Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies

ISSN: 2414-8636

Theme: Multi-religious Entanglements in Peninsular

Guest Editor: Ines Zupanov

Vol. 5. No. 1. July, 2020 Published at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

Editors

P. Pratap Editor-in-Chief Emeritus University of KwaZulu- Kumar Professor Natal, South Africa

Deepra Associate Researcher, Leibnitz-Zentrum Dandekar Editor Contested Moderner Orient, Religion Berlin

Ajaya K Sahoo Associate Associate University of Editor Professor , India

Ines Zupanov Guest Editor Professor Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS, Paris

Editorial Board Members

Member Institution Email Butler University, Chad Bauman [email protected] USA University of Michel Clasquin [email protected] South Africa Arun Jones [email protected] Emory University University of Goolam Vahed [email protected] KwaZulu-Natal Concordia

T.S. Rukmani University, [email protected] Canada Knut A. University of [email protected] Jacobsen Bergen, Norway Universität

Martin Bauman Luzern, [email protected] Switzerland Melbourne Purushottama University, [email protected] Bilimoria Australia Yoshitsugu Tenri University, [email protected] Sawai Japan University of Ramdas Lamb [email protected] Hawaii, USA University of Kim Knott [email protected] Lancaster, UK Corinne Nazereth College, [email protected] Dempsey USA Antoinette University of [email protected] DeNapoli Wyoming, USA

Member Institution Email Cleveland State Anup Kumar [email protected] University, USA University of Brij Maharaj KwaZulu-Natal, [email protected] SA Centre for South Mathieu Asian Studies, [email protected] Claveyrolas Paris

ISSN 2414-8636

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Table of Contents

Triumph in the face of Obstacles: the Nidan 2020 (July Issue) Deepra Dandekar 1

Voices from India’s Borderlands: Indigeneity and the De-Centering of Dissent against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) Shaheen Salma Ahmed & Suryasikha Pathak 3

Religious Entanglements and Shared Texts: The Western Syriac Revision and Reception of the Malabar Sermonary Radu Mustață 26

Fighting and Losing Ancestors: Untouchable and Dilemmas of Modernity in Colonial Reju George Mathew 55

Book Reviews

Antony Mecherry, SJ. (2019) Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros SJ in Malabar (16th-17th Centuries). Reviewed by Francis X. Clooney, SJ 78

Pankaj Jain. (2020) Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora. and New York: Routledge. Reviewed by Narasingha P. Sil 82

Tschacher, Torsten. (2018). Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ predicament in Singapore. New York: Routledge. Reviewed by Rodney Sebastian 85

Editorial Preface

Despite all the challenges caused by covid-19 around the world, I am finally pleased to announce the release of the July 2020 issue. I apologize to all the readers, members of the editorial board and all the stakeholders for the delayed release. The global pandemic has forced upon us a new normal in which we need to find new ways of teaching and researching. As we continue to discover new ways, Nidan will always endeavor to support scholarly publications and make them available to scholars across the globe. This year, despite all the limitations, our authors have managed to submit their papers and Nidan is happy to offer them to you, albeit rather belatedly. I want to express my gratitude to Prof Ines Zupanov for guest editing the issue. I want to thank the authors for their contributions to the Nidan’s goals for advancing scholarly . I wish to express my gratitude to all the peer reviewers for their critical and insightful comments on the papers and for helping authors to take cognizance of the issues they may have missed. I also wish to thank the book reviewers who have offered thoughtful reviews on some key publications that we have included in this issue. As always, I am grateful to all the editorial board and the associate editors, especially Dr. Dandekar for ensuring that this issue is kept alive. I thank the Sabinet staff for their continued support for Nidan. I also wish to thank the UKZN Website Staff for their diligent work, especially Mr. Vincent Mboyeni for managing our website. I hope that the readers will find the papers and book reviews thought provoking and illuminating. Thanks again for supporting Nidan.

P. Pratap Kumar Editor-in-chief

Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 1-2 ISSN 2414-8636 doi.org/10.36886/nidan.2020.5.1.1

Triumph in the face of Obstacles: the Nidan 2020 (July Issue) Deepra Dandekar, Associate Editor: Nidān Leibnitz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. [email protected]

It gives me great pleasure to announce the July issue of Nidan: International Journal of Indian Studies, for which I am now working as associate-editor for the second consecutive year. After successfully guest editing the 2019 Nidan special issue on in India, I was deeply honoured when Professor Pratap Penumala invited me to accept the position of associate editor for the journal. Professor Penumala and I had already struck up a cordial and efficient working relationship and saw eye-to-eye on several academic and political issues, giving me the freedom and confidence to choose my own themes, decide on paper submissions, and other reviewers and guest editors. Professor Penumala’s constant and gentle, encouraging words of wisdom gave me courage to face CoVid demotivation this year that sometimes felt insurmountable, and my work experience with various authors, reviewers, and the efficient team of editors at the University of KwaZulu-Natal humbled me with their dedication. I received much enthusiasm from junior and senior scholarly professionals alike, who were happy to contribute and review papers for Nidan. In fact, the academic verve I encountered while working with Nidan has gone a long way in restoring my faith in academia in general, bringing me in close contact with many highly merited researchers. That said, 2020 has been a difficult year for us all, and like other more- established journals, Nidan too was hit by the CoVid pandemic. Though we had a large number of promising contributors for the July 2020 issue, a majority of them declined in the end due to the crushing crisis of the Pandemic that saw them unable to travel, undertake fieldwork, library, or archival research, and even maintain academic contracts, with universities and research institutions closing indefinitely. While the very existence of many scholars came under threat, with classes moving online, many of our other contributors faced personal losses and family crises made more difficult by the pandemic. We take a moment to thank them for their

1 Dandekar / Triumph in the face of Obstacles dedication to Nidan this year, despite these difficulties, and also take the same opportunity to thank our reviewers. I am happy to say that despite the pandemic chaos, we have three robust papers for the July 2020 Issue, in addition to our usual array of interesting book reviews. While one of the papers on Peninsular India in the July 2020 Issue emerged out of a conference on multi-religious entanglements in South organized in April 2019 by Professor Zupanov at the CEIAS in Paris, we received an additional, independent paper on vernacular Dalit literature in Kerala. We further added to the July Issue, bolstering the conference thematic with another current, vibrant topic of significance: the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act civil movements that raged across India in 2019. And as part of this, we elicited two excellent articles on Assam, and on the Jain community in . The CAA discussions concentrating on religious difference, ethnicity and indigenous rights were not without its resonance with entanglements faced by religious communities in the past either, which was a topic so central to our conference theme. I am therefore, happy to announce that despite our editorial struggle with the CoVid chaos, our July 2020 Issue reflects the human cause of living and working together amidst various claims and vicissitudes of feeling different.

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Voices from India’s Borderlands: Indigeneity and the De-Centering of Dissent against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)

Shaheen Salma Ahmed PhD Candidate (Cultural Studies), Monash University Email: [email protected] Suryasikha Pathak Faculty, Centre for Tribal Studies, Assam University Email: [email protected]

Abstract

India’s Northeast region (NER) has been framed politically over the years in myriad ways, often as a frontier for resource extraction, or a frontier with strategic boundaries. It has also been perceived as the margins of a pan-Indian civilization, wherein the communities are constructed as the racial ‘other’. This construction has prevailed in even the precolonial discourse of difference when Assam was ruled by several dynasties and was a not part of the Mughal map. Colonialism accentuated these polarities through its administrative and ethnographic discourses. Despite being fairly integrated as a part of British India, postcolonial northeast India witnessed growing marginalisation from the centre. Issues of demographic change, resource extraction, governance, sovereignty remained political issues for movements from the region. The region remained as a ‘law and order’ situation for India. The delegitimization of voices from the Northeast has been a long historical process. The movements against CAA and the entanglements of NRC bring back those issues of ‘othering’ and ‘silencing’.

Key Words: Frontiers, Borderlands, Citizenship, Northeast India, Indigeneity, Immigration

Two political acts, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have brought questions of citizenship in India’s Northeastern borderlands to the forefront of all political debates1. Since 2018,

1 The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) to amend India’s citizenship laws in 2016. The Bill was passed in both houses of the Parliament and received the President’s assent in December 2019 and is now the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This new law amends India’s Citizenship Act, 1955 and provides a faster

3 Ahmed & Pathak / Voices from India’s Borderlands

and more aggressively since 2019, the people of this region have been protesting against the CAA for undermining especially the NRC that resulted from many decades of mass struggle in Assam. Whereas Indian ‘mainland’ protests against the NRC/NPR (National Population Register) and CAA are specifically framed within parameters seen as going against the ‘secular’ grain of the Indian Constitution, the CAA has further become communally motivated by the BJP, right-wing political party of India.2

Voices of protest from Northeast Region of India (NER) have become ignored and lost in this current conundrum where a crescendo of protests have emerged in mainland India. In the light of a long history of protest against illegal immigration from East-Pakistan/Bangladesh into Assam, this paper argues that the CAA is an anti-indigenous policy implementation for the NER that effects a complete demographic restructuring of its many regions. NER being home to many linguistically and culturally varied ‘tribal communities’, its unique cultural space has come under further significant cultural and political threat from the proposed demographic restructuring motivated by the CAA. While one might claim that the presence of Bengali speakers in the region is nothing new, since Bengali speakers are already the second largest linguistic group in the state of Assam, this number has witnessed a steady increase between the 1991 to 2011 census. This increase has yet not marginalised the Assamese language spoken predominantly in Assam.3 Bengali speakers of the region have, nevertheless, been aggressive about imposing their linguistic and cultural presence in the region. While Bengali is the eighth largest language in the global map of languages in terms of the number of its speakers, no other language from the NER figures in the top fifty languages in terms of its speakers. Moreover, it is not about language alone, but in terms of cultural practices too, the regional hegemony and homogeneity of Bengali language speakers from erstwhile East Bengal/East-Pakistan/Bangladesh makes them an aggressive community in the NER.

This paper discusses how people from the NER have been both at the centre stage as well as the receiving end of discriminative ‘mainland’ Indian policies

route for citizenship to refugees who have fled religious persecution from India’s neighbouring countries. Thus, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Parsi and Jain refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, who came to India before 31 December, 2014 and have stayed in India for a minimum period of six years are now eligible to be Indian citizens. Cf. Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019: What is it and why is it seen as a problem, The Economic Times, 31 December, 2019, accessed 11 September, 2020, for further information on the CAA. 2 Mainland India is a term used in political parlance of Northeast India as a ‘place making strategy’ producing Northeast India and its terrains as administered, governance category. Geographically speaking, the Northeast in this case refers to what is beyond the narrow landmass of 22 kms in Siliguri, West Bengal, named the chicken neck, which connects the 7 states with the rest of Indian states. This term also refers to a discourse stemming from political movements that sees Assam and other states of the region as marginalized by the Central government, and its seat of power in . (Cf. Sanjib Baruah, 2005: 3-29). 3 For further information, Cf. Sushanta Talukdar, Census 2011 Language Data: Assam records decline in percentage of Assamese, Bodo, Rabha and Santali speakers, Nezine.in, 28 June, 2018, accessed 18 May, 2020.

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imbricated within the larger history of colonialism. In fact, we argue, that the onslaught of colonialism and its political legacies are strongly entangled in the structuring and transformation of demography in the NER, with what was first a comprador relationship slowly turning into settler colonialism. This paper discusses what underlay this discriminative and selective promotion of communities in the NER, concluding that colonial methods such as racial discrimination and race sciences popular in the 19th century, were in fact at the heart of a rationale that marginalised the indigenous populations of Assam in particular and the entire NER in general.

The current peoples’ movement against CAA and the controversies around the NRC regarding its implementation, awakened issues of the distant and recent pasts. Margins have evoked and provoked constructions of stereotypes. This paper delves into this opportune construction of the ‘other’ that is always interlinked racially and politically.

The Lazy Native subject vs the Hardworking immigrant: Colonial Stereotypes

The (EIC) annexed Assam in 1826 after the first Anglo- Burmese war. Already strongly and profitably entrenched in the massive Bengal plains, the Company had no real economic interest in the region per se. Precious resources like limestone, were already being accessed from the Bengal plains into the Khasi and Jaintia Hills. As empire grew changes were imminent, as explained by historian Gunnel Cederlof; the ‘Northeast’ was to become important due to different reasons. “To the British East India Company (EIC), it spelt wealth and extended endlessly towards China. This strategically located region, termed ‘the North-Eastern Frontier’, was a factor in securing the global dominance of the British Empire” (Cederlof, 2014:1). This emergence of the NER as an important frontier / borderland was in opposition to previous, long standing, pre-colonial imagery drawn from Sanskrit and Persian texts that depicted “Assam as a remote periphery to which legend and hearsay attributed a fearsome reputation for supernatural wonders and esoteric witching rituals” (Sharma, 2012:2). The transition towards becoming an important hinterland, for Assam was finally marked by the discovery of tea. Since the presence of ample land in the province was a moot administrative point for the colonial state, the EIC in its early surveys used two metaphors for the land of the Northeast - ‘land abundant’ and ‘jungly’, both of which indicated that capitalist exploitation of land was yet to take place in Assam.4 The period after Burmese invasions experienced a sharp dip in population, with many abandoning home and hearth. Tea emerged as a commodity par-excellence in terms of its market value for the British Empire. Having run into trade troubles with China, the discovery of tea in Assam opened an opportunity for venture capitalism, and “instead of a profitless jungle, a new Eden beckoned” (Sharma, 2012: 27).

4 See Baruah, 2005: 86-87 for more discussions.

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The departure from settled and unsettled rice cultivation into commercial agriculture marked the first changes in land usage patterns in colonial Assam that witnessed the emergence of the ‘modernisation’ paradigm that subsequently developed in different directions. For example, while the profitable discovery of tea and its associated establishment as a major venture, initiated changes in land regulations in Assam, it also created an artificial shortage of manpower. The British abolished the Ahom Paik system, hoping that people freed from this system would fulfil the requirement of labour within newly acquired and functioning tea gardens.5 This expectation however, failed, and was replaced by the gradual emergence of racial stereotypes in terms of geography – producing the region and people now as an “insalubrious valley” of “lazy and indolent people” (Sharma, 2012: 63:65). Moreover, thick jungles considered malarial tracts were cleared to establish new tea plantations, and due to the growing demand of clerical work, both in the colonial bureaucracy and in the management of the tea gardens, people from other regions migrated into the province. While the first category of these ‘Babus’ hailed largely from East Bengal, they consisted of educated Bengali-speaking from districts like Sylhet, who collaborated with the EIC to build a mechanism of local governance and control over the native population of Assam. Only a few people from erstwhile scribal classes of the Ahom kingdom managed to occupy such positions. The bulk of labour came from the tribal areas of the Chotanagpur region, Eastern UP and present day Telengana, mostly brought by coercive mode of labour recruitment.

Towards the end of the 19th century, there were many other groups that arrived in Assam to build a career or to speculate, due to the opportunities offered by the colonial state. The region became incorporated, not only into the fiscal and economic mechanisms of the colonial statecraft, but also within its administrative and political framework. Mills Report, which was the foundation of many such administrative decisions, described the hills as inhabited by ‘uncivilized tribes’, further referring to the Assamese common peasant as ‘apathetic and indolent’.6 The condition of Assam described by Jenkins7 was

5 During the Ahom period, adult males arranged in what is known as Khels, rendered labour services to the Ahom state. The colonial state, looking into the hierarchies of medieval Ahom in an attempt to find revenue lineages, focused on the administrative category of ‘paik’ which transformed over a period of time into the idea of a ‘ryot’. For further discussion on the subject, cf. Kar (2019: 38-65), and Amalendu Guha (1983: 3-34). 6 A. J Moffat Mills was Judge of the Sudder Court during the early days of British rule in Assam. In the preface of his republished report C.P Saikia writes “…the Volume deals separately with six districts of erstwhile Assam, namely. Goalpara, Gauhati, Lakhimpur, Nowgong, Sibsagar and Darrang. In his report, Mills gathered information and expressed his views and offered suggestions on such diverse aspects as the area of land, revenue system, modes of cultivation, rates of assessment, population patterns, manufactures, means of communication, education and schools, judicial system, etc pertaining to the districts under survey (Mills, 1984: Preface).” 7 Francis Jenkins (1793-1866) was a military officer under the East India Company. In 1834 the office of Commissioner and Agent to the Governor-General of Assam and North-east of Rangpur was created and this post was occupied by Captain Jenkins. It marked a departure from the usual norm because for the first time a military man was in-charge of civil administration. (Banerjee, 1992: 91)

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termed “unpromising” since the region’s population had floundered from the “ravages of cholera and epidemic disease, by inordinate use of opium, and the licentious habits of the people” and therefore “without a large increase of population” (Mills, 1984: 3, 5). From the middle of the 19th century the idea of the ‘indolent native’ took root. Mills reported that “three-fourths of the population are opium-eaters, and men, women, and children alike use the drug” (Mills, 1984: 19). The ‘laziness’ of the subject population was castigated as it “enfeebles the mind, and paralyzes industry” (Mills, 1984: 19). In contrast to natives, the land itself was constructed as very productive with an “overwhelming quantity of culturable waste capable of producing the finest crops” (Mills 1984: 5). Hence, it was converted into tea gardens, and as the estimate shows for 1901, tea occupied 244, 653 acres. And “13 percent of Assam’s population was born outside” the province (Sharma 2012: 78 & 79). Another group of people that arrived in Assam following upon the heels of the colonial rule, was, what historian Jayeeta Sharma refers to as ‘Babus’ and ‘Sylheti sojourners’, whose previous patterns of migration were drastically altered with the British inaugurating opportunities for educated classes from neighbouring East Bengal in government offices, schools and tea gardens in Assam (Sharma, 2012: 97). The colonial state also encouraged migration by making the transition of immigrants easier, a gradual process that undermined the indigenous Assamese. For example, for convenience’s sake, Bengali was introduced as the official language of the province, and this facilitated the migration of unemployed Bengali men from far-flung regions to Assam. The 19th century, remarkable not only for its political transformation but also for initiating demographic changes in Assam, thus progressively marginalised the indigenous communities as ‘indolent natives’ or ‘opium addicted’ idlers, who were considered not educated enough to take advantage of the opportunities offered them by the colonial state, or were simply, too lazy to work. The emergence of such racial stereotypes progressively led to the framing of administrative policies that actively supported non-indigenous subjects in the NER.

Remaking Land Policies: Indigenous and the Immigrant peasants

The knowledge of availability of abundant cultivable land and hence the push for raising land revenue was at the core of colonial fiscal policies. Racial tropes especially played a detrimental role in the agrarian economy of Assam, further marginalising the indigenous peasants, especially the tribes, tilting the colonial policies to favour the Bengali Muslim peasants entering Assam in large numbers. The Bengal plains were already densely populated and producing surplus food, and soon, speculators and traders circulated stories of abundant land and tea gardens in Assam. The introduction of railways facilitated the movement of large numbers of immigrants, and soon, “entire households moved into Assam from the East Bengal districts of Mymensing, Pabna, Bogra, Rangpur and

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Rajshahi” (Sharma, 2012: 100). This migration was not forced, unlike indentured labour in the middle of the 19th century, but facilitated by the colonial state, and financed by rich and powerful elites known as Matabbars and later by Marwari money lenders and Assamese Mauzadars.8 Contrary to the image of a landless agricultural peasant peddled in the recent discourses, the early decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of a class that had enough economic power to buy land, and push tribal peasantry out of the way.

In a dissenting note, about the controversial ‘Line System Committee Report’ of 1938, Rabi Chandra Kachari and others argued for the retention of the Line system,9 arguing that the government, while establishing land colonisation schemes, should have kept the “interest and well-being of the children of the soil” as a primary concern (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 20).10 Dissenters also claimed they “found there is hardly sufficient land for the satisfaction of the needs of even the present population and their future expansion” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 22). The Committee report that was claimed as being based on evidence held that “Bengalees, both Hindu and Mussalmans are for the abolition of the Line system; and so are an overwhelming majority of the Assamese Mussalmans, both official and non- official; while the Assamese Hindu witnesses as a rule, are definitely in favour of the continuance of the present system” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938:24). Another aspect of colonial bias manifested in this report in its emphasis on language and culture claimed that the economic grounds for the opposition of the line system was ‘spurious’, “evident from the persistency with which it is urged that the East Bengal Immigrants must “assimilate” with the Assamese by ‘adopting their language and culture” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 25). The Report also claimed that it was too much to ask ‘proud people’ like the Bengalis, to give up their language for a mere ‘patch of land’ (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 25).

Political leaders like Nehru were moreover, not in favour of the segregation of new immigrant populations. In fact, Khan Bahadur Sayidur Rahman, one of the members of the Line System Committee quoted Nehru’s opinion, “It is also bad

8 Mauzadar, a revenue collector responsible for a mauza, which was a unit of revenue assessment. 9 Rabi Chandra Kachari was a ‘Tribal League’ leader from Mangaldai and dissenting against withdrawal of the Line System, he opined (Guha, 2006: 166-67): “It was in the 1911 that the Census commissioner first took note of the ongoing immigration as a peaceful invasion of Assam…Administrative measures had to be devised to contain the conflict. The Line system – first mooted in 1916 and adopted in 1920 – was such a device. The government encouraged immigration; at the same time, there was an increasing awareness since about 1913 that the indigenes needed some kind of protection”. 10 Colonization Scheme or policy was a result of the growing demand for land among immigrants and the need to control the reclamation of land. “The first colonization scheme was started in 1928, was successively followed by one each in the Barpeta and Mangaldai subdivisions. Under all these schemes, a small family was given about 20 bighas of land on payment of premium. The areas allotted under the Nowgong scheme to 1,619 Muslim and 441 Hindu immigrant families amounted in all to 47,636 acres till March 1933” (Guha, 2006: 168- 169).

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to confine immigrants in a particular area and so prevent them from being assimilated by the people of the province. This results in increasing separation and hostility between adjoining areas and a terribly difficult problem is created for future generations. The very basis of immigration must be the assimilation of immigrants” (Line System Committee, Vol II, Evidence, 1938: 90). The Muslim League, however, resisted this process of assimilation and there was propaganda that Bengali should be introduced in immigrant schools. (Line System Committee, 1938: 96). Questions regarding land alienation and the protection of tribal lands that had become important during the late 1920s, intensified in the 1930s, even as the report stated that members were opposed to “any discrimination, in any sphere, between Assamese and Bengalees, between ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant” (Line system report, 1938: 24). On the other hand, the colonial state opposed the idea of assimilation for immigrant populations and termed these demands as ‘blatant aggressive jingoism’, and an attempt by the Assamese to make “cultural conquest of the immigrants” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 25).

