Community and Worldview among Paraiyars of South India

'Lived' Religion

Anderson H. M. Jeremiah

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472576101
• eBook ISBN: 9781441170668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This volume presents a detailed ethnographic study of rural Paraiyar communities in South India, focusing on their religions and cultural identity. Formerly known as Dalits, or Untouchables, these are a largely socially marginalised group living within a dynamic and complex social matrix dominated by the caste system and its social and religious implications in India. Through examining Paraiyar Christian communities, the author provides a comprehensive understanding of Paraiyar religious worldviews within the dominant Hindu religious worldview. In contrast to existing research, this volume places the Paraiyars within their wider social context, ascribed and achieved identity, religious symbolism and ritual and negotiation of social boundaries.
In arguing that the Paraiyars help us to understand religion as 'lived', the author removes the concept 'religion' from the reified forms it so often obtains in textbooks. Instead, Jeremiah demonstrates that it is only in local and specific contexts, as opposed to essentialised notions, that 'religion' either makes any sense or that theories concerning it can be tested.

1

Introducing the Dalit Context

Dalits in India

Similar to the geographical diversity in India, the country is also divided on the lines of language, culture and most importantly caste, constructing a distinct system for the oppressive social stratification in the subcontinent. The caste system forms the backbone of the Hindu¹ social order in India. Interestingly, the term Caste is Portuguese in origin derived from the Latin castus (chaste, the unadulterated, pure breed) used to designate the complex social system, as it did not fit into the early classifications of the European anthropologists.² Over the years it has evolved and become synonymous with the Varna system and is also considered identical to various social classifications in Indian society. This word needs to be used with caution as it carries various meanings, and modern understanding of the caste system tends to be very complicated. The social structure and ideology of the caste system is provided by the Hindu Dharma as outlined in the best-known Manusmriti or Laws of Manu, the law code of Manu.³ Various studies point to the fact that there is a possible merger of two social structures, the Varna (colour/vocation) class divisions and the Jati (birth) divisions.⁴ There are further divisions on the basis of purity and pollution,⁵ primarily at the religious ritual level and its implied social consequences as well as occupational.⁶ Varna literally means colour and is not a social group, but a classificatory unit that can be used for people as well as gods, animals, plants or other things. Within the Hindu society, owing to its religious origin, the Varna system facilitates a sense of order among people and prevents the society from disintegrating into chaos. With reference to society, it is essentially an order of birth class, varnashramadharma,⁷ and a division of social functions, but not a caste system. There are five different levels of the system: Brahman (Priest), Kshatriya (Warrior and Landowners), Vaishya (Merchants), Shudra (Agriculturalists) and Outcastes (polluted Untouchables).⁸ Within each of these categories are the actual castes, or jatis, within which people are born, marry and die. Jati derives its root from the word jan (to be born), which is partially synonymous with Varna. It has many meanings: descent, birth, race, family, genre, species, type, clan, state, nation, etc. and is more commonly used as subcastes by the social scientist. The Varna system has been in use for many years. Even today, the values of the Varna system are strongly held. In the Vedic Hindu system, the Untouchables are the Outcastes, primarily due to the nature of their traditionally prescribed professions involving polluted things, making them polluted people and pollutants in turn.⁹ There are various theories explaining the emergence and function of the caste system in the Indian sociocultural system.¹⁰ The caste system has far-reaching impact and consequences in Indian society as Nagaraj succinctly states, ‘the caste system in India is not only a structure of cultural values but also a certain pattern of inequitable distribution of power and wealth of different kinds along the lines of caste hierarchy’.¹¹ The significant aspect emerging from the discussions on the caste system is that a large section of people are left outside of the caste system and are designated as ‘Untouchables’. Either they belonged to a different Varna or ‘god’ simply created them to be lesser.¹² This social stratification and exclusion of outcaste is ordained, pursued and perpetuated by dominant religio-political and sociocultural forces.

