What drives the Dalits to Christianity?
BHUPENDRA YADAV
DALIT THEOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY — Discordant Voices,
Discerning Pathways: Edited by Sathianathan Clarke, Deenbandhu
Manchala, Philip Vinod Peacock; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library
Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 745.
Although Christian missionaries of various denominations have been
active in India for several centuries, the 1941 Census placed the
number of Christians in colonial India at just 1.6 per cent of the
population. This clearly indicates that the main objective of the
British rulers was colonial domination and economic exploitation, not
religious conversion.
According to the 2001 Census, Christians constituted 2.3 per cent of
India's population. This rise of 0.7 percentage point in their numbers
over six decades has been a matter of debate. Starting with the Niyogi
Commission (1956) down to a Supreme Court's 1977 ruling, conversion
has been a highly contentious issue, sometimes inviting frowns from
officialdom and the judiciary. Hence the interest in the question
whether the Dalit converts to Christianity have indeed been seduced by
proselytising missionaries to "change Gods."
Urban artisans and people in the lower middle class have generally
turned against their established faiths throughout history.
Urbanisation gave these people a "greater access to religious
preachers, to literacy, to education and books, to a great variety of
personal relations, and to greater riches of urban culture," says
David Lorenzen in his introduction to Bhakti Religion in North India:
Community Identity and Political Action (1995). A distinct feature of
the Dalits who embraced Christianity is that a vast majority of them
are from the poorest sections in villages, not urbanites.
According to John Webster ( Religion and Dalit Liberation:1999),
changing the religion is one of the 'strategies' the Dalit communities
adopted in their struggle to secure social justice and equality. The
other four were: acquiring political power; securing as much
independence as possible from the dominant castes; initiating
reformist measures to reduce prejudices among themselves; and
deploying cultural modes of communication, like literature and
theatre, for conscientisation. Dalit theology has grown out of this
practice of changing religion. We have Christological reflections in
M.E. Prabhakar-edited Toward a Dalit Theology (1989), and
methodological formulations in Arvind Nirmal's Reader in Dalit
Theology (1992), and biblical reinterpretations in V. Devashyam's
Frontiers of Dalit Theology (1997).
This book presents, in three parts, 16 well-researched essays on
different themes by theologians and teachers and is a mine of profound
concepts and serious ideas on ecumenical social thought, myths of
Dalit origins, and so on. Does the 'Dalit Theology' have anything to
do with 'Liberation Theology'? Sadly, the points of
convergence/divergence between the Dalit Theology and the South
American Liberation Theology are not discussed in this book. One of
the reasons could be that Sathianathan Clarke, an editor of this
volume, has already authored a tome on the subject titled Dalits and
Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India
(1998). Yet, the omission is a real shortcoming.
From Punjab to Tamil Nadu, there have been a lot of conversions for
well over a century. What leads the Dalits to Christianity? Does
anything change for the better after conversion? It emerges that,
despite conversion, the Dalit Christians continue to be denied "land,
water and dignity." And the women among them have to bear the double
cross of 'lowest caste' and 'womanhood.' Sujatha, a woman tricked into
unwed motherhood, is told: "The palm leaf is torn, whether it falls on
a thorn or a thorn falls on it."
The relevance of the book stands enhanced in the context of the spate
of violent attacks by the Hindutva forces as a backlash to religious
conversions in recent years. The worst of these were witnessed in 2007
and 2008 in Kandhamal (Orissa), the target being the meek Dalit
Christians from the Pana caste. Dalit conversions are not a calamity
but they throw up situations of "slippery identities and shrewd
identifications," say Clarke and Peacock epigrammatically.
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