There are several examples of harassment in the evidence provided by the Line System Report. For example, in Hirapara village in Mangaldai (a town and subdivision in the Darrang district of Assam), all the Assamese were driven away by the “oppression and harassment” of immigrants, who were considered “unruly and uncongenial neighbours” (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 90). One of the examined witnesses, Kumud Ram Bora, mentioned that he had appeared as a ‘pleader’ for some cases of clashes between immigrants and Assamese (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 90). Similar note was made by the Commissioner Mr. Cantlie regarding the Assamese deserting their villages and migrating to North Lakhimpur seeking refuge out of the fear of immigrants. (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 7) The terms of land acquisition were made very lenient and Maulvi Amiruddin Ahmed, who was a member of the Muslim League, mentioned that the sale of land took place on easy terms. On being examined, he said he had left Mymensing (in East Bengal) in 1921, and already possessed 230 bighas of land by 1937, having brought 200 bighas of land from a Lalung village at Rs 1000 (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 26-27). Clearly, immigrants arriving in colonial Assam were not all landless peasants in search of a livelihood. Many were land speculators and rich landlords, land in Assam being settled not only with Muslim peasantry from East Bengal, but also Hindus from Sylhet and Cachar, Nepali graziers and cultivators, and with time-expired coolies.

Tensions mounted over the fear of demographic shift in Assam from 1930s onwards, especially after the census of 1931, with the superintendent of Census for Assam, C.S. Mullan raising concern regarding the settlement of immigrants in almost all its districts.11 Though Mullan’s language about ‘army’ and ‘invasion’ was exaggerated, he did point to a demographic change, and

11 He wrote that during the years 1921-31, “the immigrant army has almost completed the conquest of Nowgong. The Barpeta subdivision of Kamrup has also fallen to their attack and Darrang is being invaded. Sibsagar has so far escaped completely…Where there is wasteland thither flock the Mymensinghias” (Guha, 2006: 171).

9 Ahmed & Pathak / Voices from India’s Borderlands despite what historians like Amalendu Guha state, it is not Mullan who made the indigenous people aware of the questions of land alienation and loss of culture. The Congress and the Muslim League debated the availability of land and the growing population of Assam as the number of Bengali speakers had grown exponentially in the decades between 1911 and 1931 according to census figures. In the 1930s, the emergence of political, religious leaders like Bhasani and the organisation of Muslim peasantry from East Bengal rendered the issue further volatile, as he articulated the demand for more land as opposed to the calls of the indigenous leaders for land protection, to stop its unabated settlement. Bhasani was himself instrumental in the colonisation of Ghagmari and Bhasanir-char (Guha, 2006: 174).

Colonial Continuities: Old Demands and New legalities

This immigration between the provinces of Bengal and Assam emerged as one of the most contentious political issues of the 1930s and 40s, defining the political articulation of the Congress Party, the Muslim League, and the Tribal League, with demography, language, and land, emerging as primary concerns. Despite Partition, the movement of immigrants across what then materialised as international borders continued. Political scientists, like Anupama Roy, have written about the “crisis of citizenship in Assam” linking all movements, like the AASU led Assam Movement and the ULFA struggle to this fundamental problem (Roy, 2016: 24). This is despite the Citizenship Act of 1955 that had taken the Partition and its aftermath into consideration, with Partition constituting massive migration movements between the two newly-created nations. The pushing forward of dates or ‘chronological boundaries’ from the decided date of 1951 to 1971, was an exception created specially in the case of Assam, whereas general ‘cartographic boundaries’ for other regions was decided by 1947. Sabita Goswami writes in her memoirs, “Every political party took the “illegal foreign immigrant” issue as their core point of discussion. The Janata Dal, Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI), Congress (U) and the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) – these political parties wanted a logical conclusion to the “illegal immigrant issue”. They wanted the deletion of names of illegal immigrants from the voters’ list and demanded that parliamentary elections be held on the basis of a reworked, correct voters list. Their demand included the updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC)…” (Goswami, 2013: 100-101).

This issue of citizenship, linked with voting rights is evidenced from the documentation of electoral rolls that came up during the Assam movement after 1979. And when elections were forced on the state in 1983, the AASU protested “since the issue of ‘who was entitled to vote’, which was at the crux of the movement, remained unresolved.” (Roy, 2016: 41) This conundrum regarding immigrants, the ones who became legalised, and the ones who did not, kept gnawing at the social and political fabric of Assam. The Indian state’s inability to respond to the complicated remnants of the colonial state, produced the

10 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 3-25 ISSN 2414-8636 frontier of Assam as a constant borderland. As various political movements emerged in Assam, the ‘lazy native’, ‘unproductive subject’ became branded as an ‘insurgent’ creating ‘law and order’ situations. While the Assam Accord of 1985 was signed to end this long protest, and resolve the issue of illegal migration, a specific clause in the Accord (clause 6) contained a strange legal twist, entrusting a committee with the complex and confounding task of defining ‘Assamese People’. Nowhere in the world are citizens given the task of defining themselves. The long complex histories that went into making Assam and the Assamese identity was obliterated by this clause that paradoxically, threatened the secular and heterogeneous fabric of the society. While debating the status of illegal migrants whose existence no one denied, the indigenous communities of the NER had the further burden of supplying the bureaucratic machinery with their own definition, as if their ‘being’ was not enough, as if their blood ties (jus sanguinis) were not enough, and as if belonging to the soil (jus solis) was not enough. Throughout the 1980s and onwards, the state and its indigenous people continued to struggle under draconian laws, resulting in Assam and the entire NER becoming demarcated as a case of exceptional governance – beginning with the colonial state continuing well into the postcolonial state. While an uneasy peace had settled over the area, despite the non-resolution of these issues, the contentious questions of the CAA and NRC deployed by the BJP reopened old fissures.

The Making and Re-making of the Northeast The colonial encounter irrevocably influenced the cultural and the political history of the Northeast, an influence that continued in the postcolonial to present times, within which the agitation against the CAA should be contextually located. What we must first try to understand is why ‘Northeast’ itself becomes an ontological term indicating the eastern borderland regions of . Willem van Schendel and Joy Pachuau trace the of the term ‘North East’ to the Partition of the country. They argue that, “Partition created the region we now call Northeast India. Its new international borders disrupted long-established connections, both physical and man-made, and created new scales of association. The result was a configuration of contrary developments of homogenization and divergence within the region, making regional generalizations hazardous” (2016: 2). This disruption in the physical geography of the region has affected how the independent nation-state viewed its citizens belonging to the frontier zones. Richard Kamei (2020) further argues that, “the terminology northeast devoid of different states and diverse characters of inhabitants… are indicative of looking at [the people] from a top down approach”. Several authors writing on the subject have pointed explicitly to the racialisation of the NER.

Jit Hazarika (2020), for example, points out, “Northeastern region of India, part of the sub-Himalayan topography, or as a colonial would describe the “Mongolian fringe” constitutes of several ethno-linguistic groups (Mon-Khmer,

11 Ahmed & Pathak / Voices from India’s Borderlands

Tibeto-Burman, Tai) who become the racial Others in Mainland India due to perceived physical differences, where their bodies and identities are often misrepresented or imposed with different socio-political constructions”. While this racialisation can be traced to the colonial structure of mapping out locations not just spatially, but also racially, Papori Bora argues that the region inhabits “an ambiguous space – rather, a non-space” (2014: 2) within the Indian nation- state that inhabits an inclusive-exclusive political condition of being simultaneously included and excluded from the structures of representation and governance. Bora and other scholars, such as van Schendel & Pachuau (2016), Sanjib Baruah (1999), Yasmin Saikia (2006), Arupjyoti Saikia (2016) and Chandan Sharma (2009) have traced the creation of this ambiguous space to the colonial administration and how it configured the region as an administrative space, including through racial lines. Along with this ambiguous space demarcation, the region has also been ascribed as an ‘illegible space’ (Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, 2015), pitting the representation of Indian versus Northeastern (or colonial Assam inhabitants) space as binaries, a parochial process through which the Northeastern subject emerged as the ‘Mongolian Other’ of the mainland Indian.

This ‘otherisation’ or othering of the Northeast citizen-subject has continued well into the postcolonial period, and it is precisely this otherisation that forms the Indian nation-state’s policy making process and treatment of the Northeastern indigenous communities, till today. The CAA is a manifestation of this process and as explained by Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, the post-colonial state’s policies towards Assam and the Northeast, “…reordering of this border- space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India’s national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it” (2015: 931).

As explained above, if ‘extraction economy’ informed colonial policies on migration and the marking of the NER as a borderland region, the postcolonial state was no better. The years before independence and the immediate post- independent period, saw Assam being further marginalised by Nehru and the Congress Party’s mainland India-centric discourse (Saikia, 2015 and Guyot- Réchard, 2015). The Cabinet Mission of 1946 for example proposed that Assam be clubbed with Bengal but the then Assam Premier, Gopinath Bardoloi, along with other Assamese politicians, fought a pitched battle with the All India Congress Committee (AICC) against this proposal. MK Gandhi was the only national-level political leader of the time who supported Bardoloi and Assam, allowing the state to narrowly escape becoming part of then East Pakistan.12 The implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), now CAA on Assam and the NER, despite a sustained and prolonged protest movement against it, must be viewed as a continuance of the postcolonial Indian nation- state’s discriminatory politics. Nayan Moni Kumar and Mridugunjan Deka (2020) locate the premise of Assam’s marginalisation politics in the postcolonial period as one that can be termed as the ‘politics of resentment’ because Assam has

12 See Arup Saikia (2015) for a more detailed description about the Cabinet Mission announcement and the opposition movements against it.

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“this resentment against the Centre which continues to belittle the identity concerns of the indigenous people. The former and now scrapped IMDT [Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal Act, 1983] and the current CAA, in their own ways, can be seen as the materialization of such an apathetic attitude of the Centre towards Assam” in the context of which the imposition of CAA simply extends Delhi’s authoritarian attitude towards Assam.

This authoritarian attitude towards Assam and the rest of the NER that includes ignoring their dissent against the implementation of CAA, is also visible within prominent mainstream and intellectual discourses in mainland India, apart from actual political legislations and policies by the central and state governments. News and opinion pieces written in mainstream media outlets described the anti-CAA protest movement in Assam and the NER as ‘xenophobic’ 13 and ‘ethno-fascist’.14 Especially the term ‘ethno-fascist’ has been widely circulating recently in both mainstream as well as alternative media outlets along with social media, denouncing Assamese concerns over loss of identity in the face of demography change. This is a recent development in such intellectual discourses, although there is no such established term in academia as such. The first hit on a simple Google search is an article where a minister in Putin’s cabinet exercised his homophobia to critique the 2014 Eurovision contest as ‘ethno-fascist’ 15 . While more often than not, this term has been used in majoritarian discourses to negate at best, or intimidate at worst, indigenous voices of dissent against citizenship policies of the Indian nation-state from the NER. The most recent case is that of the Rongmei Naga tribal scholar Richard Kamei, who was labeled an ‘ethno-fascist’ by academics when he expressed the concerns about the indigenous communities of the NER regarding CAA implementation to noted public intellectual Noam Chomsky16. Kulajit Maisnam, in a searing essay, traces the cause of this bullying, against the indigenous people of the NER to mainstream Indian political and cultural discourses which terms the struggles of the NER as ‘belittling’ the issues of the region and its peoples17. Maisnam (2019) traces such dispensation, and mental landscapes of the Indian state and the mainland Indian citizens to the “strategic security approach to the region inhabited by people with pro-Mongoloid prejudices, the biopolitics towards the region includes the intention of demographic changes by its rulers from Delhi”. Both Maisnam (2019) and Walter Fernandes (2019) point to demographic changes brought about to the NER, especially Assam and

13 Further on this term and its problematic usage, cf. Samrat, Assam protests due to politics of xenophobia, Deccan Chronicle, 17 December, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020. 14 On the casual and problematic usage of the term, cf. Ishadrita Lahiri, QDebate: Are Assam’s Anti-CAA Protests Ethno-Fascist?, TheQuint.com, 10 March, 2020, accessed 11 May, 2020. 15 The article referred is, cf. Stefan Wagstyl, Putin ally labels Eurovision contest as ‘ethno- fascism’, Financial Times, 16 May, 2014, accessed 11 May, 2020. 16 The statement by other writers and academics of Northeast who condemned this bullying and abusive tactic against Kamei, cf. Statement Against ‘Racist Remark’ And Academic Bullying Of A Naga Tribal Scholar, Raiot.in, 2 March, 2020, accessed 11 May, 2020. 17 For further reference, cf. Kulajit Maisnam, You Don’t Get North East Of India, Raiot.in, 17 December, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020.

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Tripura in the post-Independence period, as the main reason for the indigenous support to the NRC and the opposition to the CAA. Maisnam links this contemporary struggle of the indigenous against the CAA to the callous attitude of the Indian state post-Partition towards the region, “The unabated influx from Bangladesh in the region since partition has been a crucial issue, particularly Assam and Tripura. As a matter of fact, Assamese nationalism is premised from the Bengali domination in the colonial and post-colonial period and has been the core of the politics in Assam. These two states have been taking the maximum ‘burden of partition’ in the region which was the result of the politics beyond the Chicken Neck” (Maisnam, 2019). He further adds, “Tripura today is a settler colonial state ruled by the immigrants pushing the Indigenous Tipras to fringes. When one says partition and the subsequent exodus of the people, it is not a one-time event, but rather a trail of human migration which continues for a long period and probably continuing till today” (ibid.).

Fernandes too makes a similar point, on the post-Partition migration patterns to Assam and Tripura, writing, “Assam’s residents have seen what has happened in Tripura, where the proportion of the indigenous tribal population has been reduced from 59.1% in 1951 to 31.1% in 2011. Only around two lakh of the seven lakh East Pakistani migrants who entered the state till 1960 are Partition refugees who came prior to 1951. The rest are landless peasants who came in search of land. The state government changed the land laws to de-recognise community-managed land, where the tribals lived. The migrants were resettled on that land and are now in control of the state. The fear of Assamese speakers – who are only around 50% of the state’s population – is around their land and identity” (Fernandes, 2019). But, the period from December 2019 up to March 2020 (the period of the anti-CAA protests in NER and the rest of India) saw many commentators mark the Assamese and other indigenous people of the NER and their protests as ‘xenophobic’, ‘racist’, and ‘ethno-fascist’ 18 . By March 2020, the only symbolisation of the anti-CAA movement was Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, in the media landscape, which was finally dismantled by the state authorities due to the Covid-19 pandemic19. This

18 While some such opinion pieces have already been cited above, there are many more which have been published. Predictably, there are more articles from the mainland Indian liberal commentariat describing protests in the NER as xenophobic, than indigenous voices finding articulation in national mainstream, and alternative media outlets. Only some webzines, such as the Shillong based Raiot.in have consistently provided spaces for the still invisibilised and marginalised indigenous communities of the NER. 19 Shaheen Bagh, emerged as a symbolic site on anti-CAA protests in New Delhi. First started by old women or the ‘dadis’ (grandmothers) of the locality as a sit-in protest against police brutality on students in the nearby Jamia Milia Islamia in mid-December, it soon metamorphosed into a site of protest against the CAA, NRC and NPR, frequented by many activists, academics, journalists and politicians opposing the BJP. While the protest site and the many forms of protest demonstrated there were regularly and heavily covered by the national media, it also led to many sit-in protest by smaller groups of Muslim women in different localities of Delhi. One such sit-in protest site emerged as a the battle ground between the protesters and BJP politicians who threatened to forcefully remove the protesters from the site.This tussle finally led to devastating violence in late February in Delhi, in which many were killed and displaced, even though there were also Hindu victims of this violence. The main point of

14 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 3-25 ISSN 2414-8636 invisibilisation and delegitimisation of struggles in the NER must ultimately be analysed through a historical framework subject to the background of colonial presence and perceptions about the region. Maisnam strongly asserts this invisibilisation to be the outcome of liberal, secular discourse that has currently emerged among contemporary mainland Indian intellectual classes in light of the anti-CAA opposition. He argues, “One can clearly observe the immorality of this discourse; news reports, opinion pieces announce the new Citizen Act as ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘anti-secular’ while using images from the protesting ‘North- East’. One will also find news reports where images are used from the current Assam protest and the news item never mentions the protest in Assam and its reason but talks of passing an ‘Anti Secular Bill’. While the BJP has completely annihilated the Assam Accord and the aspirations of indigenous people of ‘North-East’, the ‘liberals’ and ‘secularist’ have done no less than the BJP by muddying the entire issue at hand. BJP has killed the indigenous people of ‘North-East’ and Indian ‘liberals’ and ‘secularist’ are scoring brownie points in their liberal spaces through the bloodshed in the region” (Maisnam, 2019). This is not a recent phenomenon as we shall find out later in the paper.

The Contentious Construction of the NER Citizen-subject Peter Robb (1997) while discussing the history of citizen-subjects and the modern Indian identity describes the extent to which the colonial regime was entangled in shaping and constructing the Indian identity. Robb argues (1997:248) that at least three elements of colonial administration helped create this ‘Indian’ identity, “the first is the establishment of fixed borders, the second the assertion of undivided jurisdiction of sovereignty within those borders, and the third the assumption of state responsibility for the well-being of the people in a kind of contract between ruler and ruled”. This colonial definition of territoriality led to the creation of the frontier regions of the NER, which also included Assam. Within this process of frontierisation, British colonial administration further tried to define in absolute terms the borders that mark these frontiers. As Robb (1997: 262) explains, “The motive behind the closer definition of the frontier and the administration was not just the need to defend and define British territory, it was also the need to identify the peoples who were to be treated as British subjects”. What this also meant was that this process of defining the people through their identity as British subjects and fixing the political and geographical borders of the colony, became synonymous with marking the administration as a visible presence to the people in these regions. This was evident in how the then Chief Commissioner in the British administration, C.S. Elliott, demarcated the Naga Hills District in colonial Assam in the 1880s - both as a frontier region and as an administrative zone. Among the many steps he took towards governing the people of this district - some of difference between the Shaheen Bagh protests and the protests against CAA in the NER was that the former were protesting against the NRC and the NPR as well. In the NER, the people overwhelmingly support the NRC, while there was and still is ambivalence about the NPR since this discourse was yet to gain any ground in the NER before the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

15 Ahmed & Pathak / Voices from India’s Borderlands

which had progressive undertones such as enabling self-representation in local governance, others were questionable in motive, like major steps taken to create a series of frontier posts that “demarcate British territory more clearly, but also to “make our Government more visible” to people within the borders” (ibid.,: 258).20 This ‘militarisation’ of borders in the late 19th century was also accompanied by the clearance of forest lands so that enemy attacks could purportedly be easily thwarted. Nearly seventy years later, in the post- Independence decade of the early 1950s, another such process of government ‘visibilisation’ took place in Assam’s frontier regions under Nehru’s leadership. The central government under Nehru utilised the devastating earthquake of 1950 in Assam, to make itself ‘more visible’ to the people of the then frontier tracts of Assam (present day Arunachal Pradesh) couched as part of a rehabilitation process that also constructed military outposts, among other initiatives (Guyot-Réchard, 2015). This can be read as the first marker of postcolonial militarisation of the NER, which by now is ubiquitous to the dispensation of the region. 21 The region, as Maisnam (2019) argues, is a “radicalised frontier territory and its large parts ruled by extra constitutional legislations (such as AFSPA)22 which put the entire populations as “suspects” and potential troublemakers”. Thus, the NER, including Assam, is continually marked in terms of a ‘state of exception’, visible again today in the aftermath of the anti-CAA protests.23 Combining the political and military histories, discussed in this essay, leads us to an understanding of how the citizen-subject of the NER has been constructed in the post-colonial period. The State has has long denied rights and now, a delegitimisation of protest movements too against legislations which are viewed as against the interest of the indigenous people of the NER. This multi-pronged ‘politics of resentment’ and struggle of the indigenous people in the NER, it is important to note, has substantial parallels to the identity struggles of the indigenous people just across the border in Bangladesh. Shapan Adnan (2008) argues that the indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) have long

20 According to Robb, Elliott planned on having a series of 45 frontier posts for the Naga Hills district, each with two head constables, assisted further by 20 constables for border patrols, etc. 21 The 1958 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) grants ‘special’ powers to the Indian Armed Forces to maintain law and order in ‘disturbed areas’ of the country. As of May 2020, the Act has become applicable in the whole of Assam, most of Manipur and some parts of Arunachal Pradesh. This Act has a history of violence and trauma in Assam. Many instances of abuse of power by the Armed Forces under the guise of the Act has been recorded from most of the NER wherever this Act was applied. 22 Authors’ emphasis on the extra constitutional legislation in operation in NER. 23 Post anti-foreigner and pro-indigenous Assam Movement of the early 1980s, the militant organisation United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) emerged, who wanted an independent state of Assam from India. The whole of 1990s and the early 2000s was marked by conflict and violence in Assam due to many such self-determination movements, excess of the Armed Forces etc. While there was relative peace in the state in the past decade, the CAA has threatened to undo the peace. The protests in December saw the killing of five young Assamese protesters by the police, during which there was also an internet blackout in the state for ten days and accompanied by a week-long curfew in the largest city, Guwahati.

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struggled against threats to their ethnic identity posed by the state, writing how (2008:27), “such threats, faced by ethnic minorities in the region have been aggravated by the impacts of the immigration of settlers, land alienation, and counterproductive development interventions”. This continued threat to the indigenous people in CHT since independence has led them to develop a means of ‘ethnic nationalism’ to safeguard their cultural, political, and material rights. Adnan defines ethnic nationalism as a “means of defence as well as a platform for demanding, fully-fledged citizenship rights and due protection from the state” (ibid.). Thus, the protests against CAA in the NER and especially in Assam, must be seen through the lens of ethnic nationalism against a heavily loaded ‘mainland’ centric state that acts against the interests of the indigenous people of Assam. Such state actions against the indigenous peoples of Assam include a continuance of settler policies started in the colonial period. The implementation of CAA constitutes its latest iteration. Hence, the popular Assam Movement that started in 1979 and continued till the early 1980s, can also be framed as an ethnic nationalist response against the excesses of the state which through settler policies, threatened the cultural, political, and material histories of the peoples of Assam. Though the Assam Accord was signed by the leaders of the Assam Movement with the central government led by Rajiv Gandhi in 1985, all the resolutions of the Accord are yet to be fulfilled,24 with the CAA practically nullifying the Assam Accord. One witnesses today, the indigenous people of Assam and the NER trapped between the wheels of dominant postcolonial nationalisms in the country that are increasingly hegemonic, producing an overarching Indian identity and nationalism, that renders regions such as the NER and the people of Assam, as suspect.25 And even though the Indian government may not have overtly tried to settle Bengalis from Bangladesh in Assam, there were at least no efforts made to stem the flow of migration. Adnan (2008: 38) explains how the indigenous people of the CHT were threatened by the newly formed Bangladesh, independent from Pakistan in 1971, through the “…combined pressures of (a) the assimilationist project of the Bangladeshi nation-state and (b) encroachment into their natural habitat by Bengali migrants, state-sponsored settlers, and the security forces”. There

24 The Assam Accord is not a legislation, but akin to a promise between the Indian state and the people of Assam, made in good faith. The leaders of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), leading the movement, Prafulla Mahanta, Bhrigu Phukan and Biraj Sarma, signed this Accord with Rajiv Gandhi, leading to the NRC in Assam as one of the outcomes of the Accord. While some commitments were fulfilled by the Indian government, such as establishment of an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Assam, an oil-refinery, etc, other commitments about safeguarding the rights of the indigenous people of Assam are yet to be fulfilled even after 35 years. To read the Accord in full, cf. Accord between AASU, AAGSP and the Central Government on the Foreign National Issue (Assam Accord), Peacemaker.Un.Org, 15 August, 1985, accessed 14 May, 2020. 25 Kulajit Maisnam (2019) describes the attitude of the first Deputy Prime Minister of India, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, often called as the Iron Man of India, to the NER as, “Patel saw the North-East frontier as ‘troublesome’ and a ‘weak spot’ to India’s security with reference to China, inhibited by people with ‘pro-Mongoloid prejudices’ having no “established loyalty or devotion to India”, and hence the approach to the region till today has been from the radicalised lens of India’s strategic security, a frontier ‘taken over’ to protect its ‘heartland’.

