Public Theology

Indian Concerns, Perspectives, and Themes

Gnana Patrick, Gnana Patrick

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781506449173
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506449180
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Religion

This book situates public theology within the genre of political theology. Drawing upon the distinct strands of political theologies identified by Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Gnana Patrick treats public theology as the form of political theology for our contemporary era and takes special care to relate these strands of political theologies to the Indian context, thereby opening up the theological horizon for Indian public theology. Further, Public Theology dwells upon certain prominent features of our contemporary global world and discerns the human need for experiencing transcendence today. Taking faith to be the catalyst for this experience of transcendence, it points to civil society as the interstice through which faith can be imparted to the contemporary world. And, it argues for the relevance of public theology for that work.

7

SUBALTERNITY AND RELIGION IN INDIA

Subaltern: The Concept, the Project, and Beyond

From the year 1982, when a Subaltern Studies Project (SSP) emerged with the initiatives taken by Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, the word “subaltern” became widely known in the Indian academic and civil spheres. As we know, the SSP itself did not invent the word, but took it from its earlier usages,^[1] especially by Antonio Gramsci who used it during the early part of the twentieth century. Gramsci spoke of two layers of consciousness existing among the subaltern people: one which is their own, giving direction or meaning to their spontaneous activity of transforming the world through their labour, and the other which they take in (oftentimes through imposition) from those who exploit, oppress, and dominate over them. There is thus a layer of native consciousness which is free, autonomous, and emancipatory, and another a layer of alien consciousness, imposed from outside. This results in a contradictory consciousness in the subaltern mind. Gramsci spoke of the possibility of the subaltern classes of people to emerge as agents of their destiny only when they acquired critical consciousness, with the role played by organic intellectuals who shared the common sense of the people but converted it into a good sense characterised by historical critical thinking.

Having this Gramscian insight as the backdrop, the SSP researched upon the subaltern consciousness as well as their agency, and published in volumes (12 until now) known under the generic title, Subaltern Studies—Writings on South Asian History and Society. In the very first volume, Guha clarified the term subaltern as a “general attribute of subordination … whether it is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other way”.^[2] Contrasting it with the term elite, which, according to him, stood for the “dominant groups, foreign as well as indigenous”,^[3] Guha used the term subaltern interchangeably with the term people, which stood for “the total Indian population”^[4] differentiating itself from the dominant elite. The SSP revisited the then-existing writings on South Asian history to unearth aspects of subaltern agency that lay buried under the colonial, nationalist, and Marxist historiographies which were the major historiographical paradigms of the time. It focussed, during its initial phase, primarily upon acts of insurgence or rebellion by peasants against empires of control, the colonial empire in particular. It searched such documents as police records, administrative reports, personal diaries, and oral traditions to bring up the elements of peasants’ agency that informed their native autonomous consciousness. Thus began a project of subaltern studies, which continues until this day with their publications to underscore the agency of the subaltern people.

While this project has initiated discussion and debate on aspects of subalternity primarily in academic circles, we find several social movements, human rights activists, civil rights advocacy initiatives, and organic intellectuals, pre-existing or existing parallel to the project and contributing in manifold ways for the empowerment and emancipation of the subaltern people in India. The work of Mahatma Phule during the nineteenth century and the contributions of B.R. Ambedkar during the twentieth century are two salient examples among the many. There are a good number of studies on them, independent of the SSP. They have shed more light upon the category of subaltern, treating the latter more emphatically within the Indian specific hierarchy of caste. Even the economic problem of poverty, the gender-related problem of patriarchy, the marginality of tribal people, and the multiple socio-political exclusions cannot be understood and eradicated without taking into account the way the caste-system works in the Indian society. Several studies have emerged today upon the continuing struggles of the people subordinated by the caste system, especially the most oppressed groups of people called by the generic name Dalits whose life-world, with all its victimhood as well as agency, becomes the anchor of subaltern studies.

Subaltern Studies and Religion

“How has the SSP treated religion?” is a good question to begin our exploration of the interface between religion and the subaltern self in the Indian context. Gramsci, in the context of his thinking of the revolutionary action for socialist transformation, treated religion along with the common sense, both of which, according to him, could not produce the critical historical consciousness (individual and collective) necessary for the revolutionary praxis. Religion, according to him, could not be a critical and historical consciousness premised upon a coherent thinking, because religion went with a disconnect between thought and action, as he found in the creedal/institutional religion (rather than in religion in its confessional sense).^[5] Gramsci was much worried that the institutional religion, as he experienced Catholicism in Italy, would always endeavour to keep the masses under its control and not allow them to acquire the transformative critical consciousness.

