and preached as gospel truth in almost every forum and publication on the Dalit issue. Sometimes, it crops

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up overtly or, at other times, there are subtle references to it. Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that Dalit theology seems to be in the shadow of the Aryan invasion theory. Part of the reason for the continuance with the Aryan invasion theory is its place in the context of the historical Dalit movements. In spite of Ambedkar’s absolute refusal to have anything to do with the Aryan invasion theory, he insisted that ‘caste division does not demarcate racial division’.18 Moreover, despite his projections for an alternative theory with regard to the origins of the caste system19 as well as the origins of untouchability,20 the Aryan invasion theory has firmly grounded itself in the discourse of the Dalit movements. There are several reasons for this persistence of the theory. The first lies in the easy inversion of the Aryan invasion theory for the benefit of the Dalit communities. The plundering of the ideology of the oppressors and overturning it for the benefit of the oppressed is a well-tested method employed by and for oppressed communities. Jotibha Phule argued that while the Aryans were indeed foreign invaders, they were far from being superior to the native Indian population. Instead, according to him, they were a violent and a cruel race. He further argued that these Aryans subjugated the local people, destroyed their culture, and replaced it with the alien Aryan culture, including the caste system.21 The Aryan invasion theory was appropriated by the oppressed for their own advantage. The Dalits were now seen as the lords of the earth or the ‘sons of the soil’ as it were, a point that we shall come back to later. A second reason may be located within the larger Dravidian movements that took place in Tamil Nadu. Phule’s ideas, though specifically constructed with reference to Maharashtra, were co-opted by Periyar in the South, resulting in the Self-Respect Movement, the Justice Party, and the Dravidian movement that would affect Tamils in Tamil Nadu and beyond. The influence of the Dravidian movement has been largely influential on the Dalit movement itself.22 A third reason is the strategic position the theory held within the context of the new Dalit or the adi movements that had their origins in the 1920s. These movements made the connection to an egalitarian tradition that was ‘non-aryan’ or ‘original Indian’.23 These movements called AdDharm in Punjab; Adi-Hindu in UP and Hyderabad; and Adi-Dravida, Adi-Andhra, and Adi-Karnataka in south India were, in part, a reaction to the campaign of the Hindu Mahasabha and related organizations to win over the ‘lower’ castes. Omvedt opines that the adi-identities presented a radical alternative to both Hinduization in an overt form—as practised

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by the Hindu nationalists—as well as in its subtle form—practiced by Mahatma Gandhi—and also to the leftist movements of that age which didn’t take the caste question seriously enough.24 A fourth reason emerges from the politics surrounding the UN Durban Conference against Racism, 2001. In the build up to conference, the Indian government insisted that the Dalit issue would not be tabled because of its position that caste was not a race. These manoeuvres opened up the possibility of using the Aryan invasion theory in a new way to argue the case. The Violent Origins of the Caste System

These reasons that perpetuate the Aryan invasion theory underscore the quest for the origins of the caste system within the context of violence. To gloss over this context is to aspirate the experience of Dalits through the centuries. Hence, the location of the origins of the caste system in violence serves a three-fold purpose. First, to locate its origins within the violent framework of invasion/subjugation is to also recognize the continuing violence of the system today. Second, it also indicates that Dalits are not complicit or responsible for their own subjugation in any form and thereby removes the notion that Dalits are somehow responsible for their own victimization. Third, it offers the possibility of presenting Dalits as being the victims of history. Victimhood and suffering are central themes for Dalit theology and the motif of a violently subjugated people by a cruel invader feeds perfectly into the explication of these themes more than any other theory of origin. This is not to abstract victimization and suffering from the daily experience of Dalits or merely to imagine the experience of violence as a historical experience. Suffering and victimization continue to be part of the existence of the Dalits and has been a part of Dalit history as well. The point here is that a theory that locates itself within the framework of violence makes points of connectivity with the everyday Dalit experience and the collective memory of the historical suffering of Dalits as well. The Possibility of Re-membering

The term Dalit is a social construct of the twentieth century. Before the modern Dalit movement, there was probably no collective political consciousness among the so-called untouchables living across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. Dalit leaders and the Dalit movements initiated a collective consciousness that evolved under the banner ‘Dalit’. An important component for the development of collective consciousness

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was the recognized need for a sense of a common history and a common identity. It is here that the Aryan invasion theory probably provided the necessary ideological ground by providing a sense of a common history and therefore, also a common identity. James Massey’s Roots: Concise History of the Dalits (1996) is a classic example of this co-optation of a non-racial version of the Aryan invasion theory. The intent is not only to remember the lost history of Dalits but also to re-member the Dalits as a political force. In the face of a caste system that divides, the process of remembering a common history and a common heritage also serves to re-member this broken body. The Aryan invasion theory not only offers space for articulating a common Dalit identity based on a common notion of history but also opens up the possibility of negotiating alliances with a wider Bahujan. It offers a certain scope in drawing a common identity with Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Adivasis.25 In light of what happened in Kherlanji and Kandhamal, which saw violence by the OBC’s on Dalits in Kherlanji and between Adivasis and Dalits in Kandhamal, the efficacy of ‘non-Aryan’ rhetoric is questionable, while, at the same time, there is also a certain sense of urgency to reaffirm it. While some of the these given reasons probably offer us the reasons for the continued popularity of the Aryan invasion theory for Dalit theology, its continued usage also resulted in certain problematic tangles for theologizing from the Dalit perspective. This is, in part, because colonial moorings of the Aryan invasion theory are skewed by its racial colourings. The Creation of Binary Polarities

While we have already noted the possibilities of opening up spaces for a common Dalit identity as well as the possibility for negotiating wider alliances that the Aryan invasion theory facilitates, on the reverse side, it also opens up the danger of creating a binary between the non-Aryan ‘us’ and the Aryan ‘them’ or vice-versa, depending on who is expounding the theory. While there is no doubt that such a polarity can be used for a short-term political mobilization, there are some inherent difficulties with articulating such a position. Binary polarities result in the ghettoization of the ‘other’ and perpetuate exclusivism and parochialism. While there is no denying the fact that Dalit experience should be the ground upon which Dalit theology is done, the Dalit issue is one that should engage the whole church and society. The creation of an ‘usthem’ polarity does disservice to the goal of presenting Dalit theology as a theology of life for all.

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At worst, such kind of polarity demonizes the ‘other’ and can explode into violence in which the powerless Dalits are the worse sufferers. In this sense, the discourse of the Aryan invasion lends itself to the demonization of the Brahmin which it sees as the public enemy rather than casteism as the systemic evil. Further, it should be pointed out that the Aryan–non-Aryan discourse, as it is found in the Dravidian movement, has failed to forge alliances even among the four southern states. The reason that Ambedkar was vehemently opposed to caste being equated with race was probably because of his desire to see an underlying national cultural identity for a new India rather than a segregation based on race.26 The second difficulty with such a position would be the tendency to ignore the hierarchies that exist within the so-called ‘non-Aryan’ identity. This is already a reality with the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, where Gail Omvedt has adequately shown that the situation of the Dalits has not improved. Likewise, with all the rhetoric of a nonAryan Bahujan alliance in the daily life of Dalits, the worst oppression and violence is faced from their non-Aryan counterparts, namely, the OBCs. To attribute the continued oppression to the scheming Aryan forces not only smarts of simplistic solutions but accounts for a shrewdness that may be more imagined than real. This leads us to the issue of the internal differentiation among the Dalits themselves. An overarching binary polarity does not allow one to take cognizance of the internal differentiation and hierarchies among the Dalit communities themselves. While there is the necessity for a pan-Indian Dalit identity that brings a scattered people together, to neglect the internal differentiation is disingenuous to Dalit theology. If Dalit theology has the task of articulating Dalit experience, the question immediately arises as to which Dalit community’s experience is being articulated? It seems likely that a view that negates internal differentiation would be most likely to articulate the experiences of the most powerful Dalit community. The resulting theology would, of course, be inadequate as well as contrary to what Dalit theology actually stands for. Sons of the Soil and Lords of the Earth

The Aryan invasion theory, when inverted by Dalits to suit their own purposes, is often used to proclaim sons of the soil and lords of the earth ideologies. No doubt these ideologies offer a considerable amount of psychological support to Dalits but such ideologies have their own problematic presuppositions. They are exclusivistic and often have the tendency to

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become parochial and chauvinistic. When combined with political power, sons of the soil theologies and ideologies have the capacity of reaching demonic proportions. Varna and the Caste System: A Problematic Symmetry

The difficulty in using the Aryan invasion theory is that it tends to equate the caste system with varna. While the Aryan invasion theory may offer an explanation for the origins of the varna system, it does not offer a definite explanation for the formation of the various jatis, sub-jatis, and gothras which are in fact the functioning categories of the caste system. While it cannot be denied that the varna system has some ritualistic significance, to confuse the varna system with caste would be a mistake. While the varna system may provide a thin ideological veneer for the caste system per se, the caste system is much more complicated and diversified. The fact that the Aryan invasion theory only offers an explanation for varna and not the complexity of the whole caste system in effect does not provide a Dalit theology that takes this theory seriously with the proper theoretical tools to understand the caste system in its entirety and complexity. Patriarchy Rested at the Threshold of the Aryan Invaders

Another knotty issue with the Aryan invasion theory is that its speculative space serves as a topos for imagining the origins of patriarchy and has thereby deflected any serious engagement with Dalit feminist issues. Devasahayam, for example, in a Bible study on Mark 5, states: ‘Aryans introduced patriarchal form of family organization where the line of descent is from father to son, and the woman leave their father’s house on marriage, to live with the husband and the in-laws. The Aryans introduced religion too with patriarchal overtones . . . ’27 Other Dalit scholars seem to share Devasahayam’s view, including feminist authors such as Joanna Riddle and Rama Joshi in their book, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India.28 The difficulty with such a position is that it immediately denies the internal patriarchy of Dalit communities. Such a denial presupposes the situation of Dalit women as being better than that of non-Dalit women and that the Dalit women should be grateful for it. Insidiously, this view absolves Dalit men from any culpability regarding violence that they perpetrate against Dalit women and from committing themselves to programmatic steps that address the issue of patriarchy within Dalit communities. In as much as caste depends on endogamy for its perpetuation, the annihilation of caste first demands the annihilation of patriarchy, starting with the internal patriarchy of the Dalit household.

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Glorification of Victimhood

The Aryan invasion theory is problematic because of its implicit glorification of victimhood. While there is no doubt that the Dalit experience is one of pain, pathos, and suffering, the fact remains that these are not the only Dalit experiences. There are also difficulties with how far one can actually push this concept. Some younger theologians and scholars have questioned the entire framework of suffering and pathos and whether a suffering God can actually come to the rescue of a suffering community or whether a defeated God could rescue a defeated people. Within the context of Dalit theology, there almost seems to be a clamouring for victimhood. This self-constriction is compounded by the perpetuation of the Aryan invasion theory which mutes the possibilities for alternative thinking. Moreover, persistence of the motif of a defeated people does not allow for a sense of psychological healing. The larger question of how a preoccupation with victimhood enables the victim to psychologically overcome the victimhood needs to be interrogated. Having interrogated the Aryan invasion theory and seen the reasons why it continues to have currency with Dalit theology, our analysis of the problematic influences this could probably have for Dalit theology demands of us to look for viable alternatives. EXPLORING ALTERNATIVES TO THE ARYAN INVASION

Undoubtedly, the question of origins is an important part of the structure of Dalit theology, particularly as it has a definitive role to play in the construction of Dalit identity and Dalit self-image. John Webster says that the question of origins ‘can grant or deny considerable psychological and hence potential political power to Dalit or to the high castes.’29 If this be the case, the question of origins will always be a part of Dalit theology and ideology and, therefore, cannot just be dismissed. The question then is to search for viable alternatives that would enable a theology that is both critical and committed to justice for Dalits and is also able to present Dalit theology as a theology of life for all. It goes without saying that the theory proposed should offer a viable and comprehensive explanation for the origin of caste in its entirety. This is indeed a difficult but a necessary line to walk, and it is the necessity of the twenty-first century for us to find a possible alternative theory of origins that would allow this to happen. The immediate alternative to the Aryan invasion theory is, of course, the Occupation theory as first propagated by Denzil Ibbetson and John Nesfield, both British civil servants in colonial India. According to this theory, the occupational guilds at a certain point in history converted themselves

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into closed groups based on the ‘principle of community of blood’ which were the castes. The theory is a distinctly colonial one which makes an attempt to connect the guilds of Europe with the hierarchy based on rank, and was popular in Britain at that time. Ambedkar is critical of this theory because of a basic lacuna that it does not offer any tangible reason for the transition from occupational groups to occupational castes.30 To Ambedkar, the division of labour which is central to the occupational theory of caste is a feature and not the essence of the caste system.31 Morton Klass’ alternative theory builds on kinship-based tribes that converted into caste groups due to certain economic realities that were specific to the South Asian region.32 His thesis is an extremely workable solution and its brilliance is that it acknowledges the complexity of the caste system and offers an explanation for the economic basis of caste while, at the same time, making the connection with endogamy and, therefore, patriarchy. Its drawback is that it makes no reference to either untouchability or the ideology of purity and pollution and therefore, its value for Dalit theology diminishes. In light of these theoretical limitations, let us now turn to Ambedkar’s theory and what it offers to Dalit theology. Ambedkar’s Theory of Origins

The theory of Ambedkar on the origins of caste and untouchability can be found in two of his essays. The first essay, ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’, appears in the first volume of his collected works. The second essay, ‘The Untouchables: Who they are and Why they became Untouchables?’, appears in the seventh volume of his collected works. Characteristic of both the essays is Ambedkar conscious effort to promote a non-western, non-Bramanical, Dalit theory for the origins of the caste system. Ambedkar’s theory of origins for the caste system is based on endogamy, the essence of the caste system. At a certain point of time in history, the Brahmin class closed its doors to become an endogamous group. Other classes, through a system of open/closed door policy, also followed suit in due time.33 Second, he traces the roots of untouchability to the ‘broken men’34 who settled on the outskirts of villages. These ‘broken men’ became untouchables due to contempt for Buddhism, a religion that they followed, as well as due to their dietary dependence on carrion beef. Ambedkar’s theory offers us several possibilities as far as the process of theologizing is concerned. First, it must be noted that Ambedkar was extremely critical of any notion of race being attached to caste. Zelliot points out that Ambedkar held his stance in spite of the possibility of him

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making alliances with Dalit groups in the South that were using the language of race.35 Further, Zelliot also points out that Ambedkar was critical of the use of race because of his American experience.36 Ambedkar had seen what segregation could do to a nation and was wary about using the same language in India. Circumventing the divisive racial categories, he insisted on the single cultural and ethnic Indian as a common ground to unite India and offer an avenue of change for the Dalits through a process of democratic reform. It envisioned an inclusive India based on justice and equality and in solidarity with the Dalits. In the same vein, his theory of the origins of the caste system can be explored in a non-binary way to offer Dalit theology as a theology of life for all while, at the same time, maintaining the primacy of Dalit subjectivity. Second, the theory proposed by Ambedkar offers us the only truly pan-Indian and Dalit explanation for the origin of caste. Coming from within the Dalit community, his theory factors in the violence and cruelty of the system and, hence, has a deeper grasp of the nuances that underscore the caste system. Unlike Klass who makes no mention of untouchability, the question of untouchability is dealt with at great length by Ambedkar. Moreover, the creativity of the theory itself and in his deconstruction of the arguments of not only western, colonial scholarship but also of the Brahmanical class in India, the theory presents itself as a paradigm for Dalit theology. Third, the theory does not build on the ‘defeated victims’ motif. In fact, their role as the protectors of the village is upheld. At the same time, Ambedkar does not present Dalits as the victims of the caste system. He does not credit the Brahmins with the ability of creating the caste system and makes the point abundantly clear when he says that the Brahmins do not have the mettle for this. While the Aryan invasion theory has the implicit notion that a superior race conquers an inferior one, the theory offered by Ambedkar holds all complicit in the perpetuation and genesis of the caste system. For him, the root of the caste system is endogamy that all castes practice. To root out the caste system what is required is an end of the endogamy, a practice that all who are serious about the annihilation of caste must address. Dalits, here, are not seen as the helpless victims of an invasion but rather as having an agency in the annihilation of the caste system itself. Fourth, in identifying endogamy as the root of the caste system, the theory offers a connection between the very structure of caste and patriarchy. In as much as patriarchy is perpetuated by patrilineal, patrilocal monogamous marriage systems, the caste system is perpetuated by the

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same marriage system. Patriarchy is no longer seen as just the baggage of the invader but all who perpetuate the caste system by intermarriage in their own communities as being complicit in patriarchy. Of course, it has to be clarified that Ambedkar himself probably needed to clarify this connection between caste and patriarchy more clearly,37 but the fact remains that the connection is there and the possibilities of Dalit theologians taking this further exist. On a connected note, it offers exogamous marriage as a real alternative to the caste system, and this is something that Dalit theology must adopt as a political programme. As long as the church continues to sanction endogamous marriage, all the rhetoric of Dalit theology is in vain. As a final point, the image of the ‘broken men’ living on the outskirts of the main village, protecting it but rejected for their beliefs has a Christological significance. The efficacy of a suffering servant is a contentious parallel for many invested in Dalit emancipation but the likeness to the Christ figure is too close to be missed. An alternative and radical reading could invert the Jesus–Dalit identification by exploring Dalits as the messiah. They are the messianic community through whom salvation is wrought for the world. The difficulty with Ambedkar’s theory is that he is still trying to seek a meta-theory to explain the origin of caste all over the Indian subcontinent. He further makes an attempt to find a rational and coherent theory that would give expression to a pan-Dalit reality. This was part of Ambedkar’s modernist project to argue against Hindu obscurantist views and colonial theories. In the process, however, he overlooks, and possibly even dismisses, local theories that Dalit communities have held as being the origins of the caste system. These are of course not ‘rational’, nor do they provide a grand explanation for the origins of caste as a whole, but they provide a theological depth that pan-Indian theories omit.38 Local Dalit Myths of Origin

Local Dalits legends on the origins of the caste system, and particularly the origins of the Dalits, provide the particularized details that are missed out in modernist meta-theories. While these myths may have some basis in reality, they point to deeper truths about Dalit reality, experience, and destiny. Unlike other theories, these are neither colonial constructs nor have they been manipulated by the dominant castes for their own purposes. Rather, they provide incisive wedges into the community’s selfdefinition and genealogy. Since theories about the origins of caste are based on imagination, intuition, and hypothesis, I would argue that Dalit folklore offers us a

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wider spectrum for the origins of the caste system. For our purposes, I would like to draw our attention to two myths that come from the Chuhra community in Punjab and the Paraiyar community in Tamil Nadu. John Webster documents the Chuhra myth in Dalit Christians: A History (1992) and its variant in Religion and Dalit Liberation (2002). The story is simple enough. It speaks of a Brahmin ancestor who was tricked into removing the carcass of a cow on the assurance that he would not be an outcaste as a result. However, the three brothers outcasted him anyway, promising him that they would restore him on the fourth day. On the fourth day, he was assured restoration in the fourth week, then the fourth year, and finally, the fourth yug.39 The second is a myth that is retold by P. Arockiadoss in his article entitled, ‘Contesting Inequality through Counter Mythography: Exploration into the World of Dalit Mythology’.40 He tells us that in the beginning, there were two poor brothers who set out to seek God. God asked them to remove the remains of a cow that had died. The elder brother told God, ‘Een thambi pappaan’, which is translated as, ‘My younger brother will do it’. God, however, misheard it as ‘Een thambi paapaan’, which is translated to mean, ‘My younger brother is a Brahmin’. The younger brother becomes a Brahmin, while the older brother goes on to become a Paraiyarm. Like the Chuhra myth, this too has several versions, two more of which are recounted by Arockiadoss himself. In all the variations, one notes that it is the God/people who mishear what is being said. What immediately stands out for these myths is that they acknowledge a time when there was no untouchability. They also acknowledge the fact that at one time, all were brothers living together with some measure of equality. Common lineage and lineal equality undercut the mythical basis of hierarchal stratifications that characterize caste India. Moreover, the original commonality of blood delegitimates caste notions of purity and impurity. Contrary to the notion that untouchability is a result of the untouchable’s error, the myths absolve the ‘untouchable’ of any culpability. Rather, the onus is on the misconstruction or trickery of the one who deems the other as untouchable. In this sense, these myths point out the blatant injustice meted out to those who are rendered untouchable. Where God is the one who errs, it is significant that unlike the categorical constructions in the Manusmriti, caste is not the deliberate action on the part of God but is rather a mistake that God commits. Implicitly, untouchability is a divine mistake that needs correction. In this sense, both myths speak of innocent suffering or suffering imposed on people for no fault of their own but because of a previous

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mistake or injustice on the part of the one who imposes. A variation of the Chuhra myth adds a redemptive element to the narrative. In some versions of the story, the brothers agree to restore their tricked sibling on the condition that on the day of resurrection, when their people cross the narrow bridge that spans the mouth of hell, he would have mercy on them. Webster informs us that the apocalyptic setting is Muslim rather than Christian.41 Yet, the redemptive aspects of innocent suffering leave more questions than answers. One must question how many Dalits need to be sacrificed for the sake of the dominant castes. Given the implicit Christological motifs, I am loath to offer such a Christological significance that would only serve to justify the suffering of more Dalits. I believe that the Christological emphasis lies in the following point. Both the myths point out the need for reconciliation. In the case of the Chuhra myth, the hearer is left with the indignation that the other brothers have reneged on their promise to restore their brother. Some variants of the story claim that this present age is the fourth yug when the promised restoration will take place.42 In the Paraiyar myth, we find that there is also a need to reconcile the mistake that was perpetrated. The younger brother here does not take it upon himself to correct the mistake. In both the stories, the question is left open; a wrong that must be righted. This open-ended conclusion to the myths suggests the latent intent for the hearers that they make good the injustice or error that had been committed in the past, thereby opening up the possibility for transformative action in the present on behalf of the listeners of the myth. This reveals the character of a myth that is not only intended to offer an explanation or a rationale for what is wrong but the basis for political action. The listener is intentionally left with a sense of injustice being done and in need of correction. It is my belief that it is in this open-ended commentary on injustice perpetrated that the Christological significance lies. It is the hearer in the present who is urged to become the messiah of not only the Dalit community but of all those who are caught in the demonic net of caste. It is the hearer who takes up the challenge to right the wrong that has been done and is called to reconcile two brothers who have been estranged by either a historical injustice or a divine mistake. As a member of a messianic community, it is the Dalit hearer of these myths who assumes a messianic role when he or she makes an attempt to overthrow the caste system. To specify the agency of the Dalit hearer is to be cognizant that these myths are continuously recreated and retold within the context of the Dalit communities. These are their myths that energize and activate their people.

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CONCLUSION

One can go on expounding the theological depth of this story or the several others that abound, but this is exactly the point: these local Dalit stories open themselves up much more for theological spaces while, at the same time, offering us some insight into the origins of the caste system as seen from the perspective of the Dalit communities themselves. Since all theories of the origin of the caste system are in the realm of myth anyway, each with their own ends, the point is, why not use one of these? NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. B.R. Ambedkar, 1990, The Untouchables: Who they are and Why they became Untouchables? Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 7, Bombay: The Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, p. 244. 2. Ibid., p. 243. 3. Ibid., p. 244. 4. Ibid., p. 245. 5. John C.B. Webster, 1992, The Dalit Christians: A History, New Delhi: ISPCK, p. 1. 6. Herbert H. Risley, 1892, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 2 vols, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press; and Risley, 1908, The People of India, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. 7. A variation of this theory is that the Dalits are those who refused to be co-opted into the system of the Aryans; the Adivasis are those whom the Aryans drove into the forest areas; and the Shudras are those that the Aryans managed to co-opt into their system. 8. Romila Thapar, 1989, ‘Which of Us are Aryans?’, Seminar, 364, December, p. 14. 9. Morton Klass, 1992, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System, New Delhi: Manohar, p. 47. 10. There is a view which claims that the search for Vedas or the original texts of the Hindus was sought after because Europeans coming to India could not accept the religious ritualism that was part of Hindu India. The task was therefore to rediscover the pristine Aryan essence which it was assumed would be found in these ancient texts. It was with this mindset that the texts that were later to become part of the neo-Advaitic movements in India were rediscovered by Europeans. One has to question the obsession of Indian theological education with these texts rather than with popular religiosity as being part of the spectre of Aryan supremacy. 11. Klass, Caste, pp. 25ff. 12. Thapar, ‘Which of Us are Aryans?’, p. 16. 13. Ibid., p. 16. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Also, cf. Edward W. Said, 2001, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, New Delhi: Penguin Books, p. 3. 15. Thapar, ‘Which of Us are Aryans?’, p. 16. 16. Ibid. 17. Klass, Caste, p. 60.

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18. B.R. Ambedkar, 1990, Annihilation of Caste, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, Bombay: The Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, p. 49. 19. B.R. Ambedkar, 1990, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, Bombay: The Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, pp. 3–22. 20. B.R. Ambedkar, 1990, The Untouchables: Who they are and Why they became Untouchables? Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 7, Bombay: The Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, pp. 239–379. 21. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Positive Discrimination and the Transformation of Caste in India’; available at http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/archive/april01/artcj. pdf#ctrlF=Phule (last accessed 4 January 2008). 22. It can also be argued that the Dravidian movements have also not taken the Dalit question seriously. See Gail Omvedt, ‘The Dravidian Movement’; available at http:// www.ambedkar.org/gail/Dravidianmovement.htm (last accessed 4 January 2008). 23. Gail Omvedt, 2006, Dalit Visions: The Anti-caste Movement and the Construction of an Indian Identity, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, p. 35. 24. Ibid., p. 41. 25. Cf. Albert Minz, 1997, ‘Dalits and Tribals: A Search for Solidarity’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, Madras: Gurukul and New Delhi: ISPCK, 1997, pp. 130–58. 26. Eleanor Zelliot, 1998, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, New Delhi: Manohar, p. 82. 27. V. Devasahayam, 1997, ‘Doing Women’s Theology’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 30. 28. For an analysis of the work from the perspective of a critique of the theory of the Aryan invasion, see Gabriele Dietrich, 2001, A New Thing on Earth, New Delhi: ISPCK, pp. 214, 215. Also see, Joanna Riddle and Rama Joshi, 1986, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India, New Delhi: Kali for Women. 29. Webster, The Dalit Christians, p. 1. 30. Ambedkar, Castes in India, p. 17. 31. Ibid., p. 16. Also cf., Gabriele Dietrich, 2001, ‘The Relationship between the Women’s Movements and Dalit Movements Case Study Conceptual Analysis’, in Gabriele Dietrich (ed.), A New Thing on Earth, Madurai: TTS and New Delhi: ISPCK, p. 221. 32. Klass, Caste, pp. 135–60 33. Ambedkar, Castes in India, pp. 18ff. 34. ‘Broken men’ refers to the fragments of tribal groups that had been defeated in war and had bonded together. 35. Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, p. 41. 36. Ibid., p. 82. 37. Ambedkar sees patriarchal institutions like forced widowhood and sati as being derivatives of the caste system rather than the other way round. See Ambedkar, Castes in India, pp. 10ff. 38. Cf. P. Arockiadoss,2007, ‘Contesting Inequality through Counter Mythography: Exploration into the World of Dalit Mythology’, in Leonard Fernando and James

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Massey (eds.), Dalit World—Biblical World: An Encounter, New Delhi: CDS and Vidyajyoti, p. 50. Of particular relevance here is his difference between logos and mythos. Ambedkar’s theory would very much fall with the realm of logos. 39. Webster, The Dalit Christians, p. 10; John C.B. Webster, 2002, Religion and Dalit Liberation, New Delhi: Manohar, p. 19. 40. See Arockiadoss, ‘Contesting Inequality through Counter Mythography’. 41. Webster, Religion and Dalit Liberation, p. 19. 42. The fourth yug or the Kaliyug is the epoch in which the divine order is thought to be disturbed and is often equated with the empowerment and emancipation of women and Dalits.

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5 Envisioning a Postmodern Method of Doing Dalit Theology Y.T. VINAYARAJ

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he category Dalit is ‘historically arrived at, sociologically presented and discursively constituted’,1 to represent the collective transformative aspirations of a people who are the victims of caste system in India. As a unique social system on which socio-political and cultural structures are built, caste determines both the micro and macro power relations of social body. Dalit theology, as an academic endeavour, emerged in 1980s. It is a contested epistemology that challenges the epistemological foundations of the casteist discourses. Dalit theology that emerges from the experiences of oppression and alienation embodies Dalit aspirations for a democratic social existence. Theologizing Dalit spirituality was necessitated by the strategic silence or negligence of the so-called Indian Christian theology and Liberation theology towards the Dalit experiences. However, though it evoked a contextual theological quest for anti-Eurocentric and anti-colonial method of doing theology in India, by following the salient features of the epistemological foundationalism of the project of modernity, Dalit theology shared in some of the modernist trappings. In the twenty-first century, Dalit theology has to prepare itself to account for a methodological shift in this postmodern context. This essay explores the possibility of resignifying the method of doing Dalit theology by discussing its epistemological dilemma in the postmodern context. POSTMODERNISM: THE QUEST FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL/ ANTHROPOLOGICAL PLURALISM AND ITS THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Postmodernism,2 as an epistemological shift, refers to a range of theoretical positions that contest the key commitments of the project of

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modernity. Modernity was a quest for a universally valid, epistemological foundationalism. With the unitary notions of progress, history, and identity, modernity defines itself as a comprehensive explanatory framework for everything and everywhere. As a ‘meta-narrative’, it subordinates, organizes, and accounts for all ‘other’ narratives that often seek to stand apart from the narrating ‘self ’. Jurgen Habermas contends that there is a false notion of universalism at the heart of the project of modernity which orders cultures and people hierarchically.3 He traces the history of the origin of modern European colonialism back to the foundationalist epistemological tradition of western Enlightenment. Further, according to Lyotard, such grand narratives instantiate a specifically modern approach to the problem of legitimation.4 By rejecting the unitary theories such as scientism, liberal humanism, and Marxism that predetermine the self-actualization of the subject in history where the unfolding of the absolute consciousness occurs, postmodernism gives special attention to the particular/local/little histories or narratives of life worlds. Stanley J. Grenz observes that postmodernity embraces the narratives of particular peoples, and celebrates the diversity and plurality of the world without attempting to discover a ‘grand scheme’ into which all of these particular stories must fit.5 In employing universal indices as referential categories, theology has largely relied on a foundationalist paradigm. Postmodernism contests this epistemological foundationalism and theoretically substantiates and advances epistemological and anthropological pluralism. Postmodernism, thus, provides epistemic space for the so-called ‘theologies with a prefix’, ‘hyphenated theologies’, and contextual theologies. Simultaneously, postmodernism also identifies all versions of ‘prefix-less theology’ as a form of modernity’s vested pursuit for a hegemonic ‘meta-narrative’. These shifts from the totalizing modern to the need to account for the particular in the postmodern provide the theoretical wedge for envisioning Dalit theology as a postmodern theology. POSTMODERN DALIT THEOLOGY: A CONTESTED EPISTEMOLOGY

The mark of the postmodern epistemology is a move away from the authority of universal science towards narratives of local knowledge systems (‘small voice’ or ‘little narratives’). Michel Foucault discusses the history of the formation of such specific knowledge systems under the name ‘genealogy’. He says that there are multitudinous knowledge systems in history that have been disqualified as inadequate, located far down in the hierarchy and subjugated as ‘low ranking knowledges’.6

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Steven Seidman calls them ‘contested knowledges’.7 According to Michel Foucault, the insurrection of these subjugated knowledge systems evokes resistance spontaneously. Dalit theology is a contested epistemology. It arises out of the decasteist traditions of Dalits in India. As an episteme, caste was the product of Hindu–Brahmanic epistemology through which Brahmanism upheld hegemonic social positions by constructing certain disciplinary practices. As a meta-narrative, the casteist epistemology rejected the epistemological and anthropological pluralism and legitimized the epistemic content of the ontological discrimination of Indian social body. Advaita (non-twoness), the most widely-accepted school of Hindu philosophical thought, was one of these hegemonic knowledge systems that provided a false unitary perception of reality. By discounting all forms of concrete difference, it usurped various particularities into an ontological and metaphysical unity. Also, by projecting advaita as the highest religious revelation and philosophical achievement, Hindu–Brahmanic epistemology either supplanted or subjugated all forms of Dalit knowledge. It was the Dalit search for a de-casteist epistemology that brought them to Christianity in the early modern period. Religious conversion was a social/theological engagement for a de-casteist tradition in India. Christian missionary endeavours brought the chapel, devotion, Bible, education, and liturgy within the reach of Dalit de-casteist discourse. Modern missionary imaginations of social space and physical body envisaged Dalit self-respect movements all over India. In the 1980s, Dalit identity politics that emerged as an outcome of the Ambedkarist movements challenged the casteist social discourses and initiated the search for a modern democratic social space for Dalits. The quest for Dalit identity took shape in Indian theological field in the form of Dalit theology. The pioneers of this rearticulation such as Arvind P. Nirmal, M. E. Prabhakar, James Massey, and K. Wilson had visualized an anti-colonial method of representing themselves as doing theology in a historical context where modern prefix-less and universal theology represented Dalits variedly as the ‘colonial other’, as a ‘national other’ by traditional Indian Christian theology, or as the ‘poor’ in Liberation theology. The agency of the ‘small voices’ to resist the Hindu and western Christian tendencies to subjugate their otherness and to methodically circulate their own ‘little histories’ as an effort at self-narration was a watershed moment in the course of Indian theology. On the other hand, it is paradoxical that though Dalit theology criticizes the Eurocentric way of doing theology, it shows a rather ambivalent relation to the European

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Enlightenment tradition in the ways of defining the categories such as identity, history, power, and resistance. POSTMODERN DALIT THEOLOGY: ENVISIONING NEW SUBJECTIVITY FOR DALITS

Unlike the humanist notions of given, fixed, and essentialist identity, postmodernism proposes that subjectivity is primarily in a process of construction or formation. According to Foucault, subjectivities are formed/ constructed through the discourses.8 Discourses are ways of constituting knowledge that, together with the social practices, in turn constitute our sense of ourselves. While documenting the systemic forms and regimes of power that produce knowledge, Foucault helps us understand that subjectivity is produced through the dynamics of discursive formation. Language has an important role in the social positioning of agents. Our minds, bodies, and the social institutions are being constituted discursively as part of a wider network of power relations. It is the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed.9 Despite the crushing weight of structural systems that exercise power over individuals there, a postmodern Dalit theology could explore avenues that facilitate the equitable exercise of human subjectivity. As a synchronic system of signs, language generates meanings that shape human subjectivity through a chain of signifiers so that meaning does not reside in the sign or in an individual signifier. The lack of correspondence between the sign and the signifier implies that meaning is always in danger of sliding out of control. Modernity had addressed this danger by fixing meaning and, as a collateral move, fixing subjectivities. The postmodern turn extricates subjectivity from this fixity to become contradictory and, in the process, constantly reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak.10 Thus, subjectivity is capable of being other than what is prescribed by the system. Derrida affirms that there is no fixed subjectivity or guaranteed truth, only interpretations. Thus, by using affirmative language and engaging in creative discourses, subjectivity can be changed/reread/reinterpreted for those who are even denied their social space. Dalit subjectivity is formed within and against the casteist disciplinary practices. Caste, as an episteme, disciplines its subjects. It positions Dalits in a subordinate social status and renders them as lesser human beings. As a micro power system, it disciplines Dalit life world, their habitus, and even their bodies. By rejecting the essentialist/humanist traditions of modern epistemology, postmodern Dalit theology invites Dalits to have a fresh look

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at themselves and their life world. A new world is possible through courageously and creatively utilizing the discursive space. As Foucault contends, ‘we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.’11 POSTMODERN DALIT THEOLOGY: EMBODIED HISTORIES OF DALITS AS THEOLOGICAL CONTEXT

By following the modern humanist tradition, Dalit theologians generally render subjectivity/identity as a collective, coherent, and essential category. Experience as the source of true knowledge rests on the liberal–humanist assumption that subjectivity is the authentic source of the interpretation of the meaning of reality. According to postmodernism, there is no pure and essentialist experience that remains intact.12 It problematizes the way we look at our own experiences and the social positioning of ourselves. This prompts us to view the pathos epistemology differently. Though not to deny the authenticity of individual experience, viewing it differently orients us to contextualize and analyse the constitution of experience and the ideological power that underlies the constitution. The challenge before Dalits is to trace back the history of formation of their subjectivity; how it is constructed and the various modes of power that are played out in the construction of subjectivity. James Massey lays it out categorically when he claims that ‘Dalit theology is Dalit history’. For him, ‘Dalit theology is a call for a journey into the unexplored depths of Dalit consciousness. The theological expression that grows within the womb of this Dalit history will then lead to actions that will ultimately result in Dalit liberation.’13 Undoubtedly, the recollection of the forgotten memories is one of the important methods of subaltern historiography. But to conceive history as linear and progressive—a notion of the liberal humanism—or to relegate memories as irrational and unscientific is problematic. Such a modernist view invariably relegates Dalit history as a ‘history from below’. Michel Foucault’s theory of discursive formation informs us that the historical process in which we are formed and being formed is not detached from our subjectivity. It is we who determine our histories through formulating new discourses that provide patterns for alternate subjectivities. Thus, histories are not external to the people; rather histories live in their life worlds and even in their bodies. The people, the ones who make them, embody histories. Thus, the transformation possibilities for Dalits is not historically fixed or socially determined. It is not located somewhere outside the reach of Dalits. Instead it is both close-at-hand and open-ended.

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Thus, by engaging in new discourses, creating new languages, construing new meaning systems, and generating new symbolic capital, Dalits are able to determine their own subjectivity. Here is precisely where Dalit theology differs with the Marxist social theories. The Marxist social theories do not consider the reproduction of social relations through the active agency of the individual. It alienates him/her by rejecting the traditional quasi nature of the life world. Anthony Giddens argues that the social agency can be established through the discursive consciousness in social practices of every day life.14 According to postmodern social theories, Dalits need not wait for a class struggle in order to establish their social agency in society. They can join in remaking their lives through imaginatively and deliberately employing discursive spaces that are available to them. POSTMODERN DALIT THEOLOGY: DECONSTRUCTION AS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR DALIT HERMENEUTICS

Derrida’s deconstruction shocked the Eurocentric epistemic foundation that had rationalized the existence of ‘non-European’, ‘variegated’, and ‘marginal’ identities. For Derrida, the meanings of signs are never fixed or static; rather they are subject to contestation because the assigned meaning has political significance. Deconstruction brings out the politics behind the construction of meaning. It undermines the hierarchical dualities that occupy a supreme place in western culture and decide truth and falsity. It is because of this linguistic and political subversion that this process is called deconstruction.15 It must be clear that the purpose of deconstruction is not to reverse the value of the signs. For example, it does not aim to celebrate women’s sexuality as superior to men but rather to disrupt/displace the hierarchical signification assigned to either women or men. Thus, deconstruction allows the ‘marginals’ to present themselves as active social agents in social life, not merely as binary opposites. This is the place where the so-called marginals like Dalits, tribals/Adivasis, women, and so on find empowering possibilities in postmodernism and its deconstructive project. The Bible has been used as an effective and meaningful tool for the transformation of Dalits. Dalits read the Bible for change. When Dalits read the Bible, they read themselves. They read texts and the texts read them. Reading/rereading/hermeneutics is like the harvest where all people participate in the celebrative exercise. Thus, reading/rereading Bible is a collective activity. The text, just like the harvested land, is not a flat terrain. Some area may be cultivable while some may not be, and

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corresponding to the seasons, the fertility of the land may also vary. Similarly, the Bible is to be approached in its plurality of meanings. It is a text of textualities. Meaning is not inherent in the text. It is the new readings that create new meanings. Thus, new texts are constantly created by the community for the purpose of copious meanings to sustain the subjectivities on the Dalits. While using the liberation hermeneutics for reading Bible, Dalit hermeneutics falls into the problem of essentialism. The fixity of ‘dalitness’ or essentialism posited in Dalit identity prompts Dalits to associate themselves with stereotypical roles in biblical text. Thus, for example, they forge complete identification with the poor, leper, lame, blind, sinful woman, haemorrhaged woman, and criminal on the cross. More problematically, by attributing ‘dalitness’ to Divinity, even the pluriformity of Divinity is rejected. Dalit is not a unitary term. Just like the text, Dalit is a text of textualities. According to Kristeva, ‘just as every Text is an Intertext, so every subject (every Person) is an intersubject.’16 The pluriformity of the Dalit world is to be acknowledged. Dalit world consists of Dalit men, women, children, grandparents, differently abled persons, and so on. Again these categories are pluriform in content; for example, in the case of women, there are working women, agricultural women, mothering women, urban women, women academicians, and student women. Thus, in postmodern biblical hermeneutics, the history of the formation of the text and the reader is the most important. In postmodern Dalit biblical hermeneutics, Dalits draw on other hermeneutical elements such as inter-textuality (use of information from other texts such as cultural texts), intra-textuality (texts within the texts), and extra-textuality (extra-canonical texts). For the biblical hermeneutics of deconstruction, the Bible contains the word of God but it is not itself the word of God because the word of God is more than a written text. Thus, this method in a way questions the accepted way of talking about biblical authority. For Dalit hermeneutics of deconstruction, Dalit stories, biographies, lyrics, songs, dance, festivals, cultural symbols, and even their bodies constitute their texts. BODY AS A HERMENEUTICAL TOOL: TOWARDS A NEW METHOD OF DOING DALIT THEOLOGY

The Dalit body has always been the site of violence and oppression. Dalits’ place in the social body has been determined by the very constitution of their bodies. On the other hand, the importance of the body has been devalued by the Brahmanic–Hindu epistemologies in India. The modern epistemology was based on the ‘Almighty Mind’, while the

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pre-moderns concentrated on the ‘universal Soul’. History bears witness to the fact that in spite of the systemic neglect of the body in the dominant epistemologies, the body of the subordinate communities has always been the site of structural violence. In the epistemic shift that Dalit theology envisions, the body cannot be a side issue but must be recovered as the pivotal point of reference. Dalit theology emerges from the broken bodies of Dalits. Body as a theological method invites Dalits to have a fresh look at their bodies. Here, Dalits reject all the colonially imposed imprints/notions on their bodies. By affirming the new social meanings/imaginations of their bodies, Dalits reject the casteist traces inscribed onto their bodies and determinedly enter into new and unattached social relationships. This is the way to deconstruct and reconstruct the social body. Dalit habitus changes in accordance with this reflexive self-formation and a corresponding social formation. Dalit body as a theological method invites Dalits to review the historical construction of the social institutions that are built into certain discourses in certain historical contexts and to reconstruct them with new strategies and symbols. For transforming the existing social practices, it is imperative to develop an alternate sense of looking at themselves as active social agents in a somewhat open-ended society. Body as a hermeneutical key offers Dalits the experience of possibly new relations with other social groups at church, at home, and in the streets. Dalits acknowledge platforms such as church, civic organizations, democratic social movements, and political parties and hence, aspire for a dialogical and pluriform social existence in a dynamic future of subjectivities. TOWARDS A POSTMODERN DALIT SOCIAL PRACTICE

The postmodern social practice addresses the subtle ways of power relations and gives voice to the subjugated textualities under collective subjecthood. Audre Lorde, a Black feminist poststructuralist, comments: ‘In a postmodern context, redefining our differences, learning from them, becomes the central task.’17 The humanist tradition assumes a collective subjectivity/identity which neglects the pluriform/micro life worlds and imposes a uniform strategy of resistance. For Audre Lorde, the ways of discovering and utilizing the differences is a source of creative change. She says that ‘learning to live and struggle with many of our differences may be one of the keys to disarming the power of the white, male, middleclass norms which we all have all internalized to varying degrees.’18 Thus, postmodern social practice is micro-politics that gives attention to the micro situations of people and initiates local resistances. For example, in our

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state, we have ‘Brahmins’ curry powder in our markets while we don’t have ‘Dalit’ curry powder. The resistance to it is not just the dharnas or bandhs, rather Dalits need to create new notions about kitchens. Thus, their resistances have to begin from the micro-spaces like kitchens. The postmodern Dalit social practice gives space for multiple/plural Dalit standpoints. Dalit womanist movements, Dalit labour unions, Dalit human rights activists, Dalit theologians, and Dalit poets and artists all find acceptance and possibilities here. The linguistic, regional, and cultural pluriformity is to be reckoned as a possibility if there is provision for the possibility for dialogical/deconstructive social engagement. Postmodern Dalit social practice envisages a Dalit community where differences are reckoned as authentic, not as binary opposites or variations. To create symbols, language, and institutions for the building up of a community of ‘inherent differences’ is the task before Dalit political practice today. Dalits stand for a democratic civil society or the enrichment of a just democratic civil society. Dalit social practice challenges the inadequacies of the present democratic social existence. It makes democracy more meaningful. Dalit social practice is not just the ‘other’ of democratic social engagements. It is not a demand for a separate kingdom. These are the voices that uphold the just content of a democratic formation. These voices represent the voice of a deconstruction and reconstruction of our social body. It envisages a dialogical democratic community. This is the political content and challenge of a Dalit embodied spirituality and its social practice. Drawing from a Bourdieu insight, meaningful social agency may be located in the development of socio-political, cultural, and symbolic capitals.19 Capitals that determine the social agency vary in accordance with the context and period. The market-centred globalized economy demands capitals that can be marketed or cashed in. While referring to the recent Dalit/Adivasi struggles in Kerala, Sunny Kapikadu, a Dalit activist and scholar, says, ‘These are not just struggles for some raw materials rather they are the new searches for new social capitals which in turn make us active social agents of a contemporary democratic civil society.’20 CONCLUSION

Postmodern method of doing Dalit theology employs the potentialities of discourse through which Dalits engage in a process of deconstructing the casteist traces imprinted on them. Further, by transforming their own habitus, Dalits place themselves in a powerful discursive position. Creating new shared symbols and language facilitate a search for the cultural means of becoming a community. By directing attention to the

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differences among Dalits and to the intersecting social relations in which Dalits are situated, the theological task initiates local dialogical social practices. Search for the socio-political, cultural, and symbolic capitals that enhance Dalit social agency and the engagement in the process of transformation of the institutional discourses make Dalit theological engagement politically connected. As it envisages the restructuring of the whole democratic process, Dalit theological engagement is thus risky rather than secure, active rather than passive, expansive rather than exclusive, more like Easter rather than Good Friday—vibrant, liberating, and celebrative. As an embodied spirituality of Dalits, Dalit theology finds ways and means to celebrate their bodies. For Dalit theology, church is the site where Dalits celebrate a polyphonic social existence. Ched Meyers draws our attention to the intensity of the political oppression inflicted upon the body of Jesus. ‘And we would do well,’ he says, ‘not to forget that this very nature of arrest, trial and torture is still lived out by countless political prisoners around the world today.’21 But this same body of Jesus did not accept physical and social death as a terminus. As an embodiment of this hope, the social and corporate body of Dalits will also be resurrected and reinvent itself to proclaim liberative subjectivity to the world. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Gopal Guru, 2005, ‘Understanding the Category Dalit’, in Gopal Guru (ed.), Atrophy in Dalit Politics, Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, p. 69. 2. The term postmodernism was first used in the 1930s, but the current sense has begun with Jean Francois Lyotard’s, 1979, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. In fact, these discussions were started since the paper by Jurgen Habermas, 1992, Modernity—An Incomplete Project in the Post-modern Reader, New York: St. Martin’s Press, was delivered by the Germen theoretician in 1980. For —Habermas, the French poststructuralist thinkers of the 1970s such as Derrida and Foucault represented a specific repudiation of modernity. Postmodern philosophy is regarded as a complex cluster concept that includes: anti-foundationalism; anti-essentialism; antirealism; opposition to transcendental standpoints; rejection of the picture of knowledge as accurate representation; and rejection of principles, distinctions, and descriptions that are thought to be unconditionally binding for all times, persons, and places. David Lyon, 2002, Postmodernity, New Delhi: Viva Books Private Ltd., p. 202. 3. Jurgen Habermas, 1992, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, in Charles Jenks (ed.), The Post-Modern Reader, New York: St. Martin’s Press, p. 162. 4. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), 2003, Postmodern Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6. 5. Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, 2001, Beyond Foundationalism, London: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 23.

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6. Michel Foucault, 1979, The History of Sexuality, New York: Pantheon, p. 96. 7. Steven Seidman, 1994, Contested Knowledge, Malden, MA: Blackwell, p. 96. 8. Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato, and Jen Webb, 2001, Understanding Foucault, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Publishers, p. 31. 9. Ibid. 10. Chris Weedon, 1987, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 32. 11. Michel Foucault, 1982, Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (edited By Paul Rabinow), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 216. 12. In every perception of reality, there is a constitution of ‘other’. Frederic Jameson argues that culture is always something related to the subjectivity of others. Edward Said contends that no culture is monolithic but splintered. Frantz Fanon says that there is a subtle presence of the ‘other’ in our construction of consciousness of self. 13. James Massey, 1997, Down Trodden: The Struggle of India’s Dalits for Identity, Solidarity and Liberation, Geneva: WCC, p. 59. 14. Anthony Giddens, 1984, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 25. 15. John D. Caputo (ed.), 1997, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, New York: Fordham University Press, p. 11. 16. J. Kristeva, 1986, Revolutions in Poetic Language, USA and UK: Blackwell, quoted in Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, 1997, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, London: Harvester Wheat Sheaf, p. 68. 17. Audre Lorde, 1984, Sister Outside, New York: Crossing Press, p. 53. 18. Ibid. 19. Nick Crossley, 2001, The Social Body, New Delhi: Sage, p. 96. 20. Dileep Raj, 2001, Thantedangal, Kottayam: DC Books, p. 14. 21. Ched Meyers, 1998, Binding the Strong Man, New York: Orbis Books, p. 359.