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are distinct parallels between this assimilationist, settler project of Bangladesh and what is happening in Assam and the rest of the NER, especially evidenced from the population change figures provided for Tripura and Assam. But what is yet to be discussed is how the Indian state in its many manifestations, under different political parties or ideologies allowed for unabated migration into the lands of indigenous peoples in the NER. According to Mrinal Talukdar (2019: 14), the largest problem that Assam and its government faced immediately and continuously after independence was the “embezzlement of Assam’s land by East Pakistan and unabated migration to Assam”. While this was the immediate post-colonial challenge faced by Gopinath Bardoloi the first Chief Minister of Assam in independent India and its Premier in the period just before independence, Bardoloi and other politicians from Assam, as already mentioned, played the crucial role in convincing Nehru and other Indian Congress leaders not to make Assam part of Pakistan. But even in the post-Independence period, the Indian state under Nehru seemed nonplussed about acknowledging and addressing the legitimate concerns of the peoples of Assam regarding marginalisation of their resources and identity in the face of relentless migration from East Pakistan (later, Bangladesh). Talukdar (2019: 18) notes the situation in Assam and efforts to resolve this by the political leadership as, “although Gopinath Bardoloi made utmost efforts in the interests of Assam’s security and existence, but the (under Nehru) not even showed a slightest interest to stop migration through a legitimate provision”. The anti-indigenous, patronising policies of the Indian state towards the peoples of Assam continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s with the Indian government’s refugee rehabilitation policies, when the central government brushed aside all concerns of the Assam government regarding refugee rehabilation of East Bengalis on indigenous lands. When the government demanded some amount of reservation for the indigenous peoples of Assam “in the industrial and cooperative organisations, which the centre planned to establish for the refugees for their rehabilitation…. the Government of India insisted that this appointment will be made” (Talukdar, 2019: 19) only after the Assam government handed over lands which were marked for the indigenous people to the refugees. Thus, by 1950, as a humane gesture and under obligation to the centre, the Assam government rehabilitated almost 235,000 refugees from East Bengal. However, the central government under Congress that was pro-settler in its ideological underpinnings, allegedly cultivated what is now coloquially referred to as ‘vote-bank’ politics, in Assam,26 wherein after thirty-five years since signing the the Assam Accord, the BJP uses the same ‘vote-bank’ politics to cultivate a saffron political base. This term, vote-bank politics, which should be better termed ‘settler politics and policies’, endanger the already marginalised indigenous communities of Assam, as also observed in the case of CHT. The state’s settler policies therefore require re- framing as a regional postcolonial politics that allows for the bypassing of the

26 This essay refers to the alleged vote-bank politics by the Congress in Assam, cf. Hiren Gohain, 2017. For reference on Congress playing ‘vote-bank’ politics in Assam, cf. Snehesh Alex Philip, 2019.

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Assam Accord and its promises to stringently protect land and the resources of the indigenous people of Assam.27

Given this history, it is thus, not surprising to see the erasure of voices of dissent from the NER working through multiple ideological prisms in mainland India that then accuse the pro-indigenous protests of Assam and NER as xenophobic. Another theory that seeks to erase the indigenous peoples of Assam and the NER is to see their struggles through that of autochthony and not as that of indigenous people. Nel Vandekerckhove (2009) argues that the issues in Assam is of ‘son-of-soil’ politics and not that of indigeneity. Hence, the conflicts in Assam, “are not a reactionary outcry against the de-rooting of identity within the engulfing neoliberal world, but the result of too powerfully territorialized (ethnic) identities and the enduring but highly selective reaffirmation of “natural” geo-cultural links…” (2009: 524). Vandekerckhove further writes that she uses the terms ‘authochthony’ and ‘indigeneity’ interchangeably throughout her essay. Locating the struggles of the indigenous people in Assam and the NER through such neo-liberal lenses which have been applied to places of conflict such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), etc. only allows for unabated settler politics and policies of dominant communities to continue, while marginalising the already marginalised and threatened indigenous communities of Northeast, as well as the whole of South Asia.28 As Maisnam (2019) argues when describing the discrimination against the NER, “Dilution, defilement, belittlement have been the nature of the so-called representation(s) be it on our culture, identity or politics. This act of mis-representation is a conscious act of violence towards the people of the region by the dominant mainstream. A violence operational at the level of discourse. This violence on discourse justifies their dominance. We are, through their discourse(s) fixated into the categories of ‘anti-state’, ‘violent’, ‘unruly’, ‘barbaric’, ‘not liberal’, ‘xenophobe’ etc etc and so on”.

Contemporary Conundrums

As India prepared itself to face the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a ‘Janta Curfew’ or people’s curfew on March 22, 2020. This would become a precursor of a nation-wide , persisting at the time this essay was written. As the Janta Curfew ended in the evening, a young Manipuri female student, on her way to buy groceries, in New

27 These include guarding the long international border Assam shares with Bangladesh that includes both land and the riverine borders. Guarding and management of international borders of India are responsibilities of the central government and not state governments. For further reference, information is available on the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs, cf. BM-I: Department of Border Management, Mha.Gov.In, accessed 11 May, 2020. 28 For further reference on questions of indigeneity and citizenship in Assam, cf. Shaheen S. Ahmed, (2019).

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Delhi, became the victim of a targeted assault.29 A man riding a two-wheeler spat at her, shouting ‘Coronavirus’. Though this racist attack, typical of Delhi, India’s capital city, shocked the people of NER to the core, such racist behaviour towards Northeastern Indians is not surprising. There has been a long history of Northeast people facing racist attacks in mainland India, slurs that include ‘Momo’, ‘Chinese’ and the common-most of all, ‘Chinky’. 30 As Jit Hazarika argues, “The ordinariness of everyday racism faced by Northeastern natives is exceeded by its pervasiveness, demonstrated by the fact that it cuts across caste, class, gender, and religion” (2020). An earlier incident involving the killing of Nido Tania, a young boy from Arunachal Pradesh in a prominent market of South Delhi after he was racially abused in February 201431, led to the central government trying to institute some changes in legal provisions seeking to stem this racism. An eleven-member investigative committee headed by retired Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer M.P. Bezbaruah was immediately set up to understand the causes of this racism, and the committee submitted its recommendation to the central government within five months.32 The committee found that approximately 86% migrants from NER faced racial discrimination and/or abuse in Delhi. Among the committee’s recommendation was a suggestion to provide a stringent anti-racist law that would safeguard the people of the NER in mainland India. However, even after six years of this recommendation, the Bezbaruah Committee report is yet to be implemented by the central government. 33 As the pandemic, thus raged in India, young students or workers from the NER continued to be subjected to racism that took painful and humiliating verbal, physical and social forms. The new racist catch word, ‘Coronavirus’ was commonly being used to attack both men and women from the NER. While many Northeasterners were denied entry into grocery stores, or asked to leave their rented accommodations in different parts of India, the frequency and ferocity these increasingly racist attacks had political leaders and ministers issue strong statements against such racism on social media and within the legislative bodies of the country.34

29 To know more on the racist nature of the attack, cf. ‘He Spat and Called me Corona’: Racism Against North East Indians Feeds Off Coronavirus Panic, News18.com, 25 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. 30 See this news article on the slurs used against the Northeast peoples in different parts of mainland India, cf. Bismee Taskin, ‘Corona’ is not just a virus. Indians are using it as a slur against people from northeast, ThePrint.in, 26 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. 31 For details on the assault case, cf. Tanima Biswas, Daylight attack with iron rods killed college student Nido Tania, NDTV.com, 10 February, 2014, accessed 10 May, 2020. 32 For more information on the committee, cf. Pallavi Polanki, Bezbaruah report on North East community: Five key recommendations, Firstpost.com, 23 August, 2014, accessed 10 May, 2020 and, cf. Aniruddha Bora, The Bezbaruah Committee: Relevance in Corona Times, Bor Axom Chronicles, 26 April, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. 33 The last report on the Bezbaruah Committee implementation was reported in Indian national media in 2018. Since then there has been no such news reports, although the current wave of racist attacks have led to a renewed discussion on several regional media and social media fora in Northeast India. 34 For further information on the recent cases of racism, cf. Kiren Rijiju Calls Out Increasing Racist Abuse Against Northeast Indians in Wake of Coronavirus, News18.com, 18 March, 2020,

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It is important to remember that these cases of racism in mainland India have to be contextualized within a protracted historical, political, and cultural struggle in the NER, and not as something that is taking place within a social vacuum. As Kamei argues, “Racism in India is beyond ignorance and socio- cultural gap. It is structural in nature which enable (sic) people in power positions to racially discriminate the other” (2020). It is precisely through such a lens that we should examining the dissent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in Assam and the NER in general, to comprehend in a more holistic way, how voices of some citizens are deemed legitimate, while others are erased in the Indian nation-state. Thus, as conclusion we argue that the de-centering of dissent from the Northeast has to be located within specific histories, political genealogies, and narratives that have been implemented to colonise land and resources owned by indigenous communities of the NER for the last two centuries. Colonial policies that have been enacted through various forms and means, has only led to the marginalisation of the already marginalised indigenous communities of the NER including Assam. The blatant mis-labelling this dissent as ‘xenophobic’ only serves to further settler and neo-colonial policies which have been prevalent not just in the political landscape but also in the mental landscapes of most mainland Indians when it comes to the peoples of the Northeast.

References

Adnan, Shapan. (2008) ‘Contestations Regarding Identity, Nationalism and Citizenship During The Struggles Of The Indigenous Peoples of The Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh’, in International Review of Modern Sociology. Vol. 34, No. 1: 27-45. Banerjee, A.C. (1992) ‘Ahom Monarchy in Upper Assam, 1833-8’ in Barpujari, H.K. (ed.) The Comprehensive History of Assam, Vol IV, Guwahati: Publication Board Assam Baruah, Sanjib. (2005) Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India, New Delhi: OUP. Baruah, Sanjib. (1999) India against itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. , PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bora, Papori. (2015) ‘Speech of the Nation and Conversations and the Margins of the Nation-State’, in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 17, Issue 5, 2015, pp. 669-685. DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2014.984618.

accessed 10 May, 2020; Stuti Bhattacharya, Manipuri Woman Spat On And Called ‘Corona’ In Delhi, Proving India Is Diseased With Racism, IDiva.com, 23 March, 2020 accessed 10 May, 2020 and, BJP Leader Urges Centre To Issue Advisory Against Racism Amid Coronavirus, NDTV.com, 18 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020.

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Cederlof, Gunnel. (2014) Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers 1790-1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity, New Delhi: OUP. Goswami, Sabita. (2013) Along the Red River: A Memoir, Translated by Tribeni Goswami Mathur, New Delhi: Zubaan. Guha, Amalendu. (1983) ‘The Ahom Political System: An Enquiry into the State Formation Process in Medieval Assam (1228-1714)’, in Social Scientist, Vol. II, No. 12: 3-34. Guha, Amalendu. (2006) Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam 1826-1947. New Delhi: Tullika Books. Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. (2015) ‘Reordering a Border Space: Relief, rehabilitation, and nation-building in northeastern India after the 1950 Assam earthquake’, in Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 49, No. 4: 931-962. Kar, Bodhisattva. (2019) ‘The Birth of the Ryot: Rethinking the Agrarian in British Assam’, in Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India, ed. By Neeladri Bhattacharya and Joy L.K. Pachuau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 38-65. Line System Committee, Vol II, (Evidence). (1938) Shillong: Assam Government Press, Assam State Archives, Dispur. Mills, A.J. Moffat. (1984) Report on the Province of Assam. 2nd edition. Shillong: Assam Publication Board. Report of the Line System Committee (1938). Shillong: Assam Government Press, Assam State Archives, Dispur. Robb, Peter. (1997) ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, in Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 31, No. 2: 245-283. Roy, Anupama. (2016) Citizenship in India. (Oxford India Short Introductions). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Saikia, Arupjyoti. (2015) ‘Assam, Nehru, and the Creation of India’s Eastern Frontier, 1946-1950s’, in NMML Occasional Paper, History and Society, New Series, 78, pp.1-29. Saikia, Arupjyoti. (2016) ‘Borders, Commodities and Citizens across Mud and River: Assam, 1947 – 50s’, in Studies in History. Vol.32, No.1: 72-96. Saikia, Yasmin. (2006) ‘Religion, Nostalgia, and Memory: Making an Ancient and Recent Tai-Ahom Identity in Assam and Thailand’, in The Journal of Asian Studies. Vol. 65, No. 1: 33-60. Sharma, Chandan Kr. (2009) ‘The Tribe Caste Continuum and the Formation of the Assamese Identity’, pp. 354-366, in Tribes of North-East India: Issues and Challenges, edited by B. Medhi et.al. New Delhi: Omsons Publications. Sharma, Jayeeta. (2012) Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Talukdar, Mrinal. (2019) Post Colonial Assam (1947-2019). Guwahati: Nanda Talukdar Foundation and Kaziranga Books. Van Schendel, Willem and Pachuau, Joy L.K. (2016) ‘Borderland Histories, Northeastern India: An Introduction’, in Studies in History. Vol. 32, No. 1: 1-4.

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Vandekerckhove, Nel. (2009) ‘We are Sons of this Soil: The Endless Battle over Indigenous Homelands in Assam, India’, in Critical Asian Studies. Vol. 41, No. 4: 523-548. DOI: 10.1080/14672710903328013

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Accord between AASU, AAGSP and the Central Government on the Foreign National Issue (Assam Accord), Peacemaker.Un.Org, 15 August, 1985, URL:https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/IN_850 815_Assam%20Accord.pdf, accessed 14 May, 2020. Ahmed, Shaheen S. Amid Assam’s citizenship debate, meanings of ‘Assamese’ and ‘indigenous’ must be addressed’, Firstpost.in, 22 November, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020. URL: https://www.firstpost.com/india/amid- assams-citizenship-debate-meanings-of-assamese-and-indigenous- must-be-addressed-7676011.html Bhattacharya, Stuti. Manipuri Woman Spat on and Called ‘Corona’ in Delhi, Proving India is Diseased with Racism, IDiva.com, 23 March, 2020 accessed 10 May, 2020. URL: https://www.idiva.com/news- opinion/news/kejriwal-demands-action-after-north-east-girl-spat-on- called-corona-but-wholl-change-mindsets/18007743 Biswas, Tanima. Daylight attack with iron rods killed college student Nido Tania, NDTV.com, 10 February, 2014, accessed 10 May, 2020. URL: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/daylight-attack-with-iron-rods- killed-college-student-nido-tania-550373 BJP Leader Urges Centre To Issue Advisory Against Racism Amid Coronavirus, NDTV.com, 18 March, 2020, URL: https://www.ndtv.com/india- news/coronavirus-outbreak-bjp-leader-tapir-gao-urges-centre-to- issue-advisory-against-racism-amid-coronav-2196449, accessed 10 May, 2020. BM-I: Department of Border Management, Mha.Gov.In. URL:https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/BMdiv_I_Annexure_I_ 30012020.pdf, accessed 11 May, 2020. Bora, Aniruddha. The Bezbaruah Committee: Relevance in Corona Times, Bor Axom Chronicles, 26 April, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. URL: https://axomson.net/the-bezbaruah-committee-relevance-in-corona- times/ Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019: What is it and why is it seen as a problem, The Economic Times, 31 December, 2019. URL: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/et-explains/citizenship- amendment-bill-what-does-it-do-and-why-is-it-seen-as-a- problem/articleshow/72436995.cms, accessed 11 September 2020. Fernandes, Walter. In Fighting for NRC-Excluded, Rights and Aspirations of Assamese People Cannot be Ignored, TheWire.in, 2 September, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020. URL: https://thewire.in/rights/assam-nrc- aasu-bjp-bangladesh Gohain, Hiren. BJP is Using Citizenship Act Amendment to Reinforce and Spread Hindutva in Assam, TheWire.in, 2 January, 2017, accessed 15 May,

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2020. URL: https://thewire.in/politics/assam-citizenship-act- amendment-hindutva Hazarika, Jit. Racism in the Time of Corona, Raiot.in, 24 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. URL: https://www.raiot.in/racism-in-the-time-of- corona/ ‘He Spat and Called me Corona’: Racism Against North East Indians Feeds Off Coronavirus Panic, News18.com, 25 March, 2020. https://www.news18.com/news/india/he-spat-and-called-me-corona- racism-against-north-east-indians-feeds-off-coronavirus-panic- 2549223.html, accessed 10 May, 2020. Kamei, Richard. Indian Racism in the Time of Corona, Raiot.in, 8 April, 2020, accessed 10 May,2020. URL: https://www.raiot.in/indian-racism-in- the-time-of-corona-virus/ Kiren Rijiju Calls Out Increasing Racist Abuse Against Northeast Indians in Wake of Coronavirus, News18.com, 18 March, 2020. https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/kiren-rijuju-calls-out-increasing- racist-abuse-against-northeast-indians-in-wake-of-coronavirus- 2541309.html, accessed 10 May, 2020. Kumar, Nayan Moni and Deka, Mridugunjan. Locating #AntiCAA Protests from Assam, Raiot.in, 4 February, 2020, accessed 11 May, 2020. URL: https://www.raiot.in/locating-anticaa-protests-from-assam/ Lahiri, Ishadrita. QDebate: Are Assam’s Anti-CAA Protests Ethno-Fascist?, TheQuint.com, 10 March, 2020, accessed 11 May, 2020. URL: https://www.thequint.com/news/india/assam-news-debate-are-the- anti-caa-protests-ethno-fascist Maisnam, Kulajit. You Don’t Get North East Of India, Raiot.in, 17 December, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020. URL: https://www.raiot.in/you-dont-get- north-east-of-india/ Philip,Snehesh Alex. ‘AGP and BJP betrayed Assam’ - powerful students’ body AASU plans political party, ThePrint.in, 19 December, 2019, accessed 15 May, 2020. URL: https://theprint.in/india/agp-and-bjp-betrayed- assam-powerful-students-body-aasu-plans-political-party/336925/ Polanki, Pallavi. Bezbaruah report on North East community: Five key recommendations, Firstpost.com, 23 August, 2014, accessed 10 May, 2020. URL: https://www.firstpost.com/india/bezbaruah-report- north-east-community-five-key-recommendations-1678393.html Samrat. Assam protests due to politics of xenophobia, Deccan Chronicle, 17 December, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020. URL: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/columnists/171219/assam- protests-due-to-politics-of-xenophobia.html Statement Against ‘Racist Remark’ And Academic Bullying of a Naga Tribal Scholar, Raiot.in, 2 March, 2020. https://www.raiot.in/statement- against-racist-remark-and-academic-bullying-of-a-naga-tribal-scholar/, accessed 11 May, 2020 Talukdar, Sushanta. Census 2011 Language Data: Assam records decline in percentage of Assamese, Bodo, Rabha and Santali speakers, Nezine.in, 28 June, 2018, accessed 18 May, 2020. URL: https://nezine.com/info/bnhUV3NpcjlsUkxwVTVkNkFhdFJKdz09/censu

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s-2011-language-data:-assam-records-decline-in-percentage-of- assamese,-bodo,-rabha-and-santali-speakers.html Taskin, Bismee. ‘Corona’ is not just a virus. Indians are using it as a slur against people from northeast, ThePrint.in, 26 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. URL: https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/corona-is-not-just-a- virus-indians-are-using-it-as-a-slur-against-people-from- northeast/388345/ Wagstyl, Stefan. Putin ally labels Eurovision contest as ‘ethno-fascism’, Financial Times, 16 May, 2014. URL:https://www.ft.com/content/8d73c1b6-dc4c-11e3-a33d- 00144feabdc0, accessed 11 May, 2020.

25 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 26-54 ISSN 2414-8636 doi.org/10.36886/nidan.2020.5.1.3

Religious Entanglements and Shared Texts: The Western Syriac Revision and Reception of the Malabar Sermonary

Radu Mustață Central European University, (Budapest/Vienna) [email protected]

Abstract

In the attempt to unravel the religious entanglements of the Syrian Christians from Malabar and the literary networks of this Christian community in the early modern times, the present article focuses: (1) on collections of Syriac Catholic sermons from Malabar composed by the Catholic in order to create a new Syriac Catholic literary culture since the second half of the sixteenth century; and (2) on the later Western Syriac redaction and reception of this corpus. Consisting both of putative translations/adaptations from Latin and original creations, the manuscript evidence of such literary compositions bears witness to several successive redactions of Syriac texts from Malabar in the early modern times. It shows how this type of theological compositions became a shared literary genre, being appropriated by two rival factions of the Malabar Syrian Christians, namely Paḻayakūṟ and Putaṉkūṟ, throughout their complicated ecclesiastical history, from the second half of the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and beyond. The study of these collections of sermons across confessional boundaries testifies to the religious entanglements between the two rival groups, and brings further evidence that the reorientation of the Putaṉkūṟ from the Syro-Catholic tradition from Malabar, based on both Eastern Syriac and European traditions and sources, towards the Western Syriac tradition was a gradual and slow process.

