Ashok Kumar Mocherla - Dalit Christians in South India: Caste, Ideology and Lived Religion

This ethnographic study of Dalit Lutherans in South India examines how the lived religion of Dalit Christians contests the structures of caste domination in rural Andhra. It shows how the emergence of Dalit Christianity generated new religious ideas, patterns, terrains, rituals, and practices that challenge the traditional notions of caste privilege and impact the politics of the region. It highlights the transforming role of Dalit agency in the development of Christianity, which is largely unexplored in the studies of Christian missions and anthropology of Christianity in India. The book looks at the social history of Christianity, critical events of protest, platforms of community politics, caste ideology, and local politics and interlocking of caste with congregation to provide a constructive critique of the dominant paradigm of the Dalit movement, which often treats Dalits as a homogenous social group. It discusses the pragmatic changes within the politics of Dalit Christianity as viewed from the margins of Indian society and incorporated through engagement with political ideologies (from communism to the Ambedkarite movement) and religious belief systems (from Hinduism to Christianity).

This volume at the intersection of religion and caste will be an essential read for students and researchers of Dalit studies, political studies, sociology, sociology of religion, religious studies, social justice and exclusion studies, and South Asian studies.

Ashok Kumar Mocherla is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore, India. His academic interests include sociology of religion, caste, faith healing, and missionary medicine.

Ashok Kumar Mocherla

First published 2021

by Routledge

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2021 Ashok Kumar Mocherla

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ISBN: 978-1-138-36679-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-04510-6 (ebk)

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Dedicated in fond and loving memory of my late father:

Ashok Kumar Mocherlas doctoral research, which has culminated in this book, explored the social and religious worlds of the Malas in coastal Andhra Pradesh in a village that he termed Dravidapuram. This Dalit community converted in large numbers to Lutheran Christianity, and the author charts briefly the historical trajectory of those conversions. He argues throughout the book that Christianity is a form of political awakening and consciousness for the Dalits of this region and that the Dalit movement cannot be comprehended without understanding local Christianity. The structures of the church and congregation and the practices of Lutheran Christianity in the Telugu coastal countryside are enmeshed with Mala caste organization. The sangham is effectively both congregation and caste body, and its elders lead both caste and church. While marginal to caste society, the Dalits in this region live in largely caste-dominated villages. Hence, their consolidation into the sangham and the dominance of the sangham in the everyday religious and social life of the people of the village is more easily facilitated. Iconic images and symbols from the broader Dalit political movement are integrated with the collective celebrations and ceremonies of the Mala Lutherans, which link the Mala Lutherans with Dalits outside of this region. However, the incorporation of such symbols and icons into local religious practices does not produce a homogenous Dalit identity that marks the group. Rather, what is produced is a particular and specific form of local Dalit Christian identity that needs to be understood and examined in its context.

This book traces in detail crucial aspects of the Mala socio-religious world: the fact that they need to manage their legal Hindu identity in relation to their lived Christian one, the shift to and implications of being recipients of Dalit Christian pastoral care from having lived on the margins of Hindu religious life, and the way in which Ambedkar becomes a part of particular church celebrations centred around the birth of Jesus Christ. The author makes the larger point that Dalit Christians in this Telugu region are at the forefront not merely of the leadership of their own churches and caste sanghams but of the mainstream Andhra Dalit movement. It is precisely the merging of caste and religious identity that creates a level of cohesion and enhanced organization, enabling the possibilities of political action. Gelled into one community as co-celebrants and congregational members, the Malas of this region are also disciplined into collective unity by the threat of excommunication from the church if they disobey the diktats of their sangham leaders. The centrality of the church to the lives of the Dalits makes this into a very potent threat. This politically acute understanding of the Mala Lutheran church is one of the important contributions of this work, apart from its clear analysis of lived religion at the village level.