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6 TRANS-formative Possibilities Tribal Formations in Conversation with Dalit Theology LALRUATKIMA

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alit theology has revolutionized the contours of Indian Christian theology over the last three decades. As a turn from the metaphysical speculations of a fledgling theological community wresting itself from the moorings in a foreign missionary legacy, Indian Christian theology now finds itself entrenched in the lived realities that collectively make up that community. Socio-political and economic questions impose themselves on the intersections between the human, the world, and the divine so that theology cannot but arise from the historical conditions of the proverbial Indian soil. And yet, that community is constantly emerging in the sense that every instance of redefinition by its constituent members pries open the sense of closure perceived to have been previously arrived at. Such is the dynamism where the new is both continuous with but also disjunctive with what has gone before as new orientations and questions progressively reconfigure the parameters of the theological project. Along this dynamic trajectory, this essay excavates for openings by a concentrated focus on the very categories that form the self-referential modes from where identity-specific Indian Christian theologies emerge. Because of the tendency to smoothen off problematic histories that undergird these categories, this focus suggests we continually reconsider the categories that shape the theological constructions at every stage of development. This proposition is unpacked by bringing in tribal issues in conversation with the explorations in Dalit theology. The issues are framed not so much in terms of Tribal theology per se but by examining the discursive practices that naturalize tribal formations. The second section of the essay locates TRANS-formative possibilities for a theological project that engages some of the issues identified.

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DE-FORMATIONS: PROBLEMATIZING DISCURSIVE SOCIAL FORMATIONS

The categorization of Ladakhis as ‘tribal’ provides a convenient segue into the issues that TRANS-formation teases out. Starting out as an interspersed series of inter-communal confrontations from 1969, the Ladakhi quest for identity necessitated negotiations on how they would define themselves.1 The vying groups were eventually configured along sectarian lines. In the summer of 1989, the dominant Ladakhi Buddhist group called for a social boycott of the Ladakhi Muslim group. A few months later, and as a conciliatory move, the Government of India accorded the ‘Scheduled Tribe’ status to the Ladakhi people. According to this diktat, the following groups were included as a Ladakhi tribe: Balti, Beda, Drokpa, Bhot/Bhoto, Changpa, Gara, and Mon.2 Governmental stipulations accorded the included groups access to state-issued benefits, while those not included in the schedule contest their unequal status and their ineligibility for the same benefits. Not surprisingly, among those left out are the Christians and some Muslim sections of the Ladakhi demography. In their quest for recognition, Ladakhis find themselves defined as ‘tribal’ whereby the definition flattens their heterogeneous particularities. The multiplicity in the modes of being ‘Ladakhi’ were domesticated along Muslim and Buddhist differences with the latter deemed more authentic. This is not to discount the convenience and utility of such reductive categories. The narrative of the nation state packages a heterogeneous human collective into a manageable category secured with state-issued benefits so that the ‘Scheduled Tribe’ certificate continues to be much sought for because of the access to governmental benefits it accords. And yet, the tribal category sets in motion a particular optic which defines how the Ladakhi is perceived and also, delimits her experience within the dominant discourse in India. To put it differently, subjective experiences are shaped by the tribal category dependent on who constructs and enforces the category. This discursive naturalization of the Ladakhi as a ‘tribal’ is problematic and will be theorized in the following section. The tendentious construction of the ‘Scheduled Tribe’ parallels Karen King’s struggle with the simplistic reifications in her field of study. To garner a perspectival frame, she invokes Raziel Abelson’s pragmatic– contextualist approach to definitions according to which, Definitions are good if and only if they serve the purpose for which they are intended. Thus, an evaluation of a definition must begin with the identification

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of the point or purpose of the definition, and this requires knowledge of the discursive situation in which the need for the definition arises . . . The practical value of any account of the nature of definition is found in the clarity of standards it provides for judging when a definition is good or bad . . . What must be stated in a definition varies with the definition’s purpose.3

With the suggested possibility that definitions invariably embody intentionality that is conditioned by the discursive situation, one notes that there is a certain sense of the definition’s temporal and positional valence. It does not, however, imply a formless groping for constitution but a pointer to the observation that situated imaginings like ‘Dalit’ and ‘tribal’, as they are propped up by definitions, are provisional and culled out to achieve a certain task. They are also located within a particular situation where the perceived task arises. In one sense, the one constructing the definition, the definition itself, and the entity which is defined are constantly locked within relations underlined by power and privilege. Located and intentional, definitions also suggest more flexibility than closure so as to open up space for renegotiations of the power relations that determine the process of defining. The Dalit theological project would continue to straddle the tenuous paradox of both the realized and the problematically imagined constitutions given the changes in the discursive situation and historical location. Hence, A.P. Nirmal’s initial probing for constitution needs to be revisited: What is dalit theology? It is rather difficult to answer this question in simple and straightforward language. For one thing, dalit theology is still in the process of emergence. We are still trying to construct a dalit theology or theologies. That is why I have entitled this essay ‘Toward a Christian Dalit Theology.’ What I am trying to do in this paper is to indicate the possible shape or form that Indian Christian dalit theology may take.4

Building on this important and fluid purview in the projected goals of the speculations of Nirmal and reiterated in M.E. Prabhakar’s edited volume, Towards a Dalit Theology (1988), we see further refinement on the speculative trajectories outlined in V. Devasahayam’s edited volume, Frontiers of Dalit Theology.5 Besides these works cited, Dalit theological explorations have enriched the way we think on Christian theology in India. In this progress of Dalit theology since A.P. Nirmal, recent definitions of the Dalit feminist voices remind us of the many areas that remain unexplored and in need of critical engagement. For instance, the perpetuation of caste hierarchy and patriarchy is problematic if Dalit women are to read the Bible in ways that are liberating for them.6

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Thus, when one thinks in terms of categories like ‘Dalit’ and ‘tribal’, one engages in a constitutive act of creation which is, simultaneously, reductive and restricted by the very discursive impetuses that instantiate their formations. However, it would help to recognize the subtle yet significant differences between them: while ‘tribal’ is an imposition, ‘Dalit’ is an arrogation. To conflate them or make simplistic parallels between them would trivialize their particular genealogies. In the case of ‘tribal’, Wati Longchar wrestles with the freighted history and connotations of the category.7 He does, however, subscribe to it as a methodological wedge that recognizes its location in time and the politics of how ‘tribal’ became a descriptor. Nevertheless, the instance of the tribalization of the Ladakhis demands of us to constantly rethink the very category in light of the exclusionary and reductive dynamics embedded in the genealogy of the definitions. DEFINITIONS, DISCOURSE, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SUBJECTIVITIES

Categories define their subjects by delimiting their experiences. Humans do not possess an all inclusive and exhaustive self-definition but rather acquire it through the various self-understandings and self-representations that structural and discursive systems operating in society offer. As projections of cultural discourse, categories engineer the subject. The recognition and perception of the subject is facilitated by the categorical representations that operate and are present in the socio-cultural and theological configurations. In resisting these limitations, the tribal or Dalit subject has been recast in relation to notions of experience and selfhood as effects of politically charged systems of signification and representation. Implicitly, concepts of what constitutes the self change over time as the human subjects learn to apprehend themselves in new and differing ways. Such a postulation opens up the recognition that these self-referential systems, like the definitions that give them their notion of actualization, are constructed categories and liable to change. It would thus be important to focus on how the constitutive theological discourse is produced and how they work to produce subjectivities that, in turn, create social worlds around these constructions. Nevertheless, there is also the very real danger in perpetuating the same dominant discourse that constructs the Dalit or tribal subject if the theological project were to continue to uncritically rehearse its particularity in terms of these constructed subjectivities or what is commonly invoked as ‘Dalit experience’ or ‘tribal experience’.

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Categories are further problematic as they are inextricably entwined with notions and mechanisms of power. Studies on how power operates in societies have been turned on their heads by the shift in focus from the exclusive domain of rulers, armies, or states to the discursive practices through which persons in society learn to apprehend themselves and their roles in certain ways.8 Implicitly, the underlying power dynamics of thinking on Dalit or tribal categories cannot but be cognizant of not just the major players, events, and politics that instantiate them but, more importantly, of how the various discourses are generated and the nature of subjectivities they produce. This is all the more poignant when one predicates both the categories with ‘theology’ so that the categories are not just definitions but also imply fields of knowledge whose genealogies are embedded in the fluctuating power relations through history. At the same time, Dalit and tribal theologies have also been the result of the forging of particular discursive spaces within wider networks of other fields of knowledge, in the most instances, of Indian Christian theology as the dominant form of knowledge. These noted shifts in perspectives on the operations of power highlight the close relationship between power and knowledge. Taken to the next level, such perspectives have opened up much critical research on the production of knowledge and curricular studies that highlight the fraughtness of structures within the academy and its particular knowledge disciplines.9 We are now more aware that because certain texts are accorded canonical status, particular modes of engagement deemed valid as disciplinary approaches, and particular modes of being valorized over other modes, that discourse expresses the different underpinning truth regimes rather than explicit objective descriptions of reality. For instance, Shawn Kelley (2002)10 unravels how there are no free floating Christian origins but that at various discursive situations in scholarship, we see tendentious constructions of the category ‘Christian’ that reflected a particular and situated tendency or politics. R.S. Sugirtharajah’s explorations in Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology have opened new awareness of the problematic heritage of the Bible and biblical studies while suggesting creative possibilities for critical posturing in the ongoing theological discourse.11 Dalit and tribal interrogations have engaged the reductive horizons of Indian Christian theology and forged alternative ways of doing theology. These instances direct us to the observation that there are no neat epistemological wholes simply out there. Rather, such investigations of the enabling conditions of discursive practices have problematized the notions

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that structure fields of knowledge such as ‘authority’ and ‘reading’, indicating that they are not absolute givens but modes of producing significations and of making the world intelligible. Attention to these interconnections between power relations, the construction of subjectivities, and the production of knowledge systems in the academy would continue to impinge on the texture of the theological project. IDENTITIES AND CONSTRICTED SUBJECTIVITIES

The construction of the Ladakhi ‘Scheduled Tribe’ is a reminder that the dominant discourse invariably determines the mould in which subjectivities emerge. As an invisible but persuasive strategy, categories generate tropes and stereotypes so that attitudes and positions are neatly systematized into reductive and distinguishable categories for the easier consumption of the dominant narrative. These tropes and stereotypes function to effect what Bourdieu theorized as ‘symbolic violence’ or the imposition of symbolisms and systems of meaning in such a way that they are experienced as legitimate.12 Rehearsed in popular discourse and practice, these categorical subjectivities become naturalized projections of reality that determine how differences are packaged. Chak De India was touted as one of the Hindi movies to watch in 2007 because of its ambitious project of dishing out a can-win message rallied around subtexts of sports and national integration. The subtexts in particular were significant as they were foregrounded against a depiction of the polychromatic spectrum of Indian identities and regional contours; such a project being a refreshing change from the usual celluloid spiel that one effortlessly gets accustomed to in the world of Indian cinema. In order to accommodate this novelty, an unusual cast facilitated the inclusion of the likes of a Mary Ralte, a Soimoi, and a Molly Zimik; names that are familiar to the tribal ear and yet so dissonant for a Bollywood production. One could not help but speculate how these relative unknowns would be scripted alongside the star billing of Shah Rukh Khan in the lead role. The need for accommodation seemed to overflow from the cast onto the screenplay. That Mary scores the all important penalty stroke to clinch the championship is offset by a mere token presence throughout the narrative. Molly has three forgettable and short dialogues, while Mary is silent throughout the movie. Both serve as silent props to the narrative. A very problematic segment of the movie is one where this silence is exploited. At a team lunch, Mary and Molly are singled out as objects of verbal harassment. In a rather cinematic instance of reversals, the women get together

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to thrash the eve-teasers while the coach smiles with an epiphanic nod on seeing the team’s personal and regional differences give way to the grander narrative of unity. The women have spoken through their collaborative thrashing and yet, as the scene fades, one wonders if they, especially Mary and Molly, were heard? As a cinematic discourse, Chak De opens itself up to appreciation as a bold and non-glamorous depiction of a glimpse of the societal variations in India. It being ambiguous, this cinematic depiction can be construed as underlined by the intent to critique social reality on the part of the screenwriters. The depiction could also be interpreted as the persistence of the constructed socio-cultural structures and their indelible political colourings on the demographic imaginings even as the details of the screenplay are pieced together. Implicitly, the tribal emerges only within the frames determined by the perception of the non-tribal and dominant lenses. Exclusion and inclusion in the nation state seem to be based on non-recognition by the majority. Additionally, the silent passivity of Mary and Molly seems to reinscribe the patron–client structure so that the inclusion and exclusion of the tribal is in terms of being a recipient of the nation’s cause. Such dependence-based identities perpetuate the power relations that underscore their own emergence. Another instance when such constructions of identity are most visible is at the annual ritual of admissions to the Delhi University during the months of June and July. Students descend on to the various colleges with wads of admission forms to be submitted. Far removed from this scene of frenetic activity at the various colleges are the snaking rows of students that crowd the few windows near the University Chancellor’s office for a shot at an admission to one of the colleges in the university. These students are from the ‘Scheduled Tribe’, ‘Scheduled Caste’, and ‘Other Backward Caste’ groups from all corners of the country, submitting their applications to a common pool from where they would be assigned to one of the colleges under the aegis of the government’s reservation policy for the communities they come from. Definitions like ‘tribal’ serve as convenient reductive categories in service of dominant narratives and yet, a tribal will never identify herself as one. Back home, far removed from the sweaty queues at the Delhi University, she would probably be a Munda or a Nishi rather than the ‘tribal’ that has been fixed on her certificate. On a parallel note, electoral politics have the knack of accentuating the marked cleavages among communities identified as Dalit so that alliances, when stretched by political contingencies, can even criss-cross the vertical strata of caste differences.13

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This ambiguity instantiated by the fixity engineered in the government’s ‘Scheduled Tribe’ or ‘Scheduled Caste’ certificates is perceptively captured by Dipesh Chakrabarty: By identity, I mean a mode of relating to difference in which difference is either congealed or concealed. That is to say, either it is frozen, fixed, or it is erased by some claim of being identical or same. By proximity, I mean the opposite mode, one of relating to difference in which (historical and contingent) difference is neither reified nor erased but negotiated.14

Repetitions like cinematic reruns and annual rituals of admissions to a particular university rehearse and, over time, naturalize the dominant discourse underlying the constitution of subjects. The subject and her experiences are engineered by the systems and discursive regimes operating in society. Correspondingly, the unproblematized invoking of experience also naturalizes and reifies the subject or even perpetuates its own formative dynamics. Hence, the need for attention to the systems and institutions, their categories of representation, and their premises about what these categories are and how they are made to function. Particular discursive situations engender definitions to serve specific purposes. These definitions also determine the emergence of subjectivities in terms of reductive identities that impose a closure on the differences and power relations. Often naturalized by the dominant discourse and, hence, rendered invisible to the uncritical eye, these identities caution us to consider the invisible dynamics and politics at play in speculating on a very human activity such as a theological project with the potential for being a way of life in the twenty-first century. LOCATING TRANS-FORMATIVE POSSIBILITIES

What is compelling about life that it pushes the horizons of our theological constructions is its multiplicity and variety. And yet, we have seen instances of how this vibrancy has been tamed along with the subtle but efficient manner with which the containment has been carried out. Given the complexity of wresting free from these homogenizing dynamics at play, the explorative component of this essay can only be provisional. Rather than attempt to construct a monolithic prescription, this explorative exercise is only a preliminary attempt at locating trajectories that are recognizant of issues of power and control that were highlighted previously. Stating this caveat recognizes the very real possibility of even the inferences inadvertently perpetuating the same unequal relations that they are intended to engage. This hesitation to essentialize evil or the source of oppression also takes into account the subtlety with which

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power operates in society making it imperative for the theological task to be keenly attuned to the many sites and mechanisms of domination beyond just caste or tribal categories. TRANS-lating Scripture

Such precautionary measures will inevitably broach the issue of scripture that has played a central role in the theological discourse of both Dalits and tribals.15 Much of the theological speculation has come from a hermeneutical engagement of experience with a written text as scripture and where the text, more often than not, provides the referential frames. On considering the entrenched pre-positioning of the history and interpretation of scripture, easing off the constrictions implied by the canon could open new ways of looking at not just how a body of texts informs subjectivities but also how individuals and communities order their self-understanding between themselves, the world, and their notion of God/divine in ways not necessarily coloured by textual frames. This, however, is not to say that we junk scripture from our theological projects but rather to ‘ . . . think differently about and orient ourselves differently around interpretation, about what to interpret, where and how to begin, how to proceed, with what approaches, and with what agenda.’16 In her fascinating exposition on Jesus’ interaction with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-31, Surekha Nelavala enlivens her engagement with a scriptural text through a dialogical interaction with social texts.17 Invoking a multiplicity of voices through her reading, Nelavala addresses the need to accommodate multiple ideological positions so that alongside Jesus’ exclusionary remark in v. 27, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,’ we hear her mother’s veiled defiance, ‘You are calling us untouchables, the dirty pigs, but each grain of rice that you are eating is touched and touched by us only (sic).’18 Aside from the obvious parallels that one could draw between the Syrophoenician woman’s tactful parleys with Jesus and a Dalit woman’s subtle but effective resistance to an exploitative boss, one perceives a radical alterity hinged on a conscious engagement with power diffused through the various texts that are brought into the dialogical commentary. Nelavala’s TRANS-lation of scripture focuses on Jesus’ act of traversing boundaries to embrace differences. Foreshadowing the household of God, this act of embrace affirms a transcendent vision as a polemical means of undermining social hierarchies and inequalities. The affirmation moves beyond caste and gender differences to a higher unity beyond these differences so as to question

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their discursive formations. Jesus’ subjectivity as an outsider in Gentile territory, the oddness of the forthright Syrophoenician woman, or even Nelavala’s father’s response, ‘I wish I had been there for you,’ on hearing his wife and daughter’s ordeal, become rallying points to critically parse the constructions of difference. An inversion of binaries denies the self-evident naturalness of these constructions so that even Jesus, despite his initial refusal because of structural limitations in v. 27, eventually complies with the demands of the Syrophoenician woman. ‘The evangelizer is ultimately evangelized.’19 Coupled with the act of embrace, DE-formations are tempered to image the coexistence of multiple voices, multiple ideological positions, and, in a scriptural sense, multiple texts. While such readings highlight the destabilizing potential of a nuanced scriptural engagement, they also open up possibilities of re-forming the order that embraces a wider spectrum of subjectivities which would otherwise have been erased. TRANS-disciplinary Postures

A.P. Nirmal’s initial insistence on a methodological exclusivity for Dalit theological speculations was cognizant of the dominant theologies’ propensity to accommodate and assimilate which would inevitably result in the silencing of the Dalit voice.20 The implicit exclusiveness of Dalit theology for those who had the ‘pathos’ experience or shared it sympathetically or empathetically seemed limiting in its scope. Jayakiran Sebastian recently called for an opening up of this exclusivity by acknowledging and fostering an interdisciplinarity whereby Dalit theology positions itself strategically to tap into the rich and complex possibilities across varied fields of knowledge.21 Nonetheless, there is a very real possibility that such interdisciplinarity might inadvertently end up in the accumulation of lateral knowledge without an actual confrontation of or engagement with the power modes and mechanisms at play in the very generation of the fields of knowledge or disciplines. Overlooking these dynamics, even though the synchronic perspective is acknowledged, could adventitiously reinscribe merely the plurality of the disciplines along with their ideological baggage in tow. TRANS-disciplinary postures deepen the breadth of interdisciplinarity by highlighting the modality of knowledge as an ideological construction of reality and subjectivity in any given discipline. Thus, there is an intentional interrogative posturing that delves into the mechanisms of how different modes of understanding are privileged as knowledge at the cost of other modes that are consciously disregarded. In order to reverse this configuration, the critical posturing consciously engages that which has been

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glossed over or silenced and brings these peripheral modes to the centre of the discourse or knowledge production. Implicitly, such a position transgresses the notion that disciplines are neat wholes, while the position is sharpened by a continued self-reflexivity that undercuts any pretensions of closure or epistemological innocence. In emphasizing the communion between humans, space, and God/ divine, Tribal theology is inextricably linked to the symmetry of all three components.22 This notion of integrity with the diversity beyond the human genus impinges on theological notions so that even salvation cannot be restricted to humans alone but would also have to account for other life forms. How might the environmental implications of Tribal theology inform Dalit theology on issues of land beyond the politics of ownership? As a reflexive move, what are the investments in transcendantalizing space so that Tribal theology addresses broader insider–outsider issues in terms of encroachment and alienation? Do these investments open up space to explore the politics underlying the preservation and celebration of a way of life? How do the preservation and celebration of tribal ways of life signify on the dominant narrative of pan-Indian identities and meta-cultures? Prompting a string of probing questions, TRANSdisciplinary postures engender incisive trajectories that serve as platforms for further theological imaginings. TRANS-scribing Practices

TRANS-disciplinarity implies an opening up of the epistemic field where the pivotal pain–pathos, rather than sublimated, is further nuanced by the interrogative positioning that pries through the layers of discourse constructed around that very experience. It also focuses away from the simplistically reductive tendencies of the unproblematized subjectivities or identities but emphasizing the fluid possibilities of the proximate, a TRANS-formative posture that engages the negotiated contestations while affirming the plurality and diversity of human communities under the purview of the theological exploration. In attempting to capture the varied self-referential modes of communities, discursive practices provide points of insight whereby people construct and are constantly reconstituting their relations to power configurations. Pavan Varma’s observation is instructive when he notes, ‘Behavioral patterns have to be discovered not in the considered stance before an observer, but in the insignificant reflex preceding or following it.’23 His observations echo what Pierre Bourdieu had earlier theorized in terms of habitus:

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The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.24

The focus here is on comportment as basic as bodily postures that are internalized as a matter of routine process of socialization but continually adjusted to the objective world of other people and things. At one level, habitus orients us to the notion that practices are socially conditioned and, because they express how individuals or groups perceive reality, they are expressive of power mechanisms. At another level, because it is based on routine repetitions without explicit reference to codified rules, the habitus opens us to practices whereby people engage their subjectivities as countermeasures to the objective reality. For instance, Ladakhis engage written scriptures on a wide range of modes, one among which is to wrap it with a handkerchief. The resulting visible and symbolic gesture bridges the more foreign textual world with the subjective symbolic world enabling the practitioner to negotiate the layers of social practices and notions of power while affirming his relationship with God and his fellow Ladakhis. Sathianathan Clarke theorizes the unintentional but trenchant scouring of the ‘objective’ scriptural attitudes and practices in the mimetic performance of the woman from Vagaikulam village in the Tinnevelly district of Tamil Nadu.25 Such an engagement overrides the privilege that certain structures of meaning and order, in these cited instances the textually constructed meanings, are accorded. Implicitly, the subjectivities that people like the woman from Vagaikulam village or the Ladakhi wielder of the scripture represent are not just mere anecdotal bookmarks in a grand theological narrative but the actual locus of theology. Even though such TRANS-disciplinary engagement with practices should hopefully address issues of agency and resist duplicating the thingifying26 propensities of the dominant discourse, the caution for methodological humility is pertinent because of the diffuseness of power structures. Without this caution, our rhetorical positions in the act of transcription blur under the social texts created and engaged with. There are no innocent creations and every level of creation involves the creator’s authority and the structural presuppositions being inscribed into the text implying

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the often and unintended submergence of the agentic voice. This seemingly stifling circularity is highlighted not as a dampener to the already vibrant theological imaging and trajectories being explored but reiterated as reminder to the angles that need to be consciously engaged with in spite of how deceptively slippery they may be. CONCLUSION

A conclusion seems out of place given the cautious manner with which we have traversed through DE-formative dynamics to explore TRANSformative possibilities that attempt to account for the multiplicity and heterogeneity which have been flattened by the dominant discursive practices. I, as the writer, can only hope that, as a reader, you would decide how and what to pursue so as to continue the conversation. In doing so, we would be collaboratively forging a variety of strategic wedges into the deeper fault lines that demarcate the particularities which define and will define life in our times. A theology for life could not be more strategically located than amidst the tension and teeming diversity that mark these fault lines. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Martijn van Beek, 1997, ‘The Importance of Being Tribal or: The Impossibility of Being Ladakhi’, in Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther (eds), Recent Research on Ladakh 7: Proceedings of the 7th Colloquium of the International Association for Ladakh Studies held in Bonn/Sankt Augustin, 12–15th June, 1995, Band: Ulmer Kulturanthropologische Schriften, pp. 21–24. 2. Prem Singh Jina, 1997, ‘Turmoil and Success in Ladakh Politics’, in Prem Singh Jina (ed.), Recent Researches on the Himalaya, New Delhi: India Publishing House, p. 170. 3. Raziel Abelson, 1967, ‘Definition’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2, New York: Macmillan Publishing, p. 322, quoted in Karen King, 2003, What is Gnosticism?, Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 15. 4. Arvind P. Nirmal, 1994, ‘Toward a Christian Dalit Theology’, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), Frontiers in Asian Christian Theology, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, p. 31. 5. M.E. Prabhakar (ed.), 1988, Towards a Dalit Theology, Delhi: ISPCK; V. Devasahayam (ed.), 1997, Frontiers of Dalit Theology, Madras: ISPCK/Gurukul. 6. Surekha Nelavala, ‘Jesus Asks the Samaritan Woman for a Drink: A Dalit Feminist Reading of John4’; availableat http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/07_1/surekha_jesus_asks_ the_samaritan_woman.htm (last accessed 29 November 2007). 7. A. Wati Longchar, 2000, An Emerging Asian Theology: Tribal Theology Issue, Method and Perspective, Jorhat, Assam: Tribal Study Centre, pp. 2–6. 8. Michel Foucault, 1990, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (translated by R. Hurley), New York: Vintage Books, pp. 92–3.

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9. Michel Foucault, 1994, The Order of Things: Archaeology of Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books. See also, Sirkka Ahonen, 2001, ‘Politics of Identity through History Curriculum: Narratives of the Past for Social Exclusion—or Inclusion’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 179–94. 10. Shawn Kelley, 2002, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship, London: Routledge. 11. R.S. Sugirtharajah, 2003, Postcolonial Reconfigurations. An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology, London: SCM Press. 12. Pierre Bourdieu, 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice (translated by Richard Nice), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 183–97; see also, Peter Jenkins, 1992, Pierre Bourdieu, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 104–10. 13. Edward Luce, 2007, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, New York: Doubleday, pp. 113–14. 14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2002, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 140. 15. For instance, Dhyanchand Carr, 1997, ‘Dalit Theology is Biblical and it Makes the Gospel Relevant’, in Arvind P. Nirmal, Reader in Dalit Theology, Madras: Gurukul, pp. 71–84. 16. Vincent L. Wimbush, 2007, ‘”We Will Make our own Future Text”: An Alternative Orientation to Interpretation’, in Brian K. Blount (ed.), True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, p. 44. 17. Surekha Nelavala, ‘Smart Syrophoenician Woman: A Dalit Feminist Reading of Mk. 7:24-31’, Expository Times; available at ext.sagepub.com/cgi/ontent/ abstract/118/2/64 (last accessed 28 November 2007). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Nirmal, ‘Toward a Christian Dalit Theology’, p. 32. 21. J. Jayakiran Sebastian, 2008, ‘“Can we Bypass that Truth?”—Interrogating the Methodology of Dalit Theology’, Transformation, vol. 25, nos 2 and 3, April and July, p. 80. 22. Longchar, An Emerging Asian Theology, pp. 68. 23. Pavan K. Varma, 2004, Being Indian: The Truth about Why the Twenty-first Century will be India’s, New Delhi: Penguin Books, p. 22. 24. Pierre Bourdieu, 1990, The Logic of Practice, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, p. 53. 25. Sathianathan Clarke, 2008, ‘Transforming Identities, De-textualizing Interpretation, and Re-modalizing Representation’, in Vincent Wimbush (ed.), Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 95–104. 26. The reductive essentializing and packaging of the ‘other’. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p. 142.

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7 Jesus and Ambedkar Exploring Common Loci for Dalit Theology and Dalit Movements L. JAYACHITRA Jesus and Ambedkar: Dalit Icons Jesus sees the crowd of Dalits and has mercy on them; ‘See, these my children are like sheep without shepherd; They are crushed, scattered. Who shall lead them to the path of redemption? Who shall break their chains of slavery that had bound them for ages long?’ His Disciples intervene: Aiya, there is some one who preaches salvation to these Dalitjans, but he is not a follower of Christian faith. But he seems to have captivated the minds of Dalitjans. Jesus turns to them saying: ‘whoever is not against us is for us;’ if anyone could do good to anyone of these my little children, it is indeed done to me.

T

he caste system ‘ . . . embodies the arrogance and selfishness of a perverse section of the Hindus who were superior enough in social status to set it in fashion and who had authority to force it on their inferiors.’1 This evil practice of casteism is so intrinsically rooted in the socio-cultural realm of Indian society that Indian Christians, too, have failed to overcome it. Such practices have adversely affected the missionary witness of the Indian churches by propagating unjust caste inequalities among its members. Furthermore, it had nurtured fundamentalist attitudes and intolerance towards indigenous subaltern cultures. The efforts of Indian Christians in the creative construction of Dalits’ experience either in doing Dalit theology or Dalit biblical hermeneutics have been enriched by the symbolically rich Dalit culture and literature.2 Part of this Dalit heritage is B.R. Ambedkar’s contribution towards Dalit liberation and his iconic writings that have left a rich legacy of Dalit aspirations for equality.3 In order to facilitate conversation across biblical and Dalit worlds, this essay adopts Edward

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Said’s methodology for knowledge production, also popularly referred to as contrapuntal reading. After a preliminary discussion on contrapuntality, I have primarily attempted to deal with a contrapuntal reading of Jesus’ temple act narrated in the four gospels alongside Ambedkar’s teachings on Dalit politics. Second, I have undertaken a contrapuntal reading of Pauline vision of early Christian community and Dalit aspirations for an egalitarian society as envisaged by Ambedkar. Finally, I have explored the possibilities of enhancing a contrapuntal reading of Dalit theology and Dalit movements towards checks against caste discriminations within the church by underscoring the reality of discriminatory practices against Christian Dalits in the wider Indian society. CONTRAPUNTAL READING: A STRATEGIC APPROACH

Edward Said borrowed the term ‘contrapuntality’ from western classical music and adapted it to propose a methodology for knowledge production. In Said’s words, ‘we re-read it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.’4 A contrapuntal reading of concepts such as sovereignty, state, culture, identity, hegemony, and resistance5 reveals that a critical engagement with casteism and its associated social hierarchy opens up transformative possibilities for relations beyond caste-bound barriers. Contrapuntality functions as a reading strategy to enable, ‘the experiences of the exploited and exploiter to be studied together. To read contrapuntally means to be aware simultaneously of mainstream scholarship and of other scholarship which the dominant discourse tries to domesticate and speaks and acts against.’6 By doing so, the gap between the texts emanating from the margins and the centre can be bridged. R.S. Sugirtharajah explores the possibilities of implementing this critical reading into biblical and theological discourses.7 He writes that by ‘juxtaposing neglected texts with the mainstream, we can highlight gaps, absences and imbalances. Such reading will reiterate the fact that many readings are possible and that is preferable to highlight the diversity than privilege one over the others.’8 Following Sugirtharajah’s lead, I have read contrapuntally the select texts from the New Testament and Ambedkar’s Dalit literature, primarily his Annihilation of Caste. Such an attempt enables us to see the similar notions of equality and liberty/liberation that these two different texts pose despite the gap in time and space in which they were produced. Further, this essay highlights how Christian scriptures can be placed alongside Dalit literature to explore common grounds for Dalit emancipation.

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EXPLORING COMMON LOCI FOR JESUS AND AMBEDKAR: A CONTRAPUNTAL READING OF JESUS’ TEMPLE ACT AND AMBEDKAR’S TEACHINGS ON DALIT POLITICS

Ambedkar’s passion to liberate Indian Dalits from the hierarchical clutches of casteism resonates with Jesus’ approach to redeem the poor peasants in rural Galilee from the religious authority of Jerusalem’s high priests and the political tyranny of the Roman imperial government. Ambedkar identified Brahmanism and capitalism as the enemies of Dalits. He uses Brahmanism in the sense of negating the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In that sense it is rampant in all classes and is not confined to the Brahmins alone though they have been the originators of it. This Brahmanism which pervades everywhere and which regulates thoughts and deeds of all classes is an incontrovertible fact . . . The effects of Brahmanism are not confined to social rights such as inter-dining or inter-marriage. It extends to civic rights as distinguished from social rights. Use of public schools, of public wells or public conveyances, of public restaurants are matters of civic right.9

If Brahmanism runs counter to the Dalit cause from within Indian society, then capitalistic notions represent the external dangers. Ambedkar articulated a political move seeking structural changes in society that offer greater dignity and equality to all rather than just social mobility to a few. Dalits possess the potential to collapse the unjust structures of hierarchy once they consciously get rid of their imposed inferior status. Ambedkar realized that only by assuring political rights with reservation in legislature and a share in the administrative structure would social mobility for Dalits be achieved. He viewed conversion to any egalitarian religion as a great political act. He propagated that such conversions would help Dalits break off from oppressive religious structures and to lead dignified lives as human beings.10 Jesus challenged a similar situation of exploitation in his temple act where he exhibits a political move in an adverse society of religious fundamentalism and political imperialism in Jerusalem in the first century CE. Roman imperialism and Jewish religious aristocracy were two major threats to the egalitarian living of common people. Jesus attempts to bring about a structural change in society by which the interests of the poor and the neglected may be brought to the forefront. A contrapuntal reading of the temple cleansing of Jesus and Ambedkar’s teachings on Dalit politics would reveal that they both reinstated the prophetic role of religion to undo the hegemonic powers and to disrupt the smooth functioning of the power domains. Ambedkar advocated equal dignity for Dalits in the milieu of Brahmanical social order to evoke signals of the denigration of the elite

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and the powerful guardians of caste system. Jesus’ cleansing of the temple is a good example to illustrate how Jesus, though from a different time and space, endured the same struggle against those who were least concerned about the dignity of the less privileged. Jesus lived in a socio-political situation of foreign rule and hegemonic power, which impeded the peaceful existence of the poor in Jerusalem. The market inside the temple was located in the court of the Gentiles where vendors traded in the animals and material necessary for sacrifice such as wine, oil, flour, and salt. The items of sacrifice could be purchased only by transacting through shekel, the currency approved by the Roman government. They also used the shekel to pay the temple tax.11 The trade and money exchange exploited the people by making charges excessive for the services provided. Jesus’ temple act denotes a special concern for the poor, especially women and lepers, who suffered the brunt of social oppression and economic exploitation at the hands of the temple leaders and their agents who acted as vendors. The purity laws discriminated against lepers and women by assigning them an inferior status in society and making sacrifices obligatory. However, there was a special provision for them in the Torah so that they could sacrifice doves for the purification of women (Lev 12:6–8; Lk 2:22–24), the cleansing the lepers (Lev 14:21–22), and other purposes (Lev 15: 14, 29).12 The religious scriptures like Torah had expressed special favour for the unequally-treated sections of the Jewish society. But the temple leaders had acted as the imperial intermediaries and misused their religious power for the economic exploitation of the poor by executing purity laws, imposing new laws on offering sacrifices, and by interpreting laws with the exclusive aim of profit.13 The Greek term used for the seats of dove sellers is kathedra, which can refer to the seat reserved for philosophers, rabbis, teachers, and priests. The dove sellers could be the teachers or rabbis themselves or they allowed their seats for the trade.14 This indicates the exploitation of the poor despite special provisions for the poor in the laws regarding sacrifice (Lev 14). Jesus’ act exposes a corrupt and dehumanizing system in which the religious custodians have abused their power for their vested interests. The Greek term used for ‘overturning’ is katastrepho, meaning ‘to destroy a dwelling place’. It is indeed a destruction of the hegemonic and oppressive socio-economic interests concentrated in the temple.15 The act of overturning of the tables shows Jesus’ attack on those who financially exploited the people in the name of temple tax and sacrifices through the use of a foreign currency. Hence, katastrepho would certainly check an

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act indispensable for both public sacrifices and individual compulsory and voluntary sacrifices. Jesus highlights the liberative aspect of Jewish scriptures in contrast to their abuse by the religious authorities whereby he underscores the inclusive community envisioned by God. He quotes from Isaiah 56:7 in Mark 11:7b. It is a direct quote from the Septuagint. The original Isaian passage 56:1–8 speaks about God’s promise of an inclusive community including foreigners, eunuchs, and the outcasts of Israel.16 The essence of the promise is that God will gather all in the holy mountain and, ‘make them joyful in my (God’s) house of prayer.’ The temple was intended to be inclusive and open to the outcasts and all people irrespective of all human-made divisions and preferences. Here, we find an outspoken Jesus acerbically critical of the false religiosity based on distorted interpretations of the purity laws which had restricted entrance to the temple. Jesus’ act visualizes an inclusive community where all the dividing walls of hostility are pulled down and equality of humanhood is affirmed. No one experiences exploitation or is forced to remain inferior in any way in such a God-intended inclusive community. Jesus initiates this just society by posing an open challenge to the temple leaders. Since the temple was the seat of religious and political authority, to challenge it was to challenge the political and religious authority of both the native Jewish elites and the Roman imperial power. Jesus’ temple act translates ‘the house of God into a transcultural “house of prayer” which can extend its borders beyond to peoples of other races and cultures.’17 Hence, Jesus’ ‘inclusive temple’ promises the total ironing out of tangible barriers of race and culture. Jesus’ act is certainly political in the sense that it resisted the power structures and initiated the destruction of the religious hegemony over the common people.18 His act defies the Jewish native elites’ antagonism towards the poor and their collusion with Roman imperial power. Even though his execution by the Jewish and Roman authorities had smothered his defiance, Jesus had initiated a programmatic resistance to oppressive religion. It is Jesus’ resistance to the imperial and religious domains that inspires many in their struggles for survival amidst religious fundamentalism, especially the Dalits of today. Ambedkar realized that casteism was sustained by deep-rooted religious prejudices based on Hindu scriptures which proscribed interdining and intermarrying. He was convinced that social democracy must precede political democracy. Social disabilities like casteism and untouchability should be eradicated to enjoy the political freedom of our country. For him, economic freedom and equality were equally important to uproot

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social contradictions.19 He wanted special representation of Dalits in the legislature and in public service. He insisted that the state should maintain the right of every citizen to enjoy the liberty to free speech and the exercise of religios professios; eradicate socio-political and economic inequalities by ensuring better opportunities for the less privileged; and make certain to access fearless freedom.20 Dalit political approach emphasized the politics of numbers to ensure power in the political system. Mass conversions to Buddhism marked Dalits’ political consciousness and assertion of individual rights. In a highly politically conscious neo-colonial India, ‘Today, the road to holiness leads inevitably to politics’21 or, as Hugo Assmann states: ‘Politics today is the essential road to Christian consciousness’.22 In the conflict of Dalit interests with the Brahmanical social order, power decides which one prevails. Strangely, the socio-economic and political power is unproportionately high in the hands of the dominant castes. That being the case, power is needed to challenge power. There may be the issue of an ethical use of power but there can be no question about the need for power to challenge the dominant power centres. Ambedkar’s words become relevant here: The Untouchable is therefore under an absolute necessity of acquiring political power as much as possible. Having regard to his (sic) increasingly inadequate power in social and economic terms the Untouchable can never acquire too much political power. Whatever degree of political power he (sic) acquires, it will always be too little having regard to the vast amount of social, economic and political power of the Hindus. The Untouchable must remember that his (sic) political power, no matter how large, will be of no use if he (sic) depends for representation in the Legislature on Hindus whose political life is rested in economic and social interests which are directly opposed to those of the Untouchables.23

Ambedkar’s view on Dalit involvement in politics reverberates with Jesus’ approach in taking political steps against the unjust socio-political and religious system prevalent in Jerusalem temple. EXPLORING COMMON LOCI FOR EARLY CHRISTIANS AND DALITS: PLACING PAUL AND AMBEDKAR CONTRAPUNTALLY

Dalit hermeneutics derives principles from the sociology of knowledge. Dalit realities/experiences and Dalit consciousness are essentially learnt in a social process because all the Dalit stipulations are socially conditioned. In a sense, Dalit theology and hermeneutics have a point of convergence since neither are innocent methods but conscious deliberations that seek to establish justice for their inherent ideological commitments. Such

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convergences in social perception that determine the internalizing of social realities will enable them to encounter ideological conflicts. With reference to the Brahmanical social order of Indian society, Dalit sociology and cultural anthropology will lay bare the socio-historical circumstances which gave rise to Brahmanic postulations of Dalit identity. Since the ‘world in which we live, the world we think, or assume, has ontological foundations, is really socially constructed and is created, communicated and sustained through language and symbol,’24 Dalit hermeneutics strives to decode the theological language propagated by the Brahmanic order of religion. In essence, Dalit hermeneutics is an exercise in ideology criticism that includes the socio-economic situations and ideologies from which the biblical interpretations and theological formulations are undertaken and the impact of such efforts which sustain dominant ideological values. A Dalit hermeneutic should always be alert to ‘disguised ideological propaganda’ which has often been transmitted through apparently apolitical biblical interpretations. At such crucial a juncture as this, Dalit theology plays its role by presenting a methodology that may relate theology and ideology so that, ‘faith will never be reduced to ideology on the one hand, nor irrelevant to liberating ideology on the other.’25 Exploring common grounds for placing Paul and Ambedkar contrapuntally takes us to the biblical world of first century Christians from whom a paradigm for linking biblical texts to contemporary Dalit society may be developed. The theological language of New Testament world is directly and positively revelatory of the community for which the language is written. For instance, Gerd Theissen observes that the texts referring to Jesus calling the disciples to leave everything (Mt 8:22) reflect the existence of a group of wandering charismatics in the early Palestinian churches who did leave everything.26 Elliott highlights the use of paroikoi in 1 Peter 2:11 not as a metaphor for the spiritually alienated but to denote the social status of Christians who are resident aliens denied full citizenship rights under the colonial Rome rule.27 The correlation of such text with Dalit reality is based on what Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey observed in that ‘ . . . certain characteristics of the worldview of any given social group (attitudes toward purity, ritual, body, etc.) are correlated in a consistent and predictable fashion with sociological variables, corresponding to the group’s internal and external lines of demarcation.’28 The task of Dalit hermeneutics is to decode the meanings of the words of a given text and the social structures of the community that produced the text in order to make them relevant for the interpreter’s accustomed social structures and cultural codes. Therefore, Dalit hermeneutics

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calls for cross-cultural rereading model that will facilitate an interaction between different cultures that struggle to establish their identity on the similar ideological constructs. ‘You are all same as each other’ (Gal 3:28): Restoring the Early Christian Equality for doing Dalit Theology in India

Egalitarianism was a constructed social reality in the early Christian church (Gal 3:28). Does it remain a subjective mental construct of a few lonely dreamers of equality in Indian church today? This question is pertinent for those who engage with the critical Dalit theological and hermeneutical praxes of liberation. The Bible as a whole is concerned with the reality of identities. Any discourse on identities needs to consider various identity markers, including culture, religion, language, ethnicity, socio-political preferences, gender notions, and economic status. Some of the most socially divisive debates today are on cultural identity and diversity. The question of identities touches upon issues of justice, peace, equality, human dignity, and rights. Globalization and neocolonialism have ignored the reality of rich collective identities, especially in Asian context, and resulted in the alienation of the suppressed identities in various forms, Dalits being a prominent one among them. A realistic account of the multifaceted identities as the treasures of human existence has to be highlighted to rethink crucial issues like the practice of democracy, equality, justice, and peace. Categorically, the God of the Bible is portrayed as a companion in the identity formation of people who are otherwise without power and identity. As we have seen earlier, the vision and worldview of Jesus and his praxis strove to construct the identity of those suppressed by the power centres of Jerusalem and the Roman Empire. Galatians 3:28 points to Paul’s battle for space on behalf of the suppressed identities like Gentiles, slaves, and women among the first generation Christians. Paul’s revolutionary statement in this text is a counterresponse to the pathetic situation of identity suppression within Christian communities of the first century. A Jewish male thanked the Lord everyday for not making him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. It was a society that had naturalized the hierarchical power relations. In the formative days of Christianity, there was an acknowledged tension between two distinct communities of the church: Jews and Gentiles. The Jews prided themselves in their origin and election as the chosen people of Yahweh. As receivers of covenant and law, they placed themselves above all other nations who they categorized as ‘Gentiles’. In the course of time, this spiritual superiority and the

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adverse political environment created, among the Jews, an exploitative nature that sidelined the existence of others in their territories/communities. This exclusionary self-identification was problematic among the early Christian communities that were made up of both Jewish and Gentile converts. Jewish Christians demanded the Gentiles to become Jews first before they could become Christians. Such ‘purifying’ acts had reinstated the racial superiority of Jews. The institution of slavery was another form of hierarchy scripturally sanctioned by the Bible. The practice of slavery depicted certain races of human beings as inferior to others and, hence, the powerless were to be ruled by the powerful. That Christianity tacitly perpetuated such unjust practices can be located in its growth within Hellenistic Roman soil. The egalitarianism preached and practiced among the first generation Christians had been toned down among the succeeding generations by the end of first century.29 The household codes in Ephesians and Colossians are vivid examples of how hierarchical structures replaced the Christian proclamation of equality. Colossians 3:11 refers to the sublimation of unequal binaries: ‘There cannot be Greek and Jew...slave, free,’ but the gender binary has already been omitted under the hegemonic religion. In Colossians 3:22-4:1, the Christian slaves are exhorted to be obedient to their masters immediately after the outstanding proclamation of, ‘no more slave or free’. Even though gender was and is never a criterion in the redemptive act of God, the Christian church could not withstand the socio-cultural patriarchal traits prevalent in the church. It is in a similar complicated social system that Ambedkar strove to establish liberty, equality, and fraternity among Indian masses. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Ambedkar had envisioned an ideal society based on fraternity, liberty, and equality derived from Buddha’s teachings. He equated fraternity to democracy convinced that democracy could never function merely as a principle of governance. ‘It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen (sic).’30 In Ambedkar’s opinion, liberty would guarantee the freedom for Dalits to be active agents who decided their occupation by themselves. Caste people have denied this liberty to Dalits and thereby perpetuated a slavery where Dalit’s conduct is controlled by them. Ambedkar strongly advocated for equality that, despite its utopian vision, should nevertheless underline the basic governing principle for an ideal society. Since opportunities are not equally shared, there ought to be equality of consideration, especially in the case of Dalits who face the brunt of oppression.31

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Ambedkar’s vision of ideal society highlighted a social endosmosis. In his words, it ‘should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of association.’32 In order to realize his dream of an ideal society, Ambedkar suggested that religion should treat fraternity, liberty, and equality as its doctrinal basis. ‘This means a complete change in the fundamental notions of life. It means a complete change in the values of life. It means a complete change in outlook and in attitude towards men (sic) and things. It means conversion.’33 Ambedkar proposed a new meaning to the word ‘conversion’: [I]f you do not like the word (conversion), I will say, it means new life. But a new life cannot enter a body that is dead. New life can enter only in a new body. The old body must die before a new body can come into existence and a new life can enter into it. To put it simply, the old must cease to be operative before the new can begin to enliven and to pulsate.34

This explains his longing for a total transformation of caste-ridden Indian society. Unfortunately, the visions of both Paul and Ambedkar remain still a distant reality. What Paul affirms in Galatians 3:28 is a total removal of the discriminatory differences between Jews–Gentiles, freed–slaves, and male– female. In all these pairs of relations, contrapuntality highlights the dominant group’s unquestionable control over the suppressed identities which divides people and sets them in conflict with each other. The revolutionary statement, ‘you are all same as each other’, resonates with Ambedkar’s call for liberty, equality, and fraternity towards the liberation of Dalits. Unless the suppressed identities find space to exercise freedom over their own selves, it may not be possible for them to engage in liberative praxis. Dalits and early Christians share a common locus for liberation as Dalits of today, just as the Christians (specifically Gentiles, slaves, and women) of the first century, are trapped in the societal bondage of slavery that impedes their exercise of complete humanhood. DALIT THEOLOGY AND DALIT MOVEMENTS: EXPLORING COMMON LOCI FOR ABOLITION OF CASTE-BASED DISCRIMINATIONS WITHIN THE CHURCH

Caste-based discriminations within the churches in India have utterly failed the priestly mission: the unity of the Church of Jesus Christ ( Jn. 17). Caste-based compartmentalization of Christians highlights the social division of the people who are spiritually united as the body of Christ.