Keywords: Syriac Catholic sermons from Malabar, textual accommodatio, Paḻayakūṟ, Putaṉkūṟ, Malabar Independent Syrian Chrurch

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Introduction

The Syriac heritage of the Malabar Christians – known as Christians 1 and claiming Syrian identity – was transformed throughout the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries from a collection of standard Syriac texts belonging to the theological and liturgical literary legacy of the of the East, to a new Catholic culture in Syriac, presenting an original synthesis of Syriac sources from , and of Latin and vernacular sources from . As such, this new Catholic culture in Syriac, addressing the audience of the Malabar Christians, became an emblematic expression of the complex interactions of this Christian community with its Iraqi East Syrian prelates (both ‘Nestorian’ and, after 1552, Chaldean)2 and the Catholic missionaries present on the coastal regions of India, alongside with the consolidation of the in Asia. Being a work of erudition and a reflection of the cross-cultural interaction between the local Christians, keen to preserve their Syriac rites and jurisdiction (see Perczel, 2013), and the enterprise of in the age of the , this new Catholic Syriac literature also outlines the challenges of the early modern global Catholicism in a missionary context.

As shown by pioneering studies of István Perczel, this Syriac culture illustrates how the Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, had to accommodate Catholic doctrine to a Christian community which was perfectly integrated into the social and cultural structures of the local society from Malabar, while preserving the Syriac rites and language in worship as an essential part of its Christian identity (Perczel, 2009a, 2018). In a seminal study from 2005, Ines Županov has shown how in the second half of the sixteenth century the encounter of the Jesuit missionaries with the made the former distinguish between “civility” and “religion” (Županov, 2005: 324) and re- elaborate their missionary strategies in the context of “a late sixteenth century Palaeochristian Revival movement” (ibid.: 287) which favored “a creative re- interpretation of Christianity in order to accommodate it to non-Christian peoples and cultures” (ibid.: 284). According to Županov, “the controversial and notorious method of conversion called «accommodation» – employed in the Jesuit overseas missions among the “heathens”, has been first thought out and tested in their mission among the St. Thomas Christians in the late sixteenth century. It was by looking at the antique Christians, a strange kind of Christians who closely resembled their Hindu and Muslim neighbors in India (in customs, rituals, skin

1 Throughout this paper I am using the terms “Malabar Christians”, “Syrian Christians of Malabar” and “Saint Thomas Christians” interchangeably; again, when I refer to Malabar or Malankara, I envisage the whole territory of the current state of Kerala, where the Saint Thomas Christians live, and not only the Northern part of the state, as it is the case in modern times. 2 I am using here the term “Nestorian” referring to the for the sake simplification and in order to avoid terminological confusion, since both Church of the East and the Chaldean Church belong to the East Syrian branch of Christianity; however, on the problems related to the term “Nestorian”, see Brock, 1996.

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color, etc.), that the Portuguese and especially the Jesuit missionaries developed the idea that Christianity could accommodate non-European “social customs” without getting intrinsically corrupt as a religion.” (ibid.: 324).

In the light of newly discovered manuscript material from the local archives in Kerala, István Perczel has developed further Županov’s hypothesis, by emphasizing the role played by the Syrian bishops from Iraq and the centrality of the Syriac language in the process of accommodatio among the Saint Thomas Christians, at that time. In this context, Perczel redefines accommodatio as an entangled joint enterprise involving the Syrian Christians from Malabar, their bishops from Iraq and the European missionaries (Perczel, 2018: 195-196). While for the European missionaries accommodatio meant distinguishing and negotiating the borders between social and religious practice, from the perspective of the local community of the Malabar Christians, it rather aimed at safeguarding the community’s Syrian identity, whose focal point was its Eastern Syriac rites and (ibid.: 196). Perczel illustrates how Syriac language and literacy was adopted by the Catholic missionaries (especially by the Jesuits), to make their missionary strategy efficient; he also points out how this type of linguistic accommodatio generated a “Chaldean rites controversy” predating the quarrel over the Malabar rites from (ibid.). As a clear expression of this missionary principle, a newly created Catholic missionary literature in Syriac was created (ibid.: 218-220).

Thus, the dialectics between Catholic Christianity as a conversion religion and the multi-confessional entanglements between various Christian traditions, in a relation described as both “competitive and complementary” (ibid.), is the general setting from which this new literary canon of Syriac paideia emerged and developed. The importance of this kind of material in the field of intellectual history is manifold: its study opens up an unexplored chapter in the field of early modern global intellectual history, illustrating – through literary networks – the circulation of knowledge from both Europe and the to the (see Perczel, 2014 and 2008). Beside connecting the Iraqi manuscript- based Syriac culture and the European printing culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is an important witness to transmission of theological and humanistic knowledge from the European Jesuit teachers to their Indian disciples from Malabar, as an expression of the Jesuit principle of accommodatio (Perczel, 2014; on one such peculiar case, see as well Mustaţă: forthcoming). Moreover, it is the vivid expression of the diversity of Syriac literature in the early modern times.

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Historical context

The political and ecclesiastical setting in which this kind of Syriac literature developed is a complex one and it requires a summary of its historical developments. Throughout the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese Crown strengthened its position on the West coast of India3 by establishing a network of satellite-like settlements and strongholds, and by making alliances with the local rulers and kings, in order to consolidate and ensure its monopolistic trade system (Malekandathil, 2013: 63-82). As such this “new world system” controlled by the Portuguese and connecting the world with that of Europe through the Atlantic Ocean, collided with an “old world system”4, which it tried to suppress and replace. The latter was dominated since medieval times by the Arab traders and it connected the Mediterranean world with the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea, going further to the East (ibid.: 83-109). Due to its strategic position in the context of navigation (by reason of the monsoon winds), and its rich potential for trade with and other goods, the Malabar Coast became one of the main focuses of contention and dispute between these two macro-systems of trade (ibid.).

The Syrian Christians of Saint Thomas from Malabar were among the early allies with whom the Portuguese engaged in their trade enterprise. Two letters dated in 1523 and 1530 and sent from Cochin, by Ya‘qob, the East Syrian Metropolitan of Malabar and India, to King John III of testify to the fact that the prelate was interested in establishing an alliance, and in engaging the local Christian community in trade transactions with the Portuguese (see Schurhammer, 1934: 10-24). The Portuguese Estado da India attempted to consolidate itself on the coastal regions of India by building a network of fortresses strategically chosen so as to facilitate trade. However, in the regions which did not fall directly under its control, it made use of the ecclesiastical apparatus. In practice, this meant that: (1) on the coastal territories under its direct rule, the Portuguese crown exerted ecclesiastical control on account of a set of privileges granted by the to the king of Portugal (by virtue of the so called Padroado real)5, (2) while in the hinterland it relied on the activity of various Catholic missionaries (among whom the Jesuits played a prominent role) (Malekandathil, 2013: 63-82). This distinction is important as the Syrian Christians from Malabar were residing both close to the Portuguese strongholds

3 On the Coromandel Coast it was rather through Portuguese casados (i.e., traders working outside the authority of the Estado da India and married with local women), and through the ecclesiastical apparatus that the Portuguese Crown exerted and gradually imposed its influence (see Malekandathil 2013: 63-82). 4 This is the terminology used by Pius Malekandathil (ibid.: 88). 5 On the basis of the Padroado real (“Royal Patronage”) the Portuguese Crown had the right to appoint bishops and control the religious life of the regions subjected to its rule; this was regulated through a series of bulls granted by the from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see Aranha, 2006: 115-118).

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in Cochin and Cranganore, and, under the authority of local Hindu kings, in the hilly hinterland to which the Portuguese sources refer as the “Serra”.

As a result of the contacts of the Malabar Christians with the Middle East, facilitated through the cosmopolitanism of the Arabian Sea, their ecclesiastical life was ensured, at least since medieval times, by Metropolitan bishops consecrated and sent from Iraq to Malabar, by the Catholicoi of the Church of the East (Perczel, 2015). At the same time, at least since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the administration of the Christian community from Malabar was entrusted to an indigenous , chosen from the Pakalomaṭṭam noble family, who was supposed to work in close relation with the East Syrian bishops (see Perczel, 2009b: 205). After 1552, when the Chaldean Church was founded as the Uniate counterpart to the Church of the East, both the Chaldean and East Syrian Patriarchs sent metropolitan bishops to Malabar, claiming jurisdiction over the Malabar Church. This happened simultaneously with the attempt of the Portuguese Padroado authorities to impose Tridentine Catholicism on the local Syrian Christians, and with the intensification of the missionary work of the Jesuits within the same Christian community. Thus, the Portuguese made a systematic attempt of averting from the Malabar Coast the ‘Nestorian’ and Chaldean bishops and to ‘Latinize’ the Syriac rites and liturgy of Saint Thomas Christians, while striving to eradicate all local customs that were perceived by the Europeans as “heathen”. The zenith of this process of ‘Latinization’ was the (1599), which condemned as “Nestorian” the Eastern Syriac books of the Malabar Christians and ordered their “correction” according to the Tridentine Catholic doctrine. As a result of the synod, the same Christian community received an European , in the person of the Catalan Francisco Roz SJ (1601-1624)6, who was followed by a series of Jesuit until 1653, when the local community revolted against the Jesuit archbishops and the Portuguese.

The revolt from 1653 had a double outcome: first of all, Archdeacon Thomas (from the Pakalomaṭṭam family), the leader of the anti-Catholic faction, was chosen by a group of priests as Metropolitan under the name of Mar , and later he received his from a Syrian Orthodox bishop from the , namely Mor Gregorios Abd-al Jalīl, the Metropolitan of Jerusalem, who arrived to Malabar in 1665 (Thekkedath, 1988: 100-102). The second outcome of the revolt was that a part of the same community returned to the fold of the Catholic Church, when Alexander Parambil (1663-1687), the cousin of Archdeacon Thomas (Mar Thoma I) was consecrated and appointed as its bishop. Alexander Parambil’s consecration was performed by Joseph Maria Sebastiani OCD, Vicar Apostolic appointed directly by the pope, under the authority of the Congregatio de propaganda fide. All these events happened in the mid seventeenth century, which witnessed the shift of power in Malabar from

6 On Francisco Roz, see Mecherry, 2019.

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the Portuguese to the Dutch: the Dutch capture of Cochin happened in 1663, and this had direct repercussions on the ecclesiastical life of the Malabar Christians, as it limited the interference of the Padroado authorities in the community. As a result of this split in the community, two rival groups were formed: “the Old Faction” (in , Paḻayakūṟ), i.e. the group that remained in the Catholic fold, preserving the Eastern Syriac liturgy revised by Francisco Roz, after the Synod of Diamper; and “the New Faction” (in Malayalam, Putaṉkūṟ), the group lead by the Mar Thoma Metropolitans (their succession was hereditarily transmitted from uncle to nephew), who since the second half of the seventeenth century strived to adhere to the of Antioch, although at times they pendulated between Rome and Antioch for recognition or valid consecration (on this matter, see Fenwick, 2009: 119-167).

It is a common place in historiography that the bond of the Putaṉkūṟ with the Western Syriac rite and liturgy happened in the seventeenth century with Mar Thoma I’s consecration by a Syrian Orthodox prelate (see Thekkedath, 1988: 100-109). However, the important work of John Fenwick has collected evidence that this process of adhesion to the Church of Antioch was a slow one and, at least up to 1750, both factions were using the Malabar Catholic revision of the Eastern Syriac liturgy (see Fenwick, 2009: 151)7. It was rather through the successive work of various Syrian Orthodox missionaries sent by the Church of Antioch, for more than a century and a half, that the Western Syriac tradition got consolidated in Malabar. In this process of adapting the Putaṉkūṟ to the Western Syriac tradition, a prominent role was played by the mission of Mor Basilios Shukr Allah Qasagbi, of the East, who arrived together with Mor Gregorios Yohanna, Metropolitan of Jerusalem, on the Malabar Coast in 1751. Besides being credited with the ‘re-Syriacisation’ of the Putaṉkūṟ in the spirit of the Western Syriac tradition, the main outcome of this mission was the consecration of two rival lines of bishops among the Putaṉkūṟ:

(1) one line beginning with Abraham Kattumangat (Mar Koorilose I8) who was apparently consecrated bishop in the 1760s by Mor Basilios Shukr Allah and afterwards elevated to the rank of by Mor Gregorios Yohanna; this branch of the Western Syriac tradition became later the Malabar Independent Syrian Church of Thozhiyur; (2) a second chain of bishops who continued the lineage of the Mar Thoma Metropolitans, through the consecration of Mar Thoma VI as Mor Dionysius I by Mor Gregorios Yohanna in 17709.

7 Ample evidence for this process is gathered throughout the whole of Fenwick’s book. 8 For the names of the bishops belonging to the MISC I have used the forms in use in Kerala, which are used throughout Fenwick’s book; for the same reason, I have used the title “Mar” instead of “Mor” to refer to prelates of the same Church, although I am aware that they belong to the Western Syriac tradition. 9 On the mission of 1751 and the consecration of two lines of bishops, see Fenwick, 2009: 193- 345.

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As Fenwick pointed out, the reason why the latter lineage got precedence over the former one within the Putaṉkūṟ resides in the fact that after the revolt of 1653, with the lineage of the Mar Thoma Metropolitans, “a new role of ‘’ emerged – an Indian bishop who combined within his own person both the spiritual role of Metropolitan and the ‘head of community’ and ‘head of ecclesiastical administration’ roles traditionally exercised by the . Increasingly, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries progressed, it was this combined role to which claimants aspired” (ibid.: 148). Yet in the nineteenth century, in the context of the British rule over Malabar, the Thozhiyur lineage of bishops did provide a West Syrian Metropolitan for the whole community of Putaṉkūṟ Malankara Christians, in the person of Geeverghese Mar Philoxenos II (on this matter, see ibid.: 347-375).

The following quote from Fenwick’s work is illustrative regarding the complex relationship between the Paḻayakūṟ and the Putaṉkūṟ after the revolt of 1653:

Initially there was considerable fluidity and contact between the two groups [i.e., between the Paḻayakūṟ and the Putaṉkūṟ]. This is illustrated by the fact that until the early nineteenth century a number of Churches were still being shared by Pazhayakuttukar and Puthenkuttukar. Visscher records that in the first decades of the 18th century, in some Churches ‘the service is performed by the Syrians and Papists indifferently, not a little to the grief of the former who are scandalised at the multiplicity of images introduced by their rivals.’ Nearly a century later again, when Kerr visited Kerala in 1806, he described how in some Churches the liturgy was performed in the ‘Syrian and Latin rituals alternately by the priests of the Christians of St Thomas who have adhered to their ancient rites, and those who have been united to the Church of Rome. When the latter have celebrated Mass they carry away their images from the Church before the others enter’ (ibid.: 138).

In complementarity with this historical reality, the present study focuses on the religious transfer marked by the transition from (1) the Eastern Syriac tradition of the Church of the East (2) to a new Syro-Catholic tradition, created in Malabar by the Catholic missionaries around the times of the Synod of Diamper (1599), and subsequently by the shift from this Syro-Catholic tradition (3) to the Western Syriac tradition of the Church of Antioch, after 1653. More precisely, on the basis of newly discovered texts, the aim of my article is to present the career of a literary genre specific to Medieval Latin Europe in the Syriac literature of Malabar, across the divisions between the Putaṉkūṟ and Paḻayakūṟ. On the basis of two case studies, I will show how a collection of ‘thematic’/ ‘scholastic’ sermons was initially composed in Syriac, in Malabar, in order to accommodate Catholic doctrine to the audience of the Malabar East Syrian Christians sometimes around the Synod of Diamper (1599). After the revolt of 1653, “the New Faction”

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(Putaṉkūṟ) revised and reedited the collection for its own use and, while relying on Western Syriac sources, even used the same European literary genre (alien to the Syriac tradition), in order to write polemic sermons in Syriac against the Portuguese and against its own rival group, “the Old Faction” (Paḻayakūṟ). The study of this collection of sermons across confessional boundaries bears witness to the religious entanglements between the two groups and brings further evidence that the reorientation of the Putaṉkūṟ towards the Western Syriac tradition was a gradual and slow process. The fact that both rival groups used this corpus, and that the Putaṉkūṟ became so skilled in handling this European literary genre alien to the Syriac tradition suggests that the collection might have been used in school for the instruction of the local clergy of the Saint Thomas Christians.

The Malabar Sermonary and MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1

Among the representative literary genres belonging to the new Catholic Syriac literary enterprise/output from Malabar, since the second half of the sixteenth century, an important role is played by a collection of sermons de tempore, de sanctis and ad status fashioned according to the pattern of the European collections of medieval and humanistic sermons. Consisting both of putative translations/adaptations from Latin 10 and original creations, the manuscript evidence of such literary compositions bears witness to several successive redactions of Syriac texts from Malabar in the early modern times and shows how this type of theological compositions became a shared literary genre, being appropriated by both factions of the Malabar Syrian Christians, Paḻayakūṟ and Putaṉkūṟ, throughout their complicated ecclesiastical history, from the second half of the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and beyond.

The medieval ‘thematic’/‘scholastic’ sermon emerged as a literary genre in Western Europe in the twelfth century, in relation to theological disputation as a means of instruction, once the first European universities in Bologna, Paris and Oxford were created. In contrast to the Patristic homily which was based on an unsystematic commentary of a given biblical text, verse by verse, the ‘scholastic’ sermon presented a very clearly determined structure which was codified by the artes praedicandi (manuals of rhetoric on the technique of constructing a sermon)11. The Cistercian Alan of Lille (1128-1202/3) is credited with having written the first ars praedicandi (Briscoe, 1992: 18) and the Repertory of Medieval

10 The idea that some of the sermons from the collection might be translated from an European source, is based on their similitude to European printed collections of sermons from the fifteenth and the sixteenth century; however, I was not able so far to identify a clear model. 11 On the artes praedicandi in the Latin West, see Roberts, 2002: 41-62; Briscoe, 1992: 10-76; Wenzel, 2015; Murphy, 1989: 136-156 also provides an annotated bibliography on the topic; Kienzle, 2000 provides a thorough study on the medieval sermon as a literary genre.

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Sermons, in eleven volumes, published by Johannes Baptist Schneyer records around one hundred forty thousand sermons 12 composed according to this pattern, in Western Europe, between 1150-1350 (Schneyer, 1969-1990). After this period up to the end of the fifteenth century the production of sermons increased even more. The genre proliferated throughout Catholic Europe until the end of the fifteenth century, when in the Latin West a new type of sermon emerged: the humanistic sermon based on the classical rhetoric of the genus deliberativum (“the rhetoric of praise and blame” 13 ). Yet, even after the humanistic sermon gained prominence throughout Europe in the period surrounding the Council of Trent (1545-1563), collections of ‘scholastic’/‘thematic’ sermons continued to be published. In a nutshell, the distinctive structure of the ‘scholastic’ sermon consists of the following parts:

(a) the thema is announced; (b) it is or it may be followed by a protheme as a kind of prologue, which leads to (c) a prayer for divine assistance; (d) then the thema is repeated or resumed; (e) some kind of connection to the next part is established, which may be […] a bridge passage, or else a longer (f) introduction of the thema; (g) the division follows; (h) the members of the division are confirmed; the members are then explained or further developed with various processes including (i) subdivisions and distinctions as well as (j) other processes of dilatation; (k) at the end of the development the members might be tied together; (l) finally, the sermon ends with a closing formula, essentially a prayer (Wenzel, 2015: 48).

Without a thorough philological analysis and proper editing, it is difficult to provide an accurate picture on the beginnings and development of this corpus of texts in Syriac from Malabar, which, far from being a simple collection of sermons, seems to have functioned as both a sermonary and a teaching tool for providing instruction into the basic elements of the Catholic doctrine. Though usually preserved in later (nineteenth century) manuscript copies, the earliest preserved manuscript comprising many texts from this corpus is a seventeenth century miscellany, MS Mannanam Syriac 4614. It is the same manuscript that contains between fol. 33rB-37vB the only dated sermon of the collection: an untitled composition on the feast-day of the Elevation of the Holy Cross, dated on the eleventh of Elul (September) 1567 A.D.15. There is need for further study in order to determine whether to this early date belong as well other compositions similar in style, which seem to have stemmed from a common source, all of them

12 I have taken the estimative number of the items contained in Schneyer’s Repertory from Hanska, 2002: 299. 13 The expression belongs to John O’Malley; on the history of the humanistic sermon and the main features of the genre, see O’Malley, 1979: 36-76. 14 See I. Perczel’s description of the MS in Mustaţă, 2019: 97-103. 15 Ibid., 98.

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fashioned upon the model of the European scholastic and humanistic sermons16. It is certain that after the diocesan Synod of Diamper (1599) the corpus of sermons was augmented with several other compositions.

In a previous study (Mustaţă, 2019) I have shown how one of these post-Diamper texts – an original composition written after 1601 and based on Latin, Spanish and Syriac biblical, Patristic, hagiographical and literary sources (classical, medieval and early modern) – reflects at the textual level the Jesuit principle of accommodatio, providing important insights into the Catholic mission, and the ecclesiastical life among the Saint Thomas Christians. I have also shown elsewhere that this corpus of sermons influenced directly the composition of new liturgical poetry, which was inserted into the Malabar Catholic revision of the Eastern Syriac Ḥudrā17, after the Synod of Diamper. It was part of a bigger project which aimed at aligning both preaching and cult to the Catholic ideology of the Council of Trent (Mustaţă: forthcoming). Besides having the potential to illuminate the entanglement between various literary genres, and besides showing the complicated relationship between various Syriac texts from Malabar in the second half of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the study of this collection of sermons reflects the history of the local Christian community before and after the Synod of Diamper, while testifying as well to the revolts and internal divisions of the Syrian Christians from Malabar in the second half of the seventeenth century.

It is not completely uncommon to find manuscript copies of this collection of Syriac Catholic sermons in the libraries of the Syro-Catholic communities from Kerala, stemming from the “Old Faction” (Paḻayakūṟ). As mentioned above, after the revolt of the Malabar Christians against the Jesuits archbishops and the Portuguese from 1653, it was this community that preserved its “Malabar Chaldean” rite in the liturgy, meaning the Eastern Syriac rite “revised” under the direction of Francisco Ros SJ (1601-1624), the first European bishop of the Saint Thomas Christians after the Synod of Diamper. The revolt of 1653 was partly due to the Latinization of the rites as well as due to the attempt to suppress the customs and uproot the Syrian identity of the Saint Thomas Christians, after the synod of Diamper; it was also the direct outcome of the conflictual relationship between the European Jesuit bishops and the archdeacons, who functioned as local rulers for the same Christian community.

16 On the terminology regarding various types of sermons, I have followed the guidelines provided by Wenzel 2015: 44-50. 17 Literally meaning “cycle”, Ḥudrā is a sort of Eastern Syriac breviary; it contained initially services for the temporal section of the , in later times manuscripts of the Ḥudrā started to incorporate services for the commemorations of (usually included in the Gazzā) or the anaphoras (see Brock, 2006: 273); in this context, it is broadly described as a liturgical book containing “propers for the services, and the mass for all days of the liturgical year” (Gazzola, 2006: 291).

