Dalit Conversion Memories in Colonial Kerala and Decolonisation of knowledge

Vinil Baby Paul

DALIT CONVERSION MEMORIES IN COLONIAL KERALA AND DECOLONISATION OF KNOWLEDGE

2021, South Asia Research

This article seeks to decolonise knowledge of the conventional history of Dalits' Christian conversion and its implications in colonial Kerala. As the missionary archive is the only source of Dalit Christian history writing in Kerala, in this historiography social historians have been unable to include the memories of Protestant missionary work at the local level by the local people themselves. Their experiences and rich accounts are marked by dramatic actions to gain socioeconomic freedom and to establish a safe environment with the scope for future development. This article identifies how Dalit Christians themselves, in a specific locality, remember their conversion history, suggesting thereby the scope for a valuable addition to the archive.

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH Vol. 41(2): 1–16 Reprints and permissions: in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india DOI: 10.1177/02627280211000166 Copyright © 2021 journals.sagepub.com/home/sar The Author(s) DALIT CONVERSION MEMORIES IN COLONIAL KERALA AND DECOLONISATION OF KNOWLEDGE Vinil Baby Paul Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India abstract This article seeks to decolonise knowledge of the conventional history of Dalits’ Christian conversion and its implications in colonial Kerala. As the missionary archive is the only source of Dalit Christian history writing in Kerala, in this historiography social historians have been unable to include the memories of Protestant missionary work at the local level by the local people themselves. Their experiences and rich accounts are marked by dramatic actions to gain socio-economic freedom and to establish a safe environment with the scope for future development. This article identifies how Dalit Christians themselves, in a specific locality, remember their conversion history, suggesting thereby the scope for a valuable addition to the archive. keywords: conversion, Dalits, Kerala, missionaries, Protestant Christianity, slavery Introduction In recent decades, there have been several studies of the contributions made by various European missionary movements as well as their interactions with lower castes in nineteenth century South India (Gladstone, 1984; Kent, 2004; Kooiman, 1991; Mohan, 2015; Oommen, 1996, 1997; Viswanath, 2014; Webster, 1992). Mostly, these tend to emphasise economic factors and advantages that led to religious conversion, speaking of ‘rice Christians’ (Doss, 2018: 248). However, scholars have also found that apart from material benefits, acquisition of new traditions by imitating upper caste lifestyles, adopting Victorian morality and, above all, emancipation from social disadvantage are significant consequences of conversion. Through conversion lower caste communities began breaking economic bondage and repressive social hierarchies with the help of Protestant Christianity. They entered the world of words and public places, began wearing garments which otherwise marked out upper castes 2 South Asia Research Vol. 41(2): 1–16 (Sheeju, 2015) and started to construct new houses with the support of European mission workers (Gladstone, 1984; Kent, 2004; Kooiman, 1991). Other scholars were mainly interested in interpreting Dalit conversions under various European missionaries in Kerala (Mohan, 2015; Oommen & Webster, 2002; Yesudasan, 2010). Such efforts represent conscious, systematic attempts to move the focus away from the earlier paradigmatic history of Protestant Christian missionary work among local natives, towards the local people who left no written records of their experiences. That was not an easy shift. It began by carefully re-reading the colonial missionary texts and exploring additional local sources for writing South India’s Dalit Christian history. One of these important works analyses the experiential aspects of Dalit conversion, lower caste religious desires and the history of mentality by critically engaging with missionary writings (Mohan, 2015). This approach still faces significant constraints, however, imposed by exclusively following the often glorifying narratives of Protestant missionaries. These existing studies were developed by using missionary narratives from colonial times as a foundational and influential part of such research. In an effort to decolonise these trends in Dalit history writing in South Asia, this article demonstrates and argues that without strong support from oral archives and social memory, collected through ethnographic field surveys, textual missionary sources are inadequate for a full exploration of the history of lower caste conversion as a field of postcolonial knowledge. Fortunately, local narratives and memories of Dalit conversion are still active among Dalit Christian congregations in Kerala. This connection between local narrations of older and previous Dalit congregations and missionary writings is a crucial dimension, missing from contemporary social histories of Dalit conversion. The history of gospel communication at the local level and the local people’s memories of missionary engagements are both critically important sources for the historical study of slave castes’ past experiences. Missionary reports and ethnographic data from Dalit congregations, woven together, as demonstrated in this article, clearly depict that slave caste communities were, and are, not a blank slate. As subalterns, they can speak and claim their own versions of colonial missionary engagements, articulated from their subjective positions. From this vantage point of a methodology of decolonisation of knowledge, the article explores the history of Protestant Christian conversion memories among the Pulayas of Kerala, examining specifically the transformation of a unique Dalit settlement in Manchadikkari in Kerala’s Kottayam district from c. 1869 onwards, which was later supported by the Church Mission Society (CMS). This study explores how their ancestors’ lives and missionary memories are imprinted deeply in the minds of Dalit Christians even today. The article first outlines the historical background of slavery, missionary interventions and the Dalit representation in missionary journals. Further sections present and discuss local Dalit memories of Protestant mission work in central Kerala and highlight the precarious conditions surrounding early attempts of the converts to build a new and better life. Paul: Dalit Conversion Memories In Colonial Kerala and Decolonisation 3 Local Slavery and Missionary Journals In Kerala, vernacular and colonial sources inform us that men, women and children of lower castes were objects of transaction (Karashima, 1997: 23; Madhavan, 2012: 