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It is an illogical, yet commonly sanctioned curse upon Christian churches that caste differences are allowed to have the upper hand in the koinonia of believers. Ambedkar had agonized over the ill ‘common sense’ that had dominated the caste hegemony while he pondered over: What racial affinity is there between the Brahmin of the Punjab and the Brahmin of Madras? What racial affinity is there between the untouchable of Bengal and the untouchable of Madras? What racial difference is there between the Brahmin of the Punjab and the Chamar of the Punjab? What racial difference is there between the Brahmin of Madras and the Pariah of Madras? The Brahmin of the Punjab is racially of the same stock as the Chamar of the Punjab and the Brahmin of Madras is of the same race as the Pariah of Madras. Caste system does not demarcate racial division. Caste system is a social division of people of the same race.35

For Christians to claim that they are a chosen race and God’s own people,36 it would be imperative to include their fellow Christians in a manner that transgresses caste restrictions. This is what Ambedkar lamented over Hindus: Caste has killed public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity. Caste has made public opinion impossible. A Hindu’s public is his (sic) caste. His (sic) responsibility is only to his (sic) caste. His (sic) loyalty is restricted only to his (sic) caste. Virtue has become caste-ridden and morality has become, caste-bound. There is no sympathy to the deserving. There is no appreciation of the meritorious. There is no charity to the needy. Suffering as such calls for no response. There is charity but it begins with the caste and ends with the caste. There is sympathy but not for men (sic) of other caste.37

This observation is the same when we analyse the caste affinities of Christians within the churches today. On the one hand, Dalit theology aims to eliminate such caste-bound discriminations existing within the church, while on the other hand, it faces the challenge from the society outside the church to ensure affirmative reservation for the Dalit Christians under the constitutional provisions for Schedule Caste groups. It is at this juncture that Dalit theology has to explore the possibilities to align with various Dalit movements to widen its horizons for Dalit liberation. In post-independent India, Dalit movements have implanted positive values of liberty, equality, and fraternity; promoted political consciousness to struggle against exploitation and injustice. Through these achievements, the movements have created a significant resource base in terms of education, organizational experience, and experience of working with the apparatus of their adversaries.38 These are worth emulating for doing Dalit theology. Dalit theology has rarely been seen as an academic discipline proposing serious methodological issues by the majority of Dalit

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movements in India. The prevailing sacred–secular binary has denied the access for both Dalit theology and movements to join hands together in their common struggle against the Brahmanical social order. Dalit theology has not captured, in its methodological endeavours, the significant contours of Dalit movements which would have directed Dalit theology into political actions. Concurrently, Ambedkar had criticized Christian missionaries for restricting themselves to conversion and failing to address the political rights of Dalits. It is a big (sic) fault that they have not entered into politics. It is difficult for any institution to survive without political support. If they were in politics, things would have been different. Hundreds of boys and girls are educated, but these people have not agitated against injustice unlike the uneducated untouchables, and because of neglect towards politics, there is nobody to talk of and fight for your rights.39

Christian Dalits have to interact with secular Dalit movements in order to enhance their common goal of transformative political changes for the cause of Dalit liberation. A very encouraging development in the collaboration between Dalit Christians and secular Dalit movements is visible in the quest for Scheduled Caste status for Dalit Christians under the provisions of the Indian constitution. However, such collaborations need to grow into more stable interactive relations and common political actions. Since Dalit theology itself is a theological protest against the Brahmanical social order, it should declare its solidarity with all similar marginalized people of the world. Dalit theology should aim at inculcating Dalitist consciousness among students in seminaries and theological colleges who would later become the leaders of the church and movements. This Dalitist consciousness should transcend the methodological exclusivism to create critical awareness of Dalit experiences, irrespective of the caste background one belongs to. Such an endeavour, I hope, would eradicate the caste consciousness and create a Dalitist consciousness and a sympathetic pastoral approach to the struggling Dalit masses in Indian churches. Our genuine efforts in doing Dalit theology should safeguard against falling into the trap of perpetuating caste system in the process of reaffirming the Dalit experiences. In this way, Dalit theology may be able to build bridges with like-minded groups, secular and democratic organizations, and avoid becoming another cult group. Jamanadas critiques Dalit movements’ tendency to become isolated cult groups, which I reckon is relevant for Dalit theology as well. It (Dalit movement) should broaden its ideas and perception and reach those masses where it has not reached. It should avoid becoming politically correct.

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Identity will never work and those who have harped thesis of ‘I’ only speak for them and nobody else has a business to speak for or on behalf of Dalits should resist such things. Nobody speaks for others. We all speak our own perception. We should avoid such hyperbole that I speak for my entire community. I speak for my philosophy and experience. Because if identities are our point of speaking then one should remember Dalits are not a homogeneous community. In fact no community in the world is homogeneous. They are as wide as any body else and hence these identities fits in there also. So if this theory of Dalit speak for Dalit is used, then why should we accept western whites to speak for the Dalits. What prompts the Christians and Muslims to speak for the Dalits after all they have their own history of exploitation everywhere. Why should a Chamar speak for a Valmiki or Mala speak for Madiga? And above all, why should a Dalit male speak for Dalit female?40

A theology or a movement based on negativism will never bring about the desired outcome. V.B. Rawat expresses a similar concern: Identities have served the pocket of political masters and their ‘intellectual’ chums. They will not help the minorities among the marginalized. They are not based on democracy and participation. They are the collective ego of the powerful elite among them. A movement san respect for individual and without a corrective philosophy would not work. Dalits have their own cultural values and system, a system which need to be explored and new values added to them. It is time for us to provide our own democratic secular progressive vision and rather than just work on an agitation mode forever. We need to introspect and bring the last man (sic) into our mainstream, otherwise these contradiction are powerful enough to destroy the legacy of a powerful man, named as Ambedkar. If we consider ourselves grateful to his legacy, time has come to redefine the Dalit movement . . . The politics of identity never helps. The Dalits vision is to fight against hegemonies but in this process of breaking hegemonies, if we create our own hegemonies then the movement will break. In our efforts to break brahmanical hegemonies we created hegemonies in our own self and therefore Valmikis ( Swachchkars), Madigas, Kuhmhars, Mangs and hundreds of other communities ask question for their fair representation. And a typical elite answer is that they have been allured by the upper castes. But the fact of the matter is that there is a wide gap between the numerically powerful communities in Dalits and the minorities.41

Dalit theology, to widen its scope in the twenty-first century, should safeguard its ideology from falling prey to the trap of identity politics which fails to accommodate the collective wisdom and support for the benefit of Dalit liberation. Dalit theology has to break such hostile walls that had been built against similar people movements in the past and move towards working together in harmony. In this way, Dalit theology can function beyond the limits set by the methodological exclusivism of the past. A similar collaboration ought to take place between Dalit

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theology and feminist theology and feminist movements so that the issues of Dalit women, along with other exploited women, will become a common concern for Dalit theology and Dalit movements. Both Dalit theology and movements have to reiterate their common objective in clearer terms, whether they aim at establishing a society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity or at just reversing the sides in the equation of exploitation. Both have to rethink about their friends and foes in this context.42 CONCLUSION

A contrapuntal reading has exposed the internal apartheid manifested in the pernicious caste practices that continues to challenge the Christian churches in India. Brahmanism and capitalism pose a double threat, as Ambedkar had identified, to casteless egalitarian society. This threat has expanded its clutches in the fascist Hindutva and imperialist globalization in the neo-colonial India. My aspiration for a casteless Indian church and society finds solidarity with Teltumbde’s words: The Dalits must realize that the path of their emancipation goes over the corpses of these monsters (fascist Hindutva and imperialist globalization). It is not in their power, however, to fight them alone. They must join others who relate with them, by similarity of suffering and pain. It needs to be understood that this relationship transcends caste cleavages, this relationship alone would pave the way for annihilation of castes.43 NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’; available at http://www. ambedkar.org/ ambcd /24. Essay on Untouchables and Untouchability_political/ htm (last accessed 14 November 2007). 2. Sathianathan Clarke, 1998, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 3. One such attempt to incorporate Ambedkar and his writings into Christian Dalit liberation is found in Arvind P. Nirmal and V. Devasahayam (eds), 1991, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: A Centenary Tribute, Madras: Gurukul. 4. Edward W. Said, 1993, Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, p. 59. 5. Geeta Chowdhry, 2006, ‘Race(ing) International Relations: Postcolonialism, Contrapuntality and Transformative Possibilities’, Seminar, University of Alberta, October 12. Available at http://www.events.ualberta.ca/details.cfm?ID_event=8398 (last accessed 4 January 2008). 6. R.S. Sugirtharajah, 2003, Postcolonial Reconfigurations. An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology, London: SCM Press, p. 170.

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7. Translating this into the biblical field, it means to read Hisako Kinukawa’s Women and Jesus in Mark with Bas Van Iersel’s Reading Mark; Karl Barth’s Romans with Elsa Tamez’s The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective; R. Bultmann’s John with Appasamy’s Christianity as Bhakti Marga; and Neil Elliot’s Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle with Jaswant Raj’s Grace in the Saiva Siddhantham and in St. Paul. See Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Reconfigurations, p. 16. 8. Ibid., p. 170. 9. This speech was reported in The Times of India, 14 Feb 1938 and cited in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.), 2002, The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 402–3; P. Mohan Larbeer, 2003, Ambedkar on Religion: A Liberative Perspective, New Delhi: ISPCK and Madurai: Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, p. 71. 10. S.M. Michael, 2006, ‘Conversion, Empowerment and Social Transformation’, in S.M. Dahiwale (ed.), Understanding Indian Society: The Non-Brahmanic Perspective (reprint), Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications, p. 168. 11. Sam P. Mathew, 1999, Temple-Criticism in Mark’s Gospel: The Economic Role of the Jerusalem Temple during the First Century CE, New Delhi: ISPCK, p. 142. 12. Ibid., p. 143. 13. Ibid., p. 145. 14. Ibid., p. 144. 15. Ibid., p. 145. 16. John Nolland, 1988, Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 35a: Luke 1:1-9:20, CD-ROM. 17. Simon Samuel, 2007, A Postcolonial Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, London: T & T Clark, p. 138. 18. For Jesus’ leadership of Mass movement, see David Fiensy, 1999, ‘Leaders of Mass Movements and the Leaders of the Jesus Movement’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, vol. 21, no. 74, pp. 3–27. 19. Ambedkar, quoted in Larbeer, Ambedkar on Religion, p. 64. 20. Vasant Moon (ed.), 1989, Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, Bombay: Department of Education, Government of Maharashtra, p. 387. 21. Dag Hamerskold, quoted by Juan Stam, 1979, ‘The Hermeneutics of Liberation Theology’, Bangalore Theological Forum, vol. XI, no. 2, July–December, p. 139. 22. Hugo Assmann, quoted by Stam, ‘The Hermeneutics of Liberation Theology’, p. 139. 23. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’. 24. Robin Scroggs, 1980, ‘The Sociological Interpretation of the New Testament: The Present State of Research’, New Testament Studies, vol. 26, p. 175, quoted in Christopher Tuckett, 1987, Reading the New Testament: Methods of Interpretation, London: SPCK, p. 141. 25. Stam, ‘Hermeneutics of Liberation Theology’, p. 138. 26. Gerd Theissen, 1978, The First Followers of Jesus (translated By John Bowden), Philadelphia: Fortress Press, cited in Tuckett, Reading the New Testament, p. 142. 27. J.H. Elliott, 1982, A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegsis of 1 Peter, its Situation and Strategy, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, cited in Tuckett, Reading the New Testament, p. 142.

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28. Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey, quoted by Susan R. Garrett, 1997, ‘Sociology of Early Christianity’, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, New York: Doubleday, CD-ROM. 29. Peter Lampe, 2003, ‘The Language of Equality in Early Christian House Churches: A Constructivist Approach’, in David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (eds), Early Christian Families in Context. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Eerdmans, p. 83. 30. B.R. Ambedkar, 2002, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 276. 31. Larbeer, Ambedkar on Religion, p. 57. 32. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, p. 276. 33. Ibid., p. 301. 34. Ibid., pp. 301–2. 35. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, p. 265. 36. 1 Pet 2:9. 37. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, p. 275. 38. Anand Teltumbde, ‘The Dalit Movement: A Viewpoint’; available at http://www. ambedkar.org/admin/teltumbde.htm (last accessed 20 November 2007). 39. K. Jamanadas, ‘Let us Remember the Revolutionary Jesus’; available at http:// www.ambedkar.org/admin/jamanadas.htm (last accessed 14 November 2007). 40. Ibid. 41. V.B. Rawat, ‘Dalit Movement at the Cross Road’; available at http://www.countercurrents.org/Dalit-rawat090805.htm (last accessed 20 November 2007). 42. Teltumbde, ‘The Dalit Movement’. 43. Anand Teltumbde, 2005, ‘Hindutva Agenda and Dalits’, in Ram Puniyani (ed.), Religion, Power and Violence: Expressions of Politics in Contemporary Times, New Delhi: Sage, p. 221.

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8 Gonthemma Korika Reimagining the Divine Feminine in Dalit Christian Theo/alogy JOSEPH PRABHAKAR DAYAM

I

n the opening chapter of her novel, House of Earth, Dorothy Clarke Wilson eloquently captures the liberative character of Dalit cultural resources.

Ool ool loo! Ool ool loo! ..... Through the mud walls the sound of high yodeling voices came muted to her ears. Somewhere outside the house the neighbors were proclaiming by the shrill cry, five times repeated, that a male child had been born to Anand, son of Ram Lal. ‘It is good,’ thought Usha with satisfaction. ‘My husband, my lord, is proud that at last I have borne him a son. Will he perhaps tell me now, just once, that he is pleased with me?’ But the voices, the crowds outside, the adjoining rooms, all seemed far away, and the Old One sitting in the corner, gentle snores now issuing from her lips instead of mumbled prayers, seemed to have withdrawn even farther from reality. There were only herself and the child, the woman holding the lamp above her head. They were enclosed in this warm, dark inner chamber, as removed from the world as the life still hidden away in the swollen womb pressing hard against her shoulder. They were all unclean together. ‘What is your name?’ asked Usha suddenly. ‘Sita,’ replied the woman simply. Sita. Again Usha studied the features etched sharply against the flaring lamplight: high strongly molded cheek bones forming a triangle with the delicately pointed chin; broad but cleanly cut, sensitive nostrils; full lip curved gently as a bow; skin the deep rich color of sepia. Yes, they might well belong to Sita, that noble wife of Rama who was the ideal of every Hindu woman. How strange, that one bearing the name and the likeness of Sita had for six years been coming each day to their house to sweep the drains, clean the woman’s latrine, bear away their refuses in a flat, oozing basket on her head—and until this moment Usha had not even known her name! But why should she have known it? The women of respectable

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Brahmin household were not supposed to know the names of their sweepers. It was thoughts, like these that had so often gotten her into trouble. If Ma Devi, her lord’s mother knew now the things that she was thinking . . . But Ma Devi and the other women were far away in that world out side the small dark room. For a brief interval they could not touch her. And the old grandmother was asleep. She could say and think what she pleased. ‘Your child,’ she persisted, ‘will it come soon?’ ‘Soon,’ replied the woman briefly. ‘What would you call it—that is, if you were allowed to choose its name?’ A smile stirred about the full, curved lips. ‘If it is a boy, I shall name him Bhagwan. If a girl, I shall call her Kamala.’ ‘Kamala’ Usha repeated the word softly. ‘Lotus, It’s pretty. I like it. But—you don’t mean your husband will let you choose its name yourself!’ ‘Yes’ There were both pride and defiance in the woman’s voice. ‘I can choose it’. ‘But—the priest—its horoscope . . . ’ ‘The priests don’t bother with us. We’re too poor to pay them.’ ‘And—your mother-in-law won’t mind?’ persisted Usha, glancing toward the corner again to make sure the Old One was still sleeping. The pride was gone now from the woman’s voice. There was only defiance. ‘No. We—we don’t live as you do, all together in one big house. When I came to be with my husband, there was no room for us at his family stove, his chulha. And we women are different. We have our work to do, just like our men. We all have to do it together.’ Usha marveled. ‘You mean you have a house all to yourselves— just the two of you with your children? How wonderful that must be!’ ‘The wife of Anand would not call it a house. It’s so small.’ ‘No matter. It’s yours.’ Usha’s dark eyes glowed with a feverish light. ‘And there’s nobody telling you all the time what to do, what to say, even—what to think!’ Suddenly she reached up and clutched hard at the woman’s soiled skirt. ‘Do—do you and your lord ever talk together about—about things?’ ‘What things?’ Cautiously the woman disengaged Usha’s clasp with one firm hand while she tentatively touched the other to her forehead. ‘I think, the wife of Anand had better stop talking now.’ ‘Anything,’ persisted Usha. ‘Does he talk to you about the things he has been doing, what he thinks and feels, what he wants most in life? Do you talk together?’ ‘Yes’ The woman’s voice was gently soothing; ‘Yes, we do talk. Together’. But Suddenly Usha began to laugh. It was a strange, discordant sound, springing from deep within her racked body and mounting to a higher and higher tempo, and it brought the eyes of the old woman sitting in the corner wide open. ‘How—how funny! You’re an—Untouchable, and I’m a Brahmin—and yet it’s I who am the slave—not you. Or perhaps we’re both slaves—both of us—just as we’re both—unclean!’1

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The conversation between Usha and Sita builds up to an epiphanic climax that is accentuated by the setting: the women and the just born baby in a dark room, the domain of their freedom, and the untouchable polluted space. By juxtaposing two cultural worlds, Brahmin and Dalit, the author of this novel, writing during a time immediately after India’s independence, unveils the women’s quest for freedom in India and suggests the location from where the cultural impetus could be derived while articulating that vision for women’s freedom. While rightly observing that it is the dominant notions of purity and pollution that function as the legitimizing foundations of the gender and caste hierarchies, she insinuates that the Dalit women are relatively free.2 In reimagining the divine feminine in the theo/alogical and religious discourse, I suggest that revisiting these contesting sites of unorthodox religious experience and imagination provide fertile fields for the recovery of the divine feminine. Dalit religion is one of such sites. I am not suggesting that the Dalit culture is virtuous and the Brahmanic culture is base. It is neither to romanticize the Dalit culture nor to demonize the Brahmanic culture. Rather, I privilege the Dalit culture for the heuristic purposes based on the liberation theology’s assumption of the ‘hermeneutical privilege of the poor’. Gonthemma Korika, literally meaning the desire of Gonthemma, is also known as Gonthelamma and Gonti, a Dalit deity in Andhra Pradesh. This phrase is used to indicate the expressed desires of a person, especially when they are difficult and often impossible to fulfil. It is a common sight among the Malas in Andhra Pradesh that a woman is overpowered/empowered/ possessed by the Goddess to communicate to the community her displeasure with them and in her desire for the community to be spared from any impending calamity, often defying norms, the deity demands ‘forbidden’ things like kallu (palm wine). In the regular use of the phrase, it is used to indicate ‘strange’, ‘ambitious’, ‘forbidden’ desires of people. A female child’s desire for education in a poor Dalit family could be considered a Gonthemma korika. It is by the expression of this desire that one, at least as a fantasy, enters into the realm of reclaiming the rights that are otherwise forbidden. Reimagining the divine feminine is an ambitious task. It is to enter into the realm of the ‘forbidden’, yet legitimate and rightful endeavour. In this essay, I would revisit the traditions of Gonthelamma and derive trajectories in imagining the divine feminine in Indian Christian theo/alogy. It will have the descriptive objective of documenting a faith tradition of the Mala community in Andhra Pradesh. I also will prescribe trajectories in constructing a more inclusive Indian Christian theo/alogy.

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While working on the goddess traditions of India, scholars usually relied upon written texts and iconography.3 This approach would not be helpful while studying the Dalit goddesses for the reason that Dalits, being the people of oral traditions, have not committed their myths to writing. These myths are transmitted orally through songs and folklore. Very little has been said in the ethnographic works that are done on the Dalit communities in Andhra Pradesh. The study of these religions involves documenting their constituting myths. Iconography, too, would not help because some of these deities have no visual representation. In the case of Gonthelamma, one of the goddesses I intend to discuss here, she does not have her image placed in her temple,4 and neither did the community develop a pictorial image of the Goddess. This study is based on my observations as a participant of and belonging to the same community.5 I also make use of a few available written sources that have documented, though very little. GONTHELAMMA: GODDESS OF THE MALAS IN ANDHRA PRADESH

In several Dalit colonies in the coastal Andhra Pradesh area, one can find a shrine dedicated to Gonthelamma with no image inside. At Polavaram, the temple is located in the centre of the Mala6 colony. The temple is not only the geographical centre of the colony but also the axis of social life for the colony. When a dispute arises in the colony, the elders of the community summon the parties involved to the front yard of the temple. Whenever there is a clash with another community, Malas gather at the temple and decide on the course of action. For the children who do not attend school, Gonthelamma temple is the place around which they spend most of their time playing, singing, dancing to the recent film tunes or enacting a recent drama they have seen. During the day, the old women sit in the front yard of the temple clearing stones from the rice and engage in conversations that include sharing their difficulties and joys, news and gossip, and singing songs. But as one moves from the front yard to the temple itself, one notices the absence of the usual trappings of a temple. There is no image; instead, a mentally challenged Lambada (Gipsy) woman resides in the temple. Some portion of the temple is used as a storehouse for the community. It is believed that Gonti is the colloquial version of the Mahabharata character, Kunti. It is said that Kunti, on being found that she had an ‘illegitimate’ son (Karna) other than the ‘legitimate’ Pandavas, had to run for her life as the Pandavas pursued to kill her. She entered a Mala colony and hid herself in a pothole. The Malas hid her under a basket. Dharmaraja, the eldest of the Pandavas, stopped at the boundary of the colony for fear

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of getting polluted. Unable to enter the polluted space, he curses her to be the Goddess of the Chandalas.7 She was later incorporated into the Dalit pantheon as their deity. It is believed by the community that she grants them rains when they pray. When monsoons fail, farmers belonging to the dominant castes call some of the Mala women, give them some money, and entreat to perform the needed rituals to Gonthelamma. Women, mostly the old, bathe early in the morning and gather near the Gonthelamma temple where they erect an altar for the Goddess. If there is no temple, they erect a high place for the Goddess with seven steps. Some women say that the altar must have seven steps because Kunti was seven years old when she gave birth to her son. After an altar is built, they place milk in an earthen vessel and boil it on the altar. Then, they offer camphor. It is believed that it rains if the milk boils and spills over. It is believed that rains would come from that direction in which the boiled milk spills. It is likely that the Goddess will possess/overpower a woman in the Mala peta (Dalit hamlet). When Gonthelamma ‘falls’ upon the women, they make a prophecy and no one dares to face them. Some, including her spouse, fall at the feet of the possessed woman. As the women perform their rite of offering milk to Gonthelamma, the Dalit children simultaneously perform a different rite. They catch hold of a frog, tie a thread to its leg, and take it in a procession around the Mala peta on their way to the river Godavary accompanied by drum beats and dance. They leave the frog into the waters of the river. It is believed that this rite performed by the children would please the river which would then bring rains. Once in a year, they celebrate Gonthelamma festival. These celebrations usually transcend religious distinctions. Mala natives of this village who moved to other villages and towns usually come to their hometown for the festival. They celebrate Gonthelamma festival from three to nine days, depending on the amount of money collected from the people. While to celebrate the festival for nine days is desirable, a three day celebration is practical given the dearth of financial resources.8 On the first day of the festival, women make the image of the Goddess with mud and place it in the temple. Women gather at the temple in the nights and sing songs narrating the story of Gonthelamma. The presence of mastins (wandering bards who recite the community’s traditions) enhances the celebration. Mastins narrate stories of their ancestors and myths concerning their gods and goddesses. They also perform acrobatic feats. The temple does not have a priest. It is usually the Malapedda (elder) of the community who acts as the priest, on required occasions, for the

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community. Once the occasion is over, he is no longer a priest. Usually, the occasion on which the Malapedda officiates as a ritual leader is during the funeral. To invoke the blessings of the deity on the community, a group of women officiates over the priestly duties. On the final day of the festival, there will be a procession of the Goddess. Gonthelamma is placed under a basket to commemorate her entry into the colony and how the community protected her. The procession moves through all the streets in the colony. Men, women, and children accompany the procession accompanied by drum beats and dance. During the course of the procession, the Goddess ‘falls’ on some women. When the Goddess falls on someone, she begins to dance and roll on the ground.9 She demands food and kallu (palm wine). She is offered dhupam (smoke that comes out of incense sticks), and often, she foretells the impending danger. At Polavaram, since it is located on the bank of river Godavary, the prediction usually has to do with the wrath of the Goddess expressed through the floods. Who is Gonthelamma? Traditions that I have come across in the Dalit colonies suggest that she is Kunti, the mother of Pandavas in the Mahabharata.10 However, the tradition is not canonical. The Mahabharat does not contain this story. One can only speculate why these traditions were not included in the canon: their heterodoxy. They go against the dharma of the Hindu social order. Orthodoxy suggests that the children Kunti had were out of mystical union with the forces of the Nature.11 By contrast, the tradition of Gonthelamma does not suggest such mystical union but presupposes a human sexual union. Orthodoxy cannot perceive a woman of royal lineage entering the colony of the Chandalas. As a matter of fact, it prohibits such crossing of the boundaries. However, the problem is not just the conflict between the tradition and the canon but also the conflicting traditions within the (Dalit?) community. Wilber Theodore Elmore records a different tradition: The story runs that there was once a young woman of Sudra birth who lived in the North Country. She had brothers and no sisters. She was discovered in sin (sic) with a Madiga, and her brothers hearing of it tried to kill her. Gonti fled and hid in the house of the man with who she had been in improper relations (sic). Soon a young man came to the house. He would have been her brother-in-law according to the new relationship. She failed to arise and show him the respect due a brother-in-law, and when she became aware of her neglect, she fled to the fields, ashamed and also evidently fearing the Madigas. Mala men saw Gonti as she was wandering in the field, and she told them her story. They promised to protect her, and concealed her during the day beneath a huge heap of straw. When evening came they returned to the village, and taking Gonti

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with them, they place her on a beam in the roof of their house in order to conceal her. At night they fastened the door on the outside, but the next morning she was gone and the door had not been opened. Now they were filled with fear, for they believed her to be a goddess, and that they had offended her in some way.12

This tradition, though similar to the other tradition I have recorded earlier, raises the question as to the identity of Gothelamma. It is likely that the community is content with the ambiguity about the identity of the deity. In the cult that is built around Gonthelamma, she is seen as being independent of any male deity. The ascription of the ‘sacred’ character to the goddess does not lie in her relationship to a male consort.13 Neither in the temple nor in the worship of the Goddess during the festival do we find any place for any of her kin. In the earlier tradition (Gonthelamma as Kunti), she is believed for her ability to bring rains and well-being to the community. In the later tradition (a Shudra woman), she is feared for her ability to go out of the house even through closed doors. Perhaps, what matters to the community is the function and the power of the Goddess. CHALLENGE OF THE GODDESS FOR DALIT CHRISTIAN THEO/ALOGY

Although goddess worship is a prominent feature of religions in India,14 Indian Christian theology has not, until recently, engaged the goddess traditions in its attempts to make sense of the Christian faith.15 Its language, method, and content, for the most part, have been gender biased and have failed to view goddess traditions as having significant consequence for its enterprise.16 When the early Indian Christian theologians employed the feminine categories, such as prakruti, sakti, and maya, while reflecting on Creation, they employed them as being neutral in gender. For example, Brahmabhandav Upadyaya explained the Thomistic view of creation in an advaitic framework as the coming in to existence of maya– sakti (the empirical world or the contingent being) as Brahman who is the sat (Being) acts upon asat (non-being). By relating Maya and Sakti, he reduces Sakti to a contingent being, while Brahman is the necessary ‘Being’. While the reality of the former is at the level of vyavaharika, the later is at the level of paramarthika. He writes, ‘Maya, then is the fecund divine power (Sakti) which gives birth to multiplicity . . . It [emphasis mine] is eternal but its [emphasis mine] operation is not essential to the being of God. By it [emphasis mine], non-being (asat) is made being (sat).’17 The contemporary feminist call for gender sensitivity and gender justice was heeded by the church and its theology only to an extent of being politically correct in its theological and liturgical language. This question has not been taken into the idea of the ‘Being’ of God. Most of the attempts

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that were made in the recovery of the divine feminine contented with their reflections on the ‘feminine traits’ of the divine. In the Dalit religious traditions, the divine is usually imagined as the Goddess. It is not a mere acceptance of the feminine side of the divine but the divine is imagined as the feminine in her essential manifestations and invoked as Amma (the mother). Within the Dalit world, the initial encounters of the divine are perceived and expressed as the divine feminine. The Christian theological and liturgical language that was mediated through the missionaries and the early converts alienated the Dalit Christians from this enriching resource pool. While for the missionaries, the Dalit religious traditions were ‘demonic’, for the converts, they were ‘embarrassing’. The missionaries who nurtured the Christian faith in the early Dalit converts engaged in a vigorous iconoclasm. For instance, Clough, a Baptist missionary who worked among the Madigas in the southern costal districts of Andhra Pradesh, toured the villages of the converts with a horse and cart, grabbing all the ‘idols’ and hauling them back to his house.18 This has resulted in the disappearance of the divine feminine in the Dalit Christian imaginations. However, there is a residue of their faith that manifests itself when a Dalit person cries out in pain saying ‘Amma’. The project of reimagining the Dalit divine feminine is the recovery of that Amma in its theo/alogical imagination and liturgical invocation. Theology in Dalit context, therefore, has to become theo/alogy.19 It must be a critical discourse on the experiences of the divine encounters mediated to the community through their gods and goddesses. GODDESS AS THE PAINED AND THE POLLUTED MOTHER

In both the traditions that were weaved around Gonthelamma, she is not someone who belonged to the Dalit community. In the tradition that is recorded by Elmore, she belonged to a Shudra community. Going by the tradition that she is indeed the Kunti of the Mahabharata, she was a Kshatriya woman. In both the cases, she belonged to a community that oppressed the Malas. Two experiences of Gonthelamma led her to occupy the sacred space of the community: pain and pollution. As Kunti, she had to run for her life while her own children were after her head. In order to ensure her safety, she had to get ‘polluted’. Dalit communities felt a great sense of belongingness with two Hindu epic characters. One was Kunti and the other was her forsaken son, Karna. In Gurram Joshua’s (a pioneer of Telugu Dalit literature) poetry, Karna was viewed as the symbol of Dalit existence. His being forsaken by his mother is akin to the Dalit state of being excluded, forsaken, and un-be-

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longed. From the point of view of the Dalits, for Kunti to reclaim her motherhood and become Gonti, she had to take the road that leads to the habitat of the un-belonged. She had to disclose to her ‘belonged’ Pandavas that Karna is no longer un-belonged and claim him to be the son. Such an act exposes her to the risk of becoming un-belonged to the belonged and she takes that risk as she tells her children the truth. As her ‘belonged’ children get enraged and seek to kill her, she runs where she would belong. She knew that with the un-belonged untouchable, she belonged. The secure place for her is the ‘polluted’ space of the un-belonged. She had to choose between upholding the dharma of a Kshatriya woman by heroically dying at the hands of her belonged children by refusing to be polluted, or claim her motherhood to the un-belonged son, Karna, by getting polluted. It is this experience of knowing the pain of the un-belonged, choosing to belong with them, and taking the risk of getting polluted in the process of knowing and belonging that would take her from the boundaries of the ‘polluted’ space to the sacred space of the ‘polluted’. Kunti becomes Gonti; a mother becomes the Amma. For the Dalits, the divinity of the ‘wholly other’ lies in choosing to belong to the Dalit self by becoming one with the community and getting polluted in the process. This idea of getting polluted, as the essential condition of the divine self-disclosure, could be noticed in the popular devotion to another Dalit Goddess, Matangi, who is incorporated into the ten Mahavidyas of the Hindu pantheon. The devotees offer her the leftover food from their plates.20 By doing so, the Goddess privileges ‘pollution’ as divine necessity in her self-disclosure. This poses a challenge to the traditional Judeo-Christian theological language that conceives the ‘wholly otherness’ of God as the essential nature of the divine. From this notion of the ‘wholly otherness’ is derived the ideological axis in which purity is placed on the side of the divine and pollution on the side of the human; priests on the side of the pure, the people on the side of the impure; men on the side of the pure and women on the side of the impure. This ideological axis endorses the exclusion of the Dalits and women. Dalit religion espousing counter-cultural values challenges such notion. The Goddess of the Malas is the polluted one. The act of getting polluted transforms Kunti into Gonti making her a symbolic representation of the Divine. In Dorothy Clarke’s novel, House of Earth, Usha, a Brahmin woman could open up herself to engage in a conversation with Sita, a Dalit woman, and clasp her hand only when she realizes her pollution. It is the recognition of their shared pollution that frees her to forge solidarity. The one who was silenced and shut in the dark polluted room, begins to laugh

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aloud and exclaims: ‘How—how funny! You are an untouchable, and I’m a Brahmin—and yet it’s I who am the slave—not you. Or perhaps we’re both slaves—both of us—just as we are both—unclean.’21 Here, pollution is caused by the life-giving process of child birth. Usha is polluted by the vaginal fluids that bring the child into the world and Sita is polluted as she the midwife in such a process. In the ritual practices of the dominant religions, anything polluted and polluting distances the human from the divine. Inversely, in the Dalit imagination of the divine and the practice of the ritual, the dichotomy of purity and pollution is not only dismantled, but pollution is privileged as the necessity in the divine human interaction and the life-giving and lifesaving acts of the divine. To be divine is to be polluted. GODDESS AS THE HOSPITABLE AND THE HORRIFIC MOTHER

Traditions about Gonthelamma divulge the inclusive vision and sheltering character of the Dalit community. Gonti was sheltered by the community when her safety was threatened by her kin. She was sheltered and, later, turned into a deity who shelters the community. Hospitality here is not a passive act of letting the stranger come into one’s habitat but letting the stranger stay and be empowered as one among the community. Having received such hospitality, she opens up her sacred space to the community and the strangers. Thus, she symbolizes the sheltering grace of the divine embodied and manifested in the community. Her abode, the Gonthelamma temple, becomes a home for the alien (in the case of the temple at Polavaram, a Lambada (Gypsy) women who lives in its premises), a gathering space for the community, a dancing dais for the children, a seat for resolving conflicts, and a preserving site of food for the difficult times. God/dess for them is sheltering, entertaining, conflict resolving, and preserving power. Amma sustains the community by giving them rains. In contrast to many of the village goddesses who demand sacrifices to offer blessings, her demands do not include offering of an animal sacrifice. Instead, children catch hold of a frog, take it in a procession along with a figure representing Gonthelamma, and let the frog into the river. In parched conditions, a frog whose habitat is both the land and the water is let into the water. The Goddess ensures rains through this ritual of letting the frog into a safer habitat. While hospitality is the caring side of the Amma, her fiery side is manifested in the practice of the cult through the possession of her devotees. She manifests herself as a horrific one as she takes control of a woman

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of her choice and expresses her demands (Gonthemma Korikalu). Her erratic behaviour of being playful (as she demands for kallu) and prophetic (warning about the impending dangers) horrifies the community. She gets her share of wants through the demands she makes. She judges the community when displeased and calls for corrective measures. By possessing her chosen woman, she mediates herself to the community. It is a sign of grace, the Goddess’ chosen method of granting her devotees the vision of herself. Kathleen M. Erndl suggests that possession is a way by which the Goddess participates in the world of humans; and the medium and her audience participate in the Goddess’ divinity.22 Though possessions tend to conjure up the horrific, they are occasions of divine hospitality. As She gives the community a sacred vision, She invites the community to participate in the divine life. It is an event of the Divine–human union: as the divine penetrates the world of the humans, the humans are taken into the life of divine. CONCLUSION

This perception of the Goddess illumines the Christian understanding of incarnation. The divine who is witnessed to in Christ is ‘the pained and polluted One’, who became the ‘belonged of the un-belonged’. Incarnation is a necessity within the Godhead to become belonged of the human beings. It is a journey of knowing the human pain and getting polluted in the process of claiming the parenthood of the god/ess. Pollution is a necessity for the divine self-disclosure. God/ess who is witnessed in Christ is the journeying One who shares the human pain of being un-belonged and gets the Godhead reconciled within his/her self by becoming belonged to the un-belonged. Having become one of the human, he mediates between the divine and human through his incarnation. Thus, the incarnation of Christ is an event of hospitality: the opening up of divine to the human and the human to the divine. In the Christ event, Jesus, the one who is possessed by the Spirit, brings the revelation of God to the human world and, at the same time, takes the humans into the very life of God. I began my essay with an observation that culture and religion are the domains in which Dalit communities, historically, had expressed their subjecthood. It is in this web that they make sense of their collective living. In this web, a significant strand is the idea of Amma, the Goddess. I am yet to come across a Mala ‘God’. In our critical and constructive theological engagement with the Dalit religion, the sacred ground of the Dalits, do we speak of God or Goddess or God/ess? This poses a significant challenge

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to Dalit theology in terms of its language and content. Christian theology must become theo/alogy for it to be true to the inclusive vision of the Dalit community. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Dorothy Clarke Wilson, House of Earth, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952, pp. 4–8. 2. This, however, is not to argue that Dalit women are better off than the caste Hindu women. Though they do suffer the stigma of untouchability and are economically poor, they are relatively free within their own cultural domain. 3. There is a wealth of literature written on the Tantric goddesses like the ten Mahavidyas, most of them deriving their sources from written texts and iconography. For example, Pranay Bhandopadhyay, The Goddess of Tantra, Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1990; and David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 4. I have come across a similar case in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh where a Dalit deity, Chennakesava, does not have an image. Instead, they have an uncarved stone block in the sacred space. 5. I served a Lutheran parish in a village called Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh during 1995–7. My residence during those two years was sandwiched by a church and the Gonthelamma temple. It was here that my interest in the study of the Dalit religion took shape. I have also occasionally visited two other villages to collect stories about this deity. After my term in Polavaram as a pastor, I revisited this place several times for research. 6. Malas are one of the Dalit communities in Andhra Pradesh. They correspond to the Mahars of Maharashtra and the Paraiyars of Tamil Nadu. Their traditional occupation was weaving and agriculture labour. 7. I have tried to collect the traditions concerning Gonthelamma from different villages. Along with Polavaram, where I served a parish, I have visited two other villages in two different districts of Andhra Pradesh. It is the same story sung with different tunes and words in different places. Edgar Thurston and Rangachari record a similar version in which, instead of Dharmaraja, it is Bhima who threatens to kill Kunti and curses her that she would remain a Mala because she hides herself in a painted pot used at wedding in a Mala house. Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of South India, Vol. IV, Madras: Government Press, 1909, p. 386. 8. It is a common practice among the caste Hindus to celebrate the Devi Navarathrulu, a village annual festival. During these nine nights, the temple street of the Devi (the village goddess) is lighted up with the serial lamps. Several cultural programmes are conducted, including cine recording dances, staging Puranic dramas, and social dramas. On the final day, the Purohits perform puja to the Devi. Perhaps the desirability of celebrating the Gonthelamma festival for nine days is derived from this practice of the caste Hindus. However, on most occasions, practicality triumphs over desirability. 9. My first encounter with this was quite frightening. The Goddess ‘fell’ on a woman who was my neighbour. Her youngest daughter, who was seven years old, came to my

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house panting and told us that her mother has been taken over by the Goddess. She was so frightened that she did not want to go home for the entire day. 10. Sauda documents a similar tradition concerning Gonthelamma in his Apoorva Purana Kathalu, which suggests that Gonthelamma was cursed by Dharmaraja, the eldest of Pandavas, when she tells him, after the Kurukshetra, that Karna was his brother. He curses her to be the Goddess of the Chandalas for having not told them the truth before the Kurukshetra. Sauda, Apoorva Purana Kathalu, Vijayawada: New Syllabus, 2000, p. 139. 11. According to the canonical version, Kunti’s duty was to treat the Brahmins who come to the court of Kuntibhoja. Once, Sage Doorvasa, who is known for getting annoyed easily, visited the court and Kunti was to serve him. Pleased by her behaviour, Doorvasa taught her a mantra, by which she could have children with whichever God she invokes. After his departure and to test the mantra, she invokes the Sun God (Surya) with the mantra. Surya comes in the guise of a Brahmin young man and assures her that even though the child was born to her through him, it will not affect her virginity. Kunti delivers the child, who grows up to be Karna. Mani Vettam, Puraˉnic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary with Special Reference to Epic and Puraˉnic Literature, Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas, 1979, p. 442. 12. Wilber Theodore Elmore, Dravidian Gods in Modern Hinduism: A Study of the Local and Village Deities of Southern India, Madras: The Christian Literature Society for India, 1925, pp. 67–8. 13. It usually is the case with the Hindu pantheon that the goddesses are the spouses of gods and their divinity is based on their relationship to the gods. Even for the nonVedic goddesses, there would be a mention of their husband or brother in their myths and an image of him placed next to the goddess. For example, Kannalamma’s temple (a popular village goddess in the East Godavary district) usually will have an image for Poturaju. Gangalamma’s temple would have an image of Katamraju. 14. It is often said that India is a land of 30 million goddesses. 15. Sathianathan Clarke’s work, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, is a significant contribution in that direction. 16. The exception in being inclusive could be traced in the theological traditions that followed the Bhakti mode. Narayan Vaman Tilak and Krishna Pillai explored an imagination of the divine as mother. For N.V. Tilak’s imagination of the divine as the mother see Tilak’s poetry in Plamthodathil S. Jacob, 1979, The Experiential Response of N.V. Tilak, Madras: The Christian Literature Society. 17. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, 1991, The Writings of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, Vol. I (edited by Julius Lipner and George Gispert-Sauch), Bangalore: The United Theological College, p. 216. 18. Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, 1998, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and State in the Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 85. 19. Thealogy is a term brought into currency by the feminist scholars like Carol Christ, Starhawk, and Naomi Goldenberg to denote feminist discourse on the Goddess (thea). It is a move away from the usual androcentric conceptions of the divine to more genocentric conceptions. Melissa Raphael explains thealogy as ‘a body of

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thought—thealogy—that derives from Goddess women’s experience and from a broader history of emancipatory ideas and which can be defined as feminist reflection on the femaleness of the divine and the divinity of the femaleness, and generally, spiritual, ethical and political reflection on the meaning(s) of both.’ Melissa Raphael, 1999, Introducing Thealogy: Discourse on the Goddess, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, p. 10. Theo/alogy is a discourse on the divine based on the collective experiences of both men and women and their imaginations of the divine. 20. Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, pp. 209–22. 21. Wilson, House of Earth, p. 8. 22. Kathleen M. Erndl, 1997, ‘The Goddess and Women’s Power: A Hindu Case Study’, in Karen L. King (ed.), Woman and Goddess Traditions in Antiquity and Today, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, pp. 21–2.