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Yet, in the following paragraphs I would like to focus on a peculiar manuscript of the collection of Syriac Catholic sermons – referred to from now on in this paper as “the Malabar Sermonary” – which shows the reception of this literary genre among the members of the “New Faction” (Putaṉkūṟ), the group that after the revolt of 1653 has gradually turned towards the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 is preserved in the manuscript library of the Malabar Independent Syrian Church of Thozhiyur, which belongs to the Western Syriac tradition in Malabar. As mentioned above, this community is part of the Putaṉkūṟ and its lineage of bishops was established through the consecration of Rabban Abraham Kattumangat as bishop Mar Koorilose I by Mor Basilios Shukr Allah in the 1760s, and through his elevation to the rank of metropolitan by Mor Gregorios Yohanna (see Historical context above). The manuscript consists of two different parts which were pasted together later: a first part (fol.1r-140v), which is written in Indian Eastern Syriac script, contains a fragment of the collection of Catholic sermons and is not dated; on the basis of the script it might be traced back to the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century18. The second part (fol. 141r-204v) is written in Serṭā script and mainly consists of mēmrē19 of Ephrem20, Jacob of Sarug21 and other authors, as well as Western Syriac liturgical material; its two main subparts are dated to 1766 and 1764 A.D. (colophons on fol. 153r and 202v).

The first part of the manuscript, which is relevant to the present discussion, contains the collection of Syriac Catholic sermons; most of the texts from this section are to be found in other manuscripts copied by diligent scribes belonging to “Old Faction” (Paḻayakūṟ); yet, many of the items in MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 bear witness to a Western Syriac revision of the corpus. The aim of the present article is to assess this phenomenon critically, by bringing into focus the case of two sermons from the corpus and show: (1) how texts changed while circulating among the two rival Christian factions – Paḻayakūṟ and Putaṉkūṟ – and how the comparison between various versions of texts reveals important insights into scribal practice and the art of compilation; (2) how the European scholastic sermon was appropriated as a literary genre by the West Syrian community in order to write polemic, anti-Catholic literature. For comparison and contextual

18 Since I have worked with digital copies of the MS, I have not seen the paper’s watermark. 19 That is to say verse homilies; since the papers of the present volume are rather addressed to historians of the Indian Ocean than to Syriacists, I am providing in footnotes minimal information on literary genres, authors and topics related to the Syriac world; however, for a guided bibliography on each of these, one is encouraged to consult The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (see the reference list) and the Comprehensive Bibliography on available online through the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: http://www.csc.org.il/db/db.aspx?db=SB . 20 Ephrem (d. 373), Church Father and hymnographer, the most prominent Syriac writer of Late Antiquity and representative of the so called ‘golden age’ of Syriac literature. 21 Jacob of Sarug (451-521), poet and bishop belonging to the Syriac Orthodox tradition, mostly author of mēmrē and celebrated by the Syriac Orthodox Church as “the Harp of the ”.

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information, I will consult two other manuscripts of the Malabar Sermonary, namely MS Mannanam Syriac 46 and MS Syriac 1722. I have previously used these two manuscripts for the edition of one composition from the sermonary, a panegyric sermon on Saint , written after 1601. The first part of MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 contains the following items:

fol. 1r-12v: Sermon on the ; fol. 12v-21v: Sermon on the Dormition of the Holy Virgin; fol. 21v-30r: Sermon on the Nativity of the Holy Virgin; fol. 30r-38r: Sermon on the Nativity of Christ; fol. 38r-43r: Sermon on the Revelation of the Lord to the Magi;

fol. 43r-47v: Sermon on the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist; fol. 48r- 51r: Sermon on the commemoration of Peter and Paul the Apostles; fol. 51r-59v: Sermon on the Ascension of Christ; fol. 59v-68v: Sermon on the Pentecost; fol. 68v-75r; fol. 75v-78r; fol. 80r-95r: Untitled sermon on Mathew 10: 16-33; fol. 95r-101r: Untitled sermon on the Eucharistic celebration; fol. 102r-105v: Untitled sermon on the sufferings of the righteous; fol. 106r-110r: Prayers for the Passion Day of Christ which were added later in Serṭā script, followed by lexical notes (fol. 111r-v); fol. 113v-126v: Sermon on the added by a later hand (different from the one who copied the other sermons); fol. 127r-132v: An epitome made on the basis of of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History (???), perhaps translated from Latin; fol. 133r- 138r: A short work on chronology; the text is followed by another note on chronology (fol. 138v-140v)23.

MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1, which belongs to the Putaṉkūṟ tradition, must stem from one common source with MS Thrissur Syriac 17, a manuscript of the Paḻayakūṟ, reinforcing the idea of religious entanglement between the two groups. The main argument for postulating a common source is that, besides compositions belonging to the Malabar Sermonary, the Thrissur codex also contains, between fol. 209v-214r, the epitome made on the basis of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, which in the Thozhiyur MS is comprised between fol. 127r-132v (Mustaţă, 2019: 112). Since it is not possible to show in the present article how several of the sermons copied in MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 bear witness to a later Western Syriac redaction of the Malabar Sermonary, I am choosing as representative for this phenomenon the case study of the sermon comprised between fol. 102r-105v. For the appropriation of the European scholastic sermon as a literary genre by the West Syrian faction of the Malabar Christians (Putaṉkūṟ), I will analyze the

22 On the contents of the MS, see Mustaţă, 2019: 103-112. 23 At the request of the editors, I have not included the Syriac original of the texts used throughout this paper; this is the reason why in the description of the manuscript I have not provided the titles in the original, nor their incipit and explicit; however, I am preparing an edition of all the quoted sources in my doctoral thesis.

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text comprised between fol. 80r-95r. On the basis of a few illustrative fragments I will highlight key aspects of the transmission and later reception of the corpus and its literary genre.

Sermon on the sufferings of the righteous

The first sermon to be analyzed bears the title “Sermon on the sufferings of the righteous” (Suwādā d-‘al ulṣānē d-zadiqē)24 and is preserved in two manuscripts: MS Mannanam Syriac 46: fol. 91vA-94vB and MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1: fol. 102r- 105v25. The version from the Thozhiyur manuscript seems to be a reworking and simplification of the text from the Mannanam codex. I will first describe the text as it appears in the earlier version, providing an overview of the arguments, examples and sources used; afterwards I will present the main differences between the two versions, in order to illustrate how the text was modified in its Western Syriac revision. The sermon begins with a series of biblical testimonia about the opulence/wellbeing (Syr. kahinutā) and the prosperity (maṣlḥānutā) of the sinners and elaborates on their imminent death. The text picks up on classical Patristic topoi about the trial of the righteous in this world, quoting and alluding to such works as Cyprian’s of Carthage (c. 200-258) Liber de mortalitate and Ad Demetrianum, and Gregory the Great’s (c. 540-604) Moralia in Iob; it also quotes a decree attributed to Pope Pontian (fl. 230-235) and addressed to the Bishop Felix Scribonius and makes use of a story about the institution of the feast-day of the Rogation of the Ninevites, which precedes the service for the feast-day in the Eastern Syriac Ḥudrā; most of these sources have been removed from the text in its second redaction. The biblical quotations used throughout the sermon lay a great emphasis on the trial and consolation (buyā’ā) of the righteous, which reminds one of the experiences of desolation and consolation as imbedded in the practice of the Jesuit spiritual exercises. Some of the biblical examples and quotations used by the author are to be found as well in Cyprian’s Liber de mortalitate (such is, for instance, the emphasis put on the example of Tobit); but while the main argument of Cyprian’s treatise is that Christians should not fear death, because it is a passage to the afterlife, the sermon rather insists on the pedagogical role played by sufferings in the redemption of the righteous or on their role as a retribution for sin on earth. Like the Sermon in praise of Saint Thomas from the same Malabar Sermonary, this sermon puts a great emphasis on examples and erudition, and its author makes use of the Syriac and Latin Scriptures in the same way: most of the time he mirror-translates the

24 Whenever I transliterated Syriac words in this paper, I have used a simplified system of transliteration: I did not mark the initial and final ālap, the spirantisation of the consonants, and the doubling of the consonants within the words. 25 The text bears a title only in the Mannanam MS.

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Latin Vulgate26 by making use of the wording of the Peshitta27 or he paraphrases the text of the Vulgate in Syriac28. The text relies to a great extent on biblical examples and testimonies, which the West Syrian compiler decided to remove, so much so that in its revised version the text became three times shorter than initially.

In order to give an idea on the overall structure of the sermon, I have chosen to record the references to all the biblical quotations present in the text; the reason for doing so is that in its Western Syriac redaction, the text of the sermon was very much simplified so as to almost become a compiled list of biblical testimonia. The following list comprises the full range of biblical sources29 which are common to both redactions of the text: Habakkuk 1: 2-3, 13-14, 3-4; Psalm 73: 2-5, 7-9, 15-21; Psalm 37: 35-36; Psalm 39: 6-730; Hebrews 12: 6; Psalm 37: 1-2; Psalm 34: 15; Psalm 34: 11; Psalm 37: 37; 1 Corinthians 1: 5, 7; Mathew 11: 12; Mathew 5: 431; Acts of the Apostles 14: 22; 2 Corinthians 4: 16-18; 5: 1-232; Romans 5: 3-5; Hebrews 12: 5-1133; Proverbs 17: 3-4; Siracides 27: 5; Psalms 23: 4; Tobit 12: 13. In addition to this, the version from the Mannanam MS quotes: 1 Corinthians 7: 31; Psalm 78: 34-35; Daniel 4: 25-32 (paraphrase); Psalm 32: 9; Job 1: 3-4; Job 2: 9-10; Tobit chapter 2 (paraphrase); Luke 2: 35; Hebrews 12: 3-4; Ezekiel 9: 1-6 (paraphrase); Luke 6: 21, 24-25; Job 5: 3-5; Siracides 2: 1; 2 Timothy 3: 12; 1 Chronicles 21 (paraphrase); Jeremiah 18: 7-8; 2 Kings 21 (paraphrase); Lamentations 3: 40. The version from the Thozhiyur MS also contains a few distinct biblical quotations, which are usually developments of biblical motifs/allusions present in the initial redaction of the text; such are: Mathew 13: 24-30 (with succinct explanations on the parable); Mark 8: 34; James 1: 2; 1 Peter 4: 12-13; Mathew 8: 25; all these are developed or quoted according to the version. As mentioned above, like the author of the sermon in praise of Saint Thomas from the Malabar Sermonary, the author of this composition has the tendency to use both the Syriac and the Latin Scriptures, and occasionally to correct the Syriac version of the Peshitta on the basis of the Latin text of the Vulgate (see Mustaţă, 2019: 12-20). The biblical additions belonging to the Western Syriac redaction of the text are exclusively based on the Peshitta version. I am overemphasizing this aspect, because the use of the

26 The standard Latin translation of the done by (c. 347-420) and used in the Catholic Church. 27 The standard Syriac translation of the Bible finalized around the year 400 A. D. and used by the Syriac Churches. 28 Since I have not provided the Syriac original throughout the paper, I will not make here an analysis of these features; however, for a detailed explanation of an analogous phenomenon see Mustață, 2019: 12-20. 29 All the biblical references in this article are given according to the Peshitta version. 30 MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 cuts the quote short to Psalm 39: 6. 31 MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 contains as well Mathew 5: 10. 32 MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 cuts the quote short to 2 Corinthians 4: 16-17. 33 In the MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 a part of verse 5 and the verses 10-11 are missing.

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Latin Vulgate in Syriac throughout the Malabar Sermonary is the distinctive proof that a certain sermon has been initially composed in a Catholic milieu. By the same token, when the Putaṉkūṟ adopted this European literary genre to write an original polemical sermon against their rivals (Paḻayakūṟ) and the Portuguese, they used exclusively the Syriac biblical version of the Peshitta, in addition to Syriac authorities acknowledged by the Western Syriac tradition (see the second case study below).

In order to outline the main differences between the two redactions of the text and to give an idea on how it became transformed when it was reused by the West Syrian Christians of Malabar, I will provide the analysis of a few relevant passages that highlight important points of difference; the following comparison of parallel text samples outlines the main changes that occurred in the text of the sermon from one redaction to the other:

Translation of MS Mannanam Syriac 46: fol. 91vB-92rA:

Therefore, let us consider the end of the wicked and let us recognize the truth! For, as the Blessed David says, they boast and exalt themselves like the trees of the woods, but all of a sudden they perish and are not to be found in their place (Psalms 37: 35-36)34. For the deceitful men are like a breath; because the man walks [only] in appearance (Psalms 39: 6-7). And so, the kings are not [true] kings, but they pretend to be kings35 and the riches are not riches, but a shadow of the true riches and so on. Thus, the worldly prosperity is not prosperity, but poverty and those whom we see as prosperous, are descending all of a sudden to Sheol. For, this world is like a field in which one finds tares among the wheatears and the lord of the house is still waiting for the harvest and expects the conversion of the wicked. And when He harvests, He throws the straw into the fire and puts the wheat into the barn of heavens36. Take a look, my brothers, to God’s lovingkindness! Pope Mar Gregorios [says]: “the righteous [one] is scourged in order to be corrected, as he is preserved for the glory; and the lawless succumbs to luxury, because he abounds entirely in the worldly goods, for which reason the heavenly ones are not given to him”37; for this is how the calves which are to be slaughtered are fattened, and the one who labors under a yoke is harnessed. For, since He knows that the lawless ones will return to Sheol and will be tormented there forever, He makes them rejoice in this world on account of the good deeds they are doing, such as almsgiving, fasting and so on.

34 Throughout the translated passages, I have used Italics for the biblical quotations. 35 Literally, “they show the face of kings”. 36 Allusion to Mathew 13: 24-30. 37 Possible vague paraphrase of Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, Book VII, chapter XXI. 24 (see Migne PL 75: 778A-B).

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And as a reward for these, God grants them the corporeal goods, but He chastises the righteous and the chosen ones (see Proverbs 3:12 and Hebrews 12:6) in [this] world so as to bless them with the goods that last forever. Thus, the corporeal goods are not true goods, but they are general [gifts] for mankind, that is, for the irrational life. For this reason, let us not be sad if we are not granted the things that the Gentiles seek, but first of all let us seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matthew 6:32-33) which are the beautiful and everlasting goods; for the worldly ones are passing away.

Translation of MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1: fol. 102v-103v:

Therefore, let us consider the end of the lawless and let us know the truth! For, as the Blessed David says, they boast and exalt themselves like a tree of the woods; when I passed by, it was not there anymore and I looked for it and so on (Psalm 37: 35-36). Again, he says: For the deceitful men are like a breath (Psalm 39: 6). Again, in Matthew, the tenth section [ṣḥāḥā] [of] : The Kingdom of is similar to the man who sowed good seeds in His field; and while his men were sleeping, His enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat. The tares also appeared and the servants of the Lord of the house approached and told Him: Our Lord, did you not sow good seed in your field? From whence [then] does it have tares? He answered them: An enemy did this. His servants asked Him: Do you want us to go and collect them? He answered them: Lest while gathering the tares you would also root up the wheatears together with them, let both of them rather grow together until the harvest. And at the time of the harvest I will tell to the reapers: First, gather the tares and bind them in bundles to be burnt, and gather the wheat into My barns! (Matthew 13: 24-30), that is to say, the Sower is the Son of Men; the field is the world; the good seed are the righteous; the tares are the evil ones and the sinners; the enemy is Satan; the harvest is the end of the world; the reapers are the angels and so on (Matthew 13: 37-39). For this reason, Gregory the Patriarch says: the righteous [one] is scourged in order to be corrected, as he is preserved for the glory; and the lawless succumbs to luxury, because he abounds entirely in the worldly goods, for which reason the heavenly ones are not given to him; for this is how the calves which are to be slaughtered are fattened, and the one who labors under a yoke is harnessed. And again, the Blessed Paul says: God chastises those whom He loves (Hebrews 12: 6) in this world and grants them the sublime gifts of His Spirit and fills their hearts with spiritual pleasure and with hope for the everlasting life.

While comparing the two parallel fragments listed above, one notices the following:

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1. The compiler of the later version of the sermon (preserved in the Thozhiyur MS) tried to eliminate the commentary of the preacher from the initial text of the sermon (the one preserved in the Mannanam MS), most likely because he did not find it appealing for the audience of the Putaṉkūṟ; thus, he almost reduced the text of the sermon to a list of useful biblical testimonia about the sufferings of the righteous. 2. He has corrected according to the Peshitta version the second part of the quote from Psalm 37: 35-36, which in the Mannanam MS is quoted by memory, and shortened the initial quote from Psalm 39:6-7. 3. Since the West Syrian compiler tried to remove from his redaction of the sermon the commentary belonging to the Catholic author – while preserving the scriptural logic and arguments of the text – he developed into full quotations biblical allusions from the initial redaction of the text: this is the case with the allusion to the parable from Mathew 13:24-30 quoted in full and explained in the later version, and the allusion to Hebrews 12:6, again, developed into a quotation. 4. In quoting Gregory the Great, the West Syrian compiler referred to him as “Gregory the Patriarch” instead of “Mar Gregory the Pope,” as he was named in the initial version of the text. This is the only instance in which the West Syrian compiler preserved a Catholic authority in his redaction of the sermon; all the other quotations and references to Fathers having been removed from the later redaction of the sermon. I did not find a clear text belonging to Gregory the Great which would satisfactorily correspond to the quote as it appears in the Syriac text of the sermon; if the sermon indeed paraphrases chapter XXI. 24 from the Seventh Book of Moralia in Iob, then the phrase: “for this is how the calves which are to be slaughtered are fattened, and the one who labors under a yoke is harnessed” is not part of the quote from Gregory’s commentary. However, the West Syrian compiler might have regarded it as part of the quote from Gregory’s work and this might be a possible explanation for keeping it in his redaction of the text.

The sermon in its first redaction relies to a great extent on Old Testament erudition and examples, projecting the topic of the sufferings of the righteous into the broader context of salvation history. The West Syrian compiler renounced to much of this biblical erudition and oversimplified the structure of the text, because he might not have been interested in it. The following fragment is taken from the peroration of the initial redaction of the sermon; it illustrates how the Catholic author of the text connected biblical history with the history of the Church of the East and made use of a story about a late sixth century plague and the institution of the feast day of the Rogation of the Ninevites. The account presents the East Syrian Patriarch Sabrišo‘ I (d. 604)38 as the main agent who set the foundation of the feast day. The intention behind the inclusion of this

38 On Sabrišo‘ I, see Brock, 2011: 355.

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account into the sermon must have been the need to accommodate the message of the sermon to an audience attached to its Eastern Syriac tradition. Later on, the West Syrian compiler removed the whole passage from his revised text of the sermon, most likely because he did not find the reference to the East Syrian (i.e. “Nestorian”) holy man appealing for a West Syrian audience. The Rogation of the Ninevites is celebrated in Western Syriac tradition as well, but the Syriac Orthodox Church ascribes its institution to Marutha, Metropolitan of Tagrit (d. 649) (see Barsoum 2003: 322).

Translation of MS Mannanam Syr 46: fol. 94vA-B:

Again, in the Second Book of the Kingdoms we read that in the days of David there was famine for three years. And David asked the counsel of the Lord on this matter and [the Lord] answered him that this famine happened because of Saul who had already died and his house [that was guilty] of blood, since he killed the Gibeonites. Since they were the remnant of the Amorites and the sons of had sworn that they would not be killed, but Saul, out of ignorant jealousy, killed many of them. And David handed over and gave them seven men who were from the house of Saul and they hanged them and the wrath of God over the people ceased39. Therefore, when we are afflicted by God because of our sins, let us do what Jeremiah the said, that is to say: Let us examine our ways, let us pray and return to the Lord! (Lamentations 3:40). For the Eastern Christians of Mar Sabrišo‘ the Bishop have done this way; in that time, due to the multitude of the sins of men a pestilence almost decimated the men of Beth Garmai, and . And it happened that while this holy man, Mar Sabrišo‘, was praying to God [to cease] the punishment of [divine] wrath which was ravaging his flock, he heard the voice of an angel saying: ‘Proclaim a fast, and make a rogation, and the pestilence will be removed from you!’ Immediately the holy man ordered that the people of the Lord would be gathered to the church and would observe the fast. And in the first day of intercession, which was Monday, it happened that the Angel of the Lord withdrew his hand and nobody was afflicted anymore by the plague. And when the sixth day of the week, which is Friday, came, the people took the Holy and they were sanctified, and since then nobody died. It is from this [event] that this three days fasting has been transmitted [to us]. In the same way, also the sinful Ninevites repented through the preaching of Jonas and they were not reproved; and for the chastisement of the people it did not rain for three years and six months, according to the word of Elijah. Mar Cyprian the Bishop Martyr says: Why do we wonder that God is scourging us as we are sinners? Although we are fighting

39 Paraphrase of 2 Kings 21.

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against the deeds of our sins, we are the judges of the fact that they have not improved; being human we do not want to be reproved by God, but [we reprove] those partaking our [human] nature40.

The account about Mar Sabrišo and the plague is almost a word for word quotation of the history on the origin of the celebration of the Rogation of the Ninevites (‘eltāh d-bā‘utā), preceding the service for the feast day in the Ḥudrā (the Eastern Syriac Breviary) (for comparison, see Darmo 1960: 275-276). The popularity of the feast day among the Syrian Christians of Malabar explains this type of accommodatio, and yet it is intriguing that the Catholic author decided to refer to Patriarch Sabrišo‘ as a holy man, while a homonymous East Syrian saint 41 appears in the lists of condemnations of the Synod of Diamper40F .