The volumes of SSP carried a few essays which had direct or indirect references to religion. In one of the pioneering essays, Partha Chatterjee, an important member of SSP, related the Gramscian understanding of subaltern consciousness to the reality of caste in the Indian context, touching upon the mediatory role played by religion.^[6] He wrote that, “Subaltern consciousness in the specific cultural context of India cannot but contain caste as a central element in its constitution”,^[7] and that the centrality of caste in the subaltern consciousness worked in conjunction with religion. In order to explain this, he drew upon the arguments of Louis Dumont, as found in his well-known work, Homo Hierarchicus, wherein he had spoken of the caste system as premised upon the triple principles of hierarchy, separation, and division of labour, which were based on the tensive unity continuously being forged between the opposite principles of purity and pollution. In his own words:

The three principles rest on one fundamental conception and are reducible to a single true principle, namely the opposition of the pure and the impure. This opposition underlies hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure, underlies separation because the pure and the impure must be kept separate, and underlies the division of labour because pure and impure occupations must likewise be separate. The whole is founded on the necessary and hierarchical coexistence of the two opposites.^[8]

While this co-existence was not easy, Dumont observed that it was the legitimating role played by the Indian dharma (universal religio-ethical code) that ensured its continuance. While relating this Dumotian insight with the Gramscian theme of the two layers of consciousness, Chatterjee opines that,

Religions which succeed in establishing a dominant and universalist moral code for society as a whole can then be looked at from two quite different standpoints. For the dominant groups, it offers the necessary ideological justification for existing social divisions, makes those divisions appear non-antagonistic and holds together a potentially divided society into a single whole. For the subordinate masses, religion enters their common sense as the element which affords them an access to a more powerful cultural order; the element of religion then coexists and intermingles in an apparently eclectic fashion with the original elements of common sense. ^[9]

Chatterjee, thus, sees “religion in class-divided society as the ideological unity of two opposed tendencies—on the one hand, the assertion of a universal moral code for society as a whole and on the other, the rejection of this dominant code by the subordinated”.^[10] He goes on to add that, “It is the construct of dharma which assigns to each jati its place within the system and defines the relations between jatis as the simultaneous unity of mutual separateness and mutual dependence”.^[11] For the subalterns, it could be religion that works to construct an alternate dharma to overthrow the caste system; and we do find such instances of alternate religious traditions, operative among the people from the pre-modern through the modern to our contemporary era.^[12] Our objective must be, as Chatterjee opines, “To develop, make explicit, and unify these fragmented oppositions in order to construct a critique of Indian tradition” of the dominant dharma. ^[13]

Chatterjee’s analysis of the place of religion in the subaltern consciousness could be treated as a good example of the few cases where SSP treated religion in its exploration.^[14] However, David Arnold, one of the seven founding members of the SSP collective, points out in a relatively recent essay published in a volume entitled, New Subaltern Studies, that “Subaltern Studies failed, at the outset, to take religion seriously enough”.^[15] This was because, according to him, “The initial Subaltern Studies’ view was instrumental in the sense that religion was seen as a means of gaining access to, and locating evidence for, subaltern consciousness and collectivity”, and not as a sui generis reality. Taking cue from Arnold’s criticism, Aparna Sundar, in her study of the Catholic Church among the Mukkuvars of coastal Tamil Nadu, argues for the “primary mode of religious engagement” in cultivating such values as participation in public sphere, democracy, interrogating authority, and so on.^[16] The church, in this case, becomes the arena for learning democratic values of participation, election, and democratic authority by which the people not merely enter into the wider public sphere, but continue to contest the lack of democracy and public sphere also within the church. Religious engagement, on its own, becomes the way secular ideals are nurtured. Thus, we see the emergence of a New Subaltern Studies, which approaches religion phenomenologically as a sui generis reality, without the modernist and instrumentalist biases. And this approach positions us in a meaningful way to study the relationship between the reality of subalternity and religion.

Exploring Subaltern Religions on their Own

It is instructive at this juncture to get to know that a good number of activist-scholars who, though not enlisted among the subaltern studies collective, have studied and contributed to the understanding of subaltern religion. Some selected examples are: G. Aloysius, Religion as Emancipatory Identity—A Buddhist Movement Among the Tamils Under Colonialism (Bangalore: The Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, 1998); Sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Author
• Preface
• Relating Political Theologies to the Indian Context
• Thinking of Public Theology in India
• An Indian Public Theology of Mission
• Faith and Culture: A Christian Poiesis
• Nurturing Transcendence: Church and Civil Society
• Religious Pluralism and Democracy
• Subalternity and Religion in India
• Ambedkar’s Philosophy of Religion as a Political Theology
• Biblical Hermeneutics: A Subaltern Perspective
• A Subaltern Public Theology of the Holy Spirit
• Encounter of End-Time Beliefs As It Occurred in Pandita Ramabai
• Conversation on Dharma
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index