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9 Exploring New Facets of Dalit Christology in Critical Interaction with J.D. Crossan’s Portrayal of the Historical Jesus ANDERSON H.M. JEREMIAH

I

n order to retain the relevance and meaningfulness of most worthwhile discourses, theological or otherwise, they need to be re-evaluated and re-situated in light of changing social and ecclesiastical realities. Accordingly, Christology from a Dalit perspective needs such an inquiry to render it appropriate for the continuing peripheral lives of Dalits. This essay re-examines the Christological discourse in light of observations made on the way Dalit Christians are situated, through an extended ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a rural Tamil Christian village. Due to years of marginalization and internalized feelings of worthlessness within the Dalit community, social insignificance and cultural invisibility are serious issues in terms of communal identity formation and selfworth. Further contributing to this process is the consistent effort by the dominant groups’ manipulation of Dalits that necessitates their dependence and subordination. Additionally, the spiritual and ecclesial neglect within the Christian community leaves the Dalits wandering in a spiritual wilderness, bitter and helpless, lacking leadership and social support. The sporadic spiritual teachings that exist tend to glorify and accentuate suffering, further hindering the formation of tangible improvements for Christian Dalits within and beyond the churches. In the modern context of globalization and neo-landlordism, the lives of these landless Dalits are subordinated and their existence commodified, leaving them perpetually dependent on an exploitative and corrupt system. Further, the failure to recognize the necessity of political agency in ensuring greater rights for Dalits is heightened by the apolitical and pietistic attitudes existent in their already fragmented political representation. This brief summation offers us a critical, contemporary, and contextual paradigm

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to evaluate some aspects of Dalit Christology. This essay attempts to do three things: first, to provide a brief overview of the basic aspects of Dalit Christology; second, to enumerate J.D. Crossan’s portrayal of the Historical Jesus; and finally, to explore possible avenues for articulating a relevant Dalit Christology. EXISTING DALIT CHRISTOLOGY: A CRITICAL EVALUATION

Christology in Christian theological traditions has always played an important role in the symbolic expression of cultural and religious understanding of a particular context due to its dynamic nature and divine movement.1 As a hermeneutical principle, Christology functions as a meaningful avenue to re-evaluate the life of Jesus Christ for various hearers.2 Christology from the Dalit perspective functions in a similar way in that it contextually expresses the life of Dalits through the paradigm of the life of Jesus Christ. In other words, the purpose of Christology within Dalit theology is to interpret the relevance of the personhood and message of Jesus Christ to a perpetually excluded and subordinated people. It also provides a liberative model for Dalits, upon which they can construct an alternative vision of social and religious interactions, enabling them to move towards an emancipated life. As such, this essay downplays the distinction between the earthly and divine natures of Christ. Given the limited scope of this essay, it is impossible to review all the works that have been published in the area of Dalit Christology.3 In order to develop a broad understanding of Christology in Dalit theology, some of the basic Christological tenets will be outlined. A.P. Nirmal, the pioneer of Dalit theology, claimed that the ‘Suffering Servant’ image actualized by Jesus Christ has become the foundational manifestation of the Dalit God.4 This Christological model incorporates and operates on the pain–pathos realm of Dalits, and becomes their faith expression of a compassionate God who has taken the form of a servant through the suffering life of Jesus.5 Jesus Christ’s identification with, and participation in the rejection that Dalits experience is essential and fundamental to express God’s plan of liberation for all people. Nirmal observes, ‘He [Jesus] underwent these Dalit experiences as the prototype of all Dalits.’6 Furthering this understanding, Maria Arul Raja uses the image of one slave saving the other. Observing the humiliation of Dalits, he notes that the biblical God resolves and deliberately took on vulnerable human flesh to show complete solidarity with the suffering masses as well as restoring their lost human dignity.7 Jesus as a suffering servant moves beyond superficial similarity and engages in the very act of existence, going through the

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complete process of rejection and mockery. Devasahayam explains in a Bible study that: ‘ . . . He [Jesus] enters into the depths of human experience of agony. It was an experience of desolation and solitude, an experience of rejection by people and God.’8 According to Dalit theologians, this affirmation in the suffering servant guides the Dalit Christians to encounter a Christ who shares in earthly suffering and oppression but who also holds the hope for redemption and liberation.9 Further, Nirmal observes that the portrayal of Jesus as rejected, despised, mocked, and suffering underscores Jesus’ ‘Dalitness’ and makes him easily identifiable with Dalits.10 Bishop Azariah argues, ‘Without any shred of doubt therefore, the Dalit Christ who is the resurrected Lord, must be encountered in the Dalit experience in our day. It is this encounter with God of the Oppressed in the suffering and the oppressed Dalits in our land that has to be articulated and formulated as Dalit Theology.’11 By extension, the ‘Dalitness’ of Christ and God cannot be regarded as the passive acceptance of suffering but rather should be seen as ushering in a new life for Dalits and thereby, salvation and liberation from their marginalized existence.12 Christology from the Dalit perspective begins at the level of identification and gradually shifts towards the redemptive level. In this transformative process, Jesus Christ is viewed as the Messiah who endured suffering to bring about salvation to marginalized members of society, including the Dalits. Dalit theologians affirm this fact in light of God’s liberative work in the lives of the Israelites under Egyptian bondage to inspire an understanding of Jesus as the co-sufferer, as well as the redeemer in Dalit Christology.13 Messianic hope plays an influential role in Dalit Christology by shedding light on the acts of God through the suffering servant and the process of redemption. The paradigms of the ‘Suffering Servant’ and the Messiah were placed on the same plane as each influences the other and is seen as liberating the suffering people. Explaining this co-suffering messianic idea, Devasahayam observes, ‘Dalits for long have been looking for messiahs from outside, but Jesus as one among the oppressed collective can be a more authentic Messiah than Jesus who comes as an intruder into history and as a non-oppressed person.’14 The God who manifested himself for the deliverance of the oppressed and poor, traversed the path of utter rejection, contempt, and mockery so that the messianic hope for Dalits will be both meaningful and real. Other messianic understandings of Jesus Christ among the Dalit theologians incline more towards eschatological affirmations in light of the kingdom of God and other worldly values attached to it.15 Dalit theologians

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like Maria Arul Raja and Faustina have brought out further aspects of the messianic understanding of Jesus; they present Jesus Christ as a radical and revolutionary figure who promises to set the oppressed free. Maria Arul Raja has a critical standpoint against the classical understanding of Jesus as a Messiah within the Dalit theological framework: ‘Jesus not only preached revolutionary ideas going contrary to the dictates and the interpretation of the bible but he practiced a counter culture of treating everyone equally.’16 From the preceding brief overview of representative Dalit Christological paradigms, we can draw following conclusions. Even though the current overemphasis on the suffering servant image becomes the identification point of Dalits with Jesus Christ, Dalit theology has yet to enumerate how this facet of suffering provides hope and leads to emancipation of the Dalits. It is also important to elicit the liberative aspects possible in Jesus, because, in the words of Maria Arul Raja, ‘the ruling theology of the day portrays Jesus as a meek Dalit, predestined by his Heavenly Father to suffer insults. Jesus does not protest, but submits to get murdered. His life stands as a perfect justification for perpetrating oppression on Dalits. Jesus has stopped inspiring anyone anymore to stand up and protest against oppression.’17 Dalit Christology rather swiftly shifts to the eschatological and messianic interpretations, thereby becoming irrelevant to the present-day life of Dalits. It encourages them to endure their suffering so that later, in the kingdom of God, they will be handsomely rewarded for their unjust treatment,18 and thereby circumvent issues pertaining to practical and tangible liberation here and now. This perspective conforms to the existing authoritative structures and maintains the present status-quo. Faustina exposes this aspect, arguing, ‘Dalits are exhorted to follow Christ only in his patience, tolerance, meekness, obedience, forgiveness, compassion.’19 This critical observation exposes the inadequacy of current Dalit Christological paradigms. People need to be informed about the oppressive system and the ways of changing it rather than be taught to passively accept their social situation. There is a dire need for interpreting the life and work of Jesus in the socio-politico-economic and religious level, which will be relevant for Dalit liberation on a holistic level. Dalit Christology also has to develop a critical perspective towards institutionalized systems perpetuating internal and external oppression. With the exception of a few works, we can tentatively conclude that Dalit theology in general, and Christology in particular, display a certain shallowness and apathy in terms of resourcing and adapting interdisciplinary

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approaches to learning from the vast strides made in biblical research, practical theology, and socio-anthropological studies, rendering it ineffective and stagnated. Dalit Christology also fails to recognize and address the complicated intra-Dalit divisions and especially, the concerns of women within Dalit communities and their related complexities. Dalit Christology still remains a narrow and exclusive project rather than being reconciliatory and all-embracing. These observations can be engaged using the work of Crossan, whose historical contextualization of Jesus Christ can be further contextualized in Dalit theology. CROSSAN: HIS METHODOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SETTING OF JESUS OF NAZARETH

John Dominic Crossan has been at the forefront of twentieth century biblical scholarship on the Historical Jesus.20 Through meticulous fieldwork and rigorous researching of the ancient Middle Eastern manuscripts spanning more than two decades, Crossan has come out with one of the most influential and popular works on the Historical Jesus, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant.21 Another important aspect of Crossan’s work is his methodology. In his ‘reconstructive approach’,22 Crossan takes the reader through a journey into the layers of Hellenistic or Greco-Roman history at macrocosmic, mesocosmic, and microcosmic levels that enable the reader to understand the socio-political climate during Christ’s lifetime.23 Notably, through a systematic interdisciplinary research, Crossan places Jesus of Nazareth in the context of socio-political and cultural unrest rampant in the Palestine under Roman rule.24 He uses Lenski’s theory of social stratification to elaborate on the class distinctions by which social ordering can be understood in the broadly divided Roman society.25 In his work, Crossan clearly spells out the powerless and exploited condition of the peasant class compared with the powerful and controlling class of the rulers and aristocracy.26 The dominance of class relationships in Mediterranean society had significant economic, political, religious, and social implications, primarily due to the level of land ownership. Taking these points and inputs from Lenski’s explanation, Crossan explains the social order at the time of Jesus of Nazareth.27 The Jewish aristocracy and the priestly class functioned as the local guardians of Roman authorities, giving rise to brokered relationships.28 Additionally, the landowners, the governors, and the rulers were the natural leaders who decided the nature of a densely concentrated and power-centred society with sharp social stratifications.29 The class stratification became the basis

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for interpreting religious institutions and social values in the Jewish society. The priestly class played a significant role in the society since the temple became a centre of power within the Jewish social order, where land was understood to have a strong relationship with Yahweh.30 When the Jewish aristocracy and the priestly class came under the influence of Greco-Roman society, things began to change. There was a correlation between the class system of the imperial world and the hierarchy of Jewish society. The priestly class began to negotiate power with the Roman aristocracy, churning out rules for the ‘proper’ functioning of society, including virtues and values for social interaction between the classes.31 Within this Palestinian context of socio-political unrest, Crossan situates Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter who belonged to the artisan class which was less privileged than other peasants in the Greco-Roman society.32 As an artisan and a member of the exploited community, Jesus was also part of the repressed members of society. Arguably, this struggle gave him the direction for his life to envision and proclaim a kingdom radically different from that of the brokered, power-centred, and class-ridden Greco-Roman society, as well as the hypocritical Jewish aristocracy and the exploitative high priests of the temple. Undoubtedly, this had clear political and religious repercussions.33 Against the highly brokered power system, Jesus proclaimed his newly envisioned social order, where the presence of God can be experienced directly without any mediator or broker. Let us examine some features of that alternative society. Kingdom of Nobodies34

Crossan presents Jesus as one who advocated the kingdom of God for the ‘nobodies’, the ‘outcastes’, and the ‘expendables’, who were religiously, politically, culturally, and economically ostracized, living in the margins of the society with the destitutes, prostitutes, and outcastes. Crossan compares peasants and artisans with children in Antiquity who were designated a negligible place in society.35 The expendables were also part of what Crossan calls ‘a kingdom of nobodies’, comprised of the prostitutes, tax collectors, beggars, the demon possessed, lepers, and the blind, deaf, and dumb, who, Christ preached, will inherit his kingdom. They were regarded as socially polluting and as sinners within religious parameters. Crossan asserts that Jesus was not only consistently found with such people but also proclaimed the kingdom of God for those who were politically and legally invisible and economically exploited. Essentially, the religiously impure are the rightful constituents of the ‘kingdom of nobodies’, which should be realized here and now.36

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Brokerless Kingdom37

Rigid social hierarchy and powerful class stratification of the Roman Empire resulted in small pockets of power and pyramids of social hierarchy. Thriving brokers and mediators were able to negotiate power and rulership in return for material benefits and political gains. The upper classes, comprising of rulers, governors, and landowners, consolidated their social positions by brokering the exploitation of the poor and the marginalized. Against this brokered and class stratified Greco-Roman rule, Jesus advocated a brokerless kingdom, a kingdom of nobodies and nuisances, in which there is no need for intermediaries. It is a kingdom of experiencing God directly; where the will of God is realized in the community so as to neutralize class stratification, imperial domination, and colonial exploitation. Crossan states that Jesus brought the unclean, the polluting, and the sinners into the kingdom issuing a new world order not based on an apocalyptic vision in the imminent future. Jesus initiated a kingdom which stands in complete contrast to the hierarchical kingdom, a kingdom performed rather than just proclaimed.38 Yet, it is the task of his companions, and his disciples, spread throughout the world, to further it. Radical Egalitarianism39

The brokerless kingdom of nobodies and nuisances is a place of radical egalitarianism where there are no destitutes, no stratification, and no discrimination on the basis of pollution, gender, and social ranking. Jesus made use of two crucial activities to demonstrate his radical egalitarianism: open commensality and free healing.40 Commensality, or the act of eating together, assumes a place of social importance, since it is an act of open acceptance of one another around the table. This act of communal eating breaks the norms of purity and pollution and brings equality in the community. Bound together with this is the aspect of free healing. Healing had remained a religious activity controlled by the priestly authority that was disturbed by Jesus’ unrestricted healings beyond those religious structures. According to Crossan, illness also existed in the minds of the people and Jesus healed those illnesses and thereby broke religious bondage and brokering. Through these liberating acts, Jesus proclaimed an egalitarianism of the kingdom of God that negated the hierarchical and paternal normalness of Jewish religion and Roman power.41 This egalitarian, brokerless kingdom of God stood against the fractured and fragmented society. Mark Allan Powell comments, ‘These two activities challenged what was “normal” for Jewish religion and for Roman power. Jesus’ vision of “shared egalitarianism” was an implicit attack on a social system, a system

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that depended on patronage and brokerage.’42 The Gospel of Jesus is the declaration of this kingdom and his ministry was a fulfilment of it. Crossan says that the ultimate purpose of healing and eating is to enable individuals to interact physically and spiritually without a broker or an arbitrator in order to experience God and Christ’s kingdom. Jesus was able to realize this kingdom of God, and envisioned a society of ‘radical egalitarianism’ or a ‘brokerless kingdom’ because of the relationship he had with God. Crossan observes: The earthly Jesus was not just a thinker with ideas but a rebel with a cause. He was a Jewish peasant with an attitude and he claimed his attitude was that of the Jewish God. But it was, he said, in his life and in ones like it that the Kingdom of God was revealed, that the Jewish God of justice and righteousness was incarnated in a world of injustice and unrighteousness. The Kingdom was never just words and ideas, aphorisms and parables, sayings and dialogues. It was about life. And that means it was about a flesh and blood body. Justice is always about bodies and lives, not just about words and ideas.43

Commenting on Crossan’s work, Thomas Altizer asserts that ‘nothing is firmer in Crossan’s judgment than that the kingdom for Jesus is wholly a present kingdom and not only a present kingdom but an enacted kingdom, an enactment that is the very centre of Jesus’ words and acts.’44 Jesus emphasized the importance of accepting one another and promoting values on the basis of love and equality. The early Christians followed this Jesus because this Jesus was Christ to them. The primary motive of Crossan is to present the Historical Jesus so that Christ will constantly challenge us today. Crossan’s Historical Jesus has drawn wide range of criticisms from New Testament scholars such as Ben Witherington III,45 Luke Timothy Johnson,46 and Mark Allan Powell47 who task him on the reliability of the ‘Q’ source and the Gospel of Thomas,48 for overstretching the ideas of egalitarianism and the brokerless kingdom,49 and romanticizing the idea of the ‘cynical prophet’.50 In spite of these criticisms, Crossan’s reconstruction of the Historical Jesus draws primarily from the narratives and passages from the widely accepted canonical gospels. What matters though is the perspective and interpretative lens Crossan employs to sift through the history for a radical Jesus of Nazareth. FURTHERING DALIT CHRISTOLOGY

To read ‘Jesus the liberator’ through the lens of caste discrimination, economic exploitation, political subjugation, and religious relegation demands a disciplined attention to details. Theological expressions and reflections

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from the peripheral sections of our society have made a consistent effort to meaningfully reclaim this Jesus back into our situatedness. But, our brief analysis of Dalit Christology indicates that its liberative potential has not been fully realized in praxiological terms, thus demanding of us to explore the silenced details of Jesus’ life and work by radically rereading and interpreting the scriptures in its context. Historical Jesus research by Crossan stands in the tradition of reinterpreting Jesus’ life from a socio-political reading of his context. He sets out on an exploration to encounter the Jesus who challenges, critiques, deconstructs, and offers a new perspective in contrast to the institutionalized and hierarchical society. Encountering this Jesus, who propagated radical egalitarianism, a brokerless kingdom, open commensality, and free healing in our times, from a Dalit perspective, will help us to review the prevailing systematic and sometimes irrelevant Christologies. These Christological moorings will be furthered51 along three key facets utilizing familiar Tamil expressions to encapsulate and situate Christ’s liberative potential within the relevant Dalit context for better understanding. They are Irai-araneriyalar Yesu (Jesus: The Theo-Ethicist), Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu (Jesus: The Transcender), and Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu (Jesus: The Radical Resister). Irai-araneriyalar Yesu52 (Jesus: The Theo-Ethicist)

While biblically locating Jesus, one cannot but discuss God beyond a sympathizing God but also as an intervening God who acts on behalf of the oppressed, as demonstrated in the lives of Israelites under Egyptian bondage, and who enters the history of humankind through the incarnation of Jesus. This God of the Old Testament and the prophets is a God of love, justice, and righteousness who demands radical egalitarianism.53 The ethical requirement of knowing God and doing justice is very clear in the Old Testament and in the lives of Israelites as proclaimed by prophets.54 As an outcome of this knowledge of God, Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, which stands in opposition to the existing oppressive structures. Justice and equality, as divine ethical values are essentially linked with love and compassion. Jesus’ affirmative ethical actions are fundamentally rooted in the knowledge of God. In this regard, Jesus demands a communitarian life and a fellowship among his followers as an expression of shared love through which his presence can be experienced. In other words, ethical living in a community is not just following a set of moral rules and loving God but is integrally connected to strengthening inter- and intrapersonal relationships on the basis of shared love and mutual respect. This notion of ethical living assures the well-being of every individual in a

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community.55 Irai-araneriyalar, as a conceptual framework, encapsulates the above-mentioned ethical qualities. Jesus as an araneriyalar56 (ethicist) draws his ethical teachings from Irai sindhanai (God consciousness). Emphasis on a realized earthly experience by Irai-araneriyalar Yesu is of crucial importance for furthering Dalit Christology since the Dalit issue remains an essentially ethical issue. Therefore, Irai-araneriyalar Yesu places before Dalits as well as nonDalits the challenge to lead an ethical life that reflects unconditional relationships devoid of discrimination and prejudice. This liberative principle can only be liberative when it is actualized within the Christian community in particular, and the society in general.57 Hence, time and again, Jesus affirmed the imminent nature of the kingdom of God and emphasized the praxiological dimension of it.58 It is not just theology but ‘God consciousness’ which directs the social life of human beings in its totality. Irai-araneriyalar Yesu critiques the existing norms, constantly challenges the established unethical and discriminatory practices on the basis of caste, colour, gender, and occupation, and provides an alternative way of life in the kingdom of God. To underline the ethical idea of Jesus, Crossan writes, ‘Justice is always about bodies and lives, not just about words and ideas.’59 Therefore, Dalits should first exemplify the ethical living of Jesus Christ in their lives and, as such, invite and challenge their oppressors to do likewise. In this light, it becomes imperative that the Christian community strives to move beyond its ethical jargons and rhetorics and realize justice in every facet of life and thereby establish an ethical community that works to eradicate oppressive and marginalizing forces. The church must materialize such an understanding in its own life or risk forfeiting its credibility as the embodiment of the kingdom of God. Dalit Christology emphasizes the facet of Irai-araneriyalar Yesu who would not negotiate and collaborate with the oppressive structures but invites humanity into a new transformed relationship with God. Irai-araneriyalar Yesu strives to strengthen the broken communities and inspire their lives to experience the incarnate God of justice and righteousness and live out the essential principles of love, freedom, equality, openness, and acceptance, setting a model for the rest of the communities to emulate as well as facilitating the kingdom of God here and now. Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu60 (Jesus: The Transcender)

Jesus proclaimed a free and unmediated kingdom of God that marked a radical reversal of the way ‘kingdom’ was understood under the Roman rule and within the Jewish religion. His free healings, open commensality,

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and ethical teachings unsettled the accepted religious norms of purity– pollution practices. Jewish cultural norms were dependent on the religious rituals and practices embodying the religious divisions of pure and polluted, clean and unclean,61 those who have scriptural knowledge and those who do not, as well as distinctions based on wealth and possession of land. It was also noted that the cultural disillusionment within Judaism was also on the rise where the segregation of people within the Jewish community and with others like the Samaritans was becoming palpable.62 In this context, Jesus propagated a counter system highly critical of the insincerity and fallacy of the religious institution that did not reflect the knowledge of God. Jesus proclaimed an accessible God who demands justice and love for others to bring the hitherto forgotten ‘neighbour’ into the community of equals.63 Jesus, characterizing the divine movement of the spirit of the Lord, transcended the boundaries and barriers that fragmented and divided human communities. Though there are conceptual differences between Jewish and Hindu concepts of purity and pollution, we should not ignore the undergirding principle; the attitude of people towards the so-called pollutants. For the purposes of this essay, there are interesting similarities between the Dalit (Christian) situation and the status of the ritually impure in the Jewish society of Jesus’ times. From a Dalit Christological point of view, the radical egalitarianism of Jesus Christ is of great importance in the aforementioned context. Dalit Christology should present a Jesus who challenges the religiocultural norms that divided different communities in his context and had a standpoint that transcended the differences. In the context of internal and external subordination and divisions, Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu critiques the domineering functions of religious authority and enables Dalits to break oppressive norms in order to facilitate liberation. Jesus’ community, with open commensality and free healing, provides hope to Dalits who are considered ritually and culturally impure and perpetuating pollution. Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu envisions a community where everyone will be treated with dignity, equity, honour, and respect devoid of discrimination. Moving beyond Crossan’s presentation of Jesus, we should also recognize the transforming undertow of Jesus’ ministry. He declared the kingdom of God for all. Hence, Dalit Christology cannot afford to pursue and perpetuate narrow divisive agendas. Rather, it should promote reconciliation and inclusive embrace of the estranged other as its core affirmation.64 In order to be liberative, Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu provides an alternative society of radical egalitarianism that confronts and challenges the existing exploitative religious and cultural patterns. In these circumstances, the

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teachings regarding Jesus who challenged the oppressive religious structures need to be liberated and redeemed from the clutches of oppressive and exploitative forces. Unfortunately, the Dalit Christian situation demonstrates that the church has itself become an agent of segregation. The task of Dalit Christology inflected by Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu is to challenge the church with the task of transforming and transcending cultural, religious, and authoritarian trappings that are exclusive, discriminatory, and exploitative in nature, so that people can experience liberation by encountering this Jesus who transcends and transforms. This Christological exploration underlines Jesus’ intention for his followers, the church, to be the epitome of his alternative visions of radical egalitarianism and universal acceptance. Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu demands a radical revolution of narrow divisive and often distrustful categories, both within fragmented Dalit communities as well as the society at large, in order to realize the family of God. Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu65 (Jesus: The Radical Resister)

Within the religious and cultural unrest of his time, Jesus’ teachings and ministry had significant social and political overtones so as to inspire other resistance movements. It would be historically naïve to think that Jesus of Nazareth had no interest in the political establishment of his time.66 Crossan amply demonstrates this factor through the complexity of Jewish society under occupation and consolidation of hierarchy alongside notions of ritual purity67 which classified and excluded, making social relationship between people and communities highly brokered and mediated. It is in this context that Jesus, as a carpenter, rebelled against such a socio-economic and political system by advocating a God-centred societal reversal. He recognized and gave the rightful place to children, including all those who were excluded from the community, into his kingdom (Mt 25:31–46; Lk 14:21–24). He took a bold step to cleanse the temple (Lk 19:45–46), exposing the unethical praxis of their corrupt lives. He also unmasked the shallowness of the rituals and policies of the temple authorities due to their failure to love and show mercy to the people (Mt 23:23–24; Lk 11:37–40, 44). He traversed the social boundaries between the Jews and Samaritans.68 Jesus had a different conception of authority, where God alone had the ultimate and final authority. In the dialogue with Pilate, Jesus fundamentally differed with the Roman authorities by subverting their claim to sovereignty and subordinating their power to that of God.69 He threw open the access to God that had been resolutely guarded by the temple high priests. Jesus emphasized that the God consciousness should permeate every realm of

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the society, including politics, to become the governing principle. The ideas that Crossan lifts in Jesus’ ministry such as radical egalitarianism, brokerless relationships, open commensality, and free healing have significant economic and political dimensions. These ideas underline the impossibility of new life for the excluded within an oppressive and exploitative structure without political participation. By advocating these liberative principles, Jesus of Nazareth as Murpoku Sindhanai (forward and radical thinking) challenges and subverts the establishment and resisted domination. It is not an understatement to say that Jesus was seen as a political activist and revolutionary who was executed for his disruptive ideas by the Roman and Jewish authorities.70 In this background, Dalit Christology offers the facet of Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu, who underlines a strong socio-political participation, because social subordination, economic commodification, and political voicelessness are the actual lived realities of Dalits today. Transformation and reform in the lives of Dalits must take root in the socio-economic and political realms. Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu teaches radical egalitarianism and brokerless relationships and thereby empowers Dalits to stand for their rights. In the midst of social untouchability, economic deprivation, and political non-representation, Jesus’ idea of a new world order, a kingdom of God which is not confined to any particular geographical location or race, promises equal distribution of spiritual and material resources irrespective of caste, colour, occupation, and gender discriminations. The brokerless relationship offers hope in the midst of often exploited labour of millions of Dalits within the new economic policies and special economic zones. This kingdom of God has a strong immanent dimension without undermining the idea that the eschatological kingdom should challenge and critique the present social order.71 By proposing an alternative and egalitarian society which breaks the norms of categorization, stratification, and marginalization, Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu stands fundamentally in contrast to the existing oppressive power structures. Essentially, Jesus advocated human rights in order to restore the broken image of God by redeeming dignity and respect for all human beings.72 In the context of unjust and exploitative economics and politics, this Christological perspective becomes meaningful and pertinent to emulate. Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu explores the innate potential in Jesus’ ministry for current political participation in order to bring about a change in the daily lives of millions of Dalits, as it is apparently clear that there can be very little change in the material life of Dalits if they are not politically represented. Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu primarily proposed a counter-culture

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that challenges any oppressive, exploitative, and discriminatory socio-economic and political institution. Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu, as a Dalit Christological paradigm, should function as a means of liberation for all, for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Nothing changes unless there is a reciprocal change in the attitude of the oppressor. Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu empowers the oppressed and awakens the social conscience of the oppressor, paving the way for experiencing the fullness of life that God provides within an inclusive society. This liberative ethical praxis should take central place in the community of Christ’s followers and the church, and only then can it challenge the exploitative socio-politico-economic systems. This Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu radically resists and challenges both Dalits and non-Dalits alike, to move out of their habituated subordinated and subordinating socio-political situations to resist the marginalizing and dehumanizing forces of this world. CONCLUSION

Denial of access to land, water, and basic necessities of life, not to forget human dignity, is the lived reality of Dalits irrespective of their religious affiliation. Various efforts to change and reverse their condition, both within religious institutions and outside, have been met with serious obstacles resulting in continuation of their wretched existence. It is in this discouraging context that an effort is made to rearticulate a meaningful Christology from the peripheries. It is also important to keep in mind that Jesus of Nazareth, who lived two millennia ago in the Judeo-Palestinian area, cannot provide answers to all the problems faced by Dalits in India. Nevertheless, this first century Jesus, who inspired numerous liberative movements in the past, still stimulates a process of emancipation for the vulnerable Dalits in contemporary India. This essay engaged new resources to articulate the effectiveness of Jesus Christ for our times in relevant terms. It must be mentioned that these are only potential pointers and not a finished work. Hence, Irai-araneriyalar Yesu, Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu, and Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu can function as interpretative lenses with which to view the new life and liberation that is made possible in Jesus Christ. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. John Webster, 2005, ‘Prolegomena to Christology: Four Theses’, in Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae (eds), The Person of Christ, London: T&T Clark International, p. 36; see also, Paul Tillich, 1963, Systematic Theology, Vol. II, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 138–9. 2. Volker Kuster, 2001, The Many Faces of Jesus Christ, London: SCM Press, p. 28.

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3. Rather than detailed descriptions of individual Dalit theologians, this analysis presents broad and common points of reference in the explication of Dalit Christology. 4. Arvind P. Nirmal, 1991, Heuristic Explorations, Madras: CLS, p. 150. 5. Affirming a similar thought, M.E. Prabhakar points out that ‘it is easy to identify Jesus Christ as the suffering servant of God, in Isaiah’s prophesy. The gospels point to Jesus accepting the role of the suffering servant. As God’s suffering servant, (He) becomes God’s visible presence in the world, enduring suffering for the freedom of humanity.’ See M.E. Prabhakar, 1997, ‘Christology in Dalit Perspective’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, Delhi: ISPCK/Gurukul, p. 417. 6. Nirmal, Heuristic Explorations, p. 157. 7. A. Maria Arul Raja, 1997, ‘Some reflections on a Dalit Reading of the Bible’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 342. He further explains that God through Jesus Christ chooses to identify with the oppressed and the marginalized, which will liberate them. That God is with them is the affirmation Dalits get when they see the crucified, rejected, and mocked at and suffering Jesus. They are not alone in their suffering, rather God has made a preferential option for them to lead them out of their oppression. 8. V. Devasahayam, 1997, ‘The Nature of Dalit Theology as Counter Ideology’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 62. K. William also expresses a similar viewpoint; see 1994, ‘Dalit Theology, Voice of the Oppressed’, in James Massey (ed.), Indigenous people: Dalits, Delhi: ISPCK, p. 285–6. 9. It is important to understand that the ideas of redemption and liberation were not properly expounded at this point. Devasahayam, ‘The Nature of Dalit Theology as Counter Ideology’, pp. 62–3. 10. Nirmal, Heuristic Explorations, p. 152. 11. M. Azariah, 2000, A Pastor’s Search for Dalit Theology, Delhi: ISCPK, p. 135. 12. Prabhakar, ‘Christology in Dalit Perspective’, p. 419. 13. Ibid., p. 416. 14. V. Devasahayam, 1997, ‘The Norms of Theology’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 48. 15. M. Gnanavaram, 1997, ‘Eschatology in Dalit Perspective’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 480. 16. A. Maria Arul Raja, 1996, Jesus the Dalit, Hyderabad: Volunteer Centre, p. 96. 17. Ibid., p. 54. 18. Interestingly, the immanent nature of the kingdom of God has not been discussed in many of the presentations. Even if it is there, it fails to clearly interpret the importance of realizing it, especially in the context of oppression. 19. Faustina, 1997, ‘From Exile to Exodus’, in Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 96. 20. J.D. Crossan, 1997, ‘Jesus and the Kingdom: Itinerants and Householders in Earliest Christianity’, in Marcus J. Borg (ed.), Jesus at 2000, Colorado: West View Press, p. 21. 21. See J.D. Crossan, 1991, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Crossan was born in Ireland and was educated as a Roman Catholic servite monk and priest. He settled in the United States and taught biblical studies at DePaul University, Chicago, from 1969 to 1995. He was also involved in the

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controversial Jesus Seminar Research group but left it to pursue his own research in the field of Historical Jesus research. Many writers like Marcus J. Borg and Robert W. Funk have regarded Crossan as one of the most creative biblical scholars after Bultmann, although most of his conclusions were challenged and questioned within biblical scholarship. He has authored sixteen books, including his above-mentioned masterpiece. Some of them are very popular, like 1995, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanfrancisco; J. D. Crossan, 1995, The Essential Jesus, New Jersey: Castle Books and J. D. Crossan, 1995, Who Killed Jesus, San Francisco: HarperCollins. 22. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 456; see also in M.A. Powell, 1998, Jesus as a Figure in History, Kentucky: John Knox Press, p. 84. 23. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, pp. xxviii–xxix. His methodology of cross-cultural anthropology gives crucial information regarding the social organization of human society of that time in the Mediterranean region. 24. Crossan, Jesus, p. 199. 25. In this context, the peasant class was the site of exploitation by the merchants and the rulers, who took the entire annual crop and income of the peasants away. Explaining the situation in the commercialized agrarian society, Crossan says that the land, which was taken away from the peasantry, became an entrepreneurial commodity to be exploited by the aristocracy. Crossan, ‘Jesus and the Kingdom’, p. 24, and also, in his major work, The Historical Jesus, p. 45, he gives a detailed explanation. 26. Crossan, Jesus, p. 24. 27. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 45. 28. Crossan, Jesus, p. 136. 29. Crossan, making use of Thomas Carnius’ work on the Antiquity, observes that the landlordism which gave raise to the hierarchy, ordered the power-ridden society, savaged and appropriated the produce from the toiling peasant population. This gave raise to the slave–patron relationship within a society aided by a favourable political climate. Ibid., p. 67. 30. Crossan, Jesus and the Kingdom, pp. 26–7. Crossan explains the covenantal relationship of the Israelites with Yahweh and its crucial connectedness with the land. Because Israelites understood the land they had as a gift of God, we see a close link between notions of land ownership and temple worship. But this attitude began to change among the elite who negotiated power with Romans. 31. Citing the works of Josephus on Antiquity and Richard Horsley, Crossan presents the situation in the Palestinian regions with the agrarian unrest and the Jewish revolt. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, pp. 92–9; and Jesus, pp. 23–4. 32. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 46. 33. S.J. Patterson, 1998, The God of Jesus, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, p. 113. 34. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 267–8. 35. Crossan makes use of the Gospel of Thomas and other gospel sources to explain the position of children in the Palestinian context. Along with the other interpretation of children as being humble, honest, and innocent, Crossan brings in the idea from old Jewish understanding of treating children as somebody absolutely dependent on parental discretion and socially as ‘nobodies’, which is the heart of this interpretation. He discusses this in detail in his book, The Historical Jesus, pp. 267–9.

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36. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 283. 37. Ibid., pp. 304, 422. 38. Ibid., p. 292. 39. Crossan, Jesus, p. 71. 40. Crossan, Jesus and the Kingdom, p. 36; and Crossan, The Historical Jesus, pp. 304–31. This explanation assumes importance in the context of exclusive Jewish table fellowship and food pattern on the basis of Levitical laws of purity and pollution. 41. Ibid., p. 421. 42. Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History, p. 90. 43. J.D. Crossan, 1995, ‘Historical Jesus as Risen Lord’, in J.D. Crossan, Luke Timothy Johnson, and Werner H. Kelber et al. (eds), The Jesus Controversy, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press, p. 45. 44. Thomas J.J. Altizer, 1997, The Contemporary Jesus, New York: SCM Press, p. 35. 45. Ben Witherington III, 1995, The Jesus Quest, Illinois: Inter Varsity Press, p. 77. 46. L.T. Johnson,1995, ‘The Humanity of Jesus: What’s at stake in the Quest for the Historical Jesus’, in Crossan et al. (eds), The Jesus Controversy, p. 54. 47. Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History, p. 96. 48. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 429; and also, Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. x. ‘Q’ is a speculative collection of sayings of Jesus that is posited as a source used in the composition of the canonical gospels. Lacking a narratival structure, Q sayings are derived variedly depending on Matthew and Luke overlaps that are offset against material found in Mark. 49. Witherington, The Jesus Quest, p. 90. 50. Ibid., p. 89. 51. Sathianathan Clarke, in his seminal work, 1998, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, explores a similar Christological framework through the paradigm of Dalit Drum. 52. The English equivalents for the Tamil words are: Irai, God; araneri, ethics; Yesu, Jesus. Hence, Irai-araneriyalar Yesu means, ‘Jesus who practices God-centred ethics’. 53. Crossan, Jesus, p. 71. 54. Commenting on the practicality of theology, Duncan Forrester states, ‘practical theology and ethics are both together ultimately concerned with discerning God’s activity in the world and learning how to respond faithfully and well.’ Duncan Forrester, 2000, Truthful Action, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, p. 57. 55. Enrique Dussel, 1988, Ethics and Community, Wellwood: Burns&Oates, p. 80. 56. Araneri is the virtuous living that seeks the good of all. 57. It is essential to understand that Dalit theology is a collective theological reflection that emerges from the struggles of millions of Dalits, bringing out the liberative aspect of God, and can’t be appropriated by any one group. The core intention of this enterprise is to set free those who are oppressed and also, those who oppress, so that a community of equals can be realized nullifying internal or external oppression. 58. Brian K. Blount, 2001, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context, Nashville: Abingdon Press, p. 47. 59. Crossan, ‘Historical Jesus as Risen Lord’, p. 45.

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60. The English equivalents for the Tamil words are: kadanth, transcend; nilaiyalar, position; Yesu, Jesus. Hence, Kadanth Nilaiyalar Yesu means, ‘Jesus who transcends and transforms boundaries’. 61. Emil Schurer, 1979, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, (New English version/revised and edited by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp. 475–8.. 62. David Daube, while explaining the cultural difference between the Jews and the Samaritans, highlights the rigidity of Jewish purity laws which prohibits any sort of interaction. This purity concept stems from the religious observances of Jews that reflects in their cultural habits too; any interaction could be highly polluting. David Daube, 1950, ‘Jesus and the Samaritan Woman’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 137–47. 63. In contrast to the cultic worship, knowledge of scripture, and prayers, Jesus emphasized the praxiological side of worshiping God (Mt 23:23–24; Mk 2:23–27, 3:4). Through every act of open commensality and free healing, he challenged the traditional cultural attitudes towards people. He spent time with the tax collectors and prostitutes; he had food with them (Mt 9:10–11, 11:19; Lk 19:7); he touched the lepers and healed them(Mt 8:2–3; Mk 1: 40–44); women touched him (Mt 9:22); he did not just follow the religious practices, rather he questioned the rationality of it (Mk 2:23–27,3:4; Mt 12:11–14, 5:22; Lk 11: 37–40), encountered and appreciated the Samaritans; and he drank from the hand of Samaritan woman by which he transcended the gender boundaries in the Jewish society as well as going through a radical transformation in his own thought. He preached about the goodness of Samaritans as against the Jewish temple personnel through the parable of Good Samaritan (Lk 10:29–37; Jn 4:7–42). 64. Hugo Echegaray, 1986, The Practice of Jesus, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp. 102–3. In his presentation of the importance of actualizing Jesus and the universalistic nature of his ministry, Hugo says that Jesus transcended the boundaries of Israel and moved beyond to the Gentiles and the Samaritans. 65. The English equivalents for the Tamil words are: murpoku, radical and forward looking; ethirpalar, resister and protester; Yesu, Jesus. Hence, Murpoku Ethirpalar Yesu means, ‘Jesus who is radical and forward looking in thought and resists any process of exploitation’. 66. Christopher Rowland and Mark Corner, 1989, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, p. 89. 67. J. Jeremias, 1967, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, London: SCM Press, pp. 147–245. In his detailed description of the social classification, Jeremias describes the function of each category and their habits and other related information. See also, Helmut Merkel, 1984, ‘The Opposition between Jesus and Judaism’, in Ernst Bammel and C. F. D. Moule (eds), Jesus and the Politics of His Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135–8. 68. Robert T. Anderson, 2002, The Keepers: An Introduction to the History and Culture of the Samaritans, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, p. 40. 69. Blount, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh, p. 115. 70. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 421–2. 71. Ibid., p. 292. 72. George Newlands, 2006, Christ and Human Rights, Hampshire: ASHGATE.

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10 Dalit Theology and its Future Course GEEVARGHESE MOR COORILOS NALUNNAKKAL

D

oes Dalit theology have the potential to become a theology of the future? In a context best described as a time between times, Dalit theology needs to address issues of fragmentation, fundamentalism of all sorts and hues, market tyranny, new forms of war and poverty, genocide, and ecocide of unprecedented dimensions in order to become a theology of the future. This essay argues that a Christian theological rationale for envisioning the future course of Dalit theology can be derived from the Gospel of John 1:14, which reads, ‘The Word (logos) became flesh (sarx) and pitched its tent (eskenosen) among the people,’ which can be described, in some sense, as the crux of the Gospel of John. The argument of this essay is that this passage brings out at least three aspects of theological activity that have a bearing on the nature and task of Dalit theology, namely, philosophical imagination, sociological imagination, and poetic imagination which are textual, contextual, and inter-textual in nature, respectively. By tracing how Christian theology in both western and Indian contexts has become entangled with broad meta-narratives in their appropriation of philosophical imagination and sociological imagination, the article uses the ‘logos passage’ as a theological lens to argue for the need for Dalit theology to move beyond these entanglements and envision its theological exercise in interaction with the multiple and micronarratives of the Dalit communities in order the become more pertinent as a theology of the future. The article also points out that philosophical imagination, sociological imagination, and poetic imagination complementarily have implications for the future course of Dalit theology. THE LOGOS TRADITION AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY: A CASE OF ENTANGLEMENTS

The term ‘logos’, which literally means ‘word’ and also, ‘reason’, has played a significant role in Christian theology. John probably uses the

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word logos in this dual sense—as both word and reason. Reason, however, was perhaps the predominant sense in which the Greeks, especially the Stoics, perceived logos. For them, logos was the supreme reason of God which caused the cosmic order that governs the universe. Logos was the creative power of God that sustained the world order. Undeniably, much of what we call theology has been logos-centric, in this Hellenistic sense. This has been particularly true of the western theological tradition, where theology is considered to be essentially a rationalistic discipline—a cerebral enterprise—cognitive in both character and content. Though one could always maintain that, in the early Patristic period, Christian theology also had a spiritual and ecclesial emphasis, for the Church Fathers to do theology was essentially to meditate on the Word (logos). Understood either as theologia, which is faith reflection on the ultimate doctrine concerning Godhead—the Holy Trinity—or as oikonomia, which is the specific faith reflection on the Christ-event, theology was purely a philosophical rumination on the metaphysical. In such discourses, it was only the Word (logos) which formed theology, not the World (context). For instance, Patristic theology, grounded in monastic environments, alienated itself from the mundane realities of the world, albeit consciously. Theology invariably tended to be predominantly logos-centric. This logos-centric speculative tradition of theology perhaps reached its zenith during the period of Scholasticism, itself most notably associated with St Thomas Aquinas. What followed in the form of subsequent theological constructions was not much different. Much of modern theology, influenced by the Enlightenment movement continued to tread the logos-centric path and found allies in the thought worlds of Bacon, Newton, and Descartes. Knowledge and reason continued to be the defining features of theology. This Enlightenment-inspired theology propagated the exclusive gospel that the only legitimate knowledge was philosophical and rational knowledge. A similar influence permeated the theological trends of the time. Coming to the Indian context, the early Indian Christian theology, which emerged because western theological models were perceived to be ineffective and irrelevant to the Indian context, was little different in terms of its philosophical orientation and methodology. This so-called Indian Christian theology replaced categories of western classical philosophy with those of Indian Brahmanic philosophical traditions which were equally centred around the logos tradition. The dominant thought world of Indian Christian theology was entangled with the Vedantic

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tradition and followed Brahmanical philosophical concepts such as advaita and vishistadvaita.1 Whereas in western classical theology one found excessive usage and influence of Greek and Hellenistc categories, one would find the dominant use of Sanskritic terminologies in the classical Indian Christian theology. Most of the pioneers of Indian Christian theology were converts from Brahmanic Hinduism. They had an inherent desire to express their own caste Hindu situadedness. Further, they were also responding to the challenge of incarnating Christianity as part of the emerging national community.2 Naturally, this brand of Christian theology in India was largely rooted in the religious experiences of the upper caste. Therefore, it did not reflect or address the predicaments of the majority of the people of India who belonged to the ‘lower’ caste backgrounds, namely, the Dalits.3 This failure of Indian Christian theology to capture the aspirations and pathos of Dalits and other subaltern communities paved the way, amongst other factors, for the emergence of Dalit and indigenous forms of liberation theologies. As the pioneer of Dalit theology, A.P. Nirmal says that the failure of Indian Christian theology ‘to see in the struggle of the Indian Dalits for liberation a subject matter appropriate for doing theology in India’ provides the impetus ‘for our waking up to this reality today and for applying ourselves seriously to the task of doing Dalit theology’.4 Dalit theology, in that sense, could also be seen as a counter-tradition against the dominant logos-oriented theological endeavour. The logos passage from John is counter-intuitive to this logos-centric tradition in the sense that it makes it clear that the logos became flesh. By assuming flesh, ‘logos’ ceased to be exclusively metaphysical and assumed materiality and physicality. The radical implication of this Logos Christology, thus, disentangles Christian theology from its philosophical captivity and has great implications for Dalit theology. The very statement, ‘logos’ became flesh ‘sarx’, could have appeared like an avalanche to the Greeks. Logos assuming body was unimaginable for the Greek mind to which the body was nothing but the epitome of evil, a prison house, and a tomb. Neither Plutarch nor Philo would have said this to the Greeks. Logos and sarx could only be contrasted, not compared and hence, the teaching that the Word could assume body was nothing short of blasphemy to the Hellenistic audience of St John. The Eternal entering the zone of time and space, of history and contingency and still be the Eternal, and the Transcendent assuming mundane dimensions and still be transcendent, would have, at the least, been unfathomable for the Hellenistic mindset. It needs to be noted that John uses the term ‘sarx’, which Paul so often uses in his epistles in its most pejorative sense, that is,

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to denote the human nature with all its frailty and sinful nature. Therefore, the statement that logos became body could be construed as a powerful Johannine rejoinder to the Gnostic/Docetic rejection of humanity within the divine. This, indeed, was a scandalous theology. One had to wait for liberation theologies to take on board seriously the socio-political and theological implications of the embodiment of logos. Liberation theology, in a sense, redeemed logos from its Greek philosophical captivity and related it to the worldly realities. As James Nelson opines, ‘The embodiment of God in Jesus Christ, is, in faith’s perception, God’s decisive and crucial self-disclosure.’5 Logos has entered history and hence, it is not any more ahistorical. The Creator has identified itself with the created in a tangible manner. Liberation theologies have articulated the integral link, the gospel connection, between the Word and the world, the text and the context, the story and history. Congar talks about the implications of this emphasis for Christian theology: If the Church wishes to deal with the real questions of the modern world and to attempt to respond to them . . . it must be open as it were to a new chapter of theologico-pastoral epistemology. Instead of using only revelation as starting points, as classical theology has generally done, it must start with facts and questions derived from the world and from history.6

One of the significant contributions of Latin American liberation theology has been its efforts in relating the Word of God to the world of humanity, particularly that of the poor and the oppressed. However, liberation theology of the Latin American version tended to reduce Christ’s revelation to anthropology. In this sense, liberation theology shared the Barthian Christological emphasis, which said: ‘Man [sic] is the measure of all things since God became Man [sic].’ Methodologically, liberation theology also followed the modernist school and hence, ended up being anthropocentric and even androcentric in content and method. This can be called the sociological entanglement of the appropriation of the logos tradition. By drawing universal implications for the Logos Cristological tradition, issues of caste and class were blurred. This universalizing enterprise resulted in hegemonic anthropocentricism. This was the reason why variant forms of liberation theology schools such as Black, Dalit, feminist, and tribal theologies of liberation had to emerge later. BEYOND PRESENT ENTANGLEMENTS: DALIT THEOLOGY AND THE LOGOS TRADITION—A THEOLOGY OF AN EMBODIED LOGOS

It was in response to these philosophical and sociological entanglements that Dalit theology rose. Dalit theology being a theology that reflects on

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the pain and pathos of Dalits, their life conditions, could not afford to take the Word of God (logos) in isolation, except in relation to the body that it assumed and the social matrix where it pitched its tent with the suffering masses. When understood in such an embodied and embedded sense, the logos tradition invests Dalit theology with at least two new epistemological directions. First is the recovery and retrieval of the Dalit body in the present body politic and second, is the discovery of new depositum fidei for Dalit theology. It needs to be affirmed that both these epistemological directions are not mutually exclusive but interpenetrate and permeate the other in both explicit and implicit ways. Recovery and retrieval of Dalit body politic, ‘Embodiment of the logos’, assumes special relevance in the Indian context. Whereas ‘body’ is generally despised and condemned in the Vedic traditions, bodies of people belonging to certain castes and sections are loathed even more. As Y.T. Vinayaraj opines, ‘Dalit’s place in the social body is determined by the very constitution of their bodies.’7 Exploitation of body has always been a powerful tool in the hands of fascists everywhere. The role of body feelings in Hitler’s racist fascism was evidently strong. Hitler was apparently preoccupied with images of Jews and people with ‘dirty’, ‘grotesque’, and ‘distorted’ bodies. Under slavery, the Black people were bred like animals, the Whites coercing Black women into sexual acts. One could see the same ideology of the ‘hatred of the body of the other’ in the Hindutva brand of fascism in India. Rape of women from minority, Dalit, and tribal communities is part of this agenda. An embodiment theology challenges Dalits and other oppressed communities to ‘re-politicize their bodies’, as Evangeline Rajkumar would put it.8 Dalits are challenged to reject all imposed notions about their body and identify themselves with the body that logos assumed. This is certainly an organic theological vision. Church is the body of Christ and, therefore, Christianity is deemed a religion of the body. Incarnation is logos becoming flesh. However, the bodily dimensions of Christianity have been, over the years, narrowly spiritualized and depoliticized. Classical theologies have managed to convert Christ’s body into a human, male, and unitary body. The challenge for theology today is to liberate the body of Christ from anthropocentrism, androcentrism, and unitary universalism. A ‘politics of difference’ warrants an appreciation of the diversity of bodies. Christ’s body is a broken body—a Dalit body. As Y.T Vinayaraj exhorts us, ‘We need to convert the Church as the true body of Christ where Dalits can meet and transform other untouchable and

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abused bodies into divine agents.’9 This is an urgent ecclesiological challenge that Dalit theology has to address today. DISCOVERY OF NEW DEPOSITUM FIDEI FOR DALIT THEOLOGY

As we have already noted, with the emergence of liberation theology, theological enterprise, in general, has been liberated from its metaphysical exile. New texts and narratives, new depositum fidei are being identified. The embodied logos has pitched its tent among the masses. This part of the gospel brings out the praxiological dimensions of theology. Theology, as the father of liberation theology Gutierrez would define, is ‘critical reflection on praxis’.10 He would further argue that theology is also a ‘second act’. In other words, theology follows. Theology does not produce mission and ministry, rather it reflects on them. Unfortunately, the Cartesian mindset of modernity had managed to separate epistemology from ethics, cognitive theology from applied theology. Liberation theology, on the other hand, has taken theology from the realm of orthodoxy to orthopraxis. Logos, once embodied, has to pitch tents among people. The Greek word eskenosen is derived from the noun skene, which means ‘tent’. The Hebrew word is shekina. Skene is probably a bilingual word. The usual English rendering of John 1:1411 does not convey this praxiological emphasis of the event of embodiment of logos—the divine incarnation. The important point about the divine act is that along with assuming flesh, logos has also chosen to dwell among the tent dwellers, the homeless, and the landless. Rev 21:3 also seems to suggest this idea.12 One of the major lacunae in liberation theology’s understanding of praxis is that it perceived the concept almost exclusively in Marxian perspective. Following pre-eminently a modernist framework and a Marxian social analysis, liberation theology relied on meta-theories such as class struggle, and in the process, failed to come to terms with systems of subaltern categories such as caste, tribe, gender, race, ecology, and so on. Liberation theology tended to subsume such denominators under the broad umbrella category of the ‘proletariat’ and was caught up in the trap of economic class determinism. Social and cultural aspects of oppression unique to certain social contexts were ignored. This has resulted in the formation of liberation theologies of indigenous persuasions, theologies of particular oppressed peoples such as Dalits, women, indigenous people, Blacks, tribals, and so on. However, even these variant forms of liberation school could not quite move beyond the modernist project of liberation. Modernity has then become for us the ‘safe zone’ from which we construct our objective theologies. John the Evangelist challenges us to leave these comfort zones and leap into

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the unknown tents of meeting where the embodied logos dwells with the oppressed masses, the landless, and the homeless. In this postmodern version of embodied theology and spirituality, a theology of the logos that took the form of body and pitched its tent among the people, it is the ‘little narratives’ that are confronted in the tents of the homes and the oppressed that will shape the content of theology. One such deposit of little narratives (depositum fidei) is found in the tens and thousands of tents that the subaltern peoples have pitched in Chengara, in Pathanamthitta district of Kerala, India. THE LAND STRUGGLE OF DALITS AND ADIVASIS AT CHENGARA: A DEPOSITUM FIDEI FOR DALIT THEOLOGY

On 3 August 2007, around 8,000 families belonging to Dalit and Adivasi communities invaded a rubber plantation in Chengara, Kerala. This estate was given to a multinational firm by the Government of Kerala on a lease agreement for 99 years. Even after the lease period was over, the government did not take any steps to retrieve the property from the company. The Dalits and Adivasis who ‘occupied’ this land demanded 5 acres of agriculture land for each of their families and declared that until their demands were met, they would not leave the estate. The same people had staged a similar struggle at a government plantation during the previous government’s regime. They withdrew their struggle upon an assurance given by the then government that they would be given agriculture land soon. That promise was not kept and it forced the people to stage another protest. This historic struggle at Chengara estate, led by Dalits and Adivasis, under their own banner, has crossed one year, and has attracted international attention. Yet, the Government of Kerala is still unmoved. For the Marxist government, the land reform which was initiated by them in the 1950s had settled the land issue once and for all. They are not willing to listen to the Dalit version of the story. The real landless people, Dalits and Adivasis, were by and large ignored in the land reform, and they continue to be landless. The struggle has all the makings of truly subaltern movement for justice, an identity politics. Besides, for the Marxists, this struggle does not come under their meta-narrative of ‘class struggles’. About 8,000 small tents have been pitched in Chengara by Dalits and Adivasis. Struggles like Chengara movement offer a real locus for a future Dalit theology. At Chengara, each of the 8,000 and odd tents will offer us different ‘little narratives’—narratives, albeit unwritten, texts of their own. In order to better understand the case at Chengara, it is pertinent to have an overview of the political nature of the relationship between the

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Dalits and land ownership. The Indian society has been built on the edifice of casteism and feudalism. Both had their role in the land distribution patterns in India. According to Gail Omvedt13 who has done extensive studies on the relationship between land and caste, the rich people who owned substantial pieces of land were from the high caste groups of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. The artisans came from the lowest caste groups of Shudras and the landless agricultural labourers from those outside the traditional four castes, the so-called untouchables. The majority of Dalits lived in villages without any land of their own, and their plight continues to be the same even today. Caste has always played a crucial role in the allotment of land. In the Indian village economy, caste has been a defining factor. The agricultural producers were divided into several sub-castes or jatis. In order to have a share in the harvest, each sub-caste was required to perform its special caste duties.14 The Dalits, being the lowest on the caste ladder, were subjected to the most severe bondage in this respect. Not only were they deprived of any right to possess land but they also suffered harsh slavery in the form of severe agricultural labour. The British colonial rule introduced the zamindari system where land ownerships were conferred on to those who collected revenue from the peasants, on behalf of the regime. The Dalits and Adivasis still remained outside the purview of ownership of land. The post-colonial situation is no better, if not worse, for the Dalits and Adivasis, especially as far as land ownership rights are concerned. Even those who own small pieces of land are targeted today under the pretext of developmental projects. The new drive for ‘development’, industrial and otherwise, is implemented at the cost of the eviction of millions of Dalits and tribals all over the country. Narmada, Plachimada, Nandigram, Singur, Moolampally, and Chengara are just few names where anti-people development projects have been initiated. Land mafias in the guise of real estate business have captured most of the land areas. New policies such as Special Economic Zones (SEZ) are being created to cater to the interests of the land mafias at the expense of Dalits and Adivasi communities. As already indicated, each tent at Chengara offers us a host of ‘little narratives’, nontextual narratives of Dalits, Adivasis, Dalit women, and children. DALIT THEOLOGY OF TOMORROW: A THEOLOGY OF NEW IMAGINATIONS

To become a theology of the future, Dalit theology has to take an intertextual course of poetic imagination, where depositum fidei like Chengare are to be read in juxtaposition with biblical narratives as well as other

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inspirational memories, symbols, and rituals of Buddhism, and the narratives and legends about Dr Ambedkar, Mahatma Ayyankal,15 and others. It is in tents like these at Chengara that Dalit theology has to search for new raw materials for re-envisioning its theological methodology and content because, it is in these tents that we confront the embodied logos—Jesus Christ—who has pitched his tent among the masses. There are similar tents elsewhere, local communities where micro-politics of the subalterns are encountered and where tents are pitched, such as Plachimada, Narmada, Nandigram, and so on. A theology of the logos (logos in isolation) stands for philosophical imagination. A theology of the embodied logos reflects sociological imagination. A theology of logos pitching tents among people conveys poetic imagination. A logos-centric theology is textual. A body theology is contextual and a tent theology is inter-textual. What we need today is synthesis of these three kinds of imaginations: philosophical, sociological, and poetic; textual, contextual and inter-textual. For this to materialize though, we probably need to move even beyond the postmodern thought worlds because no ‘system’ can ‘embody’ a ‘living’ theology. To become subservient to any kind of imagination would mean eclipse imagination itself. Therefore, by remaining open to the presence and activity of the incarnate logos in the unexpected tents—depositum fidei—Dalit theology can take up the prophetic task of reimagining a theology where life is celebrated, protected, and nourished with a passion for justice and a commitment to ensure the fullness of life for all. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. R.S. Sugirtharajah, 2001, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 230, 231. 2. M.M. Thomas and P.T. Thomas, 1992, Towards an Indian Christian Theology: Life and Thought of Some Pioneers, Tiruvalla: New Day Publications, p. 4. 3. James Massey, 1994, ‘Ingredients for a Dalit Theology’, in James Massey (ed.), Indigenous People: Dalits, Dalit Issues in Today’s Theological Debate, Delhi: ISPCK, p. 339. 4. A.P. Nirmal, 1994, ‘Towards a Christian Dalit Theology’, in Massey (ed.), Indigenous People, pp. 215, 217. 5. James B. Nelson, 1978, Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, p. 8. 6. Yves Congar cited in Gustavo Gutierrez, 1974, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, London: SCM Press, p. 12. 7. Y.T. Vinayaraj, 2008, ‘Towards a Postmoderrn Dalit Hermeneutics’, in Y.T. Vinayaraj, Re-imagining Dalit Theology: Post Modern Readings, Tiruvalla: CSS, p. 61. 8. See Evangeline Rajkumar, 2004, ‘Politicizing Body: Towards a Feminist Christology’, Asia Journal of Theology, vol. 8, no. 2, April, pp. 93–102.