Polemic sermon against the Portuguese

The “Sermon on the sufferings of the righteous” with its two redactions gives a glimpse into the art of compilation and textual transmission. It shows that: (1) the Malabar Sermonary was initially composed in order to accommodate Catholic doctrine to the East Syrian Christians of Malabar; and (2) that later on it was modified and reedited, when its compositions were appropriated by the “New Faction” (Putaṉkūṟ), i.e., the group that, after the revolt of 1653, strived to adhere to the Western Syriac tradition of the Orthodox Church of Antioch. The second case study of this article, however, goes one step further into questions of textual transmission and reception of this corpus and its literary genre among the Putaṉkūṟ. It exemplifies how, due to the influence of the Malabar Sermonary, the literary genre of European scholastic sermon in Syriac was reused by the same Putaṉkūṟ, to polemicize against the Portuguese and in extenso against their rivals, the Paḻayakūṟ (“the Old Faction” that remained in the Catholic fold). The text under scrutiny is an untitled polemic sermon against the Portuguese, based on the Gospel reading from Mathew 10: 16-33, and it is comprised in the same MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1, between fol. 80r-95r; the text does not have any model or parallel in the Mannanam MS. From a structural point of view, the text of the sermon clearly follows the pattern of the European scholastic sermon with all its constitutive parts, a feature that it shares with other texts from the Malabar Sermonary. Its similarity with the other revised Catholic sermons from the same manuscript (Thozhiyur Syriac 1) is striking. The way the author handles biblical testimonies, exempla and arguments is analogous to the use of Latin Catholic

40 Perhaps a quote taken out of context from Cyprian of Carthage, Ad Demetrianum, chapter 8 or 10 (see Migne, PL 4: 549 A-B and 551A-B). 41 According to J.B. Chabot, the list of condemned East Syrian saints at the synod of Diamper (one of whom is a certain Sabrišo‘) was mainly compiled on the basis of the lives of saints included in the Liber castitatis, an Eastern Syriac hagiographic work treating the lives of monastic founders from the Church of the East; see Chabot, 1909: 619-623.

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authorities in the compositions from the Malabar Sermonary. The main differences are: (1) the exclusive use of the Peshitta version for biblical quotations and (2) the reliance on Patristic authorities accepted by the Western Syriac tradition: in addition to the mēmrē of , the author refers to the prologue of the Syriac verse grammar of Bar Hebraeus42, a mēmrā by Jacob of Edessa43 and alludes to the History of Simeon Bar Ṣabb‘e44. Its exclusive reliance on the Syriac Peshitta and the perfect combination of various authorities accepted by the Western Syriac tradition is a strong argument that the composition is original and it is not a reworking of a Catholic composition from the Malabar Sermonary.

The sermon perfectly conforms to the rules prescribed by the medieval and early modern artes praedicandi from Medieval Western Europe, whose structure I have provided above. As the following outline emphasizes, the author of the text knew very well and mastered the rhetorical division and features of the European (scholastic) sermon – which most likely he studied in school, where the Malabar Sermonary might have been used as a handbook – and he consciously made use of them in his polemic sermon against the Portuguese. The sermon can be conventionally divided according to the following scheme45:

a. Instead of the thema46, the author begins his sermon by reading in full the Gospel text on which the sermon is built. b. Then, the text of the sermon itself begins with a long protheme taken from the Old Testament – a feature shared with other sermons from the Malabar Sermonary (here, the protheme is taken from 3 Kings: chapter 3, about the wisdom of Salomon). c. It is followed by the initial prayer (in this case, “Our Father” and “Hail, Mary”). d. The repetition of the thema (in this case, Mathew 10: 16); e. The “bridge passage”47 (pes/positio pedis): here it explains the repetition of the thema: “The Lord told His disciples: ‘Behold, I am sending you out as lambs among the wolves,’ that is to say, the lambs are the disciples and also the Christians and the wolves are the pagans, the and the Muslims” (fol. 81r).

42 (1225/6-1286), polymath belonging to the Syriac Orthodox tradition, the most prolific author of the Syriac Renaissance (12th-13th century). 43 Jacob of (ca. 630-708), Syriac Orthodox bishop of Edessa, author of works on a wide range of topics (only fragmentarily preserved); among others he wrote the first systematic Syriac grammar. 44 Simeon Bar Ṣabb‘e (d. 341-344), bishop of Seleucia Ctesiphon; he became a martyr under the persecution of the Sassanian king Shapur II; the sermon alludes to the duplication of the poll tax imposed on the Christians by Shapur II. 45 For the terminology, structure and divisions of the medieval scholastic sermon, I have used Wenzel, 2015: 47-86. 46 In many sermons from the Malabar Sermonary the theme is missing in the beginning of the sermon. 47 The translation belongs to Wenzel.

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f. Introduction of the thema: the author explains why it is legitimate to call the Christians “lambs”. g. Division of the thema with its and subdivisions (prosecutiones/distinctiones): on the basis of the second part of the thema (Mathew 10: 16): “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” the author develops on the peculiarities of serpents and doves by providing tropological and allegorical interpretations (some of them similar to those from the Physiologus tradition) with supporting quotes from scriptural and Patristic (mostly Western Syriac) sources. h. Development (prosecutio) of the parts announced in the divisio thematis; in fact, the author only develops one prosecutio/distinctio that was announced in the divisio thematis, namely the resemblance between the doves and the persecuted Christians. In the divisio thematis, the idea is articulated as follows:

The word that the Lord said: “Be innocent as doves,” that is: in many cities men make big houses for doves and again they put many baskets in these houses. The doves come and dwell in them and they make many nestlings. Then, men take the nestlings and eat or sell some of them, while the doves do not get angry and do not flee away from the dwellings of their masters. In the same way it is right for the true Christians when afflictions and persecutions happen among them because of the heretics, and when a pillage of their goods happens to them to endure cheerfully and not to depart from the household of Christ, their true Lord (fol. 83r- v).

This distinctio is retaken and developed with a series of biblical and Patristic authorities, including a parable (matlā) about the water of two wells (one poisoned and causing death, and the other one fresh, sweet and life-giving) and a longer story (taš‘itā) about a Christian merchant who committed apostasy, by abjuring Christianity and becoming a Jew for the sake of acquiring earthly riches and the miraculous conversion of his Jewish master to Christianity – event projected in late antique , in the times of Pope Theophilus (-412). The paideutic function of such stories is to vilify the earthly riches, by celebrating Christian poverty and righteousness, as a mark of distinction of the Syrian Christians of Malabar in a community formed by Jews, pagans, Muslims, and ‘heretic’ Portuguese referred to as “Franks” (Prangāyē). While polemic references to pagans, Muslims and Portuguese/“heretics” are scattered throughout the sermon, the Jews appear only in the repetition of the thema and in the aforementioned story.

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i. All this material is recapitulated synthetically in the combination of the parts (unitio), which I am reproducing integrally, since it provides a good summary on the content and ideology of the text:48

Until now we have explained a bit from the readings of the Holy Gospel; let us return now to the beginning of the reading and let us speak only about the first sentence, briefly and not at length, so as not to prolong the speech [too much] for those who listen. For, the Lord said: ‘Behold, I am sending you as lambs among the wolves.’ Look carefully and see, my brothers, that He did not give them [i.e. to the apostles] a sword and war machines??? (mekānās from Gr. μηχανή?) in order to threaten the people and subdue them by violence, although – glory to His power! – He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords (1Tim 6:15, Rev 19:16). He also did not put in their hands money49 so as to lure them, although He is the Creator of gold, rubies and precious pearls, but – as you heard – He sent them as lambs among the wolves, while they did not have armor for war and silver to give as bribe, and He gave them the commandment to be poor. And it is known to the whole world that the Apostles were from Jerusalem and from the surrounding cities, according to the words of the angels who called them “men of ”, as it is written in the holy book of the Acts (Acts 1: 11). And one of these Holy Apostles is Mor Toma the Blessed Apostle; through the commandment of our Lord, he came to the land of India and proclaimed the Gospel, instructed and baptized many [people]. And the Indian Christians were following his teaching until the Franks [i.e. the Portuguese] got to rule over them, and bribed [their] kings and rulers, and afflicted and subdued them. They [i.e. the Franks] were killing the Syrian bishops who were coming [to India] for this flock. And so, through bribe, they got power over this people of India. Look closely, my beloved ones, and examine whether the deed that the Franks did is according to the teaching of Christ or according to the teaching of Mohamed, who was subduing mankind through the violence of the sword and wanted to bring them to his disgraceful law through bribe and allurement. For God said in the holy book of the Law [of Moses]: “You will not take bribe, because the bribe blinds the eyes even of those with wise judgment and twists the words even of the innocent” (Exodus 23: 8). And in the book of the Proverbs of Salomon, chapter seven, the Holy Spirit said: “The one who accepts bribe loses his soul and the one who hates to take bribe is saved” (Proverbs 15:27). Now, it does not befit you to renege on your Syrian fathers for a small amount of money that you are receiving from the Franks. For Mor Aprem said: “Those of former times had a trodden way; do not tread a

48 Fol. 92r-95r. 49 Here the author seems to play within the Syriac text with the use of transient possession as used in Malayalam language, which distinguishes between permanent and transient possession.

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[new] path by yourself!” And in the fourth section [ṣḥāḥā] of the Book of Proverbs: “The wise son gladdens his father and the foolish son brings disgrace to his mother” (Proverbs 10: 1). And in the tenth section [ṣḥāḥā]: “Do not change the ancient landmark that your fathers have set” (Proverbs 22: 28). And if one of them would tell us: ‘Behold, pagan peoples left the idols of their fathers and followed Christ. In the same way, we also left the customs of our heretical fathers and followed the Franks,’ we answer him: ‘It suffices you this disgrace that came from your own mouth and bore witness against you, [namely] that you are son of the heretics! From now on do not say anymore «I am a free-born», but son of those accursed and anathematized! Through the grace of God you have become the son of the Franks? However, we do not speak as you do, but we say that we are Syrians and sons of the Orthodox Syrians from the blessed seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, from the race of the Lady Mary, the God-Bearer, and also from the race of Saint John the Baptist, Peter, Paul and the rest of the apostles and evangelists; [we are] the disciples of Mor Toma, we are not the disciples of the Franks, unlike you. We do not need wealth, but the poverty of the Son of God, Who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in the manger of the beasts, and He did not have a place where to lay His head, according to the word of the Lord (Luke 9: 58). And for the sake of His love we are paying poll-tax, as He humbled Himself – glory to His humility – and asked Simeon to pay the poll-tax on behalf of both of them50. And we do not want to be kings, as He says: “My kingdom was not from this world” (John 18: 36), but we desire the truth of Christ, we follow His disciples and we venerate and embrace our Syrian fathers. For, Ben Sira said in the second section [ṣḥāḥā] [of his book]: “Fight for the truth until death and the Lord will fight for you (Siracides 4:30) (fol. 92r-95r). j. The combination of the parts (unitio) is followed by the closing formula.

It is quite remarkable how well all the parts of the medieval European (scholastic) sermon are mirrored in this composition whose central message is expressed in the unitio. The conflictual relationship that it articulates is twofold. First of all, it summarizes the tensions generated by the Portuguese’s attempt to control the religious life of the Syrian Christians of Malabar. The capturing of the itinerant Syrian bishops sent to Malabar by the East Syrian and Chaldean Patriarchs, throughout the sixteenth century, is an emblematic expression of all these tensions; a similar event was at the peak of the revolt from 1653 (see Thekkedath, 1988: 91-96). Then, the strong Syriac identity reinforced against the “sons of the heretics” witnesses to the rivalry and tense relationship that the Putaṉkūṟ had with their fellows belonging to the Paḻayakūṟ.

50 Apparently, an allusion to the History of Simeon Bar Ṣabb‘e.

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However, the way the events are exposed in the unitio is tributary to a series of topoi, which were present in the local Syriac and Malayalam “apologetic or teleological Church histories” (on this literary genre and its coinage, see Perczel, 2009b). Such is for instance the motive of the killing of the Syrian bishops and the insistence on bribing. In order to illustrate these two topoi, I am relying on the recent research done by Emy Merin Joy who provided a comparative study with an English translation of one piece belonging to this literary genre; the text was initially written in Malayalam, and subsequently readapted from Malayalam into Syriac (Joy, 2019). The main feature of the genre is that it “presents a linear history, singling out one ecclesiastical or jurisdictional line among the many competing ones, which, according to the author of the history, is the only one that has remained faithful to the true tradition of Saint Thomas” (Perczel, 2009b: 189). The text analysed by Joy was meant to legitimize in Malabar the authority of an East Syrian bishop, Mar Gabriel, sent on the Malabar Coast, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, by the East Syrian Patriarch Mar Eliah XI Maroghin (1700-1722)51. While making a recension of the events happened among the Saint Thomas Christians after the coming of the Portuguese, the apologetic history speaks about bribe in relation to the “Franks” [i.e., Portuguese] in two instances. First, it states that , the Archbishop of , bribed the king of Cochin in order to torture the Syrian Christians who refused to accept the decrees of the Synod of Diamper (1599):

Then, by the order of the Roman Pope, Alleśa, a Frankish bishop who was Viceroy of the Fort (koṭṭekkabīśeri) and bishop, after he came to Malayāḷam, tried by all means to convert the Suṟiyānikkar who were in Malayāḷam. Learning that this was not possible, he gave thirty thousand kāśu contributed by people (or: money contributed by thirty thousand people?) to Pērumpaṭappil Sōrupam (the Kingdom of Cochin), so that for three entire years the Suṟiyānikkar in the land of Pērumpaṭappu were tormented and their minds were tormented so that their minds become weakened and, for this reason, the Suṟiyānikkar in Malayāḷam obeyed the Frankish bishop (Joy, 2019: 59-60).

Again, the same theme of the bribe appears in order to discredit the consecration of Alexander Parambil as bishop of the “Old Faction” (Paḻayakūṟ) in 1663, by Joseph Maria Sebastiani OCD, Vicar Apostolic:

After this, the Frankish bishop [Joseph Maria Sebastiani OCD]52, who was in Fort , wrote letters to the priests and the Christians and, as he sent people in secret to certain people with expensive clothes and ornaments with them, some of them had accepted these complimentary

51 On the historical circumstances of the composition of this text, the manuscript tradition and the printed edition of the Syriac translation of the Malayalam original text, see Perczel, 2009b: 190-191,198-202, Joy, 2019: 14-20). 52 The identification belongs to Joy, 2019: 41.

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gifts and secretly went to visit the bishop. Those who visited the bishop, he satisfied [them] by words and money. As this was going on, all the supposedly firm churchmen of Suṟiyānikkar in Malayāḷam started obeying the Frankish bishop. However, the Franks and those Suṟiyānikkar who joined the Franks along with them, bribed the chieftains of each kingdom and tortured those Suṟiyānikkar who refused to join them, so that they join the perfidious Franks (Joy, 2019: 60).

The “killing” of the Syrian bishops must refer to the event that fuelled the revolt of the Syrian Christians of Malabar against the Jesuit bishops and the Portuguese, from 1653 (The Bent Cross Oath). It is meant to refer to the arrival from to Cochin of Mar Attalah, a former metropolitan of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, who entered into Catholic communion in 1631, belonging to the Catholic community of Aleppo (Thekkedath, 1988: 91; Joy, 2019: 40). Mar Atallah however, was not killed by the Portuguese; his ship was not allowed to land in Fort Cochin and it was averted to Goa (Thekkedath, 1988: 92). Yet, the topic of the killing of Mar Atallah appears in the apologetic history as well:

However, as they [i.e., the Suṟiyānikkar] had been joined to the Franks, after fifty-five good years have passed, by the order of the Catholicos, a Suṟiyāni high-priest, called Mar Ginattīs53, who came to Malayāḷam, was caught and brought from Mailappu to the Fort by the injurious Franks and was drowned in the sea, and because this became known to all of the Suṟiyānikkar in Malayāḷam, then the Suṟiyānikkar living in Malayāḷam altogether gathered in a yōgam at the church of Maṭṭāmceri and decided that ‘from now onwards forever, for the times of the generations to come we would not join either in good or bad terms with the injurious Franks,’ and they made an oath (Joy, 2019: 60).

As reflected in the text of the unitio, all these arguments against the Portuguese and the Catholics, already present in the local apologetic Church histories, have been reused by the Putaṉkūṟ in order to polemicize with their rivals from among the Paḻayakūṟ. Yet, notably enough, the polemical message has been conveyed by means of a ‘perfect’ literary piece belonging to an European literary genre, alien to the Syriac tradition (the European ‘scholastic’/ ‘thematic’ sermon); and the Paḻayakūṟ were, in fact, expected to excel in this literary genre. As I mentioned before, the practice of the rhetoric of the European scholastic sermon into Syriac was already embodied by the texts belonging to the Malabar Sermonary. If the collection of sermons was used as a manual for teaching theology in school, then this would explain the adoption of the same literary genre by the Putaṉkūṟ as a means of polemics and controversy with their rivals.

53 Perhaps a spelling of “Ignatius” ( title of the Syrian Orthodox ); apparently, in Malabar, Mar Atallah pretended to be the Patriarch of Antioch (see Joy, 2019: 40).

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Conclusion

The two case studies presented in this paper document two subsequent steps in the process of appropriation of an European literary genre in Syriac among the Syrian Christians of Malabar across confessional boundaries, in the early modern period. The Malabar Sermonary, as reflected in MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1, is both a synthesis and a reflection of the entangled history of the Saint Thomas Christians, in relation to the Catholic European missionaries, and the Syriac tradition embodied by various Churches from Iraq and Syria. The manuscript witnesses to the internal conflicts between two rival groups of the Syrian Christians of Malabar (Paḻayakūṟ and Putaṉkūṟ). The tense relationship between the two Christian groups originated in the confessional division that followed the revolt against the Portuguese from 1653, along with the consolidation of the Western Syriac tradition (of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch) in Malabar, since the end of the seventeenth century. Decoding the various layers and redactions of texts from the Malabar Sermonary, through a comparative study of the manuscript evidence and through source analysis, carries the reader from the realm of confessional rivalry to that of intellectual collaboration. As argued in this paper, the textual evidence from MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1 supports the hypothesis that the Malabar Sermonary functioned as a corpus shared by Indian Christians in spite of the confessional boundaries imposed on it by its initial Catholic redaction; it also shows the appropriation of the European scholastic sermon as a literary genre by the West Syrian branch of the Christians from Malabar, as a means of polemic with their Syro-Catholic contenders. Further research on the Malabar Sermonary will reveal the function and role of this corpus in the school curriculum and its relationship to other Syriac compositions from early modern Malabar.

References

Manuscripts

MS Mannanam Syriac 46 MS Thozhiyur Syriac 1

Published Sources and Secondary Literature

Aranha, Paolo. (2006) Il Cristianesimo Latino in India nel XVI Secolo. Milano: Franco Angeli. Barsoum, Ignatius Aphram I. (2003) The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences. Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press. Briscoe, Marianne G. (1992) ‘Artes Praedicandi,’ pp. 10-76, in Artes Praedicandi and Artes Orandi, edited by Marianne G. Briscoe and Barbara H. Jaye. Turnhout: Brepols.

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Brock, Sebastian P. (1996) ‘The «Nestorian» Church: A Lamentable Misnomer,’ pp. 23-35, in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 78:3. ______. (2006) ‘Manuscrits liturgiques en Syriaque,’ pp. 267-283 in Les syriaques, edited by François Cassingena-Trévedy. Paris: Geuthner. Brock, Sebastian, Aaron Butts et al. (eds.). (2011) The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage. Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press. Chabot, Jean Baptiste. (1909) ‘L’autodafé des livres syriaques au Malabar,’ pp. 613-623, in Florilegium ou recueil de trauvaux d’érudition dediés à Monsieur le Marquis Melchior de Vogüé. Paris: Imprimerie nationale. Darmo, Mar Toma (ed.). (1960) Ḥudrā [Ktābā da-qdām wa-d-bātar wa-d-ḥudrā wa-d-kaškol wa-d-gazā u-qālā d-‘udrānē ‘am ktābā d-mazmurē]. Vol. 1. Trichur: Mar Narsai Press. Fenwick, John. (2009) The Forgotten Bishops: The Malabar Independent Syrian Church and Its Place in the Story of the St. Thomas Christians of . Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press. Gazzola, Isaia-Claudio. (2006) ‘Lexique des termes liturgiques,’ pp. 285-295, in Les liturgies syriaques, edited by François Cassingena-Trévedy. Paris: Geuthner. Hanska, Jussi. (2002) ‘Reconstructing the Mental Calendar of Medieval Preaching: A Method and Its Limits: An Analysis of Sunday Sermons,’ pp. 293-315, in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, edited by Carolyn Muessig. Leiden: Brill. Joy, Emy Merin. (2019) Christian Manuscripts of Kerala (India): Revisiting Popular Histories of the Syrian Christians in the Early Modern Period. Unpublished MA thesis defended at the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University (Budapest/Vienna), available online: http://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/joy_emy.pdf . Kienzle, Beverly Mayne (ed.). (2000) The Sermon. Turnhout: Brepols. Malekandathil, Pius. (2013) Maritime India: Trade, Religion and Polity in the Indian Ocean. Dehli: Primus Books. Mecherry, Antony SJ. (2019) Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros SJ in Malabar (16th-17th Centuries). Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. Migne, Jacques-Paul (ed.). (1844-1855) Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina. Paris. Murphy, James J. (1989) Medieval Rhetoric. A Select Bibliography. : University of Toronto Press. Mustaţă, Radu (ed.). (2019) Sermon on Saint Thomas The Beloved Apostle. A Syriac Catholic Panegyric from Seventeenth Century Malabar. Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press.

52 Mustață / Religious Entanglements and Shared Texts

______. (forthcoming) ‘Entangled Literary Genres in Syriac from Malabar in the Aftermath of the Synod of Diamper (1599),’ in Entangled Religions: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer. O’Malley, John W. (1979) Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, 1450- 1521. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Perczel, István. (2008) ‘What Can a Nineteenth-Century Syriac Manuscript Teach Us about Indian Church History?’, in Parole de l’Orient. No. 33: 245-265. ______. (2009a) ‘Classical Syriac as Modern Lingua Franca in South India Between 1600 and 2006,’ in ARAM. No. 21: 289-321. ______. (2009b) ‘Four Apologetic Church Histories from India,’ in The Harp. No. 24 (2009): 189-217. ______. (2013) ‘Some New Documents on the Struggle of the Saint Thomas Christians to Maintain the Chaldean Rite and Jurisdiction, pp. 415-436, in Sonderdruck aus Orientalia Christiana. Festschrift für Hubert Kaufhold zum 70. Geburstag, edited by P. Bruns and H. O. Lutte. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ______. (2014) ‘Alexander of the Port/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar: A Syriac Poet and Disciple of the Jesuits in Seventeenth Century India,’ in Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies. No. 14: 30-49. ______. (2015) ‘Cosmopolitisme de la Mer d’Arabie: Les chrétiens de Saint Thomas face à l’expansion portugaise en Inde’ pp. 143-169, in South Asian Cosmopolitanisms: Sources, languages, itineraries, edited by Corinne Lefèvre, Ines G. Županov et al. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. ______. (2018) ‘Accommodationist Strategies at the Malabar Coast: Competition or Complementarity?’ pp. 191–232, in The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World, edited by Ines Županov and P.- A. Fabre. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Roberts, Phyllis B. (2002) ‘The Ars Predicandi and the Medieval Sermon,’ pp. 41– 62 in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, edited by Carolyn Muessig. Leiden: Brill. Schneyer, Johannes Baptist. (1969-1990) Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters: fur die Zeit von 1150-1350. Vol. 1-11. Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Schurhammer, George SJ. (1934) The Malabar Church and Rome During the Early Portuguese Period and Before. Trichinopoli: St. Joseph’s Industrial School’s Press. Thekkedath, Joseph. (1988) History of . From the Middle of the Sixteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century (1542-1700), vol. 2. : Church History Association of India. Wenzel, Siegfried. (2015) Medieval «Artes Praedicandi»: A Synthesis of Scholastic Sermon Structure. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

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Županov, Ines G.. (2005) ‘One Civility, But Multiple Religions: Jesuit Missions among St. Thomas Christians in India (16th-17th centuries),’ in Journal of Early Modern History. Vol. 9, No. 3-4: 284-325.