The Outcastes were marginalized and pushed to the peripheries of Indian society. Against this background, various Self-Respect movements in India during the freedom struggle under leaders like Joythirao Pule and B. R. Ambedkar encouraged the Outcaste communities to rename themselves from ‘Untouchables’ or ‘harijans’¹³ to the affirmative ‘Dalits’, meaning ‘broken’, ‘split-open’ and ‘oppressed’, which connotes their wretchedness of life.¹⁴ As James Massey accurately describes, ‘Dalit is not a Caste. Dalit is a symbol of change and revolution’.¹⁵ The term ‘Dalit’ is also an overarching and mobilizing term to represent more than 450 ‘Untouchable’ communities in India. While it may initially seem counterintuitive to appropriate such bleak terminology, it did and does continue to raise awareness and to potentially empower those living in such a repressive system. The distinction and classification based on caste and occupation continues even today in most aspects of Indian society. Explaining the existential situation of Dalits in India, M. E. Prabhakar opines,

The Dalit condition is that of destitution and dehumanisation, Dalits have been the most degraded, downtrodden, exploited and least educated in our society. They have been socially and culturally, economically and politically subjugated and marginalized through three thousand years of our history and remain so, even after half a century of ‘protective discrimination’, under the aegis of the Government of India.¹⁶

According to the 2001 India census, the Dalit population constitutes about 16.2 per cent of the total Indian population, that is, 170 million people experience different kinds of discrimination in their life every day, the majority of whom work as daily labourers and landless agricultural workers in the unorganized sectors of Indian society.¹⁷ A majority of Dalits experience extreme poverty within the contemporary market-driven liberalized Indian economy.¹⁸ Further, Dalit communities are the most violated, both physically and mentally, within the Indian society.¹⁹ Dalits are considered ritually impure and physically polluting in the religious realm, which has serious implications for sociocultural relations. Dalits in general are not allowed to enter many Hindu temples, nor are they permitted to eat in or even enter the houses of non-Dalits. This attitude and perception of ‘untouchability’, physically and mentally, still prevails in most parts of the country in devious and explicit ways, even though untouchability is constitutionally outlawed.²⁰ The late K. R. Narayanan, former president of India, and the first Dalit to occupy the highest office in the country, recollected on the golden jubilee celebration of the Indian Republic thusly,

Untouchability has been abolished by law but shades of it remain in the ingrained attitudes nurtured by the caste system. Though the constitutional provision of reservation in educational institutions and public services flow from our constitution, these provisions remain unfulfilled though bureaucratic and administrative deformation or by narrow interpretations of these special provision.²¹

As mentioned earlier, Dalits in India are not a homogeneous category, but a collective of numerous sub-castes resulting in further internal fragmentation and alienation. Adding to the external discrimination by the higher castes, internal conflict within Dalit communities contributes to furthering their misery. Many researchers have shown that the immediate adversaries of a Dalit community are perhaps ironically another Dalit community, which is fighting for the same resources.²² In such a context it was hoped by the Dalit leaders that the creation of a collective Dalit Identity must heal those inner squabbles and mobilize Untouchable communities towards transformation of their lowly cultural, socio-economic and religio-political status.

Dalit Christians

Dalit Christians constitute about 10 per cent of the total Dalit population but make up 70 per cent of Christians in India, yet their situation is no better than that of non Christian Dalits.²³ Rather, discrimination merely assumes a different dimension and manifests itself in many patterns. Along with the burden of being a Dalit, Dalit Christians have to endure multifold discrimination, at the hands of the state, the society and of the institutionalized church. Within the Indian church, caste manifests the worst form of discrimination.²⁴ Non-Dalit high-caste Christians are often biased and they discriminate against Dalits at all levels of institutional, communal and administrative bodies. Being Christians, Dalits are also deprived of the educational and employment benefits from the Indian Government for the Scheduled Caste category. In most of the cases within the church, Dalit Christians are not even given the option to express their voices against exploitation, because the sermons and official teachings encourage them to be passive and submissive towards authority figure since their situation is due to the consequence of the Original Sin (the fall of Adam) and they need forgiveness for their sins, not social liberation.²⁵

In the process of uncritical inculturation the Indian churches have incorporated the hegemonic Vedic system of segregation, and have thereby become a place for further discrimination.²⁶ Even though Dalit Christians constitute the majority of the Indian Christian population they continue to be denied educational opportunities and social responsibilities, both within the church and outside of it. The Indian church is a blatant example of division on the basis of caste, with each Christian denomination identifying with a particular caste group and some churches even having separate Eucharist services for Dalits and non-Dalits. This situation partially mirrors the state of Dalit Christians in India today.²⁷ Dalit Christians face unfair treatment in both subtle and very explicit ways. This discrimination has become an enculturated habit resulting in segregation and ostracism.²⁸ According to many studies, the dominant caste communities continue to hold authority within the church,²⁹ and as Monikaraj comments, ‘Unfortunately the evil of caste identity crept into the Church. Dalits, who longed for human dignity and worth, were shocked to see the same discrimination making inroads in to the church premises’.³⁰