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9. Y.T. Vinayaraj, 2008, Re-imagining Dalit Theology : Post modern Readings, Tiruvalla: CSS, p. 64. 10. See Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, pp. 11–13. 11. RSV and NRSV. 12. Rev. 21:3 (NRSV). 13. Gail Omvedt, 1982, Caste, Land and Politics in Indian States, Delhi: Authors Guild Publications, pp. 87–8. 14. Ibid., p. 43. 15. A well-known Dalit social reformer in Kerala.

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11 Dalits and Religious Conversion Slippery Identities and Shrewd Identifications SATHIANATHAN CLARKE AND PHILIP VINOD PEACOCK

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o help reflect upon religious conversion from the experience of Dalit Christian communities, this essay describes, analyses, and interprets the recent events surrounding the violent attacks against Christians in the Kandhamal district in Orissa. This essay is also informed by a joint visit to Orissa by the authors between 1 and 5 March 2009. During this sojourn with victims of the Kandhamal riots, we visited villages destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists and the relief camps set up to safeguard Dalit and Adivasi Christians from further assaults. We also interviewed several Christians in the Kandhamal district, some devastated by murder within their own family and many affected by brute violence that left them homeless and traumatized. Of course, in this essay, our social analysis is fused with a desire for theological construal. The social analysis contends that the incidents in Kandhamal can best be explained by a broad and integrative approach. A curious mix of shifting economic conditions, the constructible possibilities of religion, and the synergy emanating from caste-based identity politics offer a broad framework with which to explicate violence against the Christian community in this region. The theological dimensions stem from Dalit communities’ need and desire to stand by the affirmation that religious conversion is much more than an individual internal change of heart. We suggest that within a historical context of economic and social change, Christianity continues to offer Dalits a resourceful, appealing, and employable array of symbols with which to slide away from generally taken-for-granted Hindu-based identities (slippery identities) towards freer self-expressive forms of identifications (shrewd identifications). This denotes a contextual theological movement of corporeal and collective salvation, a promise of the good news of Jesus Christ for life in all its fullness, which

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threatens any expectation that vested Hindu fundamentalists’ may have to return to a hierarchical caste-justified social and economic order. It is important to attest that theology is not only reflection on inherited symbols of Christian thought forms but also on that which is practiced because of being a Christian. Dalit theology, thus, is inextricably linked with the practice of Christian mission. It cannot but reflect critically upon the conscious and systematic way in which the Christians engage the world. In India, engaging the world also involved proclaiming the Word. Thus, the responsibility of living out the Christian way of life is bound together with the obligation to profess how this Christian gospel is a saving/healing/ liberating worldview. This privilege to practice, and constraint to profess, the Christian faith was linked to another aspect central to Indian Christian existence: the freedom to propagate the Christian gospel among one’s own people. The overwhelming majority of Christians in India would not have come to embrace and enjoy this Christian faith and practice if not for this freedom to propagate the gospel in a predominantly Hindu subcontinent. It is this gift that they want to protect so as to also be able to share with their brothers and sisters that which they received as the ‘pearl of great value’ (Matthew 13: 46) from other Christian missionaries. Yet, this is at the centre of contention in India. Hindus have always resisted Muslim and Christian expansion. Apart from a partial historical understanding that Islam and Christianity were somehow implicated in a common goal of promoting a colonial project, there is also the genuine concern that Hinduism is seriously disadvantaged in this business of religious conversion because it is inherently a non-proselytizing tradition. In as much as electoral politics in India is determined by ones religious and caste-based identity, religious conversion could easily be the means for Hinduism to lose its solid vote bank in India. Furthermore, Hinduism’s central philosophical tenet that one’s individual dharma is determined by one being born into a particular caste, which in turn prescribes one’s social and economic duties does not allow for ways to escape the fixed cycle of the eternal laws of the universal dharma. No wonder then that there were years of serious and often vehement debate (1947–50) before the Indian constitution provided every Indian citizen the fundamental ‘right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion’ (Article 25: 1).1 But the dispute was not settled even after this right was incorporated into the Indian constitution by the Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949. The Christian Missionary Enquiry Committee was set up on 16 April 1954 (since it was chaired by Bhawani Shankar Niyogi, a retired Chief Justice, this has popularly been called the Niyogi Commission or

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Committee) and its report, in 1956, further complicated the plain interpretation of the constitutional right to freely profess, practice, and propagate religion. The commission turned the debate on its head. Instead of addressing conversion as stemming from the right to propagate religion, it stressed the possibility that religious conversion may, in fact, erode the rights of a united and peaceful Indian nation state. The Niyogi Report reinforced Hindu fears not only about religious conversion but also about practice of Christianity and Islam. Rudolf Heredia summarizes the findings succinctly: ‘Proselytization was seen as a threat to “national unity,” undermining “the principle of peaceful co-existence” and intending “to create a Christian party in the Indian democracy along the lines of the Muslim League ultimately to make out the claim for a separate State, or at least to create a militant minority.”’2 It was primarily to assuage these suspicions that the states of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa got down to the task of passing the Freedom of Religion Bills and Acts from 1963 onward. Ironically, this strengthened the role of the state to safeguard the freedom of the majority to keep the dominant religion (Hinduism) as a dominating one in independent India. Eventually, in 1977, the Supreme Court got involved in this dispute on religious conversion by ruling that ‘the right to propagate religion did not necessarily extend to the right to convert.’3 It was this crucial legal verdict that ‘allowed states to legislate “Freedom of Religions” bills forbidding the conversion of minors, as well as requiring Hindus converted to Christianity to provide magistrates with an affidavit.’4 There can be little doubt that this legal ruling introduced by the Supreme Court has strengthened three notable tendencies that could help legitimate violence against Christian communities. First, there is the matter of buttressing a long-held and widely-circulated lie that Christian conversion takes place mainly through fraudulence and inducement. Thus, it must be stopped at all cost, including violent means. Second, there is the reinforcement of Christian religion as being religious ‘other’ to the Hindu ‘self ’. Concluding a fascinating study on Christian conversion in another region of India, Chandra Mallampalli points to a trend that we can also notice in this context: the simplistic coupling of the religious ‘outsider’ with the Hindu enemy. In his words, ‘A key aspect of this new Hindu communal history is its tendency to portray the “outsider” as the enemy. Most often, the outsider is Muslim or Christian.’5 Third, this legal judgment invites the state, utilizing its majority community of Hindus since they constitute more than 80 per cent of the Indian population, to get involved in monitoring the religious professions and practices of the Christians and

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Muslims. In many ways, violence against Christians in situations where religious conversion is a realistic threat becomes a means whereby the dominant community metes out their version of ‘justice’ in arenas that the legal system are unable to the reach. COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN ORISSA: HISTORICAL MARKERS

A close look at the reality on the ground will show that most violence against Christians involves rage against one particular type of Christian, that is, Dalit Christians. Let us take the case of Kandhamal. On the night of 23 August 2008, violence against the Christians, for the most part Dalits, in the Kandhamal district of Orissa began afresh; this time more serious and widespread than the December 2007 attacks. In this eruption of violence, houses and institutions belonging to the Christians were burnt, orphanages and churches were attacked, and three women including a nun were raped. Reports also indicate that during the last week of August 2008, at least fifty-nine6 persons lost their lives and thousands were driven out of their homes and villages which were burnt and destroyed. Even as we moved into a new year, several hundred continue to live in relief camps, too scared to return to what is left of their houses. It is further estimated that more than 4,3007 houses belonging to Dalit and Adivasi Christians have been destroyed. Even as this article is being written, several hundreds of people from the relief camps are being forced to return home, often to social and economic boycott and, sometimes, even to death. Hindu fundamentalists are demanding that these Christians must ‘re-convert’ to Hinduism to be guaranteed safety in their community. Ironically, most of these Christians have been Christians for more than two to three generations. The events following 23 August 2008 should not be seen as an isolated one-off retaliation to avenge the killing of Swami Lakshmanananda Sawaswati as has been touted by many. Nor should it be seen merely as a wave of religious ‘persecution’ against Christians as has been the rhetoric of some Christian groups. Rather, we assert that these events need to be interpreted within a larger context of the build-up of communal tensions over several years in an area embroiled with power struggles made possible by the advance of economic flexibility, fissures and fractures in the traditional caste institution, and community prospects for reinventing alternate religious identities. The theoretical basis to think of conversion as religiously illegitimate, politically vested, and socially threatening to the Hindu majority has a long history in Orissa. It is not coincidental that Orissa had already passed ‘The Orissa Freedom of Religion Act’ in 1967,

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a whole decade before the legal verdict of the Supreme Court in 1977 to authorize states to initiate ‘Freedom of Religions’ bills. The wording of this act is worth noting: Conversion in its very process involves an act of undermining another faith. The process becomes all the more objectionable when this is brought about by recourse to methods of force, fraud, material inducement, and exploitation of one’s poverty, simplicity, and ignorance. Conversion or attempts to conversion in the above manner besides creating various maladjustments in social life, also give rise to problems of law and order. It is therefore, of importance to provide for measures to check such activities which also indirectly impinge on the freedom of religion. The Bill seeks to achieve the above objectives. (Vide Statement of Objects and Reasons printed in the Orissa Gazette, Ext., no 1592, dated 13 December 1967)8

Three insights come to mind as we read this act. First, it clearly expresses the insult religious conversion is thought to heap upon the majority Hindu community. Second, conversion itself is presumed to be spurious. There has to be an ulterior motive behind all conversions from Hinduism. Thus, force and fraud seem the most reasonable explanation. And, third, the aspiration and the determination of the converts are ignored. The state, which has been seen to act as the apparatus of the majority community, becomes the arbiter of religious conversion. We are convinced that such collective illogic induces majority communities to take on the role of vigilantes of ‘justice’ when they determine that legal ways of dealing with religious conversion is either too cumbersome or ineffective. The first instance of communal violence (an Indian expression that means violent, usually deadly, conflict between two religious communities) in Orissa took place in 1964 in Rourkela. Pralay Kanungo, writing on the Kandhamal riots in the Economic and Political Weekly, says that from this early time, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu right-wing organization, was connected with such attacks against religious minorities in Orissa.9 What followed were riots against Muslims in Cuttack in 1968 and 1992, Bhadrak in 1968 and 1991, and Soro in 1991. Kanungo further points out that during the Ramjanmabhoomi10 (a movement to reclaim the birth place of the Hindu God, Ram) agitations in the early 1990s, churches were attacked in the Kandhamal district of Orissa. While Muslims were targeted in other parts of the country, in Kandhamal, where Muslims are virtually absent, it was the Christians who faced the brunt of the attack.11 Communal riots have been particularly brutal over the last decade in Orissa. The gruesome murder of the missionary, Graham Staines, and his two sons made international news in January 1999. They were burnt to death while they slept in a van by a mob of Hindu fundamentalists for their

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alleged efforts to convert poor and illiterate Hindus to Christianity. It must be kept in mind that the nomenclature ‘poor and illiterate’ is generally a synonym for ‘Dalit and Adivasi’. In September that same year, a Catholic priest, Arul Das, was killed in Jamabani village in Mayurganj of Orissa. He also was working among the poor and illiterate. It is against this historical background that one must view the violent assault against Christians in Kandhamal around Christmas 2007, which then fed into a worse set of murderous and riotous attacks in August 2008. The reasons given for the attack are both general and specific. The expansive reason was the destabilization of religious harmony brought on by the aggressive conversion activities carried out by Christians. The more immediate and specific reason given for the August 2008 attacks was the murder of Swami Lakshmamananda Sawaswati and four of his associates on 23 August 2008. They were said to have been peacefully celebrating Janmastami, a Hindu religious festival celebrating the birth of Krishna. Incongruously, though the Maoists had claimed responsibility for the murder of the Swami, it was the Christians who had to face the repercussions of his tragic and violent death. It was clearly the emotionally charged funeral procession of the Swami and a mass rally by the Hindutva forces that was the ultimate push towards the August riots. The reasons for the riots, even while involving religious conflict, go well beyond the simplistic argument about competing religions. It is necessary to place this ensemble of violence in a wider socio-economic, political, and ideological context to make sense of what is happening in Orissa. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF KANDHAMAL

Orissa is the ninth largest state in India and ranks eleventh in terms of population. The majority of its population is Hindu (94.35 per cent according the 2001 census) and Christians account for a small minority of just above 2 per cent; a similar number belong to the Muslim community. However, in the Kandhamal district, Christians account for 18.1 per cent of the population. The larger percentage of Christians in the district is no doubt a problem for those vested in maintaining Hindu dominance. But there is also the matter of other indices of inequality. Anjana Chatterji, writing on the violence in Kandhamal, argues that there are ‘staggering inequities present in the state, where severe social and institutionalized forms of caste, class, gender and heterosexist oppressions and caste, class, gendered and sexualized violence are rampant.’12 She goes on to argue that the rate of unemployment is on the rise in Orissa and points out that 47.15 per cent of the total population of Orissa lies below the poverty

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line, while 57 per cent of the rural population are poor. At the same time, 68.9 per cent of the Adivasi populations are poor, while among the Dalits, it is 54.9 per cent.13 The super cyclone of 1999 and additional floods and droughts have meant difficulties for both the economy and the ecology of the state. Kandhamal, thus, is one of the poorer districts of Orissa, with a large percentage of the population living below the poverty line. Evidence further shows that there has been a ‘decline in the number of available employment and income generation opportunities in the area.’14 What we know is that in health, Gender Development Index (GDI), and Human Development Index (HDI) indices, Kandhamal is in the bottom five of Orissa’s districts. The two major ethnic groups in the area are the Adivasi Kandhas and the Dalit Panas. The Christian population largely comes from the Dalit Pana community, though there are also some Adivasi Christians from the Kandha community. One view maintains that the Kandhas were the early settlers in Kandhamal. This claim has been disputed by non-Kandhas. The counterclaim is that both the Kandhas and the Panas were the original inhabitants of the area. Contending that they had original control over the land, the Kandha’s purported to be the local rulers of the area and considered the Panas as their subjects. Kanungo acknowledges that this superiority extended to the social and cultural spheres of life as well.15 However, the claim of Kandha superiority is hotly contested by the Panas who affirm that both are treated as belonging to the so-called polluted communities by the dominant castes. Colonial policies and practices affected the traditional land rights of Kandhas, which further muddied the relations with the Panas. It is evident that land disputes and control over land rights seem to be part of the conflict in Kandhamal because the Sangh Parivar often claims that it is Christian missionaries and Muslim traders who have illegally acquired the Kandha lands. Although displacement from the land is a legitimate grievance in the region, the lack of land reforms in Orissa compounds the tense land-based relations. In fact, in 1998, there was an agitation towards land reforms in Kandhamal but it came to no effect. Not being the ones controlling the land, some Panas assumed the role of middlemen and petty traders for the Kandhas who were unwilling to deal with the outside world. Some of the Panas have managed to acquire some land as well. Furthermore, by gaining empowerment though the church and in the state government, a few Christian Panas have enhanced their social and economic status. These recently found social and economic gains have given rise to an unexpectedly assertive voice of the Dalit

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Christian population in that region. The Kandhas resented the perceived rise to power of the Panas, and unfairly characterized them as liars and cheats because of their role as petty traders and middlemen, as ‘exploiters’ and ‘land-grabbers’. It is evident that the Panas refute this label and hotly contest it. This ‘fact’ has also been threatening for the Hindutva forces working in this district to preserve a Hindu worldview and way of life. The rumour being spread was that the Dalits had benefited economically because of the material incentives that conversion to Christianity entailed. While there has been some upward mobility among Dalit Christians, which has developed an assertive posture against traditional caste-based hierarchy, the reality is that the majority of Dalits remain poor and landless. Chatterji states that 90 per cent of the Dalits in Kandhamal do not have land. Moreover, it is the Hindu caste communities, who entered the area recently, that enjoy economic dominance and privilege.16 RECONFIGURING CASTE, CLASS, AND CHRISTIANITY: MUCH MORE THAN RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION

A study put out by the National Campaign of Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) confirms that the practice of untouchability continues widely in the Kandhamal district. And as mentioned earlier, the Kandhas consider themselves socially ‘higher’ than the Panas. The Kandhas may be economically worse than the Panas but they were not untouchable in the Hindu system of caste. But even this status of being ‘tribal’ was under threat. Another trigger of the Kandhamal riots could stem from the demand of the thus far Dalit Panas for Scheduled Tribe status. Under the present Indian law, Dalit Christians and Muslims are not eligible for reservations for education and government employment unlike other Dalits belonging to the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist communities. However, Christians belonging to tribal and Adivasi communities are eligible for the same privileges. In Kandhamal, the Kui-speaking Kandhas were included in the list of Scheduled Castes until 2002, but with the passing of a Presidential Order that year their status was changed to that of Scheduled Tribe. This began a movement, in 2007, among the Panas, who were also Kui speaking, to have their status changed to Scheduled Tribe, which would entitle them to governmental programmes of affirmative action. This endeavour infuriated the Kandhas because they believed that their economic privilege would be snatched away by their rivals. Moreover, they feared that the Panas, who they considered to be below them on the social hierarchy, would now claim equality with the Kandhas. Also, this action equally infuriated the dominant caste Hindus. They were suspicious and

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resentful of the economic, social, and religious independence of an assertive segment of Panas. The Sangh Parivar aided in mobilizing the Kandhas under the Kandhamal Kui Samaj with a view to reverting back to a more secure and fixed order. Christianity was responsible for destabilizing conventional social and economic order. In a sense, Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati was the most visible symbol of this conventional social and economic order propagated by the Hindutva and supported by the Adivasi Kandha. Chatterji speaks of the Sangh Parivar ‘proliferating into 10000–14000 impacted villages through sectarian relief work in the aftermath of the 1999 cyclone that left 10,000 dead.’17 She further continues, ‘The Sangh Parivar seeks to build a cadre comprised of Hindus, men and women, and targets Christian, Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits and other disenfranchised and progressive and secular groups in Orissa.’18 Central to the Hindutva project in Kandhamal was the role of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, who is said to have joined the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing Hindu organization, as a Hindu missionary sometime after 1966. He came to Kandhamal in 1969 and set up his ashram there under the auspices of the RSS–VHP with the objective of Hinduizing the Adivasis and countering Christian missionaries. Claiming that Vanvasis (another term for the Adivasis meaning ‘forest dwellers’) are Hindus, the Swami made a strategic attempt at building a permanent Hindutva cadre by organizing religious meetings; introducing Hindu gods, goddesses, religious texts; and by opening Hindu-based schools, colleges, and orphanages for the Adivasi boys and girls. Kanungo opines, ‘Though Hinduisation did not offer any substantive socioeconomic empowerment to the poor adivasis, the VHP’s “packaged Hinduism” gave them a sort of religious and cultural gratification; in an otherwise hopeless existential world, it perhaps generated some hopes under a larger Hindu identity.’19 At the same time, the Swami demonized the Panas and organized ‘Ghar Vapsi ’ (reconversion) events for those who had converted to Christianity. Thus, Kandhamal was transformed into a complex site of competing ethnic identities intersecting with competing religiosities. The work of the Swami provided sufficient grounds for reinstating a caste-based division that has been covered by a veneer of religious dispute. In a changing economic landscape, the melding together of a religious identity (Christianity in this case) with the liberation potential of the political figure of Ambedkar exacerbated the fears of a traditional socio-religious and economic elite. A fact finding team of the NCDHR in a recent report states that central among the immediate causes of the December 2007 riots was the Christmas celebrations of the Ambedkar

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Vanijya Sangho (AVS). This was an organization of Dalit-identified Christian traders and shop owners. The AVS has twenty-two members, twentyone of whom belong to the Pana community. According to Paul Divakar et al. of the NCDHR, the AVS was initiated as an audacious instrument against the ‘exploitative conditions of trade with the local shops, and as an effort to directly access the market.’20 The AVS organized Christmas celebrations with increasing grandeur every year, and the indication that tensions were anticipated during the 2007 Christmas celebrations is understood from the fact that the AVS took permission from the district magistrate for the celebrations. The decorative arch that was built by the AVS was the immediate cause of the conflict in the December 2007. What becomes clear from the fact that the shops of the AVS members were targeted in the conflict is that the conflict in Kandhamal was not just religious but was aimed at targeting the economic interests of the slightly more affluent Pana Dalit Christians. Religious affirmation through Christianity, economic alteration in the form of trade display, and Dalit assertion in the self-confident symbol of Ambedkar weave together a collectively semaphored public ritual communicating radical and counter-traditional change from the stable conventions of past religious, economic, and political traditions. In this series of violent events in Kandhamal, the conflict involves two socio-economically and politically backward communities in one of India’s poorest districts. It is literally a conflict between one specific community of Dalits and another specific community of Adivasis. Yet, one cannot extract religion out of this violent clash. In many ways, the conflict in Kandhamal is an ethnic one between the Kandha and the Pana community. However, the dynamics are not that simple because there are also Kandha Christians who have been targeted in these murderous, rapacious, and vicious dynamics of violence. The fact remains that conversion to Christianity upset the status quo well suited to serving the interests of the dominant communities. In reacting with violence to show vulnerable Christians ‘their place’ within the caste hierarchy, the dominant community was able to plug into the resentment of another subaltern community that was also under pressure from the multitude of the changes over the last several decades. Christianity was projected as the overall meaning system that was responsible for the fracture of a more stable and less tentative worldview in which both the caste Hindus and the Hindu-identified Kandhas welded more power and honour. In smashing the community dimensions of the religious expression of this new-found identity, two objectives are served. On the one hand, Hindutva is collectively and

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coordinately enacted as the new and aggressive face of a negotiated religio-cultural and socio-economic polity. It promises elements of stability to numerous disenfranchised communities in a twenty-first century India experiencing traumatic change. It is because of the realistic hope of a certain kind of realignment of previously rigid power relationships that the Adivasis are willing to join the caste communities in the process of ‘forging forward by reaching backward’ in this endeavour to reclaim the outlines of a more stable Hindu world vision. On the other hand, all marginally successful competing worldviews that offer liberating ways of life to underprivileged segments (Dalits and Adivasis) are severely punished publically in order to erase them as live options. This alone can explain the systematic manner in which churches, orphanages, community centres, schools, health clinics, and social work centres were especially targeted for burning, looting, and destruction. THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT: PROFITING FROM IDENTITY SLIPPAGE AND PROMOTING IDENTIFICATION SCHEMING

While some Christians have ritually acted out a public renouncement of Christianity in order to return to their local houses and lands, most others have decided to remain faithful to their Christian faith and practice. What fuels this continued collective assertion of Dalit Christians in Orissa? Does this have something to contribute to a Christian understanding of religious conversion in India? Is there a contextual theology of soteriology that funds Christian religious life and witness? Before answering these questions, let us begin with an affirmation: India has never been static and, yet, the Hindu-based caste system has provided a definite structure for the formation of social identities. Clearly, the lower one was within the caste hierarchy, the less freedom there was for self-expression and self-representation, especially if this disturbed what was prescribed by the interpreters of the Hindu dharma. The Dalits, thus, were overdetermined by all the castes, both together and separately. This restriction was largely theologically justifiable only within the Hindu metaphysical and social worldview. The changes in economic conditions, religious choices, and social paradigms ushered in an opportune historical context for Dalits. They were now prepared to take advantage of the slippery state of their previously more proscribed identity. The hegemonic caste system, as an institution of internal colonialism, attempted to frame them somewhat tightly. The burden of being shaped to assume a socially constructed Dalit identity, which gave little or no room for creative and free identification, was showing major signs of breaking.

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It is necessary to say more on the difference between the terms ‘identity’ and ‘identification’, as we employ them in relation to the religious conversion of Dalits to Christianity. In general, we construe the term ‘identity’ to mean the object of the process of socializing whereby society, though various institutions such as family, clan/caste, school, and religious community, goes about the business of constituting individual and community selves. The stress on identity draws attention to the somewhat passive, pliable, teachable, supple, compliant, yielding, submissive, and consenting aspect of the human being. Of course, usually we think of this feature as being predominant in the first phase of human development. Thus, the child is portrayed as being open to identity formation. The elders have power over the process of formation of human identity in this stage through which the child is growing into a well-socialized adult. More specifically, Dalit communities are thought of as being objects in the overall framework of the caste community. On the canvas of a Hindu sense of religious and social order, they are to play out the identities that have been carved out for them by the caste communities. Thus, they are shaped by the agency of the caste communities. Here, the subtle belief in their subor non-human status further implicates Dalits in an object-like position in relation to the caste subject. Subjection rather than subjectivity is the posture that has been traditionally construed for Dalits. And, this vulnerability to becoming shaped according to the conventions of the agency of the caste community depended upon multiple reinforcements. Religion, culture, economics, social relations, and politics, all play a part in constituting the Dalit identities. Often this notion of identity, which is removed from the actualization of concrete individuals and communities, is stressed by the culturalist: ‘Looked at from a culturalist position, behavior follows cultural principles; it falls in line with the heartfelt moral precepts that transcend the actual people with whom one interacts and the actual situations surrounding those interactions.’21 The weakening of the assortment of factors that jointly colluded to constrain the identity of Dalits aided in Dalits utilizing a new (even foreign) religion to profit communally from this overall fluid historical situation. Individuals and communities are anyway resistant to being fully constituted by social, economic, religious, political, and cultural mechanisms of identity formation. Dalits, through the centuries, have searched out, discovered, and set in motion alternate ways of being in the world that reflect their chosen agency, authenticity, and subjectivity. Identification indicates this dimension of human beings. It names an ability to reach out further than society’s attempt at identity formation in order to posit identifications

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of self-expression that come out of a process of selecting, transfiguring, circulating, and bolstering representations of vested subjectivity. In spite of all the debilitations and strictures of the caste hegemony against Dalit selfexpression and self-representation, they still continually leave traces and markings of who they are, as they would like to be known and encountered by the world. Religious conversion as a mode of identification valorizes the subjectivity of individuals and communities. It harnesses the capacity to transport Dalits through an active process of disassociation (from castebased Hinduism) and association (with Christianity) in order to express who they want to be in the world of power-laden symbolic representation. Identification assumes that human beings also have the predilection to operate from a subject position to construct their self-representation in the world, even if this is undesirable and undermined. To differentiate this constructivist’s view of identification—which emphasizes the agential and plastic side of the process—from the earlier culturalist’s one of identity—which projects the static and passive facet of the process—let us again refer to the words of Holland et al.: ‘From the constructivist position, behavior instead is the acting out . . . of subject positions; it is pushed into line by relations of power and influence that obtain in the venues where, and among the particular people with whom, one interacts.’22 We do not wish to promote an idea that through religious conversion to Christianity, Dalits can escape all mechanisms of the caste hegemony that operate on overdrive to shape their identity in keeping with the overall logic and structure of the Hindu social order. But neither do we accept the view that the caste system has successfully dismantled and destroyed the agency of Dalits to conjure identifications through which they symbolically reproduce their own self-representations both within the fractures and ruptures of the hegemonic system and outside of its religious and cultural contours. In a sense, we are instructed by the dialogic nature that Bakhtin captures in human beings. Such ‘dialogic perspectives’ of human beings ‘explicitly free us from the idea that we as a group or as individuals can hold only one perspective at a time. Humans are both blessed and cursed by their dialogic nature—their tendency to encompass a number of views in virtual simultaneity and tension, regardless of their logical compatibility.’23 Religious conversion is one way that Dalits employ in their attempt to erase the subjugating symbolic worldview of the past and transfigure the liberating symbolic world vision of the future. For Dalits, the predicament to live out of the human dialogic nature involves mediating between the hegemonic realities that seek to constitute identities and the liberative privilege that wills to somewhat deliberately construct authentic identifications.

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Religious resources are one major source of repositioning and reinterpreting Dalit identifications. Religious conversion to Christianity provides a full repository of symbolic resources that, on the one hand, enable Dalits to disentangle themselves from the significations and ramifications of the older caste-founded identities and, on the other hand, empower Dalits to associate themselves with representations and actualizations of newer Christ-founded identifications. Humanization founded on God-in-Christ is at the heart of religious conversion of Dalits to Christianity. It must be reiterated that this is a particularized type of humanization as interpreted, modified, and qualified by God-in-Christ. It is profoundly theological. The intimate and integral relationship between salvation and humanization has been clearly established in Indian theology. The words of M.M. Thomas are relevant: ‘Salvation has always been seen by Christian missions in India in close integration with humanization. Indian theologians have even sought to define Christ and his salvation in terms of the New Humanity offered by God for the ultimate humanization of all [hu]mankind.’24 Negotiating humanization in India for Dalit communities, thus, is directly and thoroughly connected to theology. From one angle, theology can be said to arise from actual existence. It is an afterthought coming out of Dalit experiences: both of the denial of their sub-humanity within the older forms of caste-based interpretations of the world and of the affirmation of humanity that they experience despite the dehumanizing forces of such a hegemonic world vision. Theology in this sense is refection on reality: a form of reflection on action. From another angle, theology stems from hopeful longing. It is projective thought coming out of a reconfigured vision for the full actualization of all human beings. Theology here functions as a protrusion for reality: a form of constructive vision for action. This double entendre of theology as both realistic topoi and hope-filled utopia also parallels the dialogic nature of human beings as living within the actual world of constituted identities, which are somewhat rigid and thrust on communities from the outside, and within the potential world of imaginatively constructible identifications, which are chosen, projected, and promoted by the communities themselves. In this context, it may be pointed out that as we interpret this concept, humanization is both the means and the end in this assertive and creative theological activity for Dalits. It is a means because in the very act of exercising the agency to move from passive formation to active construction, the God-given gift of humanization is embraced. It is an end because a world of free and authentic expression of who we are as human beings is a hope and longing for Dalits (humanization) and for God-in-Christ (salvation).

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CONCLUDING OFFERINGS: CONVERSION AS LIVING IN CHRIST BETWEEN THE SANCTUARY OF ALTERNATE MEMORY AND THE PROMISE OF SURROGATE HOPE

As a way of concluding this reflection, we ask the question: why remaining Christian makes sense in the face of such violent attacks? We believe that Dalit conversion to Christianity offered disempowered communities a fresh and rich repository of religious resources to help them live in the present with one eye towards recasting the past and another toward reviewing the future. Such a convincing world vision, which they will not let go of, still sustains Dalits today. Let us point to the three characteristics that stand out in this movement from slippery identities to shrewd identifications. First, Dalit conversion to Christianity involves an encounter with the presence of God-as-Christ that is loving, forgiving, and freeing of each person and the whole community. Although this experience is collectively expressed, it is no doubt deeply personal. Dalit conversion to Christianity thus stems from a theophany that promises the possibility of new humanity within a new world order. In an encounter with Christ, God is experienced as close at hand; a new being has begun to be constituted and a new heaven and new earth becomes a realistic possibility. It is this concrete divine experience in the present that grounds Dalit Christian existence. It must be boldly stated that this new found birthing in God occasions all other considerations and configurations. This is clearly the reason that Dalit Christians are willing to suffer physically, socially, psychologically, and economically for the sake of their faith. Having said this, we must nonetheless be conscious of the multidimensional character of religious conversion among Dalits. Rambo’s classic, even if dated, work is still instructive on this matter: Conversion is paradoxical. It is elusive. It is inclusive. It destroys and it saves. Conversion is sudden and gradual. It is created totally by the action of God and it is created totally by the actions of humans. Conversion is personal and communal, private and public. It is both passive and active . . . Conversion is an event and a process. It is an ending and a beginning. It is final and open ended. Conversion leaves us devastated—and transformed.25

Second, Dalit conversion to Christianity creates the possibility for a template of alternate memory. The alternative memory that Christianity offers calls for an exchange of foundational theological symbols, which primarily involves refuting and recasting the symbols of God, human being, and the world inherited from caste-based Hinduism. Of course, the interrelationships between these major symbols are also part of this reconfiguration since these implicate the working out of humanization in

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the world as legitimized by God. Both a radical rupture from and a gradual transformation of various forms of the older worldview, both from the trapping of Hinduisms and from the impact of Dalit religious forms, are envisioned, even if not accomplished, in Dalit conversion. Rather than to think of this as an embrace of western forms of Christianity, we could also conceive of this as a strategy for uncoupling Dalits from unhelpful facets of memory that have seeped in from the caste world vision. This is similar to the modality adopted by Ambedkar: The major characteristic of this mode is that it does not accept the existence of liberative elements in the living experience of Dalits: the Satan of historical Hinduism has robbed the untouchable Adam of his innocence, and everything else is relegated to amnesia. Adam today consists only of Satanic memories, and his cultural presence is to be distrusted totally. Today’s Dalit is a fallen man, he has lost his radical innocence: the only treatment that cures him is to erase his present in cultural terms . . . The major assumption of the cultural politics of Ambedkar is that the caste system is organically linked to all forms of life in Indian society. The caste ethos is at the core of all institutions that the Indian society has evolved over centuries of its history . . . 26

We may claim that Dalits who convert to Christianity individually and collectively enact what Ambedkar adopted as a tactic for Dalit conversion to Buddhism. But the question still remains whether there are recesses of emancipatory knowledge of God, world, and human beings that exist for Dalits apart from and beyond the hegemonic knowledge downloaded on them by the caste-based system in India. Was not God with them as an incarnate presence in spite of concerted schemes fabricated by caste communities to allow them to experience only dehumanization? We are of the view that there are such knowledge forms that express the subjectivity of Dalits in their own authentic relationship with God and the world. Clarke has argued that the drum and independent goddess may represent such local knowledge that is theologically significant.27 While celebrating the potential for re-engineering templates of dangerous and damaging aspects of caste Hindu-based conventional memory, the challenge for theology is to locate and circulate native and liberative Dalit knowledge forms that may provide trajectories of alternate memories useful in the process of humanization. These can be discerningly and creatively correlated with themes from the Christian symbolic worldview to direct a Dalit Christian way of living that is saving for Dalits and healing for caste communities also. A third characteristic in Dalit conversion to Christianity is the generation of a gestalt of surrogate hope. There is a utopian dimension that accompanies religious conversion. Christianity becomes the arena of theological

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experimentation of newer and freer configurations of humanization. It is interesting that this possibility for hope is itself realized through the acclamation of a new way of interpreting and projecting history. It was M.M. Thomas who said that ‘all faiths that cannot find a place for human freedom and its working in social history end in the meaninglessness of the cyclic view.’28 Thus, ‘all faiths which empty human history of human freedom must sooner or later empty history of meaning also.’29 Dalit notions of history emblemize new grounds of surrogate hope. No more is the cyclic form of theological thinking in use. History is radically concretized and unfolds in the movement of world events. The end is not the commencement of yet another new cycle. It is an end that fundamentally determines God’s age. And this end time as God’s age can be the topos of New Humanity that reveals how we ought to live now. Salvation and humanization are ushered towards this end by God and all God’s people. It has not been realized yet, but it is solely by hope that we live in joyous anticipation of its fulfilment because of the power working in God. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. For an excellent discussion of this debate, see Sebastian C.H. Kim, 2003, In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 37–58. 2. Rudolf C. Heredia, 2007, Changing Gods: Religious Conversion in India, New Delhi: Penguin Books, p. 80. 3. Gauri Viswanathan, 2003, ‘Literacy in the Eye of India’s Conversion Storm’, in Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (eds), Conversion: Old World and New, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, p. 273. 4. Ibid. 5. Chandra Mallampalli, 2004, Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863– 1937: Contending with Marginality, London: RoutledgeCurzon, p. 196. 6. Gyanoday (RTC, Patna) (ed.), 2000, ‘The Recent Attacks on Christians in Kandhamal and Its Impacts’, in The Recent Attacks on Christians in Orissa: A Theological Response, Patna: Prabhat Prakashan, p. 6. It must be pointed out that the number we report represents the official figure. The book also speaks of a senior governmental official who, on condition of anonymity, claims to have cremated 200 dead bodies claimed from the jungle. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Kim, In Search of Identity, p. 207. 9. Pralay Kanungo, 2008, ‘Hindutva’s Fury Against Christians in Orissa’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 37, p. 18. 10. Agitations for the erection of a temple dedicated to the Hindu God Ram, on a dispute site on which a mosque was already standing. The mosque was demolished, on 6 December 1990, by Hindu fundamentalist groups. 11. Ibid., p. 17.

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12. Angana Chatterji, 2008, ‘Hindutva’s Terror’, in Justice, Peace, Development and Communication (JPDC) (ed.), Faith Under Fire, New Delhi: Media House, p. 37. JPDC is a wing of the Catholic Archdiocese of Cuttack–Bhubaneswar, Orissa 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 32. 15. Kanungo, ‘Hindutva’s Fury Against Christians in Orissa, p. 17. 16. Chatterji, ‘Hindutva’s Terror’, p. 33. 17. Ibid., p. 35. 18. Ibid. 19. Kanungo, ‘Hindutva’s Fury Against Christians in Orissa’, p. 16. 20. Paul Divakar et al., 2008, ‘Do We Have Freedom of Faith with Dignity’, in JPDC (ed.), Faith Under Fire, New Delhi: Media House, 2008, p. 130. 21. Dorothy Holland et al., 2001, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 14. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 15. 24. M.M. Thomas, 1971, Salvation and Humanization: Some Critical Issues of the Theology of Missions in Contemporary India, Bangalore: CISRS, p. 19. 25. Lewis Rambo, 1993, Understanding Conversion, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 176. 26. D.R. Nagaraj, 1993, The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in India, Bangalore: South Forum Press, p. 55. 27. Sathianathan Clarke, 1998, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 28. T. Jacob Thomas (ed.), 2002, M. M. Thomas Reader: Selected Texts on Theology, Religion and Society, Tiruvalla: Christava Sahitya Samithi, p. 17. 29. Ibid.

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12 Turning Bodies Inside Out Contours of Womanist Theology EVANGELINE ANDERSON-RAJKUMAR I am the breath, the daily life breath Now taking a journey inwards, in search of truth To know if there are special capillaries and vein That determine the pattern of my inner terrain? I ask the eyes also to join me in this search for truth Whether there is any silver or platinum lining of organs for people of ‘noble’ birth? How wonderfully God has designed . . . a male, a female and even a hermaphrodite We found no difference in the way body functioned whether Dalit, Rich, Black or White. The a-sexual blood, the a-gendered bones, covered with a skin so powerfully defensive Protecting from every danger, like a mother’s womb enfolding her helpless babe Their working for common purpose was a message to uphold life The body turned inside out teaches us succinctly that God is behind all LIFE. I wonder how human beings could succumb to this myth of caste and patriarchal hierarchy. And remain numb to the violence perpetuated against Dalits, women for centuries! There are more lessons to learn about LIFE from a body turned inside out And the fact that God created us all in God’s own image, absolutely equal, No doubt! What then does it imply if we discriminate another of one’s rights and dignity? It denies the power and existence of a loving Creator God from Eternity If only the internal co-ordination and mutual dependence that we witness inside our Body Could remind us of our utter commonness and celebrate the gift of equality. God’s creation is awesome, knitting life, love and generosity together Engineering the possibility to share organs and to offer life to the needy other The organs, the blood and the bones become preachers of the Gospel of Love and Equality

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Challenge the Church to imitate the insides of a Body, become a movement for mutuality A Dalit/ Female body stands therefore at the threshold of justice Challenging us to look beyond barriers and recognise in the other, a sister and a brother For the Church to recognise her own identity and role as the Body of Christ She needs to turn herself inside out and celebrate the gift of Abundant Life

I

was inspired to begin this essay with the above reflection to underline the importance of searching for new ways of articulating our faith and theology, firmly grounded in the values of love, justice, peace, and equality. If there is an issue that has stayed with me in my theological journey to wrestle with, it is the practice of casteism and sexism in church and society. I find it hard to understand how anyone could get away with accusing God of dividing a tiny minority of people on earth into castes and outcastes? Where do I begin my Dalit theology? Do I start with my faith statement that we are all created by God as equals with common gracious gift of the image of God, or with the daily experiences of Dalits, who are killed, abused, tortured, and denied their status of human beings because of the ideology of caste? Neither is it easy to put the two together where a person who passionately denounces the evil of casteism in church and society chooses to turn a blind eye to sexism and patriarchy within the church and society! Can there ever be a ‘Just Society’ where casteism and sexism are accommodated as a culture in society? In this essay, I have chosen to focus on constructing a womanist theology in context. In order to do this, I have chosen the life experience of Sunita and Jasbir, who were murdered by their own family members for defying the moral, sexual, and ethical code drawn by the village heads. As this experience brings together the issue of both caste and sexism, and the interrelated issues to the fore, I have chosen to reflect critically and theologically on this story to etch out the skeleton of womanist theology in Indian context. Additionally, this essay highlights the role of the community in theological formulation and articulation. For a long time, we focused our attention on analysing from the perspective of ‘the victims’ and prayed for the ‘oppressors’, but relatively ignored that large category of the ‘community’ that chose to either turn away with disinterest from the issue of violence or offer knee-jerk responses of ‘oohs’, ‘aahs’, and ‘so sad’. It is puzzling how people can bounce back to normal as if nothing happened even after large-scale violence is instigated by one community against another. On the one hand, we have the Constitution of India that promises equality, security, and freedom for every citizen, regardless of

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religion, class, caste, and gender. On the other hand, we see the crime clock ticking away faster everyday against the Dalits and women, oblivious to the presence of the constitution. How does it help if the Constitution of India functions as a visionary document? It is important to state some preliminary issues that are listed next before engaging in a critical analysis of the life story chosen as the reflection. Given the objectives of this essay, the task undertaken is three-fold. We begin with a life story to construct the basics of womanist theology. Based on the aspects of womanist hermeneutics identified, we will explore the possibilities of reconstructing the current theological doctrines and resources. Finally, the reconstructive exercise will involve a search for new methods, language, and insights for further theologizing in context. WOMANIST THEOLOGY: SOME PRELIMINARY ISSUES The term ‘Womanist’

The term womanist is borrowed from our African–American sisters who found in the word ‘Womanist’, coined by Alice Walker, an affirmation of themselves, a power to question their oppressors who were within their own territory. I have borrowed this radically political term from them to point out to the presence of similar challenges faced because of casteism and sexism. I would like to redefine the term ‘Womanist’ in Indian context as that double consciousness which emerges to renounce casteism and sexism as inherently evil to humanity, and stands in solidarity and spirit for justice and equality, regardless. Womanist spirituality is a collective spirituality, one that is rooted in community. Naming ourselves, our theologies

I was glancing at the titles that we ourselves have given to our own writings till today. There was no book title that seemed to be accompanied by a spirit of confidence. We began by saying, ‘towards a theology of humanhood’, ‘towards a Dalit theology’, ‘towards a feminist theology’, ‘some feminist/ women’s perspectives’, and so on. I asked myself if this hesitation to name a theology as Dalit theology, feminist/womanist theology, was real or imagined? Was there an unconscious hesitation to claim the right and the authority to name our work as feminist or Dalit theology? Was/is there a subconscious seeking of the voice of authentication from outside to stand by our work? It is not wrong to acknowledge the possibility of a space that is created to give room for further improvement, learning, and sharpening of insights. After all, we find the same spirit expressed when we trace the history of the development of Asian theologies after Christian Conference

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of Asia(CCA) was born in 1957. The truth is we do not need a Bultmann, a Kaufmann, a Barth, or a Tillich, or even an M.M. Thomas to make sure that our theologies are sound. Naming ourselves, our theologies as womanist theologies and Dalit theology is a preliminary step in empowerment. In this exercise of constructing womanist theology, we claim the right to name our theology as Indian womanist theology. Womanist consciousness

Having said that women’s experience is the primary source of womanist theology, we still need to differentiate between women’s experiences and feminist experiences. There is that common element of women being devalued in every society as against men which is a global reality. Patriarchy is in the air, and presents itself as an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent force competing with God for power and reign. When women are naturally counted as second-class citizens, as ‘baby producing machines’, and their ‘biology equated with their destiny’, these are experiences that women may or may not realize as having to do with patriarchy. Some women may feel quite at home with these roles, identities, and expectations of patriarchy. A womanist is one who is conscious of the fact that individuals, man and woman, are social constructs who often internalize the patriarchal system as normal and ideal. A womanist is one who is willing to confess and repent of one’s silent participation and consent to the system of caste and sexism anywhere. A womanist is one who is always looking out for ways of affirming human relationships in communities, and celebrates with joy the empowerment of the least, specially the Dalits and women who represent the most marginalized in the Indian context. LISTENING TO VOICES: THE VOICELESS SUNITA AND SILENCED JASBIR BALLA, India (Reuters) – Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant, Sunita was drying her face on a towel. They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping boyfriend ‘Jassa’, 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled. Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside Sunita’s father’s house for all to see, a sign that the family’s ‘honor’ had been restored by her cold-blooded murder. A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from India’s capital New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud, defiant almost to a man. Among the Jat caste of the conservative northern state of Haryana, it is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry. Although the couple were not related, they were seen in this deeply traditional society as brother and sister. ‘From

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society’s point of view, this is a very good thing,’ said 62-year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade of a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or panchayat. ‘We have removed the blot.’ Growing economic opportunities for young people and lower castes in Haryana have made ‘love marriages’ more common, experts say, and the violent repression of them has risen in tandem as upper caste Jat men fight to hold on to power, status and property. Sunita’s father Om Prakash has confessed to murdering his pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, police told Reuters. An uncle and two cousins were among four others arrested. But in Balla many people believe the father confessed merely to underline that he supported his daughter’s killing, to satisfy honor and protect the real culprits among his family or village. At their house, Sunita’s mother did not emerge to talk. Instead, a young man on a motorbike tried to intimidate the Reuters team into leaving. It turned out he was another of Sunita’s cousins, his father and brother held by police. ‘We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not, we have the honor of doing the village proud,’ he said. ‘We would not have had a face to show if we had not done this. It was the act of “real men”.’ The relatively prosperous northern state of Haryana is one of India’s most conservative when it comes to caste, marriage and the role of women. Deeply patriarchal, caste purity is paramount and marriages are arranged to sustain the status quo. Men and women are still murdered across the villages of northern India for daring to marry outside their caste, but in Haryana the practice is widespread, and widely supported. Here, women veil their faces with scarves in public. The illegal abortion of female fetuses is common, the ratio of women to men in Haryana just 861 to 1,000, the lowest in the country. Anyone who transgresses social codes, by marrying across caste boundaries or within the same village, is liable to meet the same fate as Sunita and Jasbir. Many such murders are never reported, hardly any result in prosecution, says Professor Javeed Alam, chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. ‘People from the same village are treated as siblings in Haryana,’ he said. ‘So this is treated as incest.’ Without any law to prohibit this kind of marriage, ‘the only way you can punish it is by taking the law into your own hands. People believe people who commit incest should be killed.’ Nor do politicians ever renounce the practice, Alam added, because if they did, ‘they would not win elections.’ And the legalization of property rights for women in 1956 made love marriages within a village even more dangerous for this elite, as daughters living close to home could in theory claim a part of the family land, sociologist Prem Chowdhry says. Sunita and Jasbir, sweethearts in the same class at school, had little chance. When he left school a couple of years before her to become a photographer’s apprentice, he would often hang around at the school gates to collect her. She was married off to another man, but left her husband to elope with Jasbir a yearand-a-half ago, and while the families tried to keep them apart, they realized it was a losing battle. ‘They were madly in love even to the last day,’ said Jasbir’s 16-year-old sister-in-law Lalita in the house where they lived in Machhroli village, around 35 km (20 miles) by road from Balla. To make matters worse, Jasbir was

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from a lower sub-caste, and she was pregnant outside marriage. Sunita’s parents in Balla found themselves virtually ostracized. ‘Nobody would drink water in our house,’ Sunita’s mother Roshni is reported to have said. ‘My daughter’s action made us aliens in our own land. But we have managed to redeem our honor. She paid for her ill-gotten action.’ But among Jasbir’s family, split between Machhroli and Balla, grief is mixed with fear. ‘Why are you talking to the media?’ shouted a female family member at one point. ‘This will only bring more trouble.’ At the small police post in Balla, a constable admitted the case was unlikely to ever reach prosecution, with the village putting enormous pressure on the police, and especially Jasbir’s family, to quietly drop the case. ‘We are being pressurized into reaching an agreement, a compromise, without even being given time to grieve,’ said Jasbir’s 25-year-old sister Neelam. ‘We have been told that if we don’t compromise, we will suffer the same fate.’ In the narrow alleyway outside their tiny house, women wailed in grief. A few hundred yards away, the panchayat sat in quiet self-satisfaction. ‘The people who have done this should get an award for it, said 48-year-old Satvir Singh. ‘This was a murder of morality.’1 DECIPHERING DIFFERENT VOICES WITHIN THE SOURCE

The report of the incident is reproduced in its entirety because it speaks of a volume of experiences, bringing together the life stories of several individuals, families, and communities whose lives are connected in various patterns within the web of patriarchy. This two page volume also contains a range of emotions from pain, power, powerlessness, vulnerability, fear, grief, pride, shame, honour, and much more. There is no dividing wall between the different categories of communities represented here or between the range of experiences/emotions described. Patriarchy unfolds its influence on the social body of the community as well as on the female body (Sunita) and a Dalit body (Jasbir), and this becomes obvious in the way patriarchal power is exercised to define cultural norms and expectations from the community, how it exercises control, and monitors the sex and sexuality practices within the village. THEORIZING THE BODY EXPERIENCES Masculinization of Ideology

Obviously one cannot categorize a person or a community as belonging to the category of oppressor/oppressed, perpetrator/victim, men/women or the non-Dalits by the Dalits. We see that power flows in all directions and gets into different nodal points in the society depending on how one has internalized the ideologies of caste, class, race, gender and patriarchy. I notice a process of masculinization of ideology taking place. By masculinization, I mean that legitimization of an act, a command, a practice, or a value that defies the norms of ‘common good’, ethics and morality.

