Telugu Christians

A History

James Elisha Taneti

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506469430
• eBook ISBN: 9781506469447
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This volume narrates the history of Telugu Christians, a faith community located in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry in southern India. A social history of a faith community, this volume analyzes how social aspirations of the community, local worldviews, and historical contingencies shaped the beliefs and practices of Telugu Christians. It relates and interprets the history of Telugu Christians chronologically from the sixteenth century until the current times.

The first two chapters of the book examine the earliest encounters between the Christian message that European missionaries introduced and the local Christians. Covering three centuries, this section highlights the appropriation of the Christian message among the caste converts.

Later chapters analyze the impact of Dalit conversions and women's leadership on the social fabric and theological texture of Telugu Christianity in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

The book ends with a consideration of three dominant movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first, namely the process of Sanskritization, the influences of Pentecostalism, and those of Holiness movements on the Telugu church. In conclusion, Taneti recaps how caste and empire shaped the faith and practices of Telugu Christians.

Part I

1

Introduction

Telugu Christianity is a site of collaboration, compliance, and conflict among social groups, with their religious quests and the political aspirations behind them. The confluence of social groups in the Telugu Church and their social interests determine the trajectory of its faith development. Amateur observers and non-Christian neighbors identify the community with Dalits and women, two groups at the margins of Telugu society. As a child, I witnessed the gatherings of these Christians being publicly shouted at and heard discreet whispers about their “untouchable” origins and “feminine” religion. Even the caste Christians tend to identify Christianity with Dalits and hence call themselves “converts” and not necessarily Christians. Although there may be a hint of contempt behind these claims, they are not without merit.

Telugu Christianity is a religion of the marginalized. In the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Dalits embraced it and filled the church pews and pulpits. During this period, Christianity on the subcontinent had grown exponentially. The growth of Christianity was so phenomenal that Stephen Neill, a mission historian, claimed that Protestant Christianity on the subcontinent had grown tenfold in the second half of the nineteenth century.1 It is difficult to account for the percentage of Dalits in the Telugu Church today, as many of them do not identify themselves as Christians due to the implications it would have on their education and employment. The government of India designates a certain share of seats in education and employment to Dalits, a provision aimed at protecting the groups that have been wronged and ensuring equity for all social groups. This affirmative discrimination is also called “reservation.” The Dalits who identify themselves or are identified as Christians are denied this provision because of a constitutionally agreed-upon claim that there is no caste system in Christianity and that one cannot be a Christian and Dalit at the same time.2 Reservation is denied to Muslims and Parsees as well. Given the porous nature of religious identities, Dalits and Christians may call themselves Hindus or the census might record them as Hindus. Given the politics of identity, it is both challenging and risky to accurately number the percentage of Dalits within the church. Having consulted with colleagues who specialize in the history of Telugu Christianity, I roughly estimate that at least three-fourths or more of Telugu Christians are of Dalit background.3 The lack of data did not deter Solomon Raj Pulidindi, a Lutheran scholar, from identifying the Telugu Christian community with Dalits.4

The women outnumbering the men in most Christian gatherings signals the interest women show in Christianity. In addition to filling the pews, women—Dalit and “caste”—have been at the front lines of introducing the tradition to their families and communities and in inviting them to faith in Christ, as I will demonstrate in the following chapters. They continue to transmit and interpret the Christian tradition at home and in their communities.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their location at the social margins, Telugu Christians, by and large, are as Sanskritic as their non-Christian neighbors and occasionally more Hindu than others. The very values of which they found themselves victims and protested against to become Christian and the practices that perpetuated their subservience are the same values and practices an observer and non-Christian would find in them. For example, Telugu Christians do not lag behind their dominant caste counterparts in practicing endogamy, a system designed to cement caste boundaries and the control of women. This riddle prompted the rendering of this story. I seek to explain this conundrum of the marginalized mimicking the dominators by analyzing the social processes at work in the making of Telugu Christianity. The aim of this volume is two-pronged and modest. It is, first, to narrate the story of Telugu Christians and while doing so, second, to demonstrate how the social interests of social groups shaped the reception, interpretation, and appropriation of their religion.