180–1). Agrestic slaves in Kerala belonged to communities such as Pulayas and Parayas, at the bottom of the social scale (Alexander, 1968: 1071). From the beginning of British rule in Kerala (1792), East India Company officers reported on the terrible condition of these slave castes. The Indian Slavery Act of 1843 legally abolished slavery in the Madras Presidency, part of British India (Hjejle, 1967: 96–102). During that time, however, Kerala was divided into three administrative units: British Malabar in the north, and the princely states of Cochin and Travancore, respectively, in the central and southern parts. Slave transactions continued in the two princely states until 1855 (John, 1915: 20–1). Persistent efforts of Protestant missionaries from the London Missionary Society (LMS) and Church Mission Society (CMS) played an important part in the eventual abolition of slavery also in Travancore and Cochin (Kooiman, 1991). Travancore had been first among British India’s princely states to receive Protestant missionaries. The LMS, the first Protestant missionary society in Kerala, started work on 25 April 1806 (Agur, 1990 [1903]: 497). In Travancore, LMS mission congregations were equally split among people speaking Tamil and Malayalam. The CMS movement was established slightly later, with the specific aim of spreading knowledge of Protestant ideas among the Syrian Christians of the Malabar coast areas. Thomas Norton commenced CMS work in Travancore and Cochin in 1816, exclusively for Syrian Christians, aiming to start a pure ‘English’ mission for the Syrian Christians in south-west India (David, 1930: 9). But the originally cordial relations between Syrian Christians and CMS missionaries soon turned sour and the missionaries stopped all connections with Syrians. Instead, they reached out to lower caste groups, expanding gradually across half the areas of Travancore and Cochin states, respectively. Missionary propaganda forced the colonial government in Madras to pressurise the native states to implement anti-slavery measures. The relevant proclamations were finally issued on 24 June 1855, though not widely circulated (Jeffery, 2014: 40–6). During this time, missionaries were actively working among Dalits in the native states and collected information about the living conditions of the Travancore people, in particular, which eventually became a major source of knowledge. From the nineteenth century onwards, many letters were sent by missionaries from Kerala, which at that time was not yet a state, giving details to the mission authorities in London, and a large number of writings were published in their journals. Historians who have studied Dalit conversion in south-west India based their research primarily on narratives culled from these various English missionary journals. As missionary texts have become the foundational part of such research, the social anthropologist John Peel (1996) noted the dangers of relying too much on published Protestant missionary works or treating them as a shortcut to what local primary sources could tell us. Memoirs and periodicals, which are of course edited to South Asia Research Vol. 41(2): 1–16 4 South Asia Research Vol. 41(2): 1–16 suit their particular audiences and functions, are never as full or close to the originating experiences as journals or letters, especially those written from the field (Peel, 1996: 70). Thus, the realisation dawned that accounts in missionary journals provide a peculiarly filtered view of Dalit lives and histories and generated a narrow, colonised form of knowledge about Dalit Christian life. The present article intervenes at precisely this point to provide a fuller historical record. Typically, the missionary writers themselves mostly provided only scant details about their interaction with Dalits. Generally, the names of lower caste persons are missing from such writings and unequal gender representation is a major limitation. We find not even five names of lower caste women from Kerala in the published missionary journals. For instance, in 1854, the CMS conducted the first slave caste conversion in central Travancore, when two families consisting of eight members received baptism. The missionary writings triumphantly depict this important moment but give only the two male names, Abel and his brother-in-law Cherradhy. Six female names are not mentioned. However, the history of these early converted families is quite familiar among local Dalits in central Kerala. Raj (1966: 33), one of the Dalit CMS pastors, recorded the details of the first converted family. Abel’s wife was Rahel, and they had four daughters: Ruth, Leah, Naomi and Esther. Academic works based on missionary journals, therefore, fail to fully record the local history or memories of the Dalit Christian past. More importantly, lower caste voices were abstracted or fragmented in these missionary journals. Since existing studies simply reproduced narratives from missionary journals, the emergence of Dalit Christianity was only defined by the support, and through the lens, of English mission groups. At the same time, the conversion to Christianity of Dalits in the colonial era was not merely a British plan in Kerala. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Dalit Christians were a significant presence, and a driving force, in several Christian denominations in Kerala. After the Protestant missionary’s intervention among lower caste groups (1850), the native Catholic communities (1858), Marthoma churches (1888) and Orthodox churches (1924) attracted thousands of Dalits, who joined these churches. Notably, the Zenana Mission (1865), Salvation Army (1896), Plymouth Brethren (1897), Pentecostal movements (1909) and Seventh-day Adventist Church (1914), too, had a huge following in the local community of Dalits (Thomas, 1975: 28–35). Even if we are aware of the diversity of Christian denominations, the colonial apparatus of Dalit conversion history offers little help to understand the complexities of lower caste engagement. Such narratives, at best, explain the economic exploitation of colonialism or stress the material advantage for lower castes on conversion, while still neglecting the voices of Dalits. Lower caste representation in nineteenth century Kerala thus appears in missionary journals as a jigsaw puzzle, waiting to be completed. A fuller, livelier version of this story can only be written by adding narratives of the Dalit congregations into this rather restricted, and thus partial, published account. This article argues, therefore, that only by studying Protestant missionary records and the ethnographic data together does one realise the multi-layered reality of the

Log In

DALIT CONVERSION MEMORIES IN COLONIAL KERALA AND DECOLONISATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Related papers

Related papers