It is this context of the marginalization of Dalit Christians that gave birth to Dalit Theology, which emerged in the early 1980s as a critique of the dominant Indian Christian theology espoused within the mainstream high-caste-dominated churches. The context of discrimination within the church and society is the foundation for theological reflection by Dalits.³¹ Along with being critical about traditional Indian Christian Theology, Dalit Theology expresses the aspirations and reflections of Dalits from their own situatedness of marginalization. The process of theologizing in Dalit Theology primarily stems from the pain-pathos experience of the Dalits. A. P. Nirmal, a pioneer in Dalit Theology, observes that Dalit Theology is ‘about Dalits, from the Dalits and by the Dalits’,³² which expresses the faith of the depressed classes. From the perspective of this research, it is helpful to introduce a general view of the religio-cultural worldview of Dalit communities. As this book focuses on Paraiyars, a Dalit community in Tamil Nadu, a brief introduction may be helpful.

Paraiyars

Paraiyars are a Dalit community with a significant presence in South India.³³ Paraiyars are predominately agricultural labourers living in the rural parts of the country; however, according to the Hindu social order, they occupy a low status due to their traditional occupation of dealing with dead animals, which in turn makes them ritually impure and socially polluting resulting in their untouchable status. Thus, the Paraiyar ‘outcaste’ status operates at both religious and social stratums. Unlike other theories regarding the origin of caste system in India, Paraiyars have their own myths of origin. The common understanding is that Paraiyars descended from a relatively equal position or even superior status to Brahman.³⁴ Some of the myths suggest that actually the Paraiyar is the elder brother and the Brahmin is the younger brother, through such interpretation Paraiyars claim precedence over Brahmins.³⁵ Robert Deliege suggests that,

if the Paraiyars are poor, suffering and hard working, it is not because of their deeds in a previous life or because of some congenital defect, but because of a misunderstanding about their mythical ancestor. Consequently, the low status of the Paraiyars as a whole is largely underserved.³⁶

The important observation is that Paraiyars were once in an equal social status and succumbed to lower status. Sathianathan Clarke provides another theoretical view point that, ‘the Paraiyars are not Dalits because of their low and menial occupations. Rather, they are condemned to these occupations as a punishment for breaching caste laws established and enforced by the caste communities’.³⁷ He also accounts for Paraiyars’ association with the parai (drum), which provides them with their vocation and identity; however, not all Paraiyars engage in the drum beating profession.³⁸ On the contrary, Michael Bergunder traces a more recent nineteenth-century understanding of Paraiyars ‘origin’ through the work of Ayotti Tasa who claims them to be the ‘disinherited children of the soil’.³⁹ These differing preceding observations capture the difficulty of defining and pinpointing the origin of Pariyars, whether Christian or Hindu. Various researches conducted among Paraiyars conclude that in spite of their historical substantiation, they hold a culturally unique place in South Indian society.⁴⁰ Moreover, with a significant population they have come to represent other outcaste communities in contemporary Tamil Nadu. Even though Paraiyars have been the subject of many research projects, this work considers often glossed over areas residing in the crossroads of culture and religion.

Dalit religio-cultural worldview

The diversity and complexity of religious beliefs and rituals in India itself is a pointer to the presence of multiple religio-cultural worldviews. In India, religion and culture are not two exclusive areas, but mutually influence each other and are arguably one and the same. According to some Dalit scholars, historically the religious and cultural practices of Dalits were distinct...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the Dalit Context
• 2 Caste in Contemporary South Indian Churches and its Historical Roots
• 3 Identity and Community among Paraiyars
• 4 Yesusami and the Less Visible World: The Worldview of Paraiyar Christians
• 5 Reproducing Social Hierarchies: Power and Community
• 6 Social Efficacy: Religious Symbols, Performance and Subverting Local Customs
• 7 Lived Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index