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper has been generously supported by the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement n° 647467 — JewsEast), by the Leibniz Institute for European History (Mainz) and by the Gotha Research Center of the University of Erfurt, to which I am greatly indebted. I am grateful to the editors, Dr. Deepra Dandekar and Professor Ines Županov, for offering me the oportunity to publish and for their patience, and to my supervisor, Professor István Perczel (Central European University, Budapest/Vienna) for his feedback and support. I am very much indebted to the two anonymous peer-reviewers of this article for their substantial feedback, and for helping me improve its quality. For the manuscript material used in the paper, I would like to thank Professor István Perczel and the SRITE project.

54 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-8636 Doi.org/10.3886/nidan.2020.5.1.4

Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors: Untouchable Christians and Dilemmas of Modernity in Colonial Kerala

Reju George Mathew, Assistant Professor, School of Management Studies, National Institute of Technology Calicut, , Kerala, India [email protected]

Abstract

Colonial Christian missions have often been celebrated as catalysts of social reform in Kerala or dismissed as extensions of imperial empires. Various conversions among erstwhile ‘untouchable’ under the Church Missionary Society (CMS), London Missionary Society (LMS) and Basel Mission Society (BMS) have, thus, been criticized or celebrated, often at the expense of the converting untouchable’s agency. While the missionary accounts of conversion have been available in the form of various reports from the nineteenth century, ‘Dalit’ accounts of conversion and post-conversion dilemmas came forth into public, only in the second half of twentieth century through the literary works of Dalit and writers. Novels like Samvatsarangal (1984) by S. E. James, Mukkany (1987) by D. Rajan, and short stories like “Eli, Eli, La’ma Sabach Tha’ni?” (2011) by Paul Chirakkarodu, “Achanda Vendinja Inna” (2003) by T. K. C. Vadutala and “Prethabhashanam” (2011) by C. Ayyappan reveal the dilemmas of Dalit Christianity, while songs by Poikayil Appachan, a.k.a Poikayil Yohannan or Poikayil Kumara Gurudevan, a Dalit convert who later rejected Christianity to start his own cult, Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (Church of God of Visible Salvation), to fight casteism are important for understanding the multifarious nature of colonial Christian missions. This article highlights the entangled nature of religious experience embroiled in converting ‘untouchables’ in Kerala and how this entangled process influenced emergent Dalit in the postcolonial period. The paper will focus on the tactics and strategies involved within Dalit conversion experiences from Kerala, drawn from the theorisation of everyday life, and its caste-religion liminality to emphasize the literary expression of multicultural and multi-religious entanglements and its emotions in 19th and 20th century Kerala.

Key Words: Caste, Dalit, Dalit Christianity, Syrian Christianity, Conversion

55 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors

Introduction

The European missions that worked amongst the slave castes of Kerala in the 18th and 19th centuries are directly or indirectly credited for facilitating various social reforms. They are credited for establishing schools for agrarian slave castes1, abolishing slavery and uzhiyam (compulsory service by the slave castes to the state), breast cloth movement amongst the lower castes (Houtart and Lemercinier, 1978: 9, 22-23), and enabling social mobility through the establishment of public works and plantations (Kooiman, 1991: 62). European missionary and Christian interventions are often depicted from an ‘outsider’s perspective’ in the prose writings in Malayalam during the 19th century like Pullelikunju and Saraswativijayam, and The Slayer Slain, the first serialised English novel from Kerala in the 19th century. In contrast to the above, the Dalit conversion and Dalit from the twentieth century can be considered the ‘insider’s version’ of conversion and post-conversion experiences. In the following sections, this article will first trace the genealogy of Dalit Christian writings about caste and conversion from a historical perspective and then discuss the dilemmas of the Dalit Christian identity articulated within postcolonial literature to bring to the forefront literary expression of conversion and the emotions of multicultural-multi-religious entanglements among Dalit Christians in Kerala. Based on novels, short stories and songs from the colonial and postcolonial period, this article elicits the emotions of conversion, caste oppression and the multi-religious entanglements implicit within Dalit Christianity. The vernacular novels, stories and songs analysed in this article include Samvatsarangal (1984) by S. E. James, Mukkany (1987) by D. Rajan, and short stories like “Eli, Eli, La’ma Sabach Tha’ni?” (2011) by Paul Chirakkarodu, “Achanda Vendinja Inna” (2003) by T. K. C. Vadutala and “Prethabhashanam” (2011) by C. Ayyappan to emphasize the dilemmas faced by untouchables who converted to Christianity. This article will also analyse a few songs by Poikayil Appachan, or Poikayil Kumara Gurudevan that reject casteism in both and Christianity, calling for newer religious strategies for Dalits.

Colonial Modernity and Contested Christianity in Literature from Kerala

The advent of colonial modernity in Kerala cannot be separated from the interventions of European missionary Christianity, especially amongst the slave castes. This curious engagement between Christianity and caste gets represented in the various literary works of the period. Though Vijayan Kodancherry claims that Pullelikunju by Archdeacon Koshy D. D. (1882)2 is the first Malayalam novel (Kodancherry 2007: 11-18), it could have been side-lined in Malayalam for

1 The Dalit communities like Cherumas, Pulayas, Thanda Pulayas, Parayas, Paniyars and Kuravans were agrarian slaves in Kerala. While most of them remained associated with the cultivation of their landlord’s land, they could also be sold and bought in markets. For a detailed discussion of agrarian slavery of Dalit castes see Mohan, 2015. 2 Kodancherry claims in the preface to the book that sections of Pullelikunju were serialized in the newspaper Jananikshepam before its publication as a book in 1882.

56 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863 questioning the caste system. Divided into three sections, the novel discusses the Christian gospels and ’ teachings in the final section, while the first and second sections are outright attacks on casteism in Kerala during the period. The novel also discusses the prospects of conversion for the slave castes in detail. In Saraswativijayam (1892), a novel by Potheri Kunhambu, there are references to annihilating caste and working for the development of the lower castes, among the achievements of the Basel Mission in Malabar, Kerala. And the protagonist of the novel, Marathan, is a lower caste man, who received education from the mission school, at the expense of offending the upper caste landlord. The novel discusses how Christianity and the mission during the colonial period, contributed to changing the basic appearance of the converts. The converts were depicted as happy; and women as neatly, decently and modestly dressed in clean clothes that included a blouse, with combed hair and, with the men wearing shirts. They are also described as speaking clearly with standard pronunciation (Kunhambu, 2004: 59). This decent image in the novel, however, remains in stark opposition to the depiction of the slave castes of the period in missionary literature as “utterly unclean and polluting” (Proceedings of the C.M.S., 1851:52, 145).

‘Syrian Christians’3 from Kerala, also known as ‘Syrians’ or ‘Nazaranis’, on the other hand, are not a product of 19th century European missions. They have enjoyed higher status in Kerala with social and ceremonial privileges, like the right to use the public roads, or to be part of temple festivals, in a state ruled by orthodox Hindu kings (Bayly, 1992: 8). They also claimed their origins from ‘upper’ caste Nambudiri through conversion by St. Thomas. Syrians, thus, integrated better with the larger Hindu society and observed the same rules of ritual purity as the . And they refrained from proselytising amongst the Dalit and Backward castes to prevent challenging their own special privileges and status. Koshy Curien, the anti-hero of Frances Wright Collins’ The Slayer Slain (1864-66), is the perfect example of Syrian resentment against educated Dalits guided by European missionaries (Collins, 2011: 21).

The coming of European Protestant missionaries marked the beginning of a new era in the field of education and social progress (Nag, 1983: 889). It became possible for lower castes to accompany their ‘masters’ all over India, whereas the traditional upper caste landlord would treat their lower caste slaves only in accordance with caste norms of and unapproachability (Collins, 2011: 98). The old Poulusa in The Slayer Slain shows how the missionary Christian reforms the ‘slave’ into a better person, who does not steal from his master but offers him wholehearted services instead. The ‘good slave’ even prays for his master, when the latter beats Poulusa’s grandchild to death: “Saviour of mercy, Saviour of love, look down and pity us. Bless and forgive my cruel master. Lay not this sin to his charge, Amen, Amen” (Collins, 2011: 18). While colonial

3 Syrian Christians are divided into several denominations under various churches with a common claim of Brahmin origin through conversion by St. Thomas. These include the Syro-Malabar Catholic church and the Syro-Malankara Catholic churches under papal authority, along with the Malankara Jacobite Syrian Christian church under the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, the Malankara Orthodox Church, the Malankara and few smaller churches.

57 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors modernity attempts to make ‘humans’ out of the slave castes through conversion, Poulusa is only referred to as ‘the slave’ or ‘the Christian slave’ by Frances Wright Collins. This irony can be linked to Bhabha’s discussion on Frantz Fanon’s discourse on “the continuist, progressivist myth of Man” (Bhabha, 1994: 237). The slave convert could, thus, never become the ‘Christian’, neither in the European sense, nor in the Syrian Christian one. At another point in the book, the native minister of the European mission is projected as the saviour of the slaves, against their cruel casteist Syrian Christian master (Collins, 2011: 29). And the native minister even threatens to invoke government action against the other servants to save Poulusa. Again, ironically, Christianity in such novels is portrayed as an agent that enslaves the converted Dalit Christian further, by dedicating him to his master and to work.

We wish to love our master, and our work; and we love the fields where our fathers and grandfathers have worked before us. We know every flower, and every bird that wades deep in the watery swamp. We know the sound of every chuckram4, which from our childhood to old age we have turned in their nightly course, while we have joined with the jackals in their howling. Our fathers’ spades have dug the soil and made their graves; and they have been handed down to us, and we will again and again sow and reap the paddy, and our bodies shall die and help to fatten the soil: but we will never leave our master; neither will we break God’s holy Sabbath day (Collins, 2011: 27-28).

European missionary Christianity, thus, embodied colonial modernity with its emphasis on progress and enlightenment that in other ways kept the master- slave relationship intact, while at the same time being opposed to traditional upper caste and Syrian Christian feudal oppression of lower castes. While Christian missionaries in Kerala played a major role in the social upliftment of various lower caste communities, as well as helped in the transition of Kerala into a modern state, one cannot ignore how they were also accused of the politics entailed in conversion at the expense of social reforms. At the same time, social reforms introduced by the mission, also supported and promoted the political and social base for a communist regime in Kerala that sought to further these activities to achieve better literacy5, and land reforms.6 However, as also indicated above, this is not to say that colonial modernity constituted a panacea for Dalit suffering in Kerala, especially since Dalit Christian conversion was complicated by the presence of upper caste Syrian Christians. The following section on songs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a demonstrative case of this with Appachan denouncing those religions, theologies and churches that excluded the

4 A chuckram is a large traditional water wheel used in the paddy field. A man sitting on a raised platform steps on the blades of the wheel to keep it moving, which in turn, directs the water below. Traditionally, the slave castes performed this strenuous duty in the fields of their landlords. 5 “The Kerala Education Bill” was introduced in 1957 in the assembly by the then Education minister Prof. Joseph Mundasseri and aimed at standardizing practices within educational institutions that ensured just opportunities and facilities for all. The bill also attempted to regularize the appointments of teachers, who were in service. 6 Land reforms that were initiated by the Communist government in Kerala in 1957 leading to the “The Kerala Land Reforms Act” of 1964. These land reforms were aimed at ending the zamindari system and distributing land among peasants.

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Dalit Christians of Kerala.

The Songs of Poikayil Appachan

Poikayil Appachan was born in 1879 as Kumaran, a Dalit slave of an aristocratic Syrian Christian family from in the Central region of Kerala. He converted to Christianity at a young age due to the insistence of his landlord, and became an evangelist, working with several churches like the Marthoma Syrian Church and the Brethren Church, before abandoning Christianity and burning the Bible on account of the caste discrimination he faced. Also known as Poikayil Yohannan and Poikayil Kumara Gurudevan, Appachan is known for his spiritual work amongst Dalits and for organising them under the banner of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS) (Swamy, 2011: 597-598). Apart from his work on promoting education and lifestyle changes amongst his followers, Appachan was famous for his songs in which he critiqued caste discrimination and oppression in both Hinduism and Christianity. And his writings could have led the way to a distinct form of Dalit Christian theology: Like orphans we roamed the back alleys of Hinduism. Like orphans We wandered through the outskirts of Christianity. The Hindus did not admit us, my friends, neither did the Christians, oh, my people! (Swamy, 2011: 606) This song not only critiques the casteism in Hinduism and Christianity, but it implies the absence of any theology or philosophy that reflects on the lives of the Dalits. Appachan engaged with this lacuna through systematic reflections on the nature of sin, salvation and the wrath of God. Being a ‘nobody’ both within Hinduism and Christianity was unacceptable for him and this led to his final rejection of both religions and the Church:

No, not a single alphabet is seen On my race So many histories are seen On so many races Scrutinize each one of them The whole histories of the world Not a single letter is seen on my race (Abhilash, 2013: 50) Appachan expresses his disapproval of Christian scriptures and church histories that exclude Dalit Christians from Kerala, dehumanising them. He questions those religions and societies that demonise Dalits by refusing to be ashamed of his history and caste identity and challenging the order that turns caste

59 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors discrimination into a norm. While Appachan narratively employed several notions of personal hygiene and personal attire borrowed from European missionary discourse, he also theologised the slave history of the Dalits on the lines of the Old Testament (Mohan, 2005: 147-149):

Chained and locked They were always captive Thorny whips lashed them down Yoked along with bulls and buffalos Paired with beasts Used to plough the ground (Abhilash, 2013: 57) Appachan’s songs describe the experience of slavery for Dalits and the violence meted out to them, calling for and comparing the liberation of Dalits with God’s liberation of the Israelites from bondage. Appachan rewrites the history of the Travancore region by deploying the myth of a once, glorified past to fuel social transformation (Abhilash, 2013: 55-56), making his engagement with Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in many ways, an early precedent of Dalit Christian theologies within the various churches in Kerala.

Dilemmas of Conversion in Malayalam Dalit Literature in the 20th Century

To proceed to Dalit Christian writings of the 20th century, Samvatsarangal (1984) and Mukkany (1987)7 are two important Malayalam novels that narrate Dalit lives, and the historical results of their conversions into Christianity and the intricate politics that emerge in the ensuing clash of cultures, practices and rituals. On the other hand, the short stories “Achanda Vendinja Inna!”, “Eli, Eli, La’ama Sabach Tha’ni?” and “Prethabhashanam” detail the various dilemmas and psychic traumas of the Dalit Christian in the post-conversion period, where s/he faces casteism within and outside the church. Finally, Poikayil Appachan’s songs criticise both casteism as well as the failure of Christianity in tackling casteism. The fact that three among the above-mentioned works have figured in the Dalit writing dossier No Alphabet in Sight (2011) bring the article back to analysing literary discussions about Dalit discourse and the history of vernacular Christianity in the region.

7 The names of novels (independent works) have been given in italics while short stories (part of a larger collection) are given in inverted commas.

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Samvatsarangal- The Annals of Dalit Life

Samvatsarangal (1984)8 written by S. E. James9 is one of the few Malayalam novels with Ayyankali (1863-1941), one of the pioneers of Dalit struggles in Kerala, as a central character. He fought for the education and land rights of Dalits in the regions of Travancore. The forms of protests and resistance he used against casteism challenged the age-old customs in Kerala. His forceful use of the public roads that were out of bounds to the Dalits revolutionised the struggles for self-respect and paved the way for social transformation (Madhavan, 2008: 765-766). The novel employs Ayyankali as a character and describes the intricacies of Dalit lives and the discrimination they faced at the hands of the land-owning upper castes, the Nairs. It chronicles the life of Daniel Upadeshi, a Dalit convert and protestant preacher, who brings Christianity to Maranthadam, that becomes the location of Dalit revolution. Since he fails to separate himself from his past struggles and suffering, he narrates these to his grandson, Monayi. This includes his attempt to build a church and a congregation in Maranthadam that was met with scepticism, confusions, horror and violence. Both Dalit and upper caste gods were depicted as getting offended with the arrival of a new Christian god in their somewhat mystical and traditional habitat. The elements of magical realism in the novel reflect the myths, beliefs and the multiple contours of religious and cultural practices that pre-existed in Maranthadam. His first convert in Maranthadam was named Daveed, a man called Govindan or prior to his conversion. And his conversion initiated mass conversions among the Pulaya caste10 in Patinjattumuri and Kattukulam. Here, faith is not merely an individual effort, but a community-initiated one that stands in opposition to the missionary notion of individual salvation and building personal relationships with God. It is observed that such mass conversions even led to increased competition between the missions (Lankina and Getachew, 2013: 116). Nevertheless, the caste society had nothing but scorn for the converted individuals. For instance, when Daveed comes to a local teashop run by a , he is ridiculed by both upper castes and Dalits for his conversion. Valladan came close to him. “We were calling your name all this while Konna.” “I am not Konnan.” Hunh! Everyone was surprised. They looked at each other meaningfully then and laughed. “If so Konna, then how are you the manager jammi11 of Medappera? Or are you the dead Anandanpilla jammi of Velakkenni?”

8 K. M. Krishnan’s translation of Chapter 9 of this novel is included in No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India with the title “Annals”. 9 James was one of the first novelists in Malayalam to address caste in all its intricacies. He has published four novels and several short stories and is the receiver of the Mamman Award in 1980 for his novel Samvatsarangal. 10 One of the Dalit castes in Kerala, previously treated as agrarian slaves. 11 Jammi refers to landlord. In pre-independence Kerala, Nairs were an important landowning community prior to the abolition of slavery through the Government of India Act of 1843 and the Second Proclamation of Travancore and Cochin that repudiated the buying and selling of lower caste slaves by landlords.

61 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors

“No.” Konnan said: “Daveesh!” “Daveesh?” —They came closer. “Oh, Daveesh!” “The name given to me by Upadeshi. From now on, call me only by that.” Making the cross mark on the forehead and keeping as his witness, Upadeshi had whispered the name a hundred times in his ear: “Daveed.” Then Upadeshi had taken the Bible and told him the story of King Daveed. However much ever he tried, the name of King Daveed of the psalms, came out as Daveesh from his mouth. Damodaran Nair’s regular customers looked at Daveesh sceptically. Vaathi understood the matter. Then he rose and went out of the shop. Turning towards the door, he spat on the ground and asked: “You have become a Christian, haven’t you Konna?” “Not Konnan, Daveesh.” He corrected. “Phew! Kaveesh… Kuveesh!” Vathi walked away blabbering. While walking towards the church yard, someone called from behind: “Kooi Kaveeshe. Kuveeshe…” in a mocking voice. Daveed walked on as if he did not hear. Maranthadam’s first Christian walked towards the church yard (James, 1984: 92-93).12 The new name was intended to change the Dalit Konnan into a Christian Daveed. But the transition was not a smooth one. One could argue that the name Daveesh embodied the transitional liminal space between Konnan and Daveed (Ashcroft et al., 2000: 117). Though Homi Bhabha adopts the notion of a stairwell to explain the nature of liminal space, and how differences are constructed between binaries, converted Dalits cannot really be considered to inhabit a liminal space either, since a Dalit neither converts into European Christianity, nor a Syrian Christian one.

The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy (Bhabha, 1994: 4).

The sequential evolution of becoming Christians as proposed by colonial modernity, thus, fails in this case to explain Dalit conversions that need to be separately theorized. The upper caste status of the Syrian Christians in Kerala could account for this added ambiguity in Dalit conversions.

Upadeshi is a kind and compassionate man, ready to serve even those who work for him. He provides all the workers engaged in building the church with

12 Translation mine

62 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863 homemade delicacies as well as clothes. This is met with surprise and respect from workers, otherwise located within the local caste hierarchies of Kerala where they were traditionally allowed only certain kinds and leftover food and used or tampered clothes. Upadeshi preaches to the workers about the futility of worldly pleasures, urging them to seek eternal joy in God’s kingdom. He translates the protestant theology and ethics13 of Christian missionaries into his own lived experiences. The new life of the converted Dalit is hence dedicated to Christian ways that build the local church and spread the gospel. The complexity of the conversion experience is also evident in Velu’s experiences, who was another Dalit, who took the name Mosha after converting to Christianity and is also appointed sexton of the church. However, he doubts whether he lost something dear to himself, when people are indifferent to him and mock his ideas of ‘progress’ like wearing the shirt of some fat white man from the church (James, 1984: 102). His fear of alienation in his native land and his attempts to fight it by praying and taking consolation in God were ‘essential’ components of Dalit Christian beginnings. The sudden shift of status from a Dalit to someone who has embraced a foreign religion disturbs the convert’s social location, and traumatizes him/her, as she/he fights this alienation through prayer and performing religious rituals. Apart from an emphasis on salvation through one’s personal relationship with Jehovah, Daniel Upadeshi in the novel also popularises education amongst the Pulayas and Ooralis.

He tried to make them aware of the necessity of education. “Don’t you need liberation from this state that is close to the life of animals?”, he asked. “We have been suffering this for years and years together!” “There is only one way to escape”, he said. “Learn, and progress. And through education, we can become great people, like the white people, who came here to start the church, like the Diwanji (James, 1984: 165).14 This urge for learning and education as part of civilizational progress was endorsed by colonial modernity, having deep repercussions among Nairs in the locality. Dalits with increased access to and an interest in education, especially with the arrival of Christianity is a historical reality in Kerala, which the novelist interweaves with real and fictional incidents to legitimise the history of Dalit Christians and describe their dilemmas of conversions. The invoking of Ayyankali and his historic struggles for justice and human rights for Dalits in Kerala, thus, fits well into this narrative. The novelist, therefore, succeeds in establishing that Dalit Christian lives cannot be devoid of Dalit pasts and their struggle against casteist suffering. In fact, the protagonist carries the struggles against casteism strongly forward, using his faith in Christianity and the various modes of capital that he acquired with it as agents of change and progress.

