Catholic Shrines in Chennai, India

The politics of renewal and apostolic legacy

Thomas Charles Nagy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317169147
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Though proportionally small, India's Christians are a populous and significant minority. Focussing on various Roman Catholic churches and shrines located in Chennai, a large city in South India where activities concerning saintal revival and shrinal development have taken place in the recent past, this book investigates the phenomenon of Catholic renewal in India. The author tracks the changing local significance of St. Thomas the Apostle, who according to local legend, was martyred and buried in Chennai and details the efforts of the Church hierarchy in Chennai to bring about a revival of devotion to St. Thomas. Insodoing, the book considers Indian Catholic identity, Indian Christian indigeneity and Hindu nationalism, as well as the marketing of St. Thomas and Catholicism within South India.

1
A brief history of Indian Christianity and the politics of modern-day Catholic renewal in Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Research objectives and methodology

Introduction to themes and objectives

Though proportionally small, India’s Christians are a populous and significant minority. According to the 2011 Census of India, 27,819,588 people (or 2.3 percent) of India’s one billion plus population are Christian, making Christianity the third most popular religion in India after Hinduism and Islam.¹ Roman Catholics make up the majority of India’s Christian population at somewhere between 17–20 million people.² Most of these Christians are situated in the southern-most Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. This study focuses on the Catholic shrines of Chennai, Tamil Nadu (Figure 1.1). Drawing on extensive ethnographic field work, it examines renewal and revivalist strategies associated with selected Catholic shrines and sacred sites. In so doing, it adds to the small but growing body of research into Indian Christianity.

In the most general sense, this book is about the politics of religious renewal – a theme that encompasses issues ranging from contests over indigeneity to concerns about social justice. I use the term renewal to mean a Church’s basic desire for revitalization in the face of perceived spiritual and community decline, and not in any theological sense or as an umbrella term for modern-day Pentecostal and charismatic movements. That being said, Catholic renewal in India is inevitably political partly due to the minority status of Indian Christians, and also because there are those within the Indian government and its political landscape who desire to obstruct Christian growth and evangelization. As such, this book covers a variety of significant themes pertaining to Catholic renewal in Chennai and elsewhere in India.

St. Thomas the Apostle’s missionizing legacy is a significant theme throughout this book. His first-century CE voyage to India reputedly led to the founding of the first Christian communities there, and his supposed martyrdom in the ancient Tamil city of Mylapore is still preserved by way of several significant Catholic shrines in modern-day Chennai. Thus, especially for the Catholics of Chennai, St. Thomas’s death and martyrdom play an important role in the fight for recognition of their indigeneity in the face of the political ideology of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). For the Church in Chennai, the imagery of St. Thomas’s shed blood upon Indian soil is a significant symbol of Indian Christianity’s first-century origins in Tamil Nadu that also serves to validate its claim for religious indigeneity in India. Accordingly, St. Thomas’s apostolic legacy in India also becomes a point of political contention, and St. Thomas himself, a figure of political controversy.

Figure 1.1 Map of South India showing the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as well as the location of Chennai.

Map: T. C. Nagy using StepMap: Design Your Map, http://www.stepmap.com/.

In order to highlight the general political dimension inherent to contemporary Indian Christian identity and Christian evangelization efforts in India today we only have to look as far as the official Indian census figure listed in the opening paragraph of this chapter. For many scholars of Indian Christianity the Census of India is actually seen as a highly problematic political tool, whose dubious history goes back to its inception during the era of British colonialism.³ More specifically, the Census of India represents the Indian Government’s purposefully conservative enumeration of Indian Christians living in India today. According to Kumar Singh, who was the Director General of the Anthropological Survey of India from 1984–1993, Indian Christians (c. 1992) actually make up 7.3 percent of India’s population.⁴ Furthermore, in a more recent tabulation, the World Christian Database (2015) places the number of Indian Christians at 63,396,832 people, which totals a more conservative 4.8 percent.⁵ If we take these figures at face value, the Census of India’s set estimate of nearly 28 million Christians is a far cry from reality.

Robert Frykenberg, a historian of South Asia whose work has contributed greatly to the study of Christian missions and Indian Christianity, cites both of the above statistical sources in his criticism of the Census of India. According to Frykenberg, the huge disparity between population figures is due to the influence and policies of various Hindu nationalist political organizations that have had some level of control within India’s government, and that have seemingly created an atmosphere within India’s political landscape in which, “historical understanding has become more of a hostage to ideological and political warfare, so that findings are themselves used as weapons for destroying what are deemed to be unpalatable verities and putting something more palatable in their place.”⁶ Many Indian Christians, especially those of a lower caste, are not afforded equal rights within their own country, and to some degree, not considered fully “Indian” by a substantive portion of their Hindu countrymen. There have been many instances in recent Indian history of militant Hindu nationalists perpetrating religiously motivated violence against Indian Christian and Muslim communities, which will be examined in Chapter 3. Thus, as highlighted by Frykenberg, many Indian Christians, “as tactics for their own self-defence,” choose not to identify themselves as Christians on any official government records or forms.⁷

Michael Bergunder, a specialist on Indian Christian Pentecostalism, also criticizes the Census of India for being an inaccurate representation of the Indian Christian population. Bergunder explains that this discrepancy is more a result of many Christian Dalits (low caste) not identifying themselves as such in order to maintain the “privileges” afforded them as Hindus.⁸ Combined with Frykenberg’s observations, it is easy to see how Christian identity has become a political issue in India today, especially for new and prospective converts.