While attempting to analyze the processes of reception, interpretation, and appropriation of Christianity by Telugus, I draw from the masterly work of Lamin Sanneh in his book Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture.5 Examining various episodes of vernacularization in the history of Christianity, Sanneh points to how the translatability of the Christian message undermines possible attempts by the preacher to elevate their culture and stigmatize the culture of the hearer. Every preaching of Christianity is an encounter of two cultures, that of the preacher and that of the hearer. The preacher transmits the message, and the hearer, out of their cultural worldview, appropriates it. Sanneh considers these processes of transmission and appropriation as basic to the translation of the Christian message. The principle of translation theologically inherent in Christianity invariably affirms the worldview enveloped in the local language.6

What if two groups speak the same language and yet subscribe to different worldviews and power interests? In the case of Telugu Christians, the appropriation of the Christian faith involved more than one worldview. It included the worldviews of Dalits, Adivasis, and the myriad “caste” communities. In becoming Christians, converting groups abandoned some of their beliefs and practices and retained others. At the same time, they reinterpreted and internalized parts of the Christian messages to fulfill their interests and aspirations. In these processes of abandoning parts of the old, retaining some, and appropriating elements from the new and together forging a new faith community, there were losses and gains, some volitional and others negotiated. Those with social leverage dominated this complex negotiation. The power equations between the preacher and the recipients as well as among the recipients invariably impacted the process of translation. In the process, though numerically dominant, Dalits and women had yielded more than their dominant caste counterparts had in the appropriation of the new faith. With social respect as their goal, Dalits and women, even while embracing Christianity, have subscribed to Sanskritic values and practices, what M. N. Srinivas, a sociologist, calls the process of Sanskritization. Srinivas defines this process as the one through which groups from the lower strata of society emulate the customs, rituals, ideologies, and lifestyles of the dominating castes to climb the social ladder.7 He lists religious conversions, neo-Vedantic movements, and Sanskritization as weapons of the “low” castes in their demands for better social status.8 I argue that the processes of Christianization and Sanskritization have been parallel for Telugu Christians. I consider the practices of endogamy and the hierarchy based on caste and gender as the markers of Sanskritization.

The process of Christianization invariably involved incorporating a certain degree of modernity. Colonial and missionary collaboration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made literacy accessible to Dalits. Despite having to choose between livelihood and school, Dalit Christians, by and large, took advantage of the opportunities. Not all could afford to risk lives and livelihood. Having acquired some level of education, many have pursued occupations beyond agriculture, scavenging, and leather-processing, the ones required of Dalits by the traditional Telugu society. And in the process, they moved from receiving wages in kind to a cash-based economy. The move toward literacy, nontraditional employment, and a cash economy had a social agenda as well as implications on their social status. Thus the goal of social respect has been a common thread in the processes of modernization and Sanskritization. The Telugu Christians are by-products of these processes.

To demonstrate how the social interests and political milieu of the Telugu Christian communities impacted their negotiation with the worldview of the Western preachers and with their own, I have divided the book into two sections. While the first narrates the tale of Telugu Christians in the shadow of Western colonialism—Portuguese, Danish, French, Dutch, and British—the second section focuses on the developments in the postcolonial era. This division acknowledges the role political milieu plays in the evolution of a faith community.

The second chapter analyzes the sporadic and scattered interactions among Telugus in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The sites of these encounters and the social location of the converts point to the origins of Telugu Christianity, and the literature produced during the period exposes the dominance of the literati—local and European—in its evolution. The missionary focus had been on the dominant groups, and the favorable responses had been from the Sudhra castes. The Telugu Christian literature produced by both natives and European missionaries communicated the Christian fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Part I
• Part II
• Selected Bibliography
• Index