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Such a legitimized act of power takes the shape of a missile and attacks the vulnerable, especially those who do not abide by the expectations of the dominant. Utterance of the masculinized commands demands absolute obedience. When masculinized ideologies are unchallenged or critiqued, they slowly gain a deified status. Once omnipotence is ascribed to such a masculinized symbol/patriarchal ideology, it becomes an idol; and the idol becomes a demigod, a mammon that demands human sacrifices. Masculinization of communities

The masculinization of ideologies and power is clearly visible in the community of Balla along the layers of concentric circles and this effect flows in all directions. The family and relatives of Sunita become concentric circles of masculinized power and ideology. The fact that the relatives could actually carry out the violence and murder on behalf of the family shows that once an ideology is masculinized, it gains an individual masculinized status. It has the power to kill, without a second thought. The entire family and the community can become ‘man’ and kill the woman. The whole family/community can remain adamantly silent, and maintain silence at the cost of peace and justice. Roshni, the mother of Sunita, can also get into the masculinized framework for a moment and state her daughter, ‘paid for her ill gotten action’. The young male cousins are ready to murder their ‘peer group’ female cousin and refuse to see in her a loving sister. Masculinized communities can become ‘masculinized individual’ and act as ‘One Man’. The community claims the right of an individual because there is an assumption of a homogenous community, with everyone falling in line with the dominant ideology and voice. Obedience to the system is presumed as natural and normal. Masculinization of communities becomes a necessary process for continuation of the practice of discrimination and to retain the power of control over the masses. When no one dares to question the abuse of power or the violence, the masculinization process of communities is complete. Injustice and violence continue to flow like a river into the future. Masculinization of Voices and Identities

Masculinization of voices includes the process of silencing the female and feminist voices. In the life experience of Sunita and Jasbir, it is interesting to decode the masculinization of voices. The mother of Sunita, who grieves in private, puts up a different front to make a patriarchal speech. ‘No one would drink water from our house because of this incident. She has brought shame upon the family.’ Roshni has to pretend for the sake

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of her husband (his male honour and pride) that she has no tears left for Sunita. She sounds relieved with the murder! Language of the one who has lost her beloved daughter is forced into the framework of the oppressor. Now community relationship can be restored. I would go one step further and look at the pitiable state of masculinized state: that which should protect the lives of the citizens, women, and men, of all castes and religions, can actually stand mute behind the ideology of communalism, fundamentalism, fanaticism, sexism, and casteism. The state gets into the masculinized symbol and derives its power from the ideology of caste and patriarchy and thereafter, turns a blind eye to the river of blood. Even as I write this essay, there is a commotion next door about communal riots flaring up between Hindus and Muslims. I am reminded of what we witnessed in Godhra, in February 2002, where Hindutva ideologues and activists could temporarily forge a single identity and as ‘One Man’ chose to rape women; burn the pregnant woman, Kausar Bano, a Muslim; and imagine that they were robbing the ‘honour’ of One Male Muslim. Masculinization is a temporary process but the effect of which will last long until boundaries are transgressed and power is challenged by voices like that of Sunita. The voice of the police, the media, and rest of the community seem oblivious to this masculinization process. Their mute awareness colludes in the concretization of patriarchy and its value system. We need to understand that the ‘helplessness’ that we imagine in situations where patriarchal practices continue is because of the lack of voices and individuals who would have the courage to say no and break the cycle of violence. The silent community only hinders the process of transformation. If the church is put on the dock to respond to the situation of women and Dalits in the church and society, it would be appalling to see the church guilty because of its option to remain silent when what was demanded was speech, prophetic speech. FEMINIZATION OF THE BODY: ‘OTHERING THE OTHER’

The contour of a female body has often been posed as a problem to the masculinized body/mind. Pause for a moment to recall the plight of the Church Fathers who were busy condemning the sexual and the sensual body of the female because they could not wrestle with their own understanding of sin, body, and sexuality. It was easier to locate the problem in ‘the feminine other’. Tertullian’s statements which are often uncritically repeated (‘woman you are the gateway to hell’) evoke wry smiles if not giggles, and seldom do people take time to analyse Tertullian’s presuppositions that lurk

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underneath his disparaging dictates. One could digress to mention other canons of the Christian tradition, including Paul the Apostle, Clement of Alexandria, or even Origen, but each may require a chapter on its own. Their idiosyncratic notions on gender and sexuality, however, reveal the depth and history of the process of masculinization. ‘Othering the other’ was necessary to construct a positive image for oneself. A pure Brahmin needs an impure Dalit to construct his power and identity. An upper caste woman needs the category of ‘that poor Dalit’ to thank God for her status and social location. The Pharisee needed the tax collector to define his piety and purity. The woman’s body (Sunita) and the Dalit body2 (Jasbir) are also the loci of hatred that are converted into sites of violence. The double murder of Sunita and Jasbir was widely reported in the media with details. The media caught the attention of the public not only within India but even beyond, thanks to the presence of the cyber-communication and Internet. While the society was ready to spend days, weeks, and months brooding over the different turns that the story of Arushi’s3 murder took, we had comparatively few sessions to refer critically to the double murder of Sunita and Jasbir. The report says that the whole village stood as ‘one man’ behind the murder and refers to it as murder for morality. It is an honour killing. Once the body is feminized, once it is ‘othered’, there is then no need to fuss over the issue. Honour killings in Haryana are rarely reported, the report says. Honour killings are not a crime in Pakistan and Bangladesh because the issue is that one’s honour is at stake and this is more important than the life of the one who compromises it. The ego, identity, and power of the male to count the act of Sunita and Jasbir that they loved each other and wanted to live together was looked upon as a crime committed against the inflated male egos of the village community. Now, who decides who should marry whom and when? From the report, we also gather that intra-caste marriage was a way of affirming caste purity and guaranteeing the practice of caste. Any mixing of the blood of the ‘Negative Other’ is banned in order that the mythical line of purity may continue. The fact that we have accepted the reality of a state that stands as a mute witness to this violence against Dalits and women is an even more serious issue. It is said that Balla village is not far from New Delhi, the centre of political power. Is it not odd that there was not much noise made following the double murder of Sunita and Jasbir? The corroborative silence does not depend on the physical distance from the site of violence/ incident but on sharing of the same ideology of power and ways of addressing that power.

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Consider for a moment, the silence and passivity that follows the reporting of atrocities committed against the Dalits and women. If they are paraded naked, if they are forced to eat human excreta, if their bodies are lynched and displayed, the silence of the people, the laws, of communities, our own silence, is louder than the noise that media makes. When statues of Ambedkar or a church is burnt down to punish the Dalits, there is process of converting that space into the ‘feminine, negative, hated body of the other’ and looking upon the same as a battlefield on which masculine ideological wars can be fought to retain the nodes and dynamics of power. In this case, the body does not mean only that which is enfleshed but can also mean a body that is made up of cement and mortar. Feminizing them means claiming the right to overpower, abuse, exploit, and ‘rape’ to satiate the masculinized ego of the society. There is surely continuity that I see between the process of ‘othering the other’, constructing a negative other to construct a positive and pure self. Those who fight communal wars are actually gathering mass and become ‘one male’. They have to look upon ‘the other’ as bodies in which the hated other resides. The mosque itself becomes a body desecrated; paraded naked if that is the ideology behind desecration. Those who want to continue the communal wars from the Muslim side will probably search for a common Hindu and inscribe on him the hated image of the negative other. This cycle of violence must end. If the land (property) of the women and Dalits are looked upon as spoils for grabbing, there is again the masculinization of the ideology of power and feminization of the land and the automatic right to exploit and plunder the resources and the land. This is perhaps the reason that in the context of battle, the lines were drawn clearly and the interpretation of conquering was conceived of as accessing, appropriating the other’s territory. Womanist theorizing puts people, ideologies, practices, traditions, history, and cultures on the dock and provides a possible framework to redeem and redefine our understanding of justice and liberation in a new framework and language. VOICES OF RESISTANCE: REJECTION OF MASCULINIZATION

Jasbir’s sister’s voice and the silence of Sunita are, in fact, powerful voices of resistance in this story. Though the women are expected to be beaten into silence and comply with the rules and expectations laid out for them as to how, when, who they should marry, the sister is bold enough to talk. She speaks of the love between Jasbir and Sunita. She affirms their relationship as one that should have taught the community a lesson that rules do not dictate the quality and definition of human relationships. Though

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she is reprimanded for speaking out, for voicing her faith, Neelam does speak out. She is keenly aware of the implicit threat to her life and that of the community if she speaks out. Her courageous act of defiance must be underscored and reciprocated by other members of the community, both from Balla village and beyond. However, the silence that greets Neelam from different parts of India and the world is an example of how we miss out being voices of justice in society. Though this is not the time for church bashing, it is evident that the church also joins the community that colludes in corroborative silence, a plotted silence, a passive tolerance that disqualifies the church to be the Church. The other voices of resistance in the story are Sunita and Jasbir themselves. In the eyes of the society, Sunita would have been the typical avoidable woman who is ‘married off ’ to another despite the fact that she was in love with Jasbir. For Jasbir, who would have known the consequences of transgressing the layers of power within his own village as well as the boundaries of caste which is considered dangerous even outside the village of Balla, the fact that he challenged the power of caste restrictions to dictate terms had to be disciplined and punished. And punished he was. A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR WOMANIST CHRISTOLOGY

The voices of resistance in this story may be considered as stilled. Yet, from a womanist perspective, it is the silenced voice that gets resurrected as powerful Speech, Voice, and Song while theologizing. The murder of Sunita and Jasbir was a political murder. Those who called for their blood were those who would lose their identity, power, and possession within the framework of caste. The fact that Sunita’s own relatives played the role of the enemy was because she became the embodiment of a despised body that was bearing the child of a man who was from a lower caste stratum. After murdering the young couple, their bodies were not disposed or silently buried but proudly displayed in the public view. It was to teach the public a lesson about compliance. ‘Discipline and Punish’ that Foucault describes is certainly the philosophy behind this gory display. Their bodies displayed after the murder is very similar to that of the cross of Jesus Christ lifted up at Golgotha. Though the displayed bodies after death by the powerful was meant to teach the public a lesson to conform, the ‘displayed dead bodies’, in fact, taught a counter lesson. If the cross of Jesus Christ teaches us that there was no power on earth that could nail him to the cross except the power of love, the message that the bodies of Sunita and Jasbir convey is also about the power of love. Their readiness to love the other despite all surely interrupts the story of power.

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If only Jesus conformed to the principles and powers of his time and let the downtrodden and the despised accept their inferior status in society, there would have been no cross. So also, if Sunita and Jasbir had complied with the powers, their bodies would not have become the ‘teaching aids’ for the public. The fact that Sunita and Jasbir chose to define their life, exercise agency over their bodies, and express their right to love and live speaks volumes of the possibility of breaking the cycle of violence. They speak of the possibility of life and the possible resurrection of new meaning of love. The cross of Jesus Christ also teaches us to choose between complying with the powers of the day that are defined on the basis of power, position, and possession. Jesus speaks out as the voice of resistance—resistance to the powers that wanted to silence him, to define him as an ideal male Jew, and mould him to the practices, traditions, and cultures of his time. Jesus, however, rejected these definitions that denied the human dignity of the other, the wholeness of the other. The cross of Jesus Christ teaches us that love for justice cannot be quenched by any power. They cannot be compromised or sacrificed at the altar of demonic and mammon’s power. SYMBOLS OF WOMB AND TOMB IN WOMANIST CHRISTOLOGY

Sunita’s pregnant status is a threat to the powers of caste and for the patriarchalized women and men who derive their identity from the structures of caste. The womb can actually be a dangerous place because it has the power to demystify the notion of caste. The long cherished and nourished ideology of caste with its mythical purity and pollution saga can be unwritten and unlearnt when new life is created in the wombs that cooperate with God. I wonder if the womb of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was also such a politicized, ‘dangerous’ locus? If Sunita’s womb can be destroyed, then the power to subvert the caste structure can also be checked, not only by the Balla villagers but in many other cases in history. Uma Chakravarthi shows in her articles4 just how dangerous the wombs of women were, especially if they bore children outside marriage, outside the caste framework. If the wombs are considered as a threat to the survival of caste system, then it is precisely there that we need to search for alternative nodes of counter-theology and speech. Wombs, especially Dalit wombs, are potential threats to the caste system and structure. Ambedkar had the foresight to suggest that inter-caste marriages should be encouraged. However, in our days, there are more honour killings reported than inter-caste marriages. However, reports on honour killings tell us that the patriarchal rules are very much in place to ensure

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the continuation of patriarchy. They also tell us that the strictures on intercaste marriages are being transgressed. Does this not show the patriarchal make up of the media in our times? Even today, the bodies that transgress the lines of caste are disciplined and punished. There is an imagined threat also when inter-racial and inter-caste marriages take place. It was reported that in the United States, an Indian man did not hesitate to burn his pregnant daughter, sonin-law, and grandson, though they were married for five years, because he could not digest the fact that his daughter was pregnant with the child of her husband who belonged to lower caste.5 Similar incidents are reported, though the majority go unreported because they are looked upon as honour killings. As wombs become a highly politicized space, it has to be affirmed simultaneously as the most subversive place to bring about change in the world. We cannot close our eyes to one of the greatest tragedies of our time to know that the female sex ratio is at its worst in the state of Haryana and has reached 861. Female foeticide is written off as a cultural issue, as a matter of choice and family planning method, thereby robbing the voice and speech of the female (both born and unborn) in different ways. Why would these vulnerable female children be considered a threat? Female foeticide and female infanticide patriarchal schemes look upon the female of the species as commodities in different stages of life, whose presence is required only in so far as it is available in utilitarian terms for the patriarchal male in society. I say this because the number of children and young women who are trafficked for flesh trade in the market today only reveals part of the core truth. The response of the state towards escalating violence against women and children ranges from shocked silence to dumping crores of money into new projects for their empowerment. Not much, however, is done to challenge and change the patriarchal matrix of the society because that is considered as normal and ideal in Indian society. The message that comes back powerfully is this: it is not the vulnerability of the female foetus, the womb of a woman, the body of the woman that emerges as the focus of a masculinized world. Rather, it is the power of the womb as a potential threat to subvert sexism that is considered dangerous within and for a patriarchal society. Violence against women, especially those targeted on the wombs and bodies of women, should be seen as ways of driving women and men back into respective boundaries of patriarchal power to conform to the identity and maintain status quo. The renarration of the resurrection story of Jesus tells us of the power of life in the darkest and deathly places in the world, namely, the tomb. If

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the tomb spells out defeat, death, and hopelessness to the outside world, the tomb of Jesus pronounces a reversal of these negations of life. The tomb becomes the most creative place where God knits back the life of Jesus and presents him as a new—new born to the world. Tomb becomes the second womb of God. The birth of Jesus also then becomes a high point for discussion in womanist Christology. If the plan of God was to sidestep the patriarchalized, masculinized male in the process of the birth of Jesus Christ, perhaps there was/is a lesson for humanity. ‘Turning the Body inside out’ to reread the purpose of Jesus being born of a virgin has definitely a new and a different scope in the rearticulation of Christology in context within a womanist framework and method. WOMANIST ECCLESIOLOGY: THE ‘BODY OF CHRIST’ TO TURN INSIDE OUT

In and through the poem at the very beginning of this essay, I have etched out the possibilities of redefining a different womanist methodology. According to this perspective, there is a need to pause to take stock of how theories, theologies, ideologies, and powers from the outside have bombarded the body and imaginatively inscribed their divisions and discriminations on the bodies. When the body, however, is turned inside out, there is the possibility to recognize the gift of equality, the potential for building a community that lives only for the sake of the other. This philosophy of life is stark in the inside of the body than outside. The body of Christ, the Church in this world, is too busy looking at the outside of the ‘body’ as to who constitutes the church? How will the church benefit by having x or y as the member of the body of Christ? Ecclesia as the body of Christ has immense implications for redefinition and rearticulating of the same within a womanist framework. For example, how do we understand a body that does not react to the pain induced on the body? A senseless body? A dead body? How do we understand the role of the church that has chosen not only to be silent on the matter of escalation of violence against women and Dalits but also has perpetrated injustice and violence against them. The skin that has to protect the insides of the body has lost its sensitivity, sense of role, and responsibility. Perhaps turning the body inside out will be a way of rejuvenating life into the dead cells in the skin of the church. The mute witnessing of the church to the prevailing violence is nothing but standing up as ‘one man’ to bat for the long life of patriarchy. In fact, the theologies of the church, the doctrines of the church, need to be

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urgently examined to see whether they are thoroughly masculinized. Hope for change and transformation depends on the way the body is allowed to speak out, speak for, speak against, speak to, and speak from—from a position of marginality back to the centre, from a position of being silenced to learning a new language of love and justice to speak for and of liberation of all. At any given time, there are different types of communities that appear on the scene. There may be communities that demand public attention and claim to be the voice of the whole community. We need to recall the community that shouted out for the life of Jesus saying, ‘“crucify him,” we want Barabbas to be released, but Jesus killed.’ These were voices of communities. In the same passion narrative, we also read of the women who chose to be near the cross, the most vulnerable and risky of places on earth, and to declare that they are the disciples of Jesus, there were women who followed him on his path of the cross. Their silence is not allowed to gain voice and speech just as the voice and speech of the community of women who sat together to grieve the death of Jasbir and Sunita, whereas the powerful panchayat of the village sat a few yards away and discussed the value of the murder of morality. A NEW WAY OF THEOLOGIZING IN COMMUNITY

Within the womanist framework of theologizing, there is great scope for challenging the role of the community to recover and affirm their role and responsibility in community. Within a village set up, the women look upon themselves not only as members of their own family but of the village. They claim the right to admonish other’s children too as if they were their own only because they see their role and function as a mother to many. If a child falls sick, it is then the responsibility of the community to tend to the child and nurse him or her back to health. This is perhaps what the African communities refer to as the Ubuntu spirit, a community spirit where there is no existence of the individual without reference to the community and vice-versa. There is a mutual dependence and derivation of identity between the individual and the community such that it cannot be separated. Perhaps, it is possible for us to search for something similar to Ubuntu spirit to keep the fire burning for communities of love and justice to be born. In the context of globalization where issues of global warming and climate change have sharply focused on the issue of poverty, injustice, unequal distribution of wealth, and the plunder of earth’s resources, the womanist theological framework provides a new possibility to speak of

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building the responsibility of a community to sustain the earth’s resources. The earth’s body, woman’s body, and Dalit’s body prove to be reference points that can be the locus of new ways of theologizing, for new womanist theologies to be born. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Available at http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-33604820080516 (last accessed 11 April 2009). 2. Though the report notes that Jasbir belonged to a sub-caste, I have chosen to refer to the framework of Dalit because the experiences of a Dalit, in being counted unworthy to be in a relationship with another from a higher caste, is often punished with death. The blending of blood in inter-caste marriages has the power to challenge the myths of caste purity. This demystifying role of inter-caste marriages/relationships is a threat to those who want to retain the structures of power. 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noida_double_murder_case. (accessed on 29th March 2010) Arushi Talwar was a fourteen year old girl who was murdered on 16 May 2008 in Noida, a place close to Delhi. The Media enjoyed sensationalizing the double murder of Arushi and the domestic help because it was a story that could be ruminated on like a betting game, to guess who can culprit could be? Moreover, the media hype was so intense that they played havoc with the lives of the Arushi’s parents and quite irresponsibly kept off the issue after getting maximum financial benefit from the story. The media had no interest in the question of how they managed to destroy human relationships as long as they got the profit and the attention they wanted. 4. One can read a series of relevant articles by Uma Chakravarthi in her book, 2006, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens, Calcutta: Stree. In another article titled ‘Conceptualizing Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India’, Uma points to Manu’s views where women, especially upper caste women were seen to be carriers of the purity of caste and therefore any deviation from this norm, could be punished with death. Cf. Uma Chakravarthi ‘Conceptualizing Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India’ in Maitreyi Krishnaraj (ed.), Readings on Women published by Initiatives: Women in Development(for private circulation only). 5. Intolerance to inter caste marriages surges because of the deep rooted ideology of purity and impurity linked with caste. See Uma Chakravarthi’s article titled ‘Understanding Caste’ to understand the ramifications of the issue of religion, caste, sex, and sexuality with the ideologies of purity and pollution in her book Gendering Caste, pp.6–24.

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13 Bama’s Critical–Constructive Narratives Interweaving Resisting Visible Bodies and Emancipatory Audacious Voice as TEXTure for Dalit Women’s freedom ROJA SINGH

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n this essay, I discuss Bama (b.1958), a Dalit woman writer from Tamil Nadu, as a testimony of Dalit women’s struggle for a personal sense of identity, and a collective claim for human dignity. I interweave two forms of her narrative. The first are her written texts and the other is her oral story narrated through personal interviews. From among her written works, I will draw from her Karukku and Sangati.1 The interweaving will provide evidence from these narratives to show how these TEXTures present her community to a larger world, interwoven with all its vulnerabilities and resistance, strengths and weaknesses, determination and dilemmas, rebellion and submission, ignorance and awareness, and confrontation and acceptance. Bama creates a persuasive methodological process that interweaves submerged life stories with non-dominant voices and discourses: voices of Dalit women and Dalit men; voices of resistant young Dalit girls and the older experienced resilient voices of Dalit women; the voices of Dalit cultural strengths revealed in songs and rituals; narratives emerging from forced silences where enslavement is accepted as fate; the intermixing of the voices of Hinduism and Christianity as both oppressive and liberating; and the voice of alternative teachings of a liberating Christianity as opposed to the misappropriation of such teachings by oppressive sectors in Christianity. Such interweaving of voices renders Bama’s narratives as stories that are credible, durable, and rich in their lending of layers of variations of the complexities of the lives of Dalit women. SITUATING BAMA’S WORLD

Bama is one of the first Christian Dalit women to question social issues directly related to caste through her writings. In her works, used widely

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today in universities around the world, Bama discusses the necessity and potential of the Dalit woman to forge a positive identity despite limitations and distortions imposed upon her. She uses her literary skills to subvert the traditional image of the Dalit woman as the imperfect object of caste imagining. Writing in Dalit Tamil inflected by colloquial particularities of the Pariah community, Bama rejects the hegemonic version of a Brahmanized Tamil in Tamil literature. Though Bama’s social identity is that of a Christian Dalit woman, her personal sense of identity comes from being a Dalit woman rather than a Christian Dalit woman.2 Bama joined a Catholic order of nuns with the hope of serving the Dalit community but was soon disillusioned by institutional Christianity. Yet, she highly values Christian ideals drawn from the life and teachings of Jesus as it informs a spirituality within which she practices the ideals of peace and justice. In an interview, Bama speaks of the experiences of religious conversion in the Pariah community and of her own grandparents in the earlier half of the twentieth century. She reminisces that there were two reasons why Dalits became Christians. The first involved economic reasons, where the missionaries provided work, food, and the previously denied benefit of education. Second, Dalits were given a social status they did not have within Hinduism. However, Bama also points out that the church, both Catholic and Protestant, bought into the caste paradigm. Ironically, despite the perpetuation of caste paradigms, Dalits found their dignity and respect affirmed in Christianity. Both of Bama’s works lay out a social and cultural map of the Dalit community of Pariahs in Pudupatti, Tamil Nadu. We glean details of Dalit culture that would otherwise be inaccessible for most outsiders. While Karukku speaks of the presence of Christianity as mediated through the Catholic Church in the village and in her personal life, Sangati deals very specifically with the particular flaws in her community that need to be addressed if Dalits are to realize a better life. In Karukku, Bama articulates the failings of the ancient religious tradition of Hinduism as well as failed promises of ‘the liberating religion’ of Christianity. The metaphor of the palmyra leaf, the karukku, comes alive in her self-presentation and the representation of various women in her life. Like the interlocked knife-like edges of the karukku, Bama highlights the interwoven layers of caste, religious, and gender structures that strangle the Dalit woman’s subjectivity. Bama blames the silence of the Dalit woman not on an inability to speak but rather on the deafened ears of the oppressor and the seeming ‘liberator’. Bama reflects on such complex dynamics

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that are indelible features of daily life in Pudupatti. She reveals the frailty of her hopes in the Catholic Church to lift her out of her identity as an untouchable, let alone enable her to emancipate other Dalits from their state of untouchability. She describes in detail the practice of caste within the Catholic order of nuns that she experienced as a Dalit nun. Disillusionment with the system forced her to leave the convent. In Karukku, Bama interweaves her own experiences with Christianity with the experiences of other Hindu Dalit women in her village. Significantly, karukku also signifies the birth of new leaves in the palmyra tree, where, in a renewed state of awareness, the Dalit woman herself becomes the double-edged sword to protect her pride and dignity. Sangati is also about life in Pudupatti but it dwells more on the atrocities against Dalit women from Dalit men as well as caste men. Bama’s grandmother, a central character in this book, is the authoritative questioning voice from the margins. This voice, however, is heard through the privileged educated interpretation and rearticulation of Bama. Her recollections recorded in Sangati are of her childhood—memories that have been filtered through her missionary education. Bama takes great care to recall the voice of her grandmother who has unwarily internalized the caste reality. Bama brings to focus, in Sangati, the exploitation of the Dalit woman by the ‘uppercaste masters’ as well as the faithful Dalit male servants of the landlords who replicate their masters’ violent authority on Dalits. Thus, the Dalit woman becomes the subaltern to the subaltern, the doubly oppressed or the sub-subaltern. Bama presents this state of double oppression as the most damaging factor to a Dalit woman. While Bama is clearly a voice of her Dalit community, we also need to bear in mind that what we read and hear is recollected after a significant time lapse. What validates these narratives is the fact that they consciously voice the margins both clearly and powerfully. Bama thus transforms a narration of a life story into a construction of the history of a people; a collection of testaments to record the experiences of life among the oppressed. Read worldwide, these works authenticate the necessity for a genre of testimonio, testimonial narrative, as Bama connects an invisible community with a larger community. In so doing, she facilitates dialogue with other marginalized groups. INITIATING A NEW CULTURE

Bama’s narratives evoke anger along with a strong sense of social consciousness. They create an awareness of the significance of her experiences in relation to her community and in relation to other marginalized

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communities. The narratives initiate a new culture where human dignity and personal identity embrace each other at the centre of discourse. As testaments, when Bama presents the experiences of the marginalized as victims of multiple exploitation, she galvanizes socio-political actors in their demand for justice and in their expression of resistance. In the new culture that Bama seeks to establish, cultural strengths drawn from the community’s beliefs and practices articulate an identity that resists the dominant culture. Cultural ceremonies and rituals are an integral part of this new self-understanding. Bama recalls the ways in which the elders of her community initiated her into a culture of care. In Sangati, we read of the puberty initiation rites where the older women validate and welcome young girls into the community as adults. Bama’s grandmother is an influential presence in her life, especially in the formation of a sense of pride about her self. She is knowledgeable about everything that pertains to the social and biological fulfilment of being a woman. Bama engages in a form of ‘thick description’ of the culture that surrounds and makes her. She is also gradually cognizant of the dominant culture that also surrounds but breaks her through various forms of exploitation. What authorizes Bama to speak for the community is the selfhood that arises from a close identification with her community. The individual is an individual only as a part of the community. The strong connections with the community, both spiritually and physically, due to the collective experiences as the marginalized make it possible for such narrators to speak as the community. In her narratives, Bama offers to be the voice of her community. She is driven by her own sense of compulsion to speak out arising from the experiences of the community that surrounds her. It is the two-way process of enhancing the persona of both community and the individual that characterizes testimonio, along with the ability to have a relationship with the reader, also a persona. The envisioned new culture calls for naming of specific forms of exploitation and identifying specific ways of resistance and change. For Bama, the experiences of exclusion and exploitation, and the passive acceptance of this situation by the Pariah community, traumatizes and angers her. In Karukku, we read about a community caught between two invasive structures, the colony and Christianity. Bama juxtaposes both these structures in her narrative as proofs of the possible permanency of a slave identity for her as a Pariah woman. As a voice of revolt and rebellion against structures of injustice, Bama declares the failings of seemingly iterative structures towards liberty such as Christianity. In her works, she credits her Dalit roots rather than religion for the acquired benefits of

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a culture of questioning the ethos of subjugation. Bama reveals the fact that Dalit women speak and raise questions about exclusion from within their small communities. In the ‘new’ culture that Bama seeks to establish, these voices will be heard. Where Hinduism inscribes slavery as an inborn requirement of one’s karma, recovering Dalit women’s voices will overturn their karmic acceptance of servitude. Though there are evidences to the Christian God condemning slavery, Bama’s Karukku reveals her frustrations at not being able to deconstruct caste as a paradigm from within Christianity. Christianity’s teachings on humility, servitude, and acceptance seem to reconstruct a paradigm of slavery. She states that her religious indoctrination had numbed her to the ill-treatment she faced as a Dalit nun. Bama quickly recovers from that illusion. She claims her rights to bring about changes for her community rather than remain a submissive marginalized. The foundations for a new culture of resistance lay in such reclamations. INTERROGATING INSCRIBED OPPRESSION

Bama subverts a common understanding of the ordinances of obedience and humility by reinterpreting the Bible in Karukku. Her people have been forced into these states of mind and action not by choice. Rather, the church ordained these behaviours as virtues that God demands. ‘They go on and on about the vow of obedience and force us into submission so that we can scarcely lift up our heads.’3 She could not bring herself to accept that this was the will of God. She observes the irony that while Hinduism did not allow Dalits into temples, Christianity took in Dalits only to be further marginalized. While the church posed as the representative of God and made a virtue out of humility, Bama realizes the importance of challenging such assumed representations and points to the reality of humility as humiliation. She speaks and writes against such systems that glorify class and caste oppressions as spiritual experiences in order to reinforce the Hindu concept of karma. For Bama, spirituality lies in the experience of rebellion and struggle against oppression rather than in the reverent submission to God and human. Speaking the language of the oppressors, Bama skilfully critiques oppressive systems. As a child in the Catholic schools, she religiously performed her ritual obligations. She was excited about the possibility of moving away from the colony to a new life. In a Catholic college and keenly aware of her marginalized state, she adapts subversive analyses of the very Christian institution. Her analyses open her to the dangers and hypocrisy within institutionalized religion.

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Why should I go to pusai4 everyday? Why should I take Communion? I began to think that the nuns and priests had deceived me hugely. Up to that time I had thought that God came to me through these people; but this belief changed to the extent that I now began to feel strongly that God was not with them. And so, I began to dislike everything they did. I began to question them. I argued and fought. I thought to myself with some disgust, Che, (a common Dalit expression of disgust) they are all hypocrites and frauds.5

Bama’s social positioning as a formally educated person provides her with the language of protest. She states that Hinduism is critiqued among other things for designating the Brahmin male as the exclusive medium for communication with God. Her Catholic tradition seemed to rehearse the same exclusionary language. I felt in my heart that I could go and speak directly to God without their intervention . . . I came to realize that you could see God through the mind’s eye, in nature, and in the ordinary events of every day. So all the rituals I had followed and believed in so far suddenly began to seem meaningless and just a sham. The desire to become a nun fell away from me entirely at this time.6

It was a return to animistic spirituality where her roots lay. Bama talks about a process of internal revelation when she could reach a state of belief in her self. This inner realization opened her to unmediated freedom. In Sangati, Bama’s grandmother, Vellaiyamma, often singles out formal education as the reason for Bama’s inquisitiveness and audacious hopes to overturn conventional patterns of Dalit life, especially that of a Dalit woman. Vellaiyamma chides Bama, ‘What do we know about justice? From your ancestors times it has been agreed that what the men say is right. Don’t you go dreaming that everything is going to change just because you’ve learnt a few letters of the alphabet.’7 The grandmother’s way of life is quite unlike Bama’s. The grandmother represents the unadulterated indigenous strategies of survival. Her discourses are made up of songs, stories, lamentations, and rituals. She reinstates the authority of men over women and the cultural practices that a girl child enters. These are cultural specifications that inform her consciousness of a life controlled by the social hierarchy. Within that hierarchy, she learns that she has to continue to speak and be heard by other Dalit women to share in the discourse of survival. She sings in the fields to keep herself from feeling the long and hot hours of the day, she laments aloud to cope with the untimely or unjust death in her community. Her laments celebrate the life of the deceased and conform to ritualistic prescriptions on her ritual segregation as a polluted being. For Bama, these are perduring cultural elements that need to be recognized by the Dalit woman herself and be transformed into active elements for change.

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When Vellaiyamma reminds Bama about the practice of women eating after the men in the house, Bama asks, ‘So what is wrong if we change the practice and make the women eat first?’ Vellaiyamma answers, ‘Wrong? You’ll end up like that Anantamma of West street, who was thrashed soundly and left lying there, that’s all.’8 Apparently, Vellaiyamma knows of a woman who tried to break the practice and was severely punished for it. The grandmother also sings a folk song that narrates the consequences of eating before the husband has eaten. According to the song, a pregnant woman prepared crab curry and waited for her husband. After much waiting and because he did not show up, she ate it. When the husband did return, he beat her to death. Effectively, the song rehearses the instilled fear that embalms women within certain cultural practices. The new culture that Bama envisions transforms such instances of naturalized or slavish acceptance of certain cultural practices. In Sangati, Bama reiterates the necessity for such transformations in the story of a young Dalit girl. Mariamma, a young cousin, returns home one evening with a bundle of dry sticks on her head and happens to pass by a water pump. She stops to get a drink. An upper caste landlord happens to be in the room adjoining the water pump and tries to lure her into the room to rape her. Mariamma somehow escapes and runs to her colony and narrates the incident to her friends. They advise her to remain silent because this would demoralize her since she was young and of marriageable age. The event takes a twist when the landlord, fearing blemish to his name, reports to the colony headman that young Dalit girls who pass his fields do not behave properly. He also alleges that he saw Mariamma physically intimate with a young lad, Manickam. Mariamma is made to appear before the colony council and is publicly accused of misconduct. She is asked to beg forgiveness by falling at the headman’s feet and pay a fine. On hearing the story, Mariamma’s friends advise her to accept the charges silently. Caste, class, and gender privileges converge to silence Mariamma. For young Dalit girls, silence becomes their only protection from further harm. Their silence is a discourse in itself, a testimony to the knowledge of the hegemonic power and the Dalit woman’s helplessness. We see the stark contrast between the visibility and audibility of the upper caste men, and the state of invisibility and silencing of the Dalit woman. She is unable to protect her body and honour, while the landlord gainfully protects his honour and his body. When questioned, Mariamma concedes, ‘What that Machaan states is true. When I was gathering firewood with a few others, he said a word or two to me, in fun. I came away before the others left.’

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Bama observes that, ‘If Mariamma had said anymore, she would have burst into tears. She finished speaking, wiped her face with her sari, and stood there, her head drooping.’9 Her submission to an imposed truth is performed through her body posture. Unconvinced, the council insists that she fall at the feet of the headman and beg for forgiveness and pay the monetary fine. If she did not comply, her father would have to pay a lot of money as thendam (penalty). Her father intervenes and forces her to beg for forgiveness. She maintains her innocence, “Ayya, I never did any of that. It was the mudalali who tried to misbehave with me. But I escaped from him and ran away.” She began to weep loudly’.10 Mariamma speaks to defend her honour and dignity but in vain. Mariamma stands alone as the Dalit woman accused by an upper caste male and brought to task by Dalit men. She is surrounded by patriarchy that questions her story: ‘In that case did the mudalali lie to us in everything he said? You two had better be respectful, admit the truth and beg pardon. Otherwise, we have no other way but to punish you severely.’11 What is apparent in this incident is the powerlessness of women as silenced invisible beings. When they do speak, their voice is invalidated. Testimonies of women who speak up for Mariamma avoid confrontations with the perpetrator. Anadamma testifies, ‘It was the mudalali who tried to rape her. She was scared out of her wits, refused him, and ran away. Now that whore’s son has turned everything round and told a different tale. I actually went with her that evening to fetch the firewood that she left behind.’12 Susaiyamma says, ‘What can you say to these men, . . . there’s no way of convincing them . . . But it is only to us that they’ll brag. Ask them just to stand up to their mudalaali. Not a bit, they’ll cover their mouths and their backsides and run scared.’13 They do not accuse the men openly but only in muffled whispers and Bama recalls that they were arguing but only among themselves. Although fully conscious of Mariamma’s victimization, the women dare not speak out for fear of both the Dalit and upper caste men. When Mariamma’s father slaps her repeatedly, Mariamma stands still and silent. There is nothing more to be said and now she is expected to speak through her body by falling at the headman’s feet to ask for forgiveness. Mariamma resists this imposition on her body. She stands in defiance of the hegemonic inscriptions on her body. One Dalit woman says, ‘And none of them has the brains to find out whether it wasn’t the mudalali who was doing wrong in the first place.’14 Another woman says,

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That’s a goods one! Suppose these fellows go and question uppercaste men. What if those rich men start a fight, saying, how dare these parayar dare be so insolent? Who do you think is going to win? Even if the mudalali was really at fault, it is better to keep quiet about it and fine these two eighty or hundred. Instead you want to start a riot in the village.15

Dalit patriarchy is sustained by fear. Mariamma must accept this as true so that the colony may be spared the threats of violence if they were to let her go unreprimanded. As a seemingly inextricable cycle of oppression that they are caught in, the members of the colony accept it and move on. Finally, it is Mariamma who stands stigmatized as the immoral Dalit woman. REWRITING EMBODIED SILENCES

Mariamma’s fate was representative of the inextricable cycle of violence in which many Dalit women find themselves. Bama reflects, ‘I could never forget the way Mariamma was humiliated in front of the entire village.’16 It is this memory of injustice against a Dalit woman that she recollects, reinterprets, and rearticulates as Dalit literature. Bama asks her grandmother, ‘Patti . . . after all, you are a big woman in this village, why couldn’t you have gone and spoken the truth that day.’17 The grandmother replies, ‘whether it is right or wrong, it is better for women not to open their mouths. You just try speaking out about what you believe is right. You’ll only get beaten and trampled on for your pains.’18 The grandmother naturalizes her acceptance of gender oppression to assert that there is no status for women anywhere in the world. Bama resists the colonizer’s discourse of conquest. She realizes that she is surrounded by a culture of forced acceptance of defeat and, most often, a culture that internalizes defeat. Mariamma is forced to accept defeat publicly by falling on the feet of the village headman and begging for forgiveness, despite her innocence. Bama points out male arrogance and authority as forces that force women to believe in their defeated state of existence: ‘Even here, it is the man’s maleness and power that takes precedence. A woman’s body, mind, feelings, words and deeds and her entire life are all under his control and domination . . . But if only we were to realize that we too have our self-worth, honor, and self-respect we could manage our own lives in our own way.’19 But, when acceptance is not a choice, resistance surfaces only when these women’s lives are sifted through close analysis of their day-to-day lives. Bama’s call for conquest is about claiming a sense of dignity for oneself as one of the major goals of a new culture among Dalit women. This can happen only when one makes the conscious decision to

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replace humiliation, a sign of defeat, with a sense of pride and dignity in their existent multifarious roles that include sustenance of a Dalit culture made up of ceremonial rituals. Bama’s analysis of the situation of Dalit women is based on her constant interrogations of her grandmother and on the lives of the Dalit women daily subjected to violence. The internal oppression that the women face everyday from their own men reveals the most vulnerable state of the Dalit woman. It is her body that becomes the target of the men. Bama recounts extremely violent scenes that are part of the daily scenario. Women are beaten with heavy sticks or stamped upon by their male family members for reasons as trivial as not providing money to procure alcohol, not feeding them on time, wanting to marry a boy from another Dalit community, and so on. What the body receives as punishment for no crime, the self silently appropriates as its lot in life. Bama wants to establish a renewed self and consciousness within the Dalit woman by drawing on her cultural strengths and raising selfconsciousness among Dalit women. Emerging from the experience of a silent and victimized body, Dalit women’s self-consciousness must be inverted by reversing social expectations and strategies that keep Dalit women at the bottom. The Christian Church figures problematically for the Dalit woman because, despite some of the tangible benefits it initiated, it took away the few liberating possibilities. On divorce, Bama notes that the internal Pariah law allows for any man or woman to live separately on the basis of reasonable doubt established for the contrary. The council then legally separates them and both are free to remarry. Unlike her Christian upbringing that forbade divorce, Bama finds in the Hindu Pariah law a most liberating aspect of the social structure. On observing the violence around her, that a woman can choose to leave her husband promises an escape from domestic violence. Bama sees that a Christian woman cannot make this choice because the Christian Church demands that the marriage should not be broken. She says, ‘We make a solemn promise don’t we, that we will stay with the man we marry, “in sickness and in health, for better for worse, for richer for poorer”.’20 This promise that the man and woman make with each other binds the woman most. As a counterpoint, Bama’s mother contends that law of the Hindu Pariah community makes it easier for Dalit men to desert their wives. Bama is however convinced that the wife would be better off separated than yoked to domestic violence. Bama mourns the fact that Christian Dalit women cannot avail themselves of this freedom to move out of

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an oppressive marriage relation. She contends that the Catholic faith domesticated the freedom and assertion of Pariah women through its sacrament of marriage that forces the married women to accept their state of exploitation. Religion also domesticated the Dalit woman through bodily discipline. Women were not expected to vocally express their battered emotions caused by physical and emotional humiliation. Yelling and crying were frowned upon while Catechism instilled modesty, silence and moderation as ideals to be emulated by the women. Such church-enforced constrictions silence the Dalit woman’s expression of her true self. Religious sanctions on bodily comportment deprive her of the means to live out her joys and pains. In their quest for succour in religion, the Pariahs who converted to Christianity found themselves in a more vulnerable position. While Bama’s ancestors became Christians in the hope of access to formal education, they were not educated and their hopes were never realized. To make matters worse, their new religious identity as converts faulted them from access to government-issued benefits. Bama feels doubly cheated and that their ignorance had been manipulated. She feels less secure in the society that she is in now because she has to constantly prove herself as a productive human being against the suspicions that caste people still carry about converts and specifically, Dalit converts. While human dignity was the reason for many Dalit conversions, they are not aware of the limitations of a colonial charity. As an educated Dalit woman, Bama senses a heightened scrutiny by the values of another culture that is not Dalit. While she struggles with the memory of her tortured self as a Dalit woman and the now imposed image of two colonial structures, both Christian and Hindu, she looks for her adequacy in a new self that she finds in her voice. This new self she says, can only rise from a situation where a Dalit woman is independent of male, of caste, of moral expectations. Extricating herself from the caste, gender, and church restrictions on social space and expressions, Bama rejects the institution of marriage as an instance of religion’s imprisonment of women. She says, We must give up the belief that a married life of complete service to a man is our only fate. We must change this attitude that if married life turns out to be a perpetual hell, we must still grit our teeth and endure it for a life time. We must bring up our girls to think in these new ways from an early age. We should educate boys and girls alike, showing no difference between them as they grow into adults. We should give our girls the freedom we give our boys. If we rear our children like this from the time they are babies, women will reveal their strength.

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Then there will come a day when man and women will live as one, with no difference between them; with equal rights. Then injustices, violence, and inequalities, will come to an end, and the saying will come true that ‘Women can make and women can break.’ I am hopeful that such a time will come soon.21 PROCESSES OF RE-MEMBERING

As a critical Dalit Christian woman, Bama employs her writing to engage Christianity both as a liberator and as an oppressor. Her writings show the possibility of moving a step further to claim the right to critique seemingly liberative structures. While discourses on the benefits of Christianity for Dalits are still being explicated and reimaged, Bama is ahead of her times in her critique of the flaws of such ‘emancipatory’ processes. From this critical perspective, Christianity errs because its promise of liberation masks its replication of the oppressive structure of Hinduism. Bama speaks of how, as nuns, they were forced into western religious indoctrination about the virtues of obedience and humility. Always defiantly critical of the institution, Bama’s superiors at the convent cast aspersions on her sense of divine calling to the order. They contend that her sense of calling was a self-constructed illusion.22 Bama realized that this religious structure would force her to comply. She writes in Karukku, ‘We had to change. In the final analysis, we could not be ourselves. They wanted you to be destroyed utterly and remade in a new form.’23 For Bama, this submission was a re-enactment of what Dalit women experience in the villages: forceful submission. It meant the loss of freedom of thought or expression no different from that of the caste structure. They were meant to be compliant robots within a system that dictated stereotypical patterns of thought and behaviour. This meant that the words of the superior could not be questioned in the same way that the Hindu scriptures could not be questioned about the dehumanization of Dalits. Religious and devotional God-talk functions in a way that removes the Dalit woman from the reality of people’s pain. Bama charges the order of nuns for the estrangement to one’s self from one’s inner identity with the marginalized. ‘To change you completely is the strategy of the convent.’24 She is hypnotized into thinking and speaking like the other nuns who were alienated from ordinary people. Social status, money, and food became central to one’s being. ‘But now that I have nothing of my own, and because I am exactly like them, they are able to talk to me in a much more familiar way. And I can behave towards them in a perfectly normal manner.’25 This is frightening to Bama as she realizes the rapid changes in people’s disposition to her.