On the other hand, India’s government was technically established as a secular democracy via its national constitution, which was officially adopted in 1950. Why then does the government, through the Census of India, wish to maintain that the country’s Christian population remains consistently, over several decades, at 2.3 percent of the nation’s population? Frykenberg and Bergunder seem to imply that the Indian government has its reasons for not wanting to fully acknowledge the rapid and real growth of Christianity in India. It seems obvious that the rising influence of certain forms of Hindu nationalist ideologies within the Indian government’s power structure has much to do with this attitude, and while the most mainstream forms of Hindu nationalism have become politically moderate in most respects, they still maintain a wariness of Christian population growth. By extension then, it is easy to see why Christian evangelization efforts within modern-day India have become an intrinsically political issue. As this book is about Indian Catholic renewal, which encompasses both evangelization and missionization, it is clear that such a political dimension extends even to a Church as globally influential as the Roman Catholic Church, if not especially so due to the nature of Catholic origins in India, as I will discuss further in this chapter.

Another important theme of this book is religious marketing, which provides a precise way of understanding and writing about modern-day Catholic processes for evangelization and missionization in today’s technological world. This marketing highlights Catholicism’s foreign and global character: when one joins the Catholic community, one becomes a part of an international community that shares a common faith and ritual system. For instance, the San Thome Cathedral Basilica in Chennai has the prestigious distinction of being one of only three apostolic tomb sites in the world. As a site of international significance, it spiritually connects Christian India to the rest of the Christian world. In this book I utilize some marketing terminology in order to better highlight many of the marketing strategies used by the Chennai Church towards the development of some of its shrines. Above all else, my examination of Catholic shrines in Chennai is about identifying religious innovation, in so far as to determine where and how history and tradition play as much a part in the development of modern-day Catholic evangelization as nation-wide economic growth and technological advancement

A third connecting theme in this book concerns the tensions and seeming contradictions of modern Catholic evangelization practices. On the one hand, these emphasize claims for Indian indigeneity, while on the other hand they highlight the importance of participation in a universal and international Church community. This tension is apparent in the religious marketing of Chennai’s recent Catholic renewal and St. Thomas revival, as well as in the Church’s current shrine-based evangelization strategy.

I would also like to note a second seemingly related contradiction with regard to Catholic evangelization practices in Chennai. Throughout this book I discuss two respective Church goals that at first sight appear to be separate issues. The first, as already mentioned, is Catholic evangelization, which pertains to the avid seeking out of new converts to the Catholic faith in order to grow and strengthen the local Catholic community. The second goal is communal preservation, which entails those preventive measures taken by the Church in order to curb the number of already baptized Catholics from leaving the Church. As this book will demonstrate in later chapters, such measures include greater emphasis on certain Catholic beliefs, as well as the fostering of a better communal awareness about local history and tradition, especially concerning the Indian legacy of St. Thomas. For the purposes of my project, I understand both of these agendas as parts of the same Catholic enterprise of missionization, which looks to strengthen the community of faithful through both the bringing in of new converts via evangelization, and the maintenance of the already established congregation via community support and education programs, as well as continued spiritual guidance. Both goals are equally significant parts and simultaneous steps within the Church in Chennai’s over-arching strategy of evangelization through the development of its many shrines. The basic premise is that before a parish can convince a potential convert to join the Church, it should be able to present to the individual the happy, knowledgeable, and welcoming community that he or she would hopefully join.

There is no statistical data that I have access to that validates the Church’s fear that significant numbers of Indian Catholics are leaving the Church in India. However, there are several socio-religious and political factors at play within the context of modern-day India that have given the Church cause for concern. This book discusses two significant factors. The first is the steady growth of right-wing Hindu nationalism within India’s political arena, whose most extreme factions have become hostile to the nation’s Christian minorities. This development has led many within the Church to speculate that some congregants would leave due to social pressures or even out of fear for their lives, as also noted by Frykenberg and Bergunder.

Second, and equally important, is the rising tide of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian sects that have recently gained a surprising foot-hold in South India, especially in Chennai. This phenomenon has prompted the Church to take considerable notice of allegations of “sheep-stealing” supposedly occurring in relation to Catholic youths who are being enticed away from the religion of their birth by more ecstatic and emotional forms of worship typical of Pentecostalism. This topic is discussed in more detail towards the end of this book.

Finally, I wish to make clear a specific theoretical agenda that I have maintained throughout the writing of this book. This is simply the purposeful avoidance of a post-colonial perspective with regards to Christianity in India. In other words, for the purposes of my project, I do not see post-colonial theory as being a necessary requirement for the study of contemporary Indian Christianity. In fact, it is my opinion that post-colonial theory only serves to muddy the waters within this context, especially since many of my informants are not interested in deconstructing their colonial pasts, but in progressing forward with their present-day identities as Indian Roman Catholics. In maintaining a focus primarily free of post-colonial discourses, I believe that I am better able to a present an original and empathetic discussion on contemporary Indian Catholicism and Christianity at work within Indian today. Indeed, I believe that the originality and creativity of my project owes much to the fact that I have chosen to distance it from the commonality of post-colonial theory.

It should be clear by now that the majority of this book is based on data collected in the city of Chennai (formerly Madras), which is Tamil Nadu’s capital and India’s fourth largest city (see Figure 1.1). Over a period of nearly six months in 2009, with a follow-up trip of three weeks in December o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A brief history of Indian Christianity and the politics of modern-day Catholic renewal in Chennai, Tamil Nadu: research objectives and methodology
• 2 Reviving the history of St. Thomas: martyrdom and burial as a new myth of origin for Indian Catholics in Chennai
• 3 The influences of Indian political ideologies on Catholic revivalist strategies in Chennai
• 4 The physical renovation of San Thome Cathedral: revival through tourism, branding, and heritage preservation
• 5 A broader view of Catholic renewal in Chennai: a strategy for shrine-based evangelization
• 6 Conclusion: Catholic renewal in Chennai
• Bibliography
• Index