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Reading the Bible to disturb rather than settle the minds marks the oppressed people’s subversion of an apathetic Christianity. Such readings deconstruct the image of God propagated by the Catholic Church. Rather than the image of a God who loves people because they are poor, Bama invokes an image of God who calls the poor to rise above their poverty and oppression. The image of Christ with the whip is restated as Bama writes, ‘If Jesus were to appear today he would question them much more sharply and severely than he did before.’26 Bama sees that instead of liberating the Dalits, the Catholic Church only controlled them by promising something that was not a reality even within the institution.27 Bama realizes the urgent need to talk to others and to express her opinion about the church’s failure to connect prayer and life. She says, ‘We should never believe one thing and do another. We should speak up about what we believe. That is being true to oneself. Everything else is play-acting. I never cared to survive by acting out a role.’28 Bama chooses to speak about this injustice meted out by a colonizing religion. She underlines the importance of staying connected with reality to inspire positive changes within Dalit women’s consciousness. Hence, voicing her life story and the struggles she faces with dominant ideologies are important for the establishment of a new culture. Its redefinition and rearticulation are facilitated by Dalit texts, both written and oral. In her interview, Bama expressed her conviction that the movement for a new culture has to come from within the affected community. As a trait of the European history of revolt among the working class, the culture of questioning by the proletariat and serfs is seen repeatedly as in the Russian revolutions of 1917 and 1918, and the French revolution in 1789. People from the lower working classes questioned the unequal distribution of basic resources and defied their governments through riots and strikes. The peasants demanded land reforms and the equal distribution of wealth and privileges monopolized by the aristocrats. However, the significant aspect of these revolutions, for Bama, was that the pivotal impetus for change emerged from among the affected working classes. Bama envisions a reversal of her victimized situations. She is categorical in her analysis. Caste cannot be equated, she says, to class struggle because the way out of caste is more intricate that merely ascending an economic ladder. Given these nuances, western paradigms such as socialism and Christianity only help to categorize an existing problem as a social, economic, or religious one without offering alternative solutions. Such paradigms fail because they do not address the underlying social and religious structures propped by caste Hinduism. It is logical, then, that for Bama,

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education figures as an important medium in the realization of movement away from oppressive conditions. Formal education provides Bama the vocabulary and tools to question existing paradigms rather than be forced into a passive acceptance. This is a major shift that Bama claims for a new culture. A DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE

In her literary and oral testaments, Bama has made visible those issues that have for so long been invisible to the larger world. Her narratives are told to a larger world as commentaries on the problems of poverty, caste, culture, and gender. While engaged in this activity of storytelling, Bama has constructed a cultural and social history through a process of recollection. By representing marginalized voices, Bama tells the stories of her community with their anticipations for change and the cultural strengths that hold such communities together. The message for her audience is about the resilience of a people in the face of daily struggles for dignity and survival. Hers is a voice of a people who are normally invisible to or unheard by the larger world. Bama has tried to maximize personal autonomy through this powerful form of testimony. She is able to identify, analyse, and interpret specific dynamics and institutions that threaten physical survival. This resurgent self-consciousness subverts the dominant stereotypes that categorize communities as weak and vulnerable. In her contestations, Bama redefines their body and mind in the context of specific economic, religious, and genderbased alienation that arise from their circumstances. An inversion of the colonizing discourses re-member Dalit women with their culture. What religion and hegemonic institutions had demonized is recovered as subversive strategies to claim their dignity. The women’s resilience, spontaneity, cultural strengths, courage, wit, humour, simplicity, and work ethic are resources of organic systems of knowledge, lifestyle, and praxis. Formal education only tweaks these resources by speaking of them in the grammar of the oppressors. Those with access to formal education need to connect their own experiences of marginalization with the discrimination still faced by their people in the colonies. Such inversions underscore the importance of self-determination and self-definition for Dalit women. Rather than the well-intentioned but shortsighted condescension from the outside, Dalit women can define their own identity even within limited horizons; they can rearticulate discourses that have so far defined them and their needs. By self-determination, Dalit women can forge a culture where human dignity becomes a force in its

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own right. To this end, education must be both formal and consciousness raising so that Dalit women recognize their strengths and assert themselves with dignity. The voices of Dalit women amplified by this new sense of self-awareness become voices of collective deliverance in a culture that has been denied even the conceptualization of a shared humanity. In the final analysis, writing one’s story gives voice to the experiences of oppression that have till now been suppressed. In her vision for new social configurations that recognize and promote human dignity, Bama takes us through the pains of the oppressed and their helplessness amidst the stifling circularity of systemic violence. Yet, her stories boldly engage the structures and systems of oppression to unsettle what many have uncritically naturalized and taken as the way things are. Creative explorations reanimate the silences and recover existent cultural strengths that are transformed from mere survival strategies to subversive strategies. Pointing us to more equitable and life-affirming possibilities, Bama’s stories educate us on the capacity for the creation of a resistant self. In the subversive language of the subaltern, this capacity for change is a shift from silent passivity to productive resistance. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Bama, 2000, Karukku, Translated by Lakshmi Holstrom, Chennai: Macmillan; and Bama, 2005Sangati, Translated by Lakshmi Holstrom, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2. A personal interview with author, 17 July 2002. 3. Bama, Karukku, p. 98. 4. Mass or worship. 5. Ibid., p. 88. 6. Ibid. 7. Bama, Sangati, p. 31. 8. Ibid., p. 30. 9. Ibid., p. 23. 10. Ibid., p. 24. 11. Ibid., p. 23. 12. Ibid., p. 24. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 25. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 28. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 29. 19. Ibid., p. 68. 20. Ibid., p. 94.

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21. Ibid., p. 123. 22. Bama, Karukku, p. 99. 23. Ibid., p. 98. 24. Ibid., p. 103. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 93. 27. Ibid., p. 97. 28. Ibid., p. 91.

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14 The Servant in the Book of Judith Interpreting her Silence, Telling her Story MONICA JYOTSNA MELANCHTHON

D

uring the past several decades, we have witnessed repeated calls to bring the silent to voice, often through the medium of stories/ myths. Many different scholarly communities, particularly women, have argued that naming and defining experience, articulating and legitimating new and untold stories, and making space for those stories/myths, in the wider culture, is crucial to the work of social transformation.1 While it is essential that we are alert and aware of the divisive impact of politicized identities narrated through particularized stories/myths, it is also important that we use the apparently particularized story/myth to understand the social structure that shapes it, and forward a liberatory political agenda both by articulating suppressed and distorted stories/myths and clearing space for new ones. Our rich and complex Indian culture offers many different narratives to the oppressed as tools for understanding themselves and others. These stories often operate as ‘master narratives’ when they subsume many differences and contradictions, and restrict and contain people by supporting a power structure in which gender, class, caste, and ethnicity all define who matters and how.2 They are mostly stories of the dominant group and are told by the ‘ingroup’ to ‘remind it of its identity in relation to “outgroups”, and provide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural.’3 The caste-oriented master narratives in India have either portrayed Dalits in a manner that reinforces their stereotyped and subjugated identity or have suppressed or erased Dalit contributions from record. The sexist, classist, and caste-oriented society and culture that is India, has structured opportunities, alternatives, and sanctions to ensure that Dalits remain where they have been placed. Dalits have therefore, for centuries, paid with their lives for violating these patriarchal norms of gender, caste, and class.

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Historians from the Subaltern Studies group have effectively contested what were, until recently, the dominant interpretations of Indian history, tradition, myths, and stories. Moreover, they have provided a framework within which to contest the dominant modes of knowledge. However, Subaltern Studies has not always had an easy relationship with feminism/ womanism. The place of feminism within Subaltern Studies needs to be interrogated for feminist historiography/analysis of tradition, more than anything else, and has brought questions of voice, agency, and resistance to the fore. Feminism sheds light on undocumented and unanalysed texts, histories, stories, and myths of women’s engagement with their environment, and recaptures their agency as makers of history, identity, and other modes of knowledge. Subaltern feminist interpretation, while giving voice to the silent, also rethinks history and agency. It regards women’s activities and gendered social relations as central, and is concerned with sets of cultural and political practices that cut across all domains of the social. Feminist interpretation is, therefore, more than making women visible in history or texts. It is more than bringing the silent to voice. It is restoring history/story/myth to women, aware that women are not a unified, composite ‘other’ with an autonomous experience or history, but whose lives and histories are inextricably intertwined in a web of class and caste relations, community life, colonialism, and capitalism. Doing feminist interpretation, therefore, calls for positing gender as an analytical category4 and capturing the continuous fluidity of domination and resistance in the lives of women belonging to various socio-political, cultural, and economic locations and periods, and demands an identification of both the subordination and expressions of defiance, imprinted in the micro-histories of biographies, oral traditions, legends, and myths.5 This essay seeks to revisit the Old Testament apocryphal book of Judith, which is characterized as ‘historical fiction’. It is the story of a beautiful, wealthy, and widowed Jewish woman, who, on seeing the helpless plight of the city of Bethulia besieged by Holofernes, the general of the Assyrian army, embarks on a mission to save the city. She is accompanied by her unnamed and silent servant. Judith makes effective use of her erotic power chastely and, with her servant, returns to Bethulia carrying the severed head of the general. The silence of the servant and her entire role in the story intrigues me and tickles my curiosity. Who was she? Where did she come from? What was her relationship to Judith outside of slave and mistress? How did she support Judith in her mission? What might have been her motive for involvement? My understanding of this character and my analysis of her role draws on

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Badri Narayan’s (henceforth Narayan) analysis of the women heroes.6 I attempt to reconstruct the story of the servant with the help of the few details we have within the text and through a process of historical imagination, and write the unwritten subtext. I conclude with a discussion on issues that arise from these two texts and how a handling of these issues from the perspective of the marginalized might contribute towards addressing issues of Dalit idenity, agency, resistance, and survival against caste tyranny. BADRI NARAYAN, WOMEN HEROES AND DALIT ASSERTION IN NORTH INDIA

Badri Narayan calls attention to the many shrines and memorial stones that have been erected in several regions of Uttar Pradesh (UP) to commemorate those Dalit heroes, both men and women,7 who played a significant role in the events of 1857. According to Narayan, these shrines are revered structures of hero worship for the Dalits in the region. Through stories and legends relating to them and in their commemoration as heroes, Dalits fashion a new history that glorifies the role Dalit rebels played in the events of 1857. Narayan notes that historiography in mainstream academy does not acknowledge the involvement of the local Dalits in the Mutiny of 1857. But the Dalit community has identified several heroes who are said to have played a key role in that mutiny and ascribed to them a ‘god-like status’. While this reveals the gap between academic history writing and people’s/popular history, he notes that the reincarnation of their heroes of the mutiny as ‘gods’ seems to be an existential need evinced by the lower castes for their survival, made necessary also because of the refusal by the dominant communities to acknowledge their very existence.8 Indian history confines the rebellion to the kings, queens, and feudal lords and limits the contribution of Dalits to that of ‘soldiers, guards and stick wielders’.9 The mutiny engendered a consciousness of colonialism among most Indians, but Dalits had a very different take on this recorded history and its implications. The Dalits remember individuals from the suppressed communities who fought not to seek power for themselves but for their motherland. But the ‘stories of unsung heroes who played their role behind the curtains of written history were circulated only in oral history in rural north India.’10 The fact of their being unacknowledged and the advantages of orality provided the Dalits the freedom to choose their heroes/champions and construct their images as Dalit icons. These icons were then used

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to reshape the identity of Dalits at the grass roots since they had no icons to identify with. This process of image building eventually led to the deification of these icons by the Dalits living in the region. Narayan particularly examines Dalit women heroes of the 1857 revolt, who have emerged as significant icons for Dalit assertion in UP. Significations on Jhalkaribai (Kori) of Bundelkhand,11 Udadevi (Pasi) of Lucknow,12 and Mahaviridevi (Bhangi) of Muzaffarnagar13 have also helped the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in shaping the image of Mayawati, and establishing her as the most inspiring contemporary leader. Mayawati is linked with these heroic women icons, and she is projected as one who acquires miraculous courage—the power of a goddess and a Devi—through these icons. Narayan uses these case studies to critically link myths, memories, and histories of Dalit heroes with the meteoric rise of the BSP. Today, these Dalit heroes of 1857 stand as given, visible truths, with stamps issued in their name, many statues constructed, public rallies and meetings organized, and celebrations and festivities conducted. There is no historical evidence to prove the authenticity of these women heroes. Narayan’s investigations clearly bring to the fore the manner in which oppressed communities rewrite or recreate history and myth; they reinvent the past in order to give new meaning to reality arrogate a better future. Narayan writes that Dalits are no longer content with being cast as ‘victims’.14 These marginalized communities not only use these myths for political purposes but also to reassert their identities in contravention of the Brahmanical code, and resist the humiliation sanctioned by the ancient texts of the dominant castes. JUDITH

The story of Judith presents us with a model for gender boundary crossing in the world of Hellenized Judaism. It is an exciting story of an exceptional hero who is almost depicted as a divine figure. The story of Judith is her story. Although written from a male point of view, it takes little effort to see the strength, victory, and autonomy of the woman in this story. She is accessible as a strong woman, in whom is juxtaposed and combined her godliness and carnality, chastity and immortality, truth and deception, strength and weakness, masculinity and femininity, a mixture of dualities. She is an important character to recall and to celebrate. She is the controller of many men in the story and without any one man being credited for her actions. She prevails on her own terms, and wins the day for herself and her people, all the Jewish men and women whom she champions, a saint who murdered for her people.

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A text such as that of Judith presents numerous areas of enquiry. It is a story that can probably be dated to the second century BCE. In the traditional scholarly debates concerning the author’s intention, the story of Judith is often seen as a very Jewish story giving hope to the Jews in the post-Maccabean period. THE MAID SERVANT IN JUDITH

Digressing from the historical critical details of contemporary scholarship on the book of Judith and the character of Judith, my interest in this essay is primarily the maid servant who accompanies Judith in her mission to save Bethulia. This unnamed woman15 is either mentioned directly or referred to indirectly about thirteen times in the book of Judith. She is introduced as the maid, ‘who was in charge of all she [Judith] possessed, to summon Uzziah, and Chabris and Charmis, the elders of her town’ (8:10). In chapter 10, we are informed that it was this maid who helped Judith get cleaned and dressed (10:2ff) and who carried the ‘skin of wine and a flask of oil . . . a bag with roasted grain, dried fig cakes, and fine bread . . . all her dishes’ (10: 5). She went along with Judith out ‘to the town of Bethulia’ (10:6) and after the gate of the city was opened, ‘Judith went out accompanied by her maid’ (10:10). As these two women were going through the valley, they were met by a patrol of Holofernes and, interestingly, the text at this point says that the patrol ‘took her into custody’16 (10:11). Judith alone answers all the questions posed and the maid is not mentioned again during all the time the text recounts Judith’s introduction to Holofernes and the camp. The maid appears again in chapter 12, when she goes ahead of Judith to the tent of Holofernes and spreads for her ‘on the ground the lambskin she had received from Bagaos17 for her daily use in reclining’ (12:15). Upon Judith’s instruction, we are told, the maid stood ‘outside the bedchamber . . . to wait for her to come out, as she did on the other days, for she said she would be going out for her prayers’ (13:3). After Judith cut off Holofernes’ head, she ‘went out and gave Holofernes’ head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag. Then the two of them went out together, as they were accustomed to do for prayer. They passed through the camp, circled around the valley, and went up the mountain to Bethulia, and came to its gates’ (13: 9–10). The people of the town opened the gates and ‘welcomed them’ (13: 13). Judith, of course, is celebrated as the hero, the saviour of Bethulia. The maid is quietly forgotten but Judith is remembered until her death at the age of a hundred and five and after. Before she died, ‘she set her maid free’ (16: 23).

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These few details are nevertheless revealing. That the maid servant was close to her and probably a confidante is quite clear. It is the maid rather than the male servants that Judith trusted and sent to summon the elders (8: 10). She is the ‘trusted and trusting companion of the heroine.’18 It is significant that the story ends with Judith setting the maid free (16:23). For some reason, the maid has not been sufficiently incorporated into the narrative. The basic frame of reference is androcentric and as Amy-Jill Levine writes, ‘ . . . the patriarchal culture can deal with only one woman who speaks and acts; another such exceptional individual would too severely compromise the status quo. Thus, until Judith’s death, her “favorite slave” must remain silent and in service.’19 Old Testament scholarship has been, to a large extent, conspicuously non-committal about this maid. Other than mentioning her in passing, they have failed to acknowledge her involvement and the significant role she played in the liberation of Bethulia. This failure on the part of scholarship carries an interconnected double meaning. It not only contributes to a forgetting of her presence in the story, but it also conceals the ideological possibility of redefining women’s roles and relationships across class, and perhaps ethnic boundaries, in the larger social context of the Late Second Temple period in Israel. There has been no radical thinking about her role in the story. The maid has, therefore, remained a blind spot within almost all analyses and interpretations of this story. Her character, in my opinion, is perhaps the most haunting and therefore, deserving of our attention. Identifying her silence within the narrative, however, is just the beginning of the purported gendered (re)reading. Not only is she silent, but she has become almost invisible within traditional interpretations of the book. It is essential that we identify and recuperate her voice as well as presence and action. REPRESENTATION OF THE MAID SERVANT IN ART

Judith has been a potent symbol in the struggle between the sexes and one of the great stories of female heroism and sexuality that has inspired artists in nearly every generation. These artistic representations are epistemological, revealing considerations and issues related to cultural mythology and hence, disclose an ‘interpreted Judith’ as well as the importance of ambiguity to sustain and subvert, construct and deconstruct. Judith’s traditional iconography includes several scenes, but the most popular one is that of the decapitation in Holofernes’ tent, often with Judith’s female servant.20 The prominence of Judith’s maid servant in most of the art work reflects the fact that the artists considered the maid as crucial to the story. One among several treatments of Judith painted by

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the woman artist, Artemesia Gentileschi21—the famed Italian lady painter of the early Baroque period—which presents the murder itself, is striking for all its gory violence. What is interesting for me is that, in the painting, Judith is assisted by the maid servant who helps pinion the naked Holofernes to a bed; Judith grasps the helpless general’s hair with one hand while the other plunges a sword into his neck as jets of blood spurts forth in many directions.22 Only Gentileschi presents Judith as being aided by the servant. The maid servant is active, unlike in other paintings where she just seems to be watching. Gentileschi seems to emphasize the need for united efforts on the part of women to overcome oppression. This is significant because Gentileschi, like several other painters, chose to put both women on a single canvas, together and inside the bedchamber of Holofernes. In the biblical version, however, the maid servant waits outside! Plays written on this text, operas,23 etc., have also included the maid as someone who is integral to the play and have named her as either Habra/ Abra24, meaning ‘graceful’ or ‘beautiful’.25 INTERPRETING HER SILENCE

Let us also call the maid Habra. That she was a slave should come as no surprise since slavery was part of life in the biblical world, although slave women experienced it differently than slave men.26 However, ancient Israelite and early rabbinic law treated enslaved women differently from enslaved men and enslaved Israelites differently from enslaved foreigners.27 Attached to the wealthy family were its servants, female and male, and their families. Servants could be free-born or slaves. Had Habra not been a house-born slave, she might have been released sooner. It is possible that the only life she knew was growing up within the household of Manasseh and Judith. My guess is that she was single. Her status as slave does not necessarily mean that she lived a miserable life. Her attachment to Judith might have provided her with substantial economic and social freedom.28 Her living in the home might have created the opportunities for Judith and Habra to rely on one another, especially after Manasseh’s death. We know nothing of her racial or ethnic background, although I lean towards identifying her as a non-Israelite. That she was not released sooner would be contrary to customs had she been an Israelite slave. She was literate and hence, was made in-charge of Judith’s estate.29 She would have supervised and transacted business concerning real estate, agriculture, and livestock production on Judith’s properties.30 Habra’s silence in the text gives the impression that she glided silently around the house while attending to her mistress’ needs. Her prominence

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among the slaves, and also her experience, gave her some authority to order other slaves and to ensure an efficient housekeeping routine. These slaves possibly engaged in different types of work according to their skill and where they came from.31 Left to themselves, servants would generally discover a solution to even the most vexing housekeeping dilemma. Relieved of her domestic chores, Judith as a widow created structure and meaning for her existence by dedicating her potentially vacant life to the observance of Jewish piety and ritual, and to the affairs of the city of Bethulia.32 Women, more than men, developed intimate relationships with their servants and trusted them. Judith probably worked hard to elicit the respect of her servants through her self-confidence and authoritative manner. This relationship with her servants, created and maintained by Judith, was a complex mixture of trust counterbalanced perhaps by feelings of fear and suspicion.33 The latter brought on by her dependence on Habra. It is not impossible to imagine a close personal relationship between Judith and Habra based on female affinity, and these affectionate feelings were reciprocated by Habra’s benevolence and affection. Such an action on the part of Habra may be construed as a manifestation of self-respect, and as a means of preserving her individual status. She may have constructed a situation in which Judith needs Habra and Habra reverses the role: she becomes the one who meets Judith’s needs. What the psychological motivation for such behaviour might be could be speculated but there is much evidence of such concerned and caring behaviour of servants for their employers in the Indian context. Judith’s confidence to carry out her plan came out of the knowledge that she would have Habra to assist her. Judith had power that came from her status and her beauty and yet, she needed a companion for the plan to have worked. It has been suggested that Habra was not told of the plan.34 On the contrary, those who hold on to this position are unable to conceive of a friendship and camaraderie between the women that transcended class, age, and ethnicity. It was essential for Habra to know what to do and what to say if questioned. They needed each other for the purpose of safety and to encourage each other. If Judith was risking her life, so was Habra. She was, by virtue of being the servant, susceptible to being raped by the soldiers of Holofernes’ army but was probably safe because she was Judith’s servant and Judith was a woman that Holofernes desired. In my imagination, both women would have, in the privacy of their tent, talked, planned, weighed options, disagreed, agreed, expressed fear to one another, encouraged each other, and despite their doubts and fear, stayed focused on the task at hand. They had to do what they set out to do and

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they had to be successful not for themselves alone but also for the entire city of Bethulia. Habra stands in contrast to Holofernes’ servants, all of whom fell asleep while Judith was with Holofernes in his bedchamber. But she was alert, waiting to go in when called, to quickly slip in, and help her mistress with the decapitation. Maybe, it was Judith who stabbed him in the neck to incapacitate him but it was Habra who actually did the sawing. Though grotesque in its imagery, this likelihood is not impossible. If they had been caught leaving the camp with the head, both were liable to be killed. Both risked their lives and both managed to hoodwink the enemy. Habra’s involvement in the plan was spurred on by her love for and loyalty to her mistress and her loyalty to Bethulia. She was most probably not a Jew, but Bethulia was the only home she had ever known. In their success, Judith was received with jubilation, her courage celebrated, and she was blessed. Despite their friendship, Habra always knew her position in the societal structure and, even at the best of times, never forgot her place in relation to Judith. She was the slave and could do nothing but allow Judith to enjoy the limelight.35 Yet, she was in her own ways a star as well since she was the only eyewitness from the city who could give account for what and how it happened. She must have been cornered by people to tell the story, to share her experience. She may have exaggerated or underplayed her role. We do not know. In any case, she was not completely forgotten for she remains in the memory of the people, even as the ‘unnamed servant’ who accompanied Judith. Habra continued in the services of Judith but was released much later.36 She had aged and so had Judith. When she was set free by Judith following the rules of manumission, Judith gave her enough money to sustain her for as long as she lived. ISSUES ARISING

The narratives of Dalit women heroes and the book of Judith are set within the context of a community’s struggle for identity and nationhood. The heroism of these women is lauded because they were doing something significant—they took risks and helped their communities gain victory over the colonizer. Yet, questions remain. What implications do these narratives, when analysed from a gendered perspective, have for Dalit and other marginalized women? Do we highlight women heroes from marginalized communities such as Udadevi, Jhalkaribai, Mahaviridevi, and Habra only to build the image of a nation or political personality? Is it possible to

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recover through them the muted and silenced voices of oppressed women? Do these narratives contribute to the emancipation of Dalit women or do they simply replace the Dalit women’s victimhood with a new archetype of heroism, or can they be seen as ‘positive engendering’, provoking reflection on the enabling potential for women’s real lives? I believe that it is possible to do all of this with these narratives. Dalit men utilize the narratives of Dalit women heroes for a limited political purpose—to shape the identity of the Dalit community and to project Mayawati, the leader of the BSP. But, Dalit women can utilize these very same narratives to engender Dalit women’s identity and to highlight Dalit women’s agency in the struggle against caste and patriarchal tyranny. STORY/MYTH VERSUS HISTORY: THE RELEVANCE OF THE BOOK OF JUDITH AND THE STORIES OF DALIT WOMEN HEROES

The myths referred to in this essay cannot, for the most part, be substantiated or authenticated historically and yet, they can be understood as those that aid the ‘democratization of history as a discipline’, where the distinction between a myth and verifiable fact blurs.37 Myths can influence reality and this has been proven in the Indian experience. The narratives identified earlier are a case in point; the controversy surrounding the Sethuram Project, the Babri Masjid, and the Ramjanmaboomi campaign are some other examples. Therefore, what makes the use of a myth appropriate or politically correct is an important question. I would like to believe that myths which empower communities for the cause of liberation to fight against any kind of dehumanizing power, that forges identity and community, and enables one to live with respect and dignity is an appropriate use of a myth. But myths used to foster separatism, group superiority, and dominance, are inappropriate uses of myths.38 Stories/myths of Udadevi, Jhalkaribai, and Mahaviridevi have not failed to stir the imagination of the Dalit community. They have enabled the community to tie into their nationalist past and assert their role in the freedom struggle. They help them also to claim a respectable place in the contemporary process of nation building and a share in state-sponsored development projects and other democratic benefits. By repeatedly narrating their role in the nation-making process, the marginalized communities put forward a moral logic in favour of reservations and social justice for themselves. Even so, questions are raised about the historical accuracy and authenticity of these Dalit accounts due to insufficient documentation from this period of Indian history.

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A similar question may be raised regarding the book of Judith as well. Scholarship is agreed on the ‘fact’ that there was no actual invasion by Holofernes or that he was killed by a Judith of Bethulia. However, there is awareness of the fact that the author of the book has taken extraordinary liberties with Israel’s history, and these liberties are central to its meaning. We can, therefore, conclude that both the Jewish author of the book of Judith and the Dalit communities in UP have constructed their narratives liberally using historical events to showcase their heroes. But these narratives do not lose their value because their historical authenticity is doubtful. Let me cite Marc Zvi Brettler, who says that there ‘is no form critical marker . . . that says: “I am a text that is attempting to accurately depict the past.”’39 I have found Esler’s treatment of the book of Judith in relation to this issue extremely helpful. Esler applies social scientific ideas, particularly those of anthropology, to the book of Judith, ‘to explore what sense it might have made to its original audience in their own culture, especially in relation to the remarkable freedom with which it treats Israel’s past, arguably as a way of offering an interpretation of what it means to be an Israelite, of Israelite ethnic identity.’40 Esler points to the scepticism of anthropologists who question the accuracy and the authenticity of historical records and maintains instead that all voices from the past are but interpretations of what they purport to describe.41 A biblical anthropologist is not concerned about the ‘truth’, rather in ‘the ways in which historical narratives are produced by individuals, communities, or schools of thought, from their own point of view and their own experience’.42 A consideration of what ‘actually happened’ does not certainly apply to Judith, and it perhaps should not to the Dalit narratives either.43 Both texts were written to meet a certain need of the communities they represent. And so, their significance lies in their telling, writing, and celebrating, and the manner in which the stories meet the needs, desires, and expectations of Dalits/ oppressed—whether imagined, nationalist, or otherwise.44 Human beings continue to find meaning in new myths, or resurrect and revitalize the old ones for, despite their being authorless, ahistorical, archetypal, and symbolic, they do have value and provide meaning. Studied alive, myth . . . is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements. Myth fulfils in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man (sic). Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked

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active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom . . . 45

Myths turn out to be more influential than reality and it is not rare for myths to give new meaning to reality. Myths and memories often help people cope or even overcome an oppressive present and, inversely, the past is sometimes reinvented to overcome such a present. This is the case for many historical marginalized communities who give new interpretations to their past to suit the needs of their present, in order to move towards a better and brighter future.46 Constructing a myth about Habra that challenges the community to reflect on her role in the saving of the nation might bring to the fore traits and qualities, identified through her actions, which could be used for the sake of the marginalized. Reconstructing Habra would provide the marginalized communities with a hero, perhaps a role model. WHY WOMEN HEROES?

‘The point of literary analysis is that there is no truth. And when truth is absent women can creep in,’ says Bal.47 She cautions, however, that ‘the alternative readings I propose should not be considered as yet another, superior interpretation that overthrows all other.’48 I agree that the process of rereading, however, must not become only a process of excavating ‘forgotten’ or ‘hidden’ women and celebrating the women pioneers/ heroes of myths and movements. As Tharu and Lalita have cautioned, women’s history/lives/experience is not a submerged territory waiting to be unearthed in an unadulterated form. It is necessary to place women’s history in relation to the existing socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts of male domination.49 Women’s issues are woven through the matrix of gender relations and the portrayal of women in stories needs to be seen according to the way it has been intertwined with other political motives. Judith was created to reinvent Israelite identity around the issue of gender at a time when the Jewish community was confronted by the overpowering influence of Hellenism and their nation threatened by the Greek invaders.50 However, the reinvention does not take into consideration the identity of the female slave, her gender, class, and ethnicity, and how that might impact Israelite identity as a whole. Had Habra been given a voice and agency, if she were adequately credited for her role in Judith’s rescue mission, the story would have had significance for a wider audience, including those who were not wealthy, Jewish, or beautiful. Judith is certainly an excellent example of ‘the weak’ overthrowing ‘the strong’ (of females usurping male

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power), and she is also representative of the powerless, since she is a widow.51 This allows for some linkages to be drawn between her and the Dalit women’s experience of powerlessness and marginalization. Yet, her class and wealth and the stress on her Jewishness create a privileged social space for her and the like (read dominant) to legitimize a philosophy of superiority, dominance, and separation. Hence, it is imperative that we create a parallel account that gives visibility, voice, and agency to Habra. This is not to undermine Judith and her courage,52 but by bringing Habra to the fore, one contributes to the identity and self-esteem of all marginalized. It should also be noted that these women are referred to not as heroines but heroes who question existing gender stereotypes in a very powerful way. Yet, women who are so essential to a community’s self-identity are often conjured by writers and constructors of myths as ‘women’. They are often representative of the ‘others’ who conform to the values of the colonizers or suffer cultural annihilation.53 Judith is represented as a powerful femme fatale, the archetypal androgyne who transcends the male/ female dichotomy,54 the very antithesis of a woman-identified woman who ‘effectively promotes gynophobia, not equity, in a patriarchal narrative’.55 She is the autonomous woman who exceeds the bounds of the societal roles imposed on her (marriage, motherhood, and domesticity) and is an ideal type or model of faithful Israel by virtue of being named ‘Jew’, faithful to Torah, and using erotic power chastely.56 ‘She is God’s Assassin’, an image of the autonomy that is constantly being wrested from us all,57 independent, sexually subversive, one who challenges notions of gender in her own culture and our own, who exposes the Jewish culture’s vested options. By beheading Holofernes, she shames him and calls his masculinity into question. Yet, it is not only his masculinity that is impugned but that of the entire regime he had served.58 As an icon she offers much to the feminist discourse of liberation. In a situation where women in master narratives are usually portrayed as victims, a distinctly discernable mode in feminist as well as subaltern history writing is the solemnization of women’s courage despite their marginal status.59 It is, therefore, very exciting to have strong women hero figures in re-visioned myths. But the problem is that, ‘The trends of translating the history of women’s participation in radical political movements into either narratives of “loss and pain” or a celebration of women’s “astounding heroism” in periods of crisis reify the question of women’s political agency into two polar opposite images of women—either as victims or as agents.’60 While it is significant that the heroes in the texts under study are women, we still need to investigate what a focus on Dalit women

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heroes of 1857, Judith, or the maid servant might mean for oppressed women, especially from a gendered perspective. Are victims and heroic agents the only two options before Dalit women? These women heroes are intriguingly linked to images of goddesses and masculinized to some extent, and while they might evoke pride and self-esteem, and function as narratives for creating political consciousness or political mobilization of Dalit women, they seem to simply replace Dalit women’s victimhood with a new archetype of heroism. They are not women who the average Dalit woman can easily identify with. This literature may not, therefore, be seen as completely emancipatory and liberative for Dalit women at large. But through a personality such as Habra, we might be able to recover the silences and/or muted voices of Dalit women in history. A character such as her might be seen as a symbol of ‘positive engendering’, provoking reflection on the enabling potential for women’s real lives. MARTYRDOM AND DOMESTICATION

Women such as Laxmibai of Jhansi are celebrated for their heroism and yet, what is glorified is her ‘patriotism, femininity, loyalty towards the husband, religiosity,’61 which suit the ideology of the dominant community. Dalit women heroes, on the other hand, are remembered for their valour, courage, risk, aggression, and their martyrdom—for all the women heroes in the Dalit myths are martyred, they are either hung or shot to death. Their martyrdom is celebrated as an achievement that strengthens the morale, corporate identity, and pride of the group.62 Martyrdom, which is considered as a mark of one’s supreme dedication to the nation, is valorized and glorified, and is understood as a significant contribution to Dalit heritage of dedication and patriotism. Martyrdom strengthens the community’s resolve to endure and struggle against caste tyranny. Upon closer examination, we discover that Judith is uplifted as a hero but is eventually domesticated and colonized since she resists neither patriarchy nor racism (against Gentiles), nor class within her own community.63 Judith and Habra are both marginalized on account of the siege and they together present a joint front of resistance against the enemy. Their different social statuses that seemed incidental during the mission re-emerge once the enemy is no longer a factor to contend with. Once peace is restored, Judith ‘withdraws from the public sphere to the silence and privacy of her home.’64 She, therefore, works within the framework of patriarchy. The choices that these narratives place before Dalit women are either martyrdom or domestication, and neither option is necessarily empowering. Dalit women are continuously killed in the many caste conflicts and

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their blood shed for the survival of the community. Yet, their lives or their blood shed on behalf of the community have had no impact on the communities they belong to. Their deaths have had no effect on either the dominant or the Dalit communities. Similarly, Habra gained nothing from her involvement—no recognition or blessing. But her stoic silence, risk, courage, the maintenance of self-esteem, self-respect, and independence are characteristics that the Dalit women may identify with. However, it is important to move women’s experiences, history, and stories from the private into the public spaces that shape political and social consciousness. A WORD ABOUT SILENCE, SPEECH, AND ACTION

Since speech is identified as self-expression, and silence as self-extinction, they are closely tied into the project of subject constitution. In a further move, since speech is regarded as a right, and the suppression of speech as a denial of that right in a democratic polity, the access to speech has defined social hegemony, just as its lack has defined subalternity in unequal social structures and situations.65 There is the silence of the subaltern, the marginalized—an imposed silence, speech denied—which needs to be distinguished from the silence of the dominant or the master narratives on the state and role of the marginalized. ‘It is a silence that turns imperial triumphalism into the testimony of colonial confusion and those who hear its echo lose their historic memories.’66 One must resist the silence of the dominant from overpowering the silence of the subjugated. Habra is denied a voice as enslaved person, but she is to be remembered silently as a servant, her name unknown, her courage and involvement erased. ‘Such forgetting is an inevitable feature of colonization . . . This is the reality of empire . . . these gaping silences.’67 If these silences are not filled by the marginalized, there will be further myths written by the dominant to crowd and to justify the denigrated status of the Dalits. The silence of Habra produces mystery, enigma, perhaps displeasure or resistance. Habra’s silence invites us to give it a voice, to dispel the mystery, and unravel the enigma surrounding her. But if we fill it with sound that does not resonate with her context—social, economic, and political experience—then the emerging sound may do more harm than the silence. We also need to be aware that speech is also, ‘a “contaminated” area for research into women’s subjectivities, an insufficient as well as distorting expression of “motive”. But I do not suggest that it is for that reason politically invalid.’68 Speech is not a transparent medium of the self even when the source is credited to be authentic. Critical strategies of interpretation are crucially

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called for in negotiating the complexities of subaltern speech.69 Given this problematic in the silence and speech of the subaltern, a significant alternative image of Habra needs to be constructed on the basis of her actions which bespeaks of stoicism, patience, loyalty and a hidden strength, courage, risk, independence, and most of all, dignity, a woman who commands respect. COLLECTIVE FEMINISM THAT TRANSCENDS ETHNIC, CASTE, AND RELIGIOUS BOUNDARIES

Female individualism is futile when the need today is for a collective feminism. Some men would prefer that women fight lone battles and would celebrate this as strength and courage, and therefore empowering of women. Judith is projected as someone who shouldered the burden of reprisal on her own. In matters of this kind, individuals cannot triumph. But what the stories of Judith and Jhalkaribai equally demonstrate by default is the difficulty of individual action and the need for collective action when wrongs have to be righted or revenge exacted by the resisting subaltern (woman). A reconstruction of Habra with an emphasis on the solidarity between the two women across generational, religious, class, and ethnic affiliations would perhaps offer a model for solidarity among women. Feminism can help grant legitimacy to women’s tales, and by circulating them, continue to alter our very experience of reality.70 The Dalit heroes identified by Narayan were women who have been identified as being in the service of other women from dominant communities. Jhalkaribai was an attendant to Laxmibai of Jhansi and Udadevi was a widow in the army of Begum Hazrat Mahal. They were not only of different castes but different religion and class, and a rewriting of these stories stressing the camaraderie between these women would perhaps provoke conversation between women of differing caste communities to work for reconciliation between castes and the betterment of the Indian society. CONCLUSION

The empire with its myths is an ‘omnipresent, inescapable, and overwhelming reality in the world: the world of antiquity . . . and the world of today.’71 Myths are needed in times of identity crisis. Only apparent incompatibility needs myth to resolve or make sense of social dilemmas. Master narratives operate internally—we compare our lives to the stories we know. They also operate externally, in the ways other people interpret and understand our lives and reflect them back to us. They are, then, widely circulating in the culture, not only in obvious ‘story’ forms

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in movies, literature, television but also in our accounts of our own and each other’s lives. They gain strength from repetition and mirroring; they accumulate familiarity and clarity while blurring and erasing plot elements that don’t fit.72 Given their ductility, we need myths to counteract the influence of these master narratives. According to Narayan, imagination and memory, which may be constructed out of myth and history, are ‘the foundational requirement for the identity, self-respect and social existence of the marginalized communities in an age of power, conflict and competition.’73 They are not claims to sympathy and support but claims to fame and power, recognition and acknowledgement. ‘In this sense, one can propose that the past can be an authority but the nature of this authority is seen as shifting, amorphous and amenable to intervention.’74 Dalit feminist reflection, analysis, and interpretation needs to critique the silence of the master narratives and find ways to recover, reinvent, and reconstruct the alterity of the marginalized as it is presented in history, myths, and stories, identify dissenting icons, and construct new texts that could play a significant role in the Dalit struggle for identity, power, and resistance against caste hegemony. May the witness of Habra in all its reconstructed forms be welcomed for the empowerment and liberation of Dalit and all marginalized women. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Mary Romero and A.J. Stewart (eds), 1999, Women’s Untold Stories: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity, New York and London: Routledge, p. xiii. 2. Ibid. 3. R. Delgado, 1995, ‘Legal Storytelling: Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative’, in R. Delgado (ed.), Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, p. 64. 4. Joan Wallach Scott, 1988, Gender and the Politics of History, USA: Columbia University Press. 5. Mallarika Sinha Roy, 2006, ‘Speaking Silence: Narrative of Gender in the Historiography of the Naxalbari Movement in West Bengal (1967–75)’, Journal of South Asian Development, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 207. 6. Badri Narayan, 2006, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics, New Delhi: Sage. Also, cited from Badri Narayan, 2007, ‘Reactivating the Past: Dalits and Memories of 1857’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 19, 12, pp. 1734–8. 7. He identifies, for example, Rajit Baba of the Shahabad region, Bhau Bakshi, Puran Kori, Jhalkaribai, Avantibai, Pannadhai, Udadevi and Mahaviridevi, and Matadin Bhangi, also cited by D.C. Dinkar, 1990, Swatantrata Sangram mein Achhuton ka Yogdan, Lucknow: Bodhisatva Prakashan, p. 27. 8. Narayan, ‘Reactivating the Past’, p. 1734.

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9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 1735. 11. The myth recounts how Jhalkaribai, a low caste maid servant in the palace of Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, hoodwinked the British who had besieged the fort of Jhansi by dressing in the queen’s clothes while the queen made good her escape with her child. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 117–119. 12. Udadevi, according to the myth, was a member of the army of women soldiers organized by Begum Hazrat Mahal. She accompanied Begum Mahal in the fight against the British and in one of those confrontations, lost her husband. She vowed to avenge his death. She dressed as a male, and hid in a Peepul tree, and shot to death thirty-six British soldiers who came to the tree for a drink of water stored in earthen jars beneath the tree. It was only after being shot dead herself that the British realized that it was a woman. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 140–5. 13. The Bhangis of Muzaffarnagar remember Mahaviridevi as the woman who mobilized a mass movement at the grass roots to fight against the British. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 156–8. 14. Ibid. 15. Judith is the only named woman character in the book. 16. Note the singular ‘her’ at this point when the verse begins with a reference to both the women. 17. The eunuch in charge of Holofernes’ personal affairs. 18. Andre LaCocque, 1990, The Feminine Unconventional: Four Subversive Figures in Israel’s Tradition, Overtures to Biblical Theology, Minneapolis: Fortress, p. 46. 19. Amy-Jill Levine, 2004, ‘Sacrifice and Salvation: Otherness and Domestication in the Book of Judith’, in Athalya Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, p. 219. 20. Cf. Paintings on Judith by David Teniers the Younger (Flemish, 1610–90); Christopher Allori (1613); Orazio Gentileschi (1618); Caravaggio (1598); Cavaliere Baglione (1566–1643); Sandro Bottecelli (1472; 1498); Cesari (1605). 21. Artemesia Gentileschi, ‘Judith slaying Holofernes (1612–13)’; available at www. gallery.euroeb.hu Last accessed on 11 June 2008. Also, see the analysis of this painting by Mieke Bal, 2004, ‘Head Hunting: “Judith” on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge’, in A. Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, London/New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, pp. 253–87; Linda Bennett Elder, 1994, ‘Judith’, in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed.), Searching the Scriptures: Volume Two: A Feminist Commentary, New York: Crossroad, pp. 465–6. 22. Cf. Deborah Heller, 2005, Literary Sisterhood: Imagining Women Artists, Montreal: McGill-Queens, pp. 59–60. 23. Howard Barker, 1990, Judith (with The Europeans), London: Galder; Arnold Bennett, Judith a play in Three Acts (1867–1932); Judith – Music by Eugene Goosens and Libretto. 24. Based on a transliteration of the Greek word used in Judith 8:10 - a[bran 25. Amy-Jill Levine, ‘Sacrifice and Salvation’, p. 219. 26. Depending on the economic assets, especially the state and extent of its inherited landholdings, the typical household would also have, among others, male and

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female servants who like other dependents were ideally and in theory considered members of the household. J. Blenkinsopp, 1997, ‘Family in I Temple Israel’, in Leo G. Perdue et al. (eds), Families in Ancient Israel, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 52. 27. Compare Leviticus 25:39–42; Deuteronomy 15:12–14; Jeremiah 34:9; Leviticus 25:44–46, Exodus 21:4ff. 28. Cf. James A. Arlandson, 2004, ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Christian: Women, Wealth and Social Freedom’, in Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff (eds), A Feminist Companion to the Acts of the Apostles, Sheffield: Continuum, p. 168. 29. Ibid., p. 167. Unfortunately, we have little evidence of female managers, and what evidence we have does not detail her duties. 30. Elder, ‘Judith’, p. 459. 31. Master–servant relations are more significant for the domestic reproduction of inequality than hitherto acknowledged. Earlier studies have discussed this inequality in terms of class, but it has been argued that master–servant relations also are flavoured by caste. The employment of servants is partly motivated by the masters’ avoidance of defiling tasks and substances; servants are frequently appointed according to their caste specialization; and employers maintain considerable distance from untouchable servants. Upper and middle-class children, then, are socialized into a tacit worldview in which caste and inequality are naturalized and taken for granted as a part of the social order. See Kathinka Frøystad, 2003, ‘Master-Servant Relations and the Domestic Reproduction of Caste in Northern India’, Ethnos, vol. 68, no. 1, March, pp. 73–94. 32. Cf., for example, Mary A. Procida’s analysis of servants in, 2002, Married to the Empire: Gender Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 84. 33. I say this because the story does not mention any children or other relatives whom Judith could have relied on for support and help. She is projected as being completely independent and mistress of all that was left to her by her husband. In fact, she was able to even evade the laws of Levirate marriage. 34. Linda Day, 2001, ‘Faith, Character and Perspective in Judith’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, vol. 26, no. 1, p. 86. 35. It has been said that the oppressed usually never forget to address their bosses with the respectful title of address even when they are being abused. 36. This is an issue that scholars have used to question Judith’s piety. If her servant is Israelite, then Judith did not follow Deuteronomic law by not freeing her much earlier (Deut. 15.12). 37. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 88. 38. Cf. the collection of essays in Felix Wilfred and Jose D. Maliekal (eds), 2002, The Struggle for the Past: Historiography Today, Chennai: Department of Christian Studies, University of Madras. 39. Marc Zvi Brettler, 2002, The Book of Judges, London and New York: Routledge, p. 2. 40. Philip F. Esler, 2002, ‘Ludic History in the Book of Judith: The Reinvention of Israelite Identity’, Biblical Interpretation, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 107–8. 41. Citing M. Cousins, 1987, ‘The Practice of Historical Investigation’, in D. Attridge et al. (eds), Post Structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 135; Esler, ‘Ludic History in the Book of Judith’, p. 110.

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42. Citing Mario Aguilar, 2000, ‘Rethinking the Judean Past: Questions of History and a Social Archaeology of Memory in the First Book of Maccabees’, Biblical Theology Bulletin, vol. 30, no. 2, p. 61; Esler, ‘Ludic History in the Book of Judith’, p. 110. 43. The question of ‘history’ would be important if these texts were considered as historical documents and analysed in accordance with historiographic methods. 44. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India. 45. B. Malinowski, 1992, ‘Myth in Primitive Psychology’, in Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., p. 110. 46. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 15. 47. Mieke Bal, 1987, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 1. 48. Ibid., p. 132. 49. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), 1991, Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 50. Esler, ‘Ludic History in the Book of Judith’, p. 139. 51. Britanny E. Wilson, 2006, ‘Pugnacious Precursors and the Bearer of Peace: Jael, Judith, and Mary in Luke 1:42’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, p. 455. 52. Similarly, the Dalit communities do not reject Laxmibai or Begum Mahal but they uplift Udadevi and Jhalkaribai. 53. Judith E. McKinlay, 2004, Reframing Her: Biblical Women in Postcolonial Focus, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, pp. 15, 163. 54. P. Montley, 1978, ‘Judith in the Fine Arts: The Appeal of the Archetypal Androgyne’, Anima, vol. 4, no. 1, 1978, pp. 37–42. 55. P.J. Milne, 1993, ‘”What Shall We Do with Judith?” A Feminist Reassessment of a Biblical “Heroine”’, Semeia, vol. 62, no. 65, p. 55. 56. M. Hellman, 1992, ‘Judit, eine Frau im Spannungsfeld von Autonomie und göttlicher Führung: Studie uber eine Frauengestalt des Alten Testaments, New York: Peter Lang. 57. M. Stocker, 1998, Judith: Sexual Warrior, Women and Power in Western Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 252. 58. T.M. Lemos, 2006, ‘Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 125, no. 2, p. 234. 59. Peter Custers, 1987, Women in Tebhaga Uprising: Rural Poor Women and Revolutionary Leadership, Calcutta: Naya Prokash, cited in Roy, ‘Speaking Silence’, p. 210; and P. Sundarayya, 1972, Telengana People’s Struggle and its Lessons, Calcutta: Communist Party. 60. Roy, ‘Speaking Silence’, p. 210. 61. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 128. 62. See the very interesting treatment of this issue by Felix Wilfred, 2005, ‘Religions and Martyrdom Today’, in Felix Wilfred(ed.), The Sling of Utopia: Struggles for a Different Society, New Delhi: ISPCK, 2005, pp. 164–81. 63. Musa W. Dube, 2004, ‘Rahab says Hello to Judith: A Decolonizing Feminist Reading’, in Fernando F. Sergovia (ed.), Toward a New Heaven and Earth: Festschrift for Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, pp. 54–72. 64. Ibid., p. 67. 65. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, 1993, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, London and New York: Routledge, p. 84.

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66. Homi Bhabha, 1994, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, p. 123. 67. Judith McKinlay, 2008, ‘Living with Clashing Texts’, A Paper presented at the International Meeting of the SBL, Auckland, New Zealand, 11 July. 68. Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, p. 89. 69. Ibid. 70. T. Modleski, 1998, Old Wives Tales and Other Women’s Stories, New York: New York University Press, p. 8. 71. Fernando F. Segovia, 1998, ‘Biblical Criticism and Postcolonial Studies: Towards a Postcolonial Optic’, in R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), The Post Colonial Bible, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, p. 56. 72. Romero and Stewart, Women’s Untold Stories, p. xiv. 73. Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, p. 2. 74. Ibid., 78.

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15 Visibility of Her Sins Reading the ‘Sinful Woman’ in Luke 7:36–50 from a Dalit Feminist Perspective SUREKHA NELAVALA In a Bible study for a group of church women, I planned on discussing the text in Mark’s narrative on the woman who anoints Jesus, and who Jesus highly commends.1 After someone had read the story from Mark 14, I asked the group to tell me what they knew about the woman who anointed Jesus, from what they had just heard. Almost everyone said that she is a papatmuralina stree, which in Telugu means, ‘a woman of a sinful soul’. I was not surprised, because it was the same thing that played over and again, every time I touched upon the story of the woman who anointed Jesus. My next question was, ‘What was her name?’ ‘Mary Magdalene,’ they answered rather confidently. When I asked them to explain how they knew her name, they said that it is written in the Bible, and referred to the John’s parallel account. They were shocked to find that in John’s account, it was not Mary Magdalene but Mary of Bethany.2 Next, I asked them to tell me what she did to Jesus, and every one of them said that she washed the feet of Jesus, and were amazed to refer to the episode in Mark’s gospel to find that the woman is unnamed, and had anointed the head of Jesus. This interpretive exercise intended to point out the prevalent distortions in reading the Bible, and to emphasize their frequency with regard to the stories of women in the Bible. What is striking is that the story of the sinful woman remained in the memory of these people of faith, and that Luke’s account of this woman in 7:36–50 becomes the lens for reading parallel gospel accounts of anointings. Apparently, the story of the sinful woman and her act of touching the feet of Jesus—which in its retelling perpetuates the existent derogatory norms for women—is more popular and visible than the other versions of the story.3

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Marginalized people are ill-treated generally in two ways: first, by assigning them notoriety that reaffirms the negative stereotypes and labels of the marginalized; and second, by disregarding the person’s value by overlooking her contributions and underplaying her importance. With regard to the sinful woman, if the first response is obvious both in the text and in the male-biased, traditional interpretations, the second reaction can be noticed among feminist explorations ignoring this text. Compared to other anointing stories, Luke’s version was dismissed as an ideological construct culled from an original version of the story. Hence, textual aspersions downplay the character and significance of the sinful woman. Effectively, the sinful woman is marginalized both in the text and its history of interpretation. The sinful woman is discriminated against in multiples ways: as a woman, a sinner, a greater sinner,4 and as an untouchable.5 As I approach the text, the pressing similarities that the ‘sinful woman’ brings to Dalit women draw me towards her story more than the other anointing stories. As a Dalit woman, I consider it essential and important to seek a liberative message in the story of the sinful woman, which in turn can suggest liberative options for the Dalit women. The similarities lie in the women’s invisibility and their marginality. For Dalit women in India, the figure of the prophetess who anoints the head of Jesus in Mark’s story is an impossible call, as, in a similar way, Dalit women cannot identify with a Hindu goddess.6 Therefore, for a Dalit woman, the prophetess figure is only an ideal image that is unattainable, whereas the image of sinful woman is realistic, and calls for attention which seeks towards liberation. For generations, Dalit women have suffered pain, tears, and humiliation, and continue to face a situation where nobody seems interested in them. Dalit women are invisible, unnoticed, undermined, and muted human beings, despite the fact that their numbers are in millions. But they are well known and labelled as greedy servants, dishonest labourers, and vicious women. Coming from this context, Dalit feminist interpretation of the text of the sinful woman, first, attempts to liberate the sinful woman from the extreme notoriety of her sin while bringing visibility to her marginalization and second, it approaches the text to bring liberating relevance to the context of Dalit women. This essay analyses the story of the sinful woman from a Dalit feminist perspective for its relevance to the context of Dalits. The analysis employs an inter-contextual critical conversation that engages both the text and the context of Dalits underscored by my own social location that enforces, attributes, and perpetuates the stigma of untouchability. The similarities between the status of the sinful woman in the text and Dalit women in their context reveals the insight of a Dalit

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feminist reading, which I will try to uncover through auto/biographical narration and criticism. My questions to the text come largely from the context of the suffering of Dalit women, who are treated as untouchables, persistently victimized and re-victimized. The sinful woman in the story is considered to be the marginalized person, and her streaming tears are the representation of her pain, hurt, and suffering from her marginalization rather than from guilt, as is traditionally interpreted. As a Dalit woman, my methodological approach to the text aims less to probe into the historical accuracy or literary play of the text; rather, methodologically, the critical questions that I will raise are primarily influenced by my social location and the experiences. My hermeneutical method reveals the influence of auto/biographical, contextual, and cultural criticisms. Although there is an element of a reader–response approach to the text, I am conscious of myself as a reader, very much shaped by my social location. Dalit feminist interpretation of the text aims, first, to question the visibility and distinctiveness of her sinfulness and its gendered nuances by asking whether her sinfulness is apparent because of the intensity and the extent of her sin, and whether her sinfulness is overemphasized because of her marginalized status. Such an interpretation excavates the silence and absence of her voice in the story and its relation to her marginalization by speculating on the investments that benefit from her silence. A related concern is about her vulnerability and diffidence. As a profound non-verbal voice, the woman’s tears seem to reinstate her marginality as helpless, guilty, and suffering. While addressing the societal impositions on the woman, my enquiry rests on interpreting Jesus’ role and the role of the Pharisee as the privileged in order to liberate the marginalized and the sinful woman. In this context, I apply hermeneutical suspicion to the voice of the privileged in general, as the voiceless continue to face issues related to power and voice. NOTORIETY, MARGINALIZATION, AND DALIT IDENTITY

Notoriety and negative visibility generate negative stereotypes to categorize the marginalized. This has been a common phenomenon, whether in the context of racism, sexism, colonialism, or casteism. These labels and stereotypes, in turn, influence the perspective of the community on the basis of personal identity, and reinforce the victimization. For instance, the myth of the Black rapist emerged from fear of setting Blacks free, and from undue visibility that resulted when some enraged Black men made such abusive attempts. The notoriety and visibility that their mistakes

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gained is sufficient that it continues to haunt their identity, and thus they are re-victimized by the negative labels.7 DALIT SINS AND NOTORIETY

Dalits are generally poor labourers who work in the fields as daily wage labourers. Vulnerable and manipulated, they are denied both justice and knowledge of human rights in a democratic and independent India. Dalits are impoverished slaves as they spend their meagre earnings to repay nominal loans taken for unforeseen circumstances such as severe illness or hospitalization. They pay back their loans by their labour, which is often unending and unaccountable. Caught between inextricable poverty and the desperation for a modicum of existence, Dalits bear the brunt of the constant surveillance of their masters because they are considered untrustworthy people who steal the belongings of the landlord, such as grocery items, a couple of coins, a fistful of detergent from what is given to them to wash clothes, or even a few grains that they tend in the fields. Though not to justify the perceived thievery of Dalits, the visibility and currency of the idea of the thieving Dalit seems to serve as eyewash for the exploitative landlord whose privileged status permits him to rob the Dalits of their entire livelihood. That one form of thieving is more visible only underscores the marginality of the Dalits. Similarly, the woman in Luke’s story is a silent compliant to the judgements made on her character. She is labelled as the most sinful of the sinners; her tears were simply from the cause of her sins and overburdened guilt. The marginalized are vulnerable people who serve as easy targets of imposed guilt. Sin and its visibility are tenuous markers of marginality. A Dalit feminist perspective is suspect of such categories that have defined women and other marginalized communities. Hence, to read a text or its tradition of interpretation from this perspective necessitates critical attention to the overplay of attributed sinfulness. VISIBILITY OF HER SINS: THE WOMAN IN LUKE 7

The woman in Luke 7 is, among other labelled women in the Bible, popularly known as and notorious for being a sinful woman. This unnamed woman is an established sinner; the Pharisee who blames her sins and Jesus who forgives her sins, both attest to this characterization. Despite Jesus’s pardon, the nature of the woman’s infraction continues to animate speculation at its most sophisticated level. Scholars have boldly interpreted her sin to be prostitution, or a sin that is sexually related.8 Thus, as F. Scott Spencer

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states, the ‘“loose” woman has suffered rather “loose” interpretation.’9 Despite the fact that the story figures prominently in the history of interpretation as one of the anointing stories, the sin of the woman invariably becomes the central subject. Suggestive descriptions and mannerisms in Luke’s account lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Among others, the woman is a sinner in the city. Loose unbound hair, appearance at a public meal, touching Jesus in public, tears of guilt, non-stop kisses, and the expensive ointment for Jesus—scholars employ these biographical text-ures to identify the woman as a sinful prostitute who came to Jesus, guilty, repentant, and seeking forgiveness of her many sins.10 This interpretation started with the earliest biblical interpreters that included, among others, Origen, Tertullian, and Marcion, and continued unchecked until feminist exegesis entered mainstream biblical interpretation. Even though some feminist exegetes have allied with the interpretation that the woman is a prostitute, they have contributed to this reading mostly by critiquing the judgemental approach to her sins.11 Thus, it is interesting to note the magnitude of scholarly investments in the nature of the woman’s sin. The expression, ‘a sinner in the city’ (Lk. 7:37), served as a place holder for both traditional and feminist scholars to suggest that the woman is a prostitute. Historical–critical scholars imply that the nature of her sin, that is, prostitution, is what makes her a greater sinner than others, whereas feminist scholars, while identifying the woman as a prostitute, mostly argue that it was Luke himself who intended to identify the woman as a prostitute. Thus, feminist scholars disagree with historical, male-biased, biblical scholars, and dismiss the idea of attributing greater sin to prostitution over other sins to suggest that sexuality cannot be taken per se to be sin. Louise Schottroff thinks it must have been a ‘female kind of sinfulness’, but contends that the story is not about prostitution that could be overcome by repentance and forgiveness. Rather, the story presents mercy and respect for a prostitute by Jesus, who is different from the prejudiced Pharisee, Simon. Therefore, she argues that story is not about repentance but about acceptance.12 Renita Weems calls the woman in Luke 7 a ‘sensual worshipper’,13 suggesting that it is a fully accepted way of worship in love. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza contends that the original story was altered according to Lucan theological and Christological presuppositions. Similarly, Kathleen Corley, Jane Schaberg, Applegate, and Turid Seim, argue that the Lucan text intentionally identifies the woman as a prostitute.14 Seim refers her as ‘the local whore’, while emphasizing the aspects of love

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and adoration, ‘pleasure in excess’, and ‘lavish presence of her body’. She supposes that all of these traits are expected of a whore. These observations highlight the textual problems that the figure of the sinful woman poses and yet, the implications may be far more than merely textual. Textual constructions have a constitutive effect on social posturing. The equation of woman with sin and prostitution echoes patriarchal and misogynic practices that attribute sexual sinfulness to women by overplaying woman’s sensuality, and regarding the woman as a cause while the man’s participation is merely an effect. Thus, the woman is made absolutely responsible for the action of both man and woman. Teresa J. Hornsby, for instance, cautions the interpretive conclusions that portray the sinful woman as a prostitute.15 What must be noted, however, in the text is that it is her reputation that bothered the Pharisee, not the way she presents herself in the setting, which suggests the probability that her actions are not unduly offensive to the public. Similarly, there is also no indication that anyone around Jesus has tried to stop her for her obscene behaviour. However, presuming that the woman offered her sensual touch, Jesus’ privileged status protects him from receiving such inappropriate touch. Neither the text, nor the interpretive tradition suggests that it was mutual, although evidently she offers and he reciprocates in the text. Thus, on the one hand, the story of the sinful woman became popular through the emphasis on the woman’s sin in various interpretations, including feminist interpretations, but on the other hand, the story is contested in feminist explorations on account of its implicit traditional and patriarchal templates such as the emphasis on female sinfulness, female servitude, female muteness, typical male accusation, and male superiority. On a comparative note, this situation fittingly addresses the situation of Dalit women. Dalit women and their stories are brought into light only when their mistakes or misfortunes are spoken of, while being completely ignored and discriminated against at other times. Their strengths are too distanced to be acknowledged, whereas their limitations are given publicity. Sin, prostitution, silence, and tears are subtle yet effective tropes that inflect the inscription of social dynamics and configurations. Fiorenza remarks in her explanation about sinners in relation to the story of the sinful woman that all the sinners are the marginalized in some way or the other, according to the ancient definition of a sinner.16 The sinful woman is thus marginalized among all sinners as a greater sinner, and has been labelled as a prototype of a sinner. Even though Jesus forgives her in the narrative, she remains sinful, immoral, and immodest in popular imagination, and she continues to be marginalized for her sins. The tropological

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construction of marginality takes on a life of its own in the history of biblical interpretation. Therefore, it is important to note the interconnection between the notoriety and the marginalization, and how it perpetuates not only the patriarchal privilege but also internalized attitudes on marginal women in particular. DALIT FEMINIST INTERPRETATION

Reading Luke’s narrative of the sinful woman with a pre-notion that she was an archetypal ‘sinful woman’, I was made keenly aware of a more personal angle by the words of the Pharisee in verse 39, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him.’ She had been rendered untouchable. As a person belonging to the Dalit community, these words struck deep. They reawakened memories of being repeatedly condemned because of who I am, an untouchable. Our destinies are predetermined for us. We are born to do what others have disdained as polluting. We become what we do. We are polluted. Roving eyes police our touch. We are deemed untouchable. Had Jesus visited our community, the Pharisee might have said those same words to caution Jesus. Imputing my own subjectivity in my reading of Luke’s narrative makes for a wholly embodied interaction with the text. The more I have imagined the image of the sinful woman, the closer she came to the reality of a Dalit woman; her vulnerability in public spaces, unsophisticated, not modest; constantly shamed and considered shameless, and expressive of her naked emotions and tears without inhibitions. All these uninhibited emotions inscribe her as a loose woman, and less than human. Being less than human, such loose women are thus prone to violence in its most profound sense; physically, sexually, ideologically, and theoretically. They are labelled, discriminated against, oppressed, and marginalized, and revictimized as victims of violence, the so-called whores and prostitutes. A Dalit feminist interpretation of the story resists the undue visibility given to the sinful woman, while aiming to reconstruct her space and her significance within the story. In the process, the text is mostly read in terms of its position as a canonical text that assumes authenticity and significance. This offsets the textual determinacy of the historical–critical questions that much of biblical interpretation has relied on. Thus, my primary interest in the story of the sinful woman is neither to defend the long tradition with regard to the nature of her sin, nor to oppose strictly the probability of her being a prostitute. Rather, it is to critically understand her suffering, and to condemn the victimization of the sinful woman through the judgemental,

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discriminatory, and oppressive approaches that expose the woman and her sins without any attention to her victimization. How did the story of the sinful woman receive such notoriety and visibility? Was the visibility of the sin of the sinful woman accidental, or incidental within a systemic patriarchal operation? Our survey of critical interpretations of the text suggests that readers have created their own text in appropriating meaning to their biased needs, and in like manner, developed their understanding of the text. Although most scholars argue that Luke’s intention was to suggest that the woman is sinful, and a prostitute, one wonders whether Luke’s mention of her sinful status was intentional. Taken rhetorically, the articulation of her sin is related to her marginalized status as a woman. Beyond her gender, the Pharisee’s words of judgement on her untouchableness inscribe deeper layers of marginality. Dalit feminist interpretation seeks to peer through these text-ures of notoriety and visibility to extract self-affirmation for marginalized people, especially for Dalit women particularly. MY SOCIAL LOCATION AND A DALIT WOMAN’S LIFE NARRATIVE

I come from a middle-class Christian family. As Dalits, I remember our conscious efforts to overcome or even bypass our Dalit identity because we did not want to be shamed. Second, we did not want to fit into the stereotype of Dalits, who are regarded as poor, pathetic, dumb, slow, and inefficient. My approach to overcoming Dalit identity was through denial of my identity. I was always ashamed of speaking about it, and feared being treated the same as other Dalit girls at the college I attended. In an instance of self-denial, I consciously avoided any association with another Dalit girl Sujatha. Events in Sujatha’s life would, over time, turn my avoidance to one of identification, an embodied sense of my own connection with her. Sujatha was an only daughter. Her father was an alcoholic. His addiction made him irresponsible, self-centered, and a liability for the family. He channelled all his earnings to feed his addiction. As in many Dalit families, Sujatha’s mother became the main breadwinner of the family. Despite financial strains compounded by domestic tension, the mother was determined to send Sujatha to college, and encouraged her to do well in her studies. Ironically, being the main breadwinner does not liberate the woman by virtue of her control over the household finances. Rather, she carries the liability on by herself while the man devolves himself of any household responsibility or accountability. The mother worked for several years as a helper for a young medical doctor in his hospital, a position popularly designated as a servant. Sujatha

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accompanied her mother frequently for several years. The young doctor, who noticed Sujatha growing into an attractive young woman, showed interest in her. It is a common phenomenon that Dalit women find themselves vulnerable in their work places. The women are first casually approached. If they do not respond positively, they are threatened into compliance. Faced with such a situation, Sujatha had innocently encouraged the doctor’s advances, and eventually conceived a child. In a society where dating or pre-marital sex is strictly prohibited, such matters are usually hushed away. But due to her pregnancy, Sujatha had to confess and confide her concern to her mother. Having no support from her husband, Sujatha’s mother at once understood the situation and its implications for their lives. The mother accused her daughter, and in helplessness, she approached the doctor asking him to take the responsibility for the girl and the child. The doctor laughed sarcastically at both of them and asked them if they were aware of the disparity in their status. He shouted at them reprimanding them for daring to broach the issue. He also threatened them against any word about his involvement being made known. In their vulnerability, the mother and daughter had no courage to fight their case, and they have never revealed the doctor’s name. The doctor humiliated Sujatha, pointing to her untouchability, and reminded them of a proverb that suggested the care a woman must constantly remind herself of, ‘Whether a thorn falls on the palm leaf or a palm leaf falls on the thorn, it is the palm leaf which always gets torn down.’ Implicitly, Sujatha’s safeguard was entirely her own responsibility. Being shamed by her pre-marital pregnancy, Sujatha discontinued her studies, and I never met her again during my college days. Almost everyone in college spun her story in ways so distorted that she was branded as a polluted and a rotten woman. The doctor remained unnamed. I did meet Sujatha ten years later. Sitting in the same train compartment I was travelling in, her change in appearance shocked me. She looked haggardly overburdened, but she was happy to see me again. We had two long hours before we reached our destination, and she wept all the time, bewailing her life and her fate while reciting the above story. Because of her pre-marital conception, she was never able to get married; she was seen as an illegitimate woman by other women, and as a commodity for easy access by the men in the community. She was re-victimized for her plight. Sujatha narrated her story to me with the confidence that she might not see me again, and it was a way of relieving her stress. She told me that in the last ten years, she had not spoken to anyone so openly and that nobody empathized with her, including her mother. Rather, they have accused her of a grave

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mistake. Sujatha was a marginalized Dalit girl. She was exploited and made vulnerable due to her marginality. Her mistake against social expectations was overemphasized. She was silenced, was forced to accept the false story about herself, and had to live with hurt and pain. SINFUL WOMAN VERSUS A DALIT WOMAN

In many ways, the condition of the sinful woman is no different than that of Sujatha, a Dalit woman. They both were marginalized and were untouchables, although their conditions of untouchability were different: Sujatha was deemed untouchable by caste dictates, whereas the sinful woman was attributed untouchability for her sin by the so-called righteous. Victimized as untouchables, their moral standing was questioned, and their voice muted. Given no opportunity to defend themselves, their only voice were the silent but hurtful tears that they shed uninhibitedly. In both the cases, their side of the story never came out but was simply left to the wild imagination of their audience. The cloak of silence over male complicity in the women’s ‘notoriety’ underlines gender-based privileges. In both the stories, the men who were equally involved in a sexual or sinful act were either protected or systemic privileges did not impute the onus of responsibility on men as with the women. The luxury of silence is adopted for the protection of the privileged. A crucial difference between the two stories, however, is the role that Jesus plays as a privileged other. Although Jesus does not invite the sinful woman to speak for herself, he defends her actions against the discriminatory approach of the Pharisee, the co-privileged. On the other hand, Dalit women like Sujatha face a double bind. Their stories are typically silenced and go unheard or, if ever told, their stories are distorted beyond recognition and yet are legitimized by the caste and male privileges. Despite their differences, both stories point to the marginality of women from the centres of social privilege and agency. Jesus’ parable in Luke 7: 40–42 is commonly interpreted as confirming her sinful status and that the woman was in need of forgiveness. Following the parable (v. 44 – 50), Jesus does not admonish the woman but sends her in peace. Jesus’ approach to the woman in the text certainly provides space to discuss whether Jesus intends to liberate her from the allegations railed against her. What would his praise of her lavish love and affection mean in this context? For the Pharisee, a privileged male, even her touch is unacceptable. In contrast, Jesus’ approach to the woman publicly breaks down the disparity between the so-called sinners and the righteous, between male and female, and thus, between the main stream and the marginalized. Jesus

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not only defends her but also counters the other privileged, Simon, the Pharisee, and thus eliminates her marginality as a sinner by declaring forgiveness. In this process, what brings liberation for the sinful woman is not necessarily the forgiveness that she receives, but how, by Jesus’ intervention, she may now be accepted in the community. Jesus uses his powerful, privileged status to disrupt the oppressive elements in the story, while giving his voice to the voiceless. In this manner, Jesus communicates the radical message of transformation against the power disparities in society. Jesus’ voice in the text is a definite powerful voice in the story that diverts and shifts the image of the sinful woman. His perception of the woman and her action transcends barriers in several ways. First, Jesus disregards her visible self-presentation. Her unbound hair, as important as it was for the author and interpreters of the text, does not decide Jesus’ attitude towards the woman. Rather, he acknowledges her actions and interprets them to be the sign of great love and hospitality, in contrast to the popular view that it is excessive ‘sensuality’.17 Second, Jesus’ comparative explanation completely brings the paradigm shift in how to perceive the acts of the woman. He emphasizes only her love, service, and hospitality, and is thus wryly dismissive of the label of sinfulness attributed to the woman. Jesus’ approach to her was not biased, discriminatory, or judgemental. He sees her beyond her reputation and perhaps notices that her reputation does not match her excessively expressive actions. Jesus liberates her burden, grief, and pain by seeing beyond the Pharisee’s eyes and the perception of the people in the city, in spite of the Pharisee’s effort to influence Jesus against her. Thus, Jesus re-energizes her, not dramatically, but through articulate affirmations of her actions as meaningful and important. Jesus’ public confession that her actions meant a lot to him, in fact, elevates her status and provides an affirmative perception of the woman. It was this element of Jesus’ words that silenced the others while empowering the marginalized woman in the story. However, Jesus does not give her voice; rather, he provides the voice for her. This situation compels one to ask, in light of marginality, whether Luke’s Jesus in the text requires the silence and tears of the women, as thereby reinstating the prerogative of the privileged. As much as the silenced woman needed a mediatory voice, one must defer the finality of such mediation to look for the immediate voices—the agency of the sinful woman or the Dalit woman. This aspect of the story will be necessary and important to the much-debated Dalit feminist question of who could represent the voice of Dalit women and who should speak on behalf of Dalit feminism. The question, however, is more complicated, as it needs

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to resolve and address the question of what is the helpful role of the privileged counterparts who support the cause of justice and liberation, and how important it is for the privileged to speak out against the discriminatory and oppressive practices that prevail in the society. Thus, as Dalit feminist, I see that Jesus’ role in the story conveys a liberating message for the role of the privileged in the liberation for the oppressed. First, Jesus breaks through the moral binary of the sinful and the righteous; second, he discredits the statement of the Pharisee which suggests untouchability, by not only allowing the sinful woman to touch but also to kiss; and third, Jesus reinstates the sinful woman on par with her male accusers. Finally, he proves the Pharisee vindictive by calling into question the social scales employed to accuse the woman. CONCLUSION

It is a recurring phenomenon that in most hierarchical societies, the marginalized have no voice. If they do, it is usually ignored or subdued. Similarly, a casteist and patriarchal society such as India silences the voice of the marginalized. Reading the story of the muted, unnamed, and vulnerable sinful woman alongside the life of Dalit women, what is necessary for the liberation of the marginalized is to give visibility to their oppressive stories, and to listen to the voice of the oppressed, while approaching the oppressors’ visibility with suspicion. Our theological interaction with sacred texts and society at large must not but bring to light the layers of victimization, oppression, and discrimination which otherwise go unnoticed. Dalit feminist interpretation of the sinful woman attempts to bring out the aspect of unjust notoriety that the marginalized suffer, and the constant denial that they bear. In its interpretation of Jesus’ role as the privileged person, Dalit feminist interpretation calls for the responsible involvement of the privileged, and considers it as one of the important factors, in the process of the liberation of the marginalized. NOTES AND REF ERENCES 1. Matt. 26:6–13; Mk. 14:3–9; Lk. 7:36–0, and Jn. 12:1–8. 2. Jane Schaberg explains that the tradition of misunderstanding and identifying the sinful woman with Mary Magdalene probably comes from the text which precedes the story of the sinful woman in Luke 8:2 where Mary Magdalene is mentioned. See Jane Schaberg, 1992, ‘Luke’, in Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (eds), Women’s Bible Commentary, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 374. 3. Standard commentaries have argued a complex tradition–historical relation between these stories. For the scholarly debate and discussion, see Raymond E. Brown, 1966, The Gospel According to John (i-xii): Introduction, Translation and Notes, Garden City,

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NY: Doubleday, pp. 449–52; and John Nolland, 1989, Luke 1:1–9:20, Dallas: Word, pp. 351–3. Generally, Mark’s account is regarded to be the closest to the original; see, for example, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 1990, In Memory of Her, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, pp. 127–30. 4. Jesus’ parable denotes her to be a greater sinner, Luke 7: 47–48. 5. Simon, the Pharisee, attributes her untouchability and the oppressive disparity between Jesus and the woman as due to her sin. Luke 7: 39b. 6. The Hindu religion is one of the religions which has powerful Hindu goddesses worshipped equally by both men and women; however, goddesses are not interpreted to be the prototypes of women in general. These goddesses are holier, purer, and godly, thus making it an impossible task for unclean Dalit women to emulate them. 7. For more discussion on the myth of Black rapist, see Angela Y. Davis, 1983, ‘Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist’, in Angela Y. Davis (ed.), Women, Race and Class, New York: Random House, pp. 172–201; Aline Helg, 2000, ‘Black Men, Racial Stereotyping, and Violence in US South and Cuba at the Turn of the Century’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 576–604; Tommy Lee Lott, 1999, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, pp. 27–46. 8. The references cited here provide exhaustive data of all those who suggested her sin to be prostitution, and to suggest how widely the view has been shared among the scholars. C.B. Caird, 1977, The Gospel of St. Luke, New York: Penguin Books, p. 114; Cyril, 1983, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, Astoria, NY: Studion Publishers, p. 171; E.E. Ellis, 1966, Gospel of Luke, London: Nelson, p. 123; J. Fitzmyer, 1981, The Gospel of Luke, New York: Doubleday, p. 689; D.W.C. Ford, 1967, A Reading of St. Luke’s Gospel, New York: J.B. Lippincott, p. 110; Joachim Jeremias, 1963, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 126; I.H. Marshall, 1978, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, p. 308; C.L. Morris, 1975, The Gospel According to Luke, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, p. 146; Alfred Plummer, 1910, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Luke, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, pp. 210–11; E.J. Tinsley, 1965, The Gospel According to Luke, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 82. See also, Judith K. Applegate, 1999, ‘”And She Wet His Feet With Her Tears”: A Feminist Interpretation of Luke 7. 36–50’, in Harold C. Washington et al. (eds), Escaping Eden: New Feminist Perspectives on the Bible, Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, pp. 69–90; Kathleen Corley, 1993, Private Women: Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, p. 124; Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, p. 129; Sharon Ringe, 1995, Luke, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 108; Louise Schottroff, 1991, Let the Oppressed Go Free, Louiseville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, p. 150; Elisabeth Moltmann Wendel, 1993, The Women around Jesus, New York: Crossroad, p. 65; Ben Witherington III, 1984, Women in the Ministry of Jesus: A Study of Jesus’ Attitudes to Women and their Roles as Reflected in his Earthly Life, New York: Cambridge University Press. 9. F. Scott Spencer, 2004, Dancing Girls, Loose Ladies, and Women of the Cloth, New York: Continuum, pp. 108–9. 10. See Fitzmyer, The Gospel of Luke, pp. 686–7. There are, however, various interpretations and arguments related to this concept whether she was forgiven before she

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offers her love, or whether she is seeking forgiveness. For instance, John J. Kilgallen, in his article, 1985, ‘John the Baptist, the Sinful Woman, and the Pharisee’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 104, no. 4, pp. 675–9, says that apheontai in 7:47–48 in perfect tense proves that she was already forgiven. 11. Applegate, ‘And She Wet His Feet With Her Tears’, p. 82; Corley, Private Women, p. 124; Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, p. 129; Ringe, Luke, p. 108; Schottroff, Let the Oppressed Go Free, p. 150; Turid K. Seim, 1994, The Double Message: Patterns of Gender in Luke and Acts, Nashville: Abingdon Press, p. 93; Wendel, The Women around Jesus, p. 65. 12. Schottroff, Let the Oppressed Go Free, pp. 138–57. 13. Renita Weems, 1988, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible, Philadelphia: Innisfree Press, pp. 93–4. 14. Applegate, ‘And She Wet His Feet With Her Tears’, p. 82; Corley, Private Women, p. 124; Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, p. 129; Schaberg, ‘Luke’, p. 374. 15. Teresa J. Hornsby, 1999, ‘Why is She Crying? A Feminist Interpretation of Luke 7: 36–50’, in H. C. Washington, S. C. Graham, and P.L. Thimmes (eds), Escaping Eden: New Feminist Perspectives on the Bible, 91–103; Hornsby, 2001, ‘The Woman is a Sinner/ The Sinner is a Woman’, in Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff (eds), A Feminist Companion to Luke, Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 121–32. In addition to some feminist scholars, some male scholars also counter the argument that the sinful woman is a prostitute without any evidence in the text. For example, see Spencer, Dancing Girls, pp. 108–9. 16. Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, pp. 128–9. 17. Hornsby, ‘The Woman is a Sinner’, p. 132.

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16 Caste Branding, Bleeding Body, Building Dalit Womanhood Touchability of Jesus PRASUNA GNANA NELAVALA The perceptions of the world formed during my childhood are significant for my self-comprehension and the way I articulate theology. My parents are educators by profession and deeply religious Christians. We are four children in my family, two girls and two boys. Our parents valued us equally. We belong to a Dalit community. I am a third generation Christian and first generation theologian. I have been very independent since childhood. Along with the independent streak in the way I think, I have also experienced the caste struggles of my people and the gender discrimination in the world around me. Education, profession, and economic development play a major role in resisting the caste system. My experience as the daughter of educators is both liberating and oppressive. I am liberated because I enjoyed freedom. I am oppressed because of my experiences as an outcaste. Growing up in the village, one early morning, I went to collect milk from a vendor. On my way back, an elderly Brahmin woman returning from her ritual bath with a pot of water was approaching me. As soon as she saw me, she threw the water and returned to the well to draw water again. My presence had polluted the water in her pot. I rushed to my parents and told them of what had happened. My father got up and walked towards her. Seeing him, the woman threw the water away yet again. To teach the woman a lesson, my father walked up to her repeatedly. This silliness was repeated six times before the woman finally took her water home. I carry my father’s assertion in this instance with me. It is this socio-cultural location that serves as the foundation of my theology. The oppressive status of Dalit women can be understood better in the observations of the feminist sociologist, Gail Omvedt, that a Dalit woman is ‘the Dalit of the Dalit’.1 She concurs with Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s view to

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describe the Hindu caste system as a pyramid of earthen pots set one top of another: Brahmins at the top; and Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and the untouchables at the bottom. But within each earthen pot, the men are placed above the women. At the very bottom rung are Dalits, within which the Dalit women languish like crushed and wasted powder.2 Dalit women are those who have lost their laughter, labour, and life for the sake of upper caste men and women and even their co-Dalit men. Dalit women are completely neglected and ignored, dismantled, diminished, and distorted human beings. I admit that grass root Dalit women are often unfamiliar with the way I write and reflect and that sometimes they are not even aware of their own struggles. I confess that a certain distance exists between academic theology and the daily life of Dalit women. However, I am convinced that my interlocutors are not Dalit women, but dominant groups who exclude and oppress Dalit women. Part of my ongoing research is to explore interconnections between biblical texts and the Dalit woman’s context in developing a Dalit feminist hermeneutics. In these efforts, it is my hope to create space wherein the voices of Dalit feminist theologians may be heard in the theological academia The experience of the struggles and the resourcefulness of the strengths of Dalit women serve as the backdrop for the formulation of a Dalit feminist theological hermeneutics. What is the need for Dalit feminist theological hermeneutics? How is it different from feminist hermeneutics or Dalit hermeneutics? What does Bible mean to Dalit women in their context? A compelling drive for this essay is a quest for answers to these questions. THE DYNAMICS OF GENDER AND CASTE

Both the Dalit movement and feminist movement share a common concern and discuss the issues of oppression and liberation. However, both failed in giving space to the experience of Dalit women, which is different and distinct from their Dalit male and caste female counterparts since their own oppression is a complex mingling of caste and gender debilitations. Dominant Dalit ideologies seem to be less perceptive of the pains and claims of Dalit women. For instance, Kancha Ilaiah, while admitting the existence of patriarchy among Dalit families, declares that Dalit units are more democratic compared to other caste households.3 Is it possible to have democracy in the patriarchal structure? Can democracy and patriarchy go together? Democracy and patriarchy are two different entities existing independently for different purposes. Democracy is for freedom, while patriarchy implies bondage. Can freedom and bondage go together? James Theophilus Appavo notes that the religion of Dalits is a religion

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of equality and women are treated equally. He says women are allowed to perform priestly duties and often take precedence over men with regard to particular rituals. He validates his observation by pointing to the mullapari festival in the Chengalpet district of Tamil Nadu where the first share of the offering is given to the older women in the Dalit community.4 Beyond the tokenism of such accommodations, it is doubtful that the ritual enactment of equality flows over into everyday life. Feminists like Kamla Bhasin and Nighat Said Khan stated that women have been harijans of Indian society.5 What do they mean when they say women have been harijans6 of Indian society? The struggle between caste and gender is not given serious thought in the feminist movements. Dalit women’s emotional and psychological experiences are not taken care of in the feminist movements. They seem to ignore the fact that the category of women includes the women from the socalled harijan community. While both the Dalit and feminist movements declare all women as Dalits, they forget that the Dalits include women too. Dalits are not just men alone.7 Dalit hermeneutics has not given enough attention to the experience of Dalit women and hence, very little change was imagined for the lives of Dalit women. Emerging, for the most part, from among caste women, feminist hermeneutics did not consider the experience of outcaste women. Therefore, their contribution wrought little towards transformation specifically for the Dalit woman. However, Dalit feminists share a clear sense of identification with the essential articulations brought out by both these movements. Dalit feminists need to retain their exclusive voice within the Dalit movement and feminist movement so that we can contribute more meaningfully to these movements and also work towards mutual solidarity with our Dalit and feminist counterparts.8 A Dalit feminist hermeneutics is credible for Dalit women since it takes both the gender and caste experience as a basis of theological hermeneutics. While formulating Dalit feminist hermeneutics, the chief concern expressed is whether we need to retain the caste brand or whether we can we look for a new brand. CASTE BRAND VALUES

In India, to be born a Brahmin is like buying the winning raffle ticket of life since this caste represents a superior caste brand. To move towards a casteless community amidst the brand claims for superiority, it is imperative for Dalit feminist hermeneutics to move away from brands such as ‘outcaste’ and work towards new self-definitions. We need a society which has a strong foundation on egalitarian values.

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A brand is a symbol that personifies all the key information about a product or a service; it could be a name, a slogan, a logo, or a graphic design. Reference to the brand carries with it a whole series of associations as well as expectations of how it will perform. A brand, by its very name, can juggle certain associations. The ‘outcaste’ brand implies dishonour rather than honour and must not be perpetuated. While interviewing women from the South Andhra Lutheran Church, I have come across certain caste–Christian women. To my surprise, they often mentioned their ‘caste brand’ through the course of a 15 minute talk and openly expressed their dislike for their family members who embraced the God of Malas (one of the main Dalit communities in this region). In naming Mala Christians as a separate social entity, they manifested their internalized caste mindsets. They were comfortable about flaunting their caste brand despite their having embraced Christ. Other women were not able to claim their outcaste names, given to them by the caste people as a humiliating and degrading gesture. Most of them did, however, affirm that they were Adi Andhra Christians. The ‘Low caste Women’ brand carries emotional pain and humiliation. Though Dalits are outside the caste system, they are given names which designate them as ‘low castes’ and hence, implicitly within the system. Given the politics of branding, this essay looks for an alternative brand that promotes the lives of Dalit women. While discussing on the brand value of caste, it is important to speak of an identity of a Dalit woman without forcing a monolithic identity. I have certain identities which play a major role in the way I understand myself and the world I dialogue with. Swathi Margaret asserts that ‘we need to define ourselves otherwise they will define us for their betterment and for our detriment.’9 I would like to define myself as a Dalit, middle class, university and seminary educated, and a Lutheran Christian woman. My self-awareness plays a decisive role in building my politics and it helps me meet my basic needs of security and belongingness.10 The details of my self-definition denote a significant development from Dalitness11 to a middle class. In naming my education at both the university and seminary levels, I indicate that it is possible for Dalit women to progress in the academy. My identity as a Lutheran Christian woman signifies that I belong to a community of honour and not of dishonour. My self-definition is special and different from the definition given by the caste men, caste women, and Dalit men who, despite their best intentions, define me as secondary, inferior, weak, impure, dirty, and untouchable. Hence, I strongly believe that Dalit women need a brand new image to keep up with the times. In order to build an identity which will have recall

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and recognition value, we need to develop a professional brand image. This will help us express our self-value. Building our image is a process. We need a changed and fresh brand that promotes our public image and our identity. The Bible is rich in resources where the humiliating brand has been changed into an exalted brand. The story of the woman with the flow of blood drives us to think in this direction. A branded unclean, impure, dirty, outcaste, and nameless woman has received a fresh brand name as a ‘daughter’, and she was able to promote her fresh brand in the midst of the crowd. The following section connects the story of the woman with the flow of blood with the lives of Dalit women in order to flesh out a more equitable brand. THE STORY OF BIBLE AND DALIT WOMEN: CONNECTIONS

The Bible has often been used to oppress people. It is a well-known fact that the Bible was written by men and so, certain biblical texts project the subordination of women. Clearly, God’s inspiration could not overcome this gender bias. Traditional theology and interpretations through the centuries were also formulated by men so that women’s contexts continue to be marginalized. Hence, the connection between worlds represented by women and the Bible is not apparent. As Monica Melanchthon precisely points out: The Bible was shaped in a male-dominated world, councils of men determined the canon itself, and over the centuries, male theologians and scholars interpreted texts that were considered to subordinate women. It is therefore a difficult and complex task to reconsider those texts from the perspective of women and bring to the fore an interpretation that reveals God’s concern for the whole humanity. Besides, it has been proven that the oppressed often internalize the ideals and values of the oppressor, and women are much more apt to do this because of their belief in scripture as the divine word. Hence, sometimes women are highly resistant to feminist interpretations.12

In my research, I found that most of my interlocutors thought that God created women to be helpers and hence, they had to obey their husbands at any cost. Most of them denied women’s ordination on the grounds of female impurity and dependency. All of them agreed that they were lacking in the resources and gifts of life and were not leading a life of fullness. However, they disagreed on matters related to gender equality. Women are very strong in asserting that women are weak and, therefore, cannot compete with men in doing everything that men do. But we can no longer be silent on gender and caste issues that exclude Dalit women from the mainstream. It is equally important not only to raise the

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issues of oppression and liberation but also to explore the interconnections between the Dalit woman’s world and the biblical world with the intention of transforming Dalit women. JESUS AND A WOMAN WITH THE FLOW OF BLOOD (MARK 5:21–43)

The story of the woman with the flow of blood is found in all three of the synoptic gospels which underlines the importance attached to this event in the life of Jesus. While Jesus was on his way to Jairus’ home to heal his young daughter who was dying, a large crowd followed and pressed around him. A woman who had expended all to cure her vaginal haemorrhage of twelve years was in that crowd. She had heard about Jesus and thought that even his slightest of touches would heal her. She came up behind him amidst the crowd and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment. Her bleeding stopped instantly. Jesus immediately realized that power had gone out from him and he turned to the crowd to inquire about who had touched him. His disciples answered him, ‘You see the people crowding against you and pressing you,’ and yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?’ Still insistent, Jesus looked around to see who had done it. The healed woman came from behind trembling with fear, fell at his feet and told him the truth. Jesus comforted her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your sufferings.’ In the larger narrative structure, the healing of Jairus’ daughter (Mk 5:21–43) is interrupted by the story of the woman with haemorrhage (Mk 5: 24b-34). STUMBLING BLOCK BECOMES A BUILDING BLOCK: RELEVANCE TO DALIT WOMEN

The climax of the story is in the instant healing of the woman with the flow of blood in Mark 5:30–34. Jesus insists on personal contact with the healed woman because the healing was not yet complete. The significance of this story can be understood only when read empathetically with the condition of the bleeding woman. Any woman who has experienced the discomforting changes brought on by her menstrual periods can fathom the angst of a twelve years flow of blood. Her condition was characterized by wholesale oppression: physical, psychological, economic, religious, and social. Her suffering was both internal and external.13 However, despite her compounded stress, her hope for healing persisted. By faith, she decided to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. The woman knew very well that in touching Jesus’ garments she would ritually defile him.14 And yet, her faith strengthened her resolve for a healing. She received the power from Jesus which liberated her from all her suffering.

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Pressure and strain tend to distort the minds and bodies of Dalit women. Often, the resulting stress works to the detriment of the woman’s health. A renowned sociologist, Leela Dube, probes the complicated relation of caste and gender to explain the attribution of impurity to the female gender. Menstruation and childbirth are observed as the natural basis of female impurity in the traditional socio-cultural order. A periodical pollution through menstruation makes women essentially less pure than men in each caste. The impurity is two-fold in the life of Dalit women as they also get polluted through occupational activities. Unlike widowers, widows are considered impure and barred from performing the puja (worship) of family deities.15 The stories of Dalit women are wrenching, emotional, and anger provoking. Their stories are the stories of poverty, abandonment, abuse, betrayal, illness, job pressures, failures, goals missed, forced widowhood, and exploitation. The experience of Dalit women is characterized by wholesale oppression. The biblical story challenges Dalit women that they should come forward to transform their lives. As the woman came forward to touch Jesus despite the religious norms of that day, Dalit women also need to come out of their internalized inferiority and untouchability to have a new life. The suffering should not lead them to hopelessness but to look for the ways to heal themselves from all the suffering as the woman did in the story. THE RELEASE OF POWER IN JESUS: EMPOWERMENT OF DALIT WOMEN

The story of the woman with the flow of blood (Mk 5:25–34) grabbed the attention of feminist scholars. They claim that Jesus was against the Jewish purity system and that he granted women dignity. In the context of the haemorrhaging woman, Jesus does not address issues of menstruation and the purity system. Rather, that Jesus insisted on meeting the woman who had drained him of his power is significant. Jesus used this occasion as a platform to protect the woman’s reputation by affirming her daring deed against the religious laws and norms that discriminated against women. Jesus refuses publicly that he became defiled by the touch of an impure woman. He did not even care to ritually cleanse himself after having been touched by the woman but instead, goes on in his mission to raise Jairus’ daughter.16 Jesus’ reassurance of healing conveys (she was instantly healed when she touched him) that she is freed from her physical pain as well as pain related to economical, social, and religious status. An affirmative proclamation, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your sufferings,’ is a powerful climax of the story. When Jesus addressed her as ‘Daughter’, did he not give her a new identity? Jesus invites

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her into his household by calling her ‘daughter’. A branded untouchable, sick woman becomes a ‘daughter’ when the power of Jesus is shared. All of us exercise power in one way or the other: parents over children, husbands over wives, teachers over students, employers over employees, pastors over congregations, high castes over low castes, men over women, and first world over third world. It is obvious that those who exercise power handle it as a stick to make sure that the end product is submission and oppression rather than liberation. Power is like fire in nature. It should be rightly used, otherwise it will reap violence. One needs to realize the power within one’s inner world that has control over one’s own words and actions.17 Jesus has the inner power to liberate people from all kinds of sufferings, to instil self-esteem, and to give a sense of belongingness to his hearers. The power of Jesus to empower others is the best paradigm for Dalit women. An empowerment could take place only when power has gone out from Jesus and reached a powerless woman. The call for power and power sharing led to empowerment instantly in the biblical story. Shared power and values would lead to the success of Dalit women. The impossible can be made possible as people rally around a common vision and goal. The vision and goal of Jesus is to free the people from all the bondages that lead to stress. While the present socio-political–economic–cultural reality would force Dalit women and men to internalize shame of their skin, body, and blood, and to think of themselves as impure and dirty, and polluted, a new Dalit hermeneutics should affirm that the bodies and the blood of Dalit women and men are equal, life giving.18 Their bodies and blood have equal share in the body of Christ to release power and to receive power in order to bring transformation in the lives of Dalit women. Therefore, resistance by the oppressed must be consolidated by the reconciliation of the oppressor towards liberation and transformation in the lives of the oppressed and suffering. CLASS AND GENDER DYNAMICS: SIGNIFICANCE FOR DALIT WOMEN

Class and gender-based analysis of the text helps us to draw significant insights. Gender-based analysis helps us to understand that both the miracles mentioned in the text are concerned with women. Within the narratival structure of Mark 5: 25–35, it is important to note that one woman was bleeding, while the other was dead. Both blood and death are considered polluting and ceremonially defiling.19 Both are in need of touch, and both are valued by Jesus. The then gender discrimination and Jesus’ mission of overcoming this evil is well projected in the text. Class-based analysis is

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essential while reading the text from Dalit women’s perspective. The women who were healed in the text come from contrasting social backgrounds. The twelve year old young girl belongs to high class and is well protected by her father. She enjoys a high status on account of her father being a ruler of the synagogue. In contrast, the haemorrhaging woman comes from lower and vulnerable class. Her oppression is compounded: physical, economical, religious and social.20 Both the miracles took place by means of a touch. One is at a private residence and the other is on the public street. The gender and class dynamics that we notice in the text are significant in the context of Dalit women as they are the thrice-oppressed in Indian society. Dalit women cannot be compared with the caste women. Dalit women await their liberation from all kinds of public and often demeaning work, whereas caste women generally do not have such an experience of working on the cruel streets of India. Dalit women cannot be grouped under the umbrella of Dalits because the branded uncleanness and impurity of Dalit women based on menstruation, gender, and widowhood are alien to Dalit men. Dalit women cannot be discussed under the shade of all women in India because the caste oppression is foreign to many them. The haemorrhaging woman in the story is from a lowly class and has no choice but to be healed in public. Jairus’ daughter, on the other hand, even though unnamed and hence marginal within the family structure, still enjoys the privilege of belonging to a high class. The women of high castes in India enjoy certain amount of privileges due to their class and caste, whereas Dalit women undergo humiliation because they belong to the outcaste community. Hence, Dalit women are a separate entity and deserve special attention by the theologians. CONCLUSION

The impression of impurity and untouchability applies to the Dalit woman in three different ways. She is untouchable and impure because of her caste. Her gender subordinates her to men. She is doubly impure during her menstrual cycles, at widowhood, and because of the ‘polluting’ occupations she is assigned to carry out. The experience of Dalit women is unique and it cannot be equated with that of Dalit men nor generalized with that of all women in India. In formulating Dalit feminist theological hermeneutics, both gender and caste experience of Dalit women receives careful attention. The essay proposed to acquire a new brand for a new image and a new identity for Dalit women. In the discussion on the biblical story where the branded unclean, sick woman has become a ‘daughter’, that transformation is seen as a new brand. Under this new brand, she no

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longer projects herself as an unclean, sick woman but rather as a daughter who partakes in the power of Jesus and has entered into his household. The essay also connects the biblical story with the living stories of Dalit women. Jesus turned around to see the person in need. In fact, he is more sensitive to the special needs of those that need their dignity affirmed through touch. Dalit women who are treated as untouchable have a special need to be recognized as dignified human beings, to be called to come forward and enter into a family partnership. It is a mandate for us, the advocates of the oppressed and the church, to turn around and to feel the needs of the oppressed. Unless we turn around, the weak, the oppressed cannot come forward and be liberated. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Aruna Gnanadason quotes Gail Omvedt in , n.d., ‘Dalit Women—The Dalit of the Dalit’, in Arvind P. Nirmal and V. Devasahayam (eds), A Reader in Dalit Theology, Madras: Gurkul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, p. 130 2. Ibid. 3. Kancha Ilaiah, 2003, ‘Why I am not a Hindu’, in Anupama Rao (ed.), Gender and Caste: Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism, New Delhi: Kali for Women and Women Unlimited, p. 88; and cited in Swathi Margaret, ‘Insight’; available at http://www.sannaduttgu.com/INSIGHT/editorial_swathi_margaret (last accessed 3 June 2005). 4. James Theophilus Appavo, 1994, ‘Dalit Religion’, in James Massey (ed.), Indigenous People: Dalits, New Delhi: ISPCK, p. 120. 5. Kamla Bhasin and Nighat Said Khan, 2004, ‘Some Questions on Feminism and Its Relevance in South Asia’, in Maitrayee Chaudhuri (ed.), Feminism in India, New Delhi: Kali for Women & Women Unlimited, p. 5. 6. The term harijan was introduced by Mahatma Gandhi in lieu of ‘untouchable’. Dalits have rejected the term. 7. Margaret, ‘Insight’. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. From an anthropological perspective, the basic human needs include not only food, shelter, and clothing but also high self-image, security, and belongingness. 11. ‘Dalitness’, in its strict sense, connotes a lowly, oppressed, and suppressed subjectivity rather than within the restricted sense of caste. I struggle to wrest free of this caste-based determination than to just deconstruct the ‘outcaste’ category. 12. Monica Melanchthon, 2005, ‘Indian Dalit Women and the Bible: Hermeneutical and Methodological Reflections’, in Ursula Kind and Tina Beattie (eds), Gender, Religion and Diversity, London: Continuum, p. 221. 13. V. Devasahayam, 1997, ‘New Thrusts of Dalit Theology’, in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, Madras: ISPCK/Gurukul, p. 36. 14. D.A. Carson (ed.), 1953, New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, Secunderabad: OM–Authentic Books, p. 960.

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15. Leela Dube, 2003, ‘Caste and Women’, in Anupama Rao (ed.), Gender and Caste, pp. 231–132. 16. Devasahayam (ed.), 1997, Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p. 34. 17. Mini Krishnan and Malini Seshadri, ‘From Power to Empowerment’; available at http://www.hindu.com/quest/200708/stories/2007081050080200.htm (last accessed 16 April 2009). 18. Evangeline Anderson-Rajkumar, 1994, ‘Skin, Body and Blood: Explorations from Dalit Hermeneutics’,” in James Massey (ed.), Indigenous People, pp. 116–17. 19. Philip V. Peacock, ‘Untouchability is the Key’, In God’s Image, vol. 26, no. 3, September 2007, p. 57. 20. Devasahayam (ed.), Frontiers of Dalit Theology, p.32

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