13 Cf. Weber (2005) for a detailed and celebrated analysis of protestant Christianity and its relation with work culture and the rise of capitalism in Germany. 14 Translation mine

63 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors

Mukkany, D. Rajan’s Novel

D. Rajan, through his novel Mukkany (1987), unravels the lives of Parayas, a Dalit community in Southern Travancore, whose occupation was to cut mukkany15 from the Sahya mountain ranges and earn a livelihood on various products made from it. The novel brings to light the internal hierarchies within the Paraya caste, attempting to create space for their myths, beliefs and customs in . This is also a ‘chronicle novel’ (Ayrookuzhy and Chirakkarode, 1995: 32) that narrates the story of three generations among the Parayas. The first generation is represented by the Paraya elder, Nanjan Mooppan, who is feared by all in the locality and practices occult rituals and magic. He also symbolises the violent and polygamous ‘pagan’ Paraya within the Christian missionary discourse. He is the “leader, guru, priest, magician and everything for the Parayas” (Rajan, 1987: 17). The second generation that initiates social change is represented by Nanjan Mooppan’s daughter Painkili and her husband Chennan. Chennan is revived by Dalit Christians from Myladi,16 after he was almost beaten to death by some of Painkili’s relatives. Chennan and Painkili get married, following which they meet with various hardships. They are supported by Vedamanickam and his wife Nahomi, third generation Dalit Christians, after Chennan meets with an accident and loses his left eye. Vedamanickam and Nahomi bring them home and care for them (Rajan, 1987: 158) and are depicted as pious Christians who did not work on Sundays and who dedicated one tenth of their earnings to the church (Rajan, 1987: 160-1). The couple taught Chennan and Painkili many Christian songs and taught them to recite from the Bible (Rajan, 1987: 162), while the priest and other church members opposed the non- Christian Dalits being hosted by Vedamanickam’s family (Rajan, 1987: 163-4). Finally, as conversion seems the only solution, Chennan and Painkilli are baptised as Shilas and Raseena (Rajan, 1987: 166).

The adoption of a new name is significant here, as it is a public declaration of their new belief and life in Christ that sheds their caste identity. But, Chennan and Painkilli continued their traditional occupation of cutting mukkany and selling its products along with other Paraya Christians and non-Christians. Vedamanickam, being a devout Christian and appointed deacon of the church, assumes the role of a godfather for Stephen, Shilas and Raseena’s son. He is portrayed as guiding Stephen from childhood, to read and narrate biblical stories. While portraying the religious fervour of Paraya Christians, the novel employs many popular Christian songs in standard Malayalam, in stark contrast to the Paraya dialect of Malayalam that characters use for conversations. The narrative voice of the novel employs standard Malayalam, while also highlighting the specific flavour of Paraya Malayalam. The novel uses biblical language and imageries repeatedly for instances when Stephen is discriminated at school for being a “beef-eating Paraya” (Ibid.: 186). Vedamanickam advises Stephen at such

15 A variety of forest bamboo, used for weaving baskets, mats, ropes and other utilities. 16 The novelist attempts to invoke the early history of Dalit conversions in Southern Travancore through his references to Myladi. The first Dalit convert from the region, Maharashan was also given the name ‘Vedamanickam’ after conversion. For a detailed discussion of this history, see Chirakkarode, 2000.

64 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863 instances to depend on god and study well to overcome his difficulties, citing the Bible on how the poor and the suffering would receive relief in heaven.

The novelist, Rajan, uses biblical stories and themes meaningfully to describe Paraya lives. For example, when Vedamanickam decides to meet the Bishop to seek permission for Stephen’s ordination as a priest, the image of Moses from the Old Testament is invoked to express hope that Stephen would deliver Parayas from a life of slavery and darkness (Rajan, 1987: 194-5). Slavery is not merely spiritual here; it was the lived and systemic experience of caste discrimination for Parayas17. The novelist also discusses white missionaries leading the church since the colonial period in glowing terms as: “It used to be foreign missionaries then. They were white bishops. They had sacrificed their lives for others. They were the true disciples of Jesus Christ” (Rajan, 1987: 196). This description of European missionaries is in stark contrast with the native Bishop who gets angry with Vedamanickam and shouts at him for wanting to get Stephen admitted in the seminary. Though Stephen is smart and has passed the matriculation exam with first class that is not enough for him to join the seminary. The Bishop says: “You are a deacon. Your son should be made a priest. In this way, you would say that his son be made bishop. You need lineage and heritage for priesthood. Will church members obey if the Paraya and Pulaya become priests?” (Rajan, 1987:196-7).

The novelist furthers stresses the difference in attitude between white missionaries and the native bishop by narrating how Vedamanickam’s grandfather converted to Christianity. Villi Parayan, Vedamanickam’s grandfather was a black magician, who had killed an upper caste drunkard for disrupting a Paraya festival. When all the Parayas in the locality came under police and social persecution for this, the white priest stepped in and ensured the security of the Parayas. The character of Vedamanickam in the novel says: “They were saved from the police with the help of the saayip18 priest. And they joined Christianity en masse for self-protection. Villi Parayan, the evil magician was baptized and became Christian and he adopted the Christian name, Habel. Habel’s son was Hanok. Hanok’s son is Vedamanickam” (Rajan, 1987:197). This incident relates the heterogeneous nature of motives underlying the Christian conversion of Dalits into missions. While for some, Christianity was a spiritual quest, for others it was embroiled with improvement of social status and for still others it was associated with the privileges of mission life.

The novelist makes the best use of his narrative voice to talk about continuing casteism within the church by referring to different parishes for Dalits who were not allowed to attend the same church along with the upper caste Christians. Intelligently enough, the novelist also refers to the works of other European missionaries in Kerala through Vedamanickam’s voice, who remembers these as

17 The British abolished slavery in Malabar in 1843. And slavery finally ended in practice through Royal Proclamation in Travancore and Cochin in 1853 and 1854 respectively. 18 Saayip is a term for white man, while madaamma is used for a white woman. Saayip is the same as sahib or saheb commonly used in other Indian vernaculars.

65 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors stories told to him by Habel, his grandfather:

European missionaries came to Kerala to spread Christianity. True missionaries… People who had dedicated their lives for the spread of the gospel... These foreign missionaries had come to India to convert those uncivilised people to Christianity, who were performing evil things like magic, black magic, sacrifices, ghost-talks, etc… For that, they build churches. They started schools. They built hospitals. They made orphanages. They constructed factories… Those white gospel workers went to the huts of the poor and gave them clothes. They gave them food. They took care of the sick. They taught them how to live cleanly and with respect. They got their children to join school… They taught them to sing and pray. They raised them to be humans (Rajan, 1987: 199-200).19

Thus, the liminal space that Dalit Christians would have occupied turns more ambiguous and contested with the seemingly ‘benevolent’ missionaries and the traditionally oppressive Syrian Christians at two possible ends for the stairwell in which the Dalit converts are culturally located. Neither do they become the European Christian nor the Syrian Christian.

The third generation in the novel is also represented by Stephen, who joins hands with other Dalits, voicing his anger against caste discriminations within the church and outside it. He is a fictional representative of the postcolonial Dalit Christian subject, caught up in numerous dilemmas. As a Christian, he is refused any caste reservation within educational institutions or government employment unlike Hindu Dalits. And his dilemma even propels him to consider converting back to Hinduism to avail of reservation, so that he can join a college. But he is dissuaded by Vedamanickam, who reinstates Christian faith in him and warns him from falling for worldly desires (Rajan, 1987: 228-234). This is a realistic portrayal of the Dalit Christian in contemporary India, where s/he gets discriminated against, based on her Dalit origins, even after generations of conversion. S/he is a ‘Lower Caste Christian’ or ‘New Christian’ or ‘Weak Christian’ for society and church and is yet kept away from affirmative governmental action that provides Dalits caste reservation. This anger against discrimination is best portrayed in the words of Christopher, a friend of his, who encourages Stephen to fight casteism in the church:

Nowadays, casteism is most widely practised amongst Christians. They build separate churches for different castes. Pulayas and Parayas have small churches with roofs thatched from grass and leaves. They make fun of it calling it pulapallikal and parapallikal20. The elites have tall magnificent churches! They have special cemeteries. Lakhs of rupees are sent to them from America, England and Germany for missionary work. They enjoy its fruits— the upper castes, the rich, those from elite families! We are mere worms (Rajan, 1987: 243).21

19 Translation mine 20 While Pulapallikal refers to Pulaya churches, parapallikal refers to Paraya churches. 21 Translation mine

66 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863

Stephen draws inspiration from the words of Harold Laski22 and B. R. Ambedkar in organising against the inequalities of the church (Rajan, 1987: 244). When Vedamanickam dies, his body is taken to a far-off cemetery as Dalit Christians were not allowed to share their cemetery with Syrian Christians. Also, in spite of Stephen being popular as a writer and a god-fearing Christian, his lover Celin’s fath e r, the Syrian priest of parapalli, refuses to let them get married and she has to run away from home to be with Stephen. Thus, the novel shows how manifold the challenges faced by Dalit Christians are, and these problems do not automatically disappear in the ‘post’ conversion period. The post conversion experience of the Dalit should not be understood as sequential in nature, but as an “ex-centric site” that reveals newer experiences and avenues of empowerment as well as resistance (Bhabha, 1994: 4).

“Achanda Vendinja Inna!”- Father, Here’s Your Scapular!

In this short story (2003), T. K. C. Vaduthala23 brings to light the tensions and ironies of Dalit Christian lives in Kerala, for whom conversion to Christianity constituted a source for liberation and emancipation from caste oppression. The protagonist of the story is a man from the Pulaya caste named Kandankoran who converts to Christianity after suffering from a serious illness, especially after his Syrian Christian landlord, ‘Kochu Thamban24’, visits him and instructs him to convert. Kandankoran is, thus, baptized with a new name, ‘Devassi,’ and the immediate effect of this conversion is depicted as impressive, with the Syrian Christians of his neighbourhood willing to everything for the “New Christian”. Devassi is, hence, proud to be a staunch Catholic and becomes elevated from his lower caste status. However, he also starts to think that Pulaya life is now unworthy of him and pities those Pulayas who continue to remain “two-legged cattle” that work for others. He considers converting his wife and children too, completely abandoning the family’s old Pulaya way of life, since he now thinks of Pulayas as the “children of Satan”. But his wife refuses, and they fight. He also demands that one of his neighbours, a Pulaya named Thevachan, call him ‘Thevasthi Thamban’. But when everyone laughs at Devassi for pretending to be a Syrian Christian and making such demands as a Pulaya, Devassi severs all ties with the Pulayas, abandoning his wife and children. Devassi’s encounter with his father-in-law is also a revealing instance of the same caste intricacies of Christian conversion, when his father-in-law calls him ‘Kandangaran Thevasthi’. Devassi fights with his father-in-law and demands to be called ‘Devassi Thamban’ and his attempts to transform himself into an upper caste Christian becomes increasingly obvious in the story, when Devassi fights with another Pulaya for daring to call him ‘brother’. Devassi, thus, isolates himself from the other Pulayas and develops an aversion to the lifestyle followed by his

22 Harold Laski (1893-1950) was a British political theorist, economist and socialist active in the interwar years. 23 Vaduthala wrote stories on several themes including caste discrimination, feudalism, alcoholism amongst Dalits, and the rise of political awareness, and religious conversions. 24 ‘Thamban’ is a term used by the Pulayas of his locality to address Syrian Christians. It is similar to the term Thambran, a term traditionally used by the Dalit castes for Nair and other upper caste landlords.

67 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors caste.

The author, Vaduthala also describes the material changes that took place in Devassi’s life with conversion. He stopped working in his own fields and became an attendant of the Syrian Christian family. He wore a scapular25 or vendinja given to him by the priest and he did not need to refer to Syrian Christians like other Pulayas had to do. He had his own ‘elevated’ status and better names. But this dream world is disrupted when his father-in-law tells him how the , the Syrian Christians, still refer to him as a Pulaya. He is perplexed about why they still call him Kandankoran even after his conversion and the change of his name. One can either be Kandankoran or Devassi; but, how can one be both Kandankoran and Devassi? This question troubles him and he realizes that despite conversion, he does not get the opportunity to eat with Syrian Christians, whom he refers to as ‘real Christians’ (Vaduthala, 2003: 42). Vaduthala invokes the image of a bat, while describing Dalit converts to Christianity, since bats are neither birds nor animals. While conversion instils a feeling of superiority in the mind of a Dalit convert that makes him shun other Dalits, Syrian Christians continue to consider Christian converts Dalits. Kandankoran Devassi is a representative of Dalit Christians in Kerala who face caste discrimination at various levels in the church. The new name after conversion is deceptive and becomes a mere adage to the Dalit’s previous identity and he fails to become a ‘real’ Christian, a Syrian Christian in this social context. One just becomes a ‘Dalit Christian’ instead.

A culmination of this identity crisis takes place in the novel when one of the church elders, a Syrian Christian of great authority publicly calls Devassi ‘Kandankoran Devassi’ and all the Pulayas laugh at him, mocking his pseudo- Christian status. He reaches the church with a heavy heart and breaks down before the priest, and without answering the latter’s questions, removes the scapular from around his neck and returns it to the priest saying: “Father, here is your scapular. I will live as the old Kandankoran” (Vaduthala, 2003: 44). This is the moment in the novel when Kandankoran decides to shed his belief in Syrian Christianity, an upper caste , and asserts his identity as a Pulaya, as someone not requiring liberation and emancipation, but as someone who can speak for himself and can see through the casteist agenda of the church. This story asserts that casteism operates in similar ways, both within Hinduism and (Anilkumar, 2004: 83). And borrowing the notion of “psychic trauma” from the postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon26, one can identify the Dalit Christian as a hybrid, who realises the futility of attempting to become an upper caste Syrian Christian or shed the specific cultural identities that are despised as

25 Scapulars or vendinja are locket-like sacramentals worn mainly by the Roman Catholics to show their devotion and allegiance to certain saints. Scapulars would have images of saints, Mother Mary, Jesus etc. or even biblical verses on them and be worn around the neck. 26 Fanon was a French psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary, known for his formulations in postcolonial theory. His most famous works include Black Sin, White Masks (Originally in French as Peau noire, masques blancs in 1952 and translated into English in 1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (Originally in French as Les damnés de la terre in 1961 and translated into English in 1963).

68 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863 lower caste by the society (Loomba, 1998: 176). Kandankoran’s psychic trauma in post-conversion phase leads him to abandon Syrian Christianity, a religion that is comparable to the whiteness that was promised to the Fanonian hybrid colonised subject.

“Eli, Eli, La’ma Sabach Tha’ni?”- Fighting the Casteist Christian

In this short story (2011), Paul Chirakkarode27 narrates how a pious Dalit Christian resorts to counter violence in order to fight the injustices meted out to him and his family by a Syrian Christian. This story is translated under the same name by Shirly M. Joseph in No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India (2011). The story opens with a court scene where Pathrose, a preacher, talks about his life, writing his name as ‘Kandankoran Pathrose’, as his name was Kandankoran before converting. He describes the lives of the Pulaya caste from his childhood, and how Pulaya men and women toiled the whole day in the fields to earn a living. He explains how he was invited by the priest from the Mission to join the seminary in his youth after which he underwent three years of training to emerge as ‘Preacher Pathrose’. His missionary training and Christian fervour are evident in the passionate and biblical phrases he uses to describe his beginnings as a preacher (Chirakkarode, 2011: 397). Pathrose marries Mariam, a Pulaya woman, who was earlier called Chirutha before converting, and they had a daughter called Marykutty. The passion and devotion with which Pathrose preached, shocked people who were prejudiced against Pulaya Christians. To quote: Crowds gathered to listen to my rendering of the Word. Their eyes reflected the shock of witnessing the unimaginable. They turned to one another and whispered, amazed: ‘Is this not one whom we know? Is he not the one who grew up in the pulaya hovels beside the fields? Isn’t Thiruvanchan Pulayan his father and his mother Azhaki Pulakalli? Who is it that has given him this knowledge and this power?’… All the way, they muttered to themselves: ‘To think that this should befall us; that we should have to listen to a pulaya preaching to us!’ ‘Enough. Were we not already Christian when they were still heathens?’ (Chirakkarode, 2011: 397-398)

The allusion here is to how people in Jesus’ hometown got amazed when he started teaching them in the synagogue.28 This amazement and shock also point at new and multireligious ways of being that simultaneously asserted Dalit identity, facilitated by missionaries. “This knowledge and this power” for Dalits came with the arrival of missionaries in the region, even though Christianity was present in Kerala for a very long time before that as a casteist enterprise.

27 Chirakkarode was a Dalit writer and activist who worked against casteism within the Christian churches of Kerala. Apart from several novels, short stories and essays, he also contributed to the establishment of Dalit literature in Malayalam through his essay Dalit Sahithyathinoru Mukhavura and the book Dalith Saahityam: Oru Padanam (1995, Christava Sahitya Samithy, Tiruvalla), co-authored with Rev. Dr. Abraham Ayrookuzhy. 28 Refer to Verses 54-56 in Chapter 13 of the in the Bible for the story.

69 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors

Marykutty in the book, on the other hand, challenges Pathrose for ignoring the needs of his family:

God will make a way for us. Pray earnestly. Do you not believe in the One who can send food even through a crow? And my daughter—God, how could she say that? —she said: Father, these days, food does not get sent through crows, but through ration shops and in hotels (Chirakkarodu, 2011: 399). This conversation contests faith as the only factor that fends for the Dalit convert’s everyday needs, and therefore also contests the teachings of missionary Christianity. The allusion here is to the story29 of Prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, who gets fed bread and meat by the ravens. But, such miracles are not a part of the lived reality of the Dalit Christian lives. When Pathrose discovers that Marykutty is pregnant as a result of her relationship with a Syrian Christian man named Kunjunjutti, he asks the latter to accept her as his wife. The ensuing conversation between Pathrose and Kunjunjutti reveals how caste determines marital relationships, even in the church. Kunjunjutti says:

The preacher is knowledgeable. And though I am a wageworker, I am from an aristocratic Christian family. We have been Christian since the time of St. Thomas in Kerala. To that I reply: “Am I not a servant of God? Am I not a Christian?” “Preacher, you are a mock Christian, a convert. You have forgotten that, haven’t you? Go find some Pulaya lad to give her off to.” (Chirakkarode, 2011: 401) In the story, Pathrose kills Kunjunjutti with an axe. Pathrose understands the various events in his life and society purely from the lens of his Christian faith. For him, Christianity has overwritten his Dalit identity. And his trust in God leaves him unaware of the colours and contours of the caste system he is associated with, despite being a fiery preacher:

Do I plead guilty of murder? How can this be murder? I am the one who is the servant of God, the one for whom His Word is the girdle, the one who obeys His commandments? It is according to His commandment that I meted out punishment. His commandment? Which one? The Word of God spells it out: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death.’ The Lord my God will never find me guilty. Never. Never (Chirakkarode, 2011: 402).

The biblical dictum that the wages of sin is death30 guides the action of the preacher who considers himself to be the agent of God. He fails to understand the norms and laws of the caste order as well as the legal system, both alien to the Bible that believes in.

29 Refer to Chapter 17 of Book 1 Kings in the Old Testament of the Bible for the story. 30 Refer to Verse 23 of Chapter 6 of the Epistle to Romans in the Bible.

70 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863

“Prethabhashanam”/ “Ghost-Speech”

While Christian conversion has been a major theme in the many literary works authored by Dalits in Kerala, C. Ayyappan31 stands out with his sarcasm and denial of any ‘glory’ accorded to Christianity. His analysis of Kerala society and Syrian Christianity, his disrespect for the casteist system and casteist churches is unambiguously depicted in his short stories, containing extraordinary and innovative narrative techniques. “Ghost-speech” is an English translation of C. Ayyappan’s short story “Prethabhashanam” (2011) that was initially published in a short story collection Uchayurakkathile Swapnangal from 1986. Translated by Udaya Kumar for the book No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India (2011), the entire story is in the form of a speech made by the ghost of a Pulaya girl, inhabiting the body of Rosykutty, a Syrian Christian girl. The ghost explains the reasons underlying her death in the story.

When she was alive, the Pulaya girl had a relationship with the Syrian Christian girl’s brother, Kunjakko, that started after he molested her. The Pulaya girl did not realize that Kunjakko was only interested in sex and asks him to marry her. He retorts with a question, “How can I marry you?” (Ayyappan, 2011: 351), and this reflects the unequal social condition of Dalits, where upper caste men may consider it right to sexually exploit a Dalit girl but objectionable to marry one. Even though Kunjakko is a primary school teacher, with a steady income, he cannot marry a Pulaya girl, especially as he is a Syrian Christian who has traditionally enjoyed upper caste status in Kerala, often equated to that of the elite Nair castes (Bayly, 1992: 249). He also spits at her desire to have his child, since an upper caste Christian would not consider a lower caste person’s desire for legitimacy as valid (Anilkumar, 2004: 61). While the Pulava girl is too young and lacking in ways to identify caste oppression prevalent in Christian society, to identify her own exploitation and exploiter, Kunjakko beats her and forces her to state in public that she does not love him. He also abuses her later in the story when she tries to find out whether he loves her. She cries, not because of the abuse, but because Kunjakko does not love her. And she commits suicide, unable to tackle this trauma. Kunjakko is scared of being polluted by the Dalit girl’s love, then, after being forced to accept it in public. It is to be noted here that the Syrian Christians have traditionally observed rituals and customs similar to those of the Nairs in relation to birth, death, puberty, etc. “In fact they were rites which safeguarded the Syrians’ corporate substance and guaranteed their status within a shared moral order which was defined in terms of gradations of ritual purity and pollution” (Bayly, 1992: 252). The lack of honour that prevents Dalit Christians from having their own voice leads to the Pulaya girl’s suicide in the novel, thus making possible the only means for the articulation and expression of her oppression, as a ghost.

The ghost further reveals why Rosykutty’s father killed Kunjakko, Rosykutty’s

31 Ayyappan was a noted Dalit short story writer and poet in Malayalam and has written widely on Dalit issues and Dalit women’s issues. His stories stand apart in their uncommon, intense and disturbing themes as well as narrative techniques. Several of his short story collections have been published, such as Uchayurakathille Swapnangal (1986) and C. Ayyappante Kadhakal (2008).

71 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors brother. Rosykutty, once inhabited by the ghost, refused to stay away from Kunjakko, expressing a sexual interest in him.32 Even when he beat her, she laughed and continued. And everyone except him knew that it was the ghost of the Pulaya girl in Rosykutty’s body. While the ghost was not worried about the possibility of exorcism, she was worried that Kunjakko would commit suicide, disallowing her from enjoying the smell of his sweat that she now did through Rosikutty’s nose. Kunjakko is killed by his father, when the latter finds him sleeping next to his sister Rosykutty’s chained body, hugging her. Though the father realized that it was due to the Pulava girl that Kunjakko took advantage of his sister Rosykutty’s illness, he killed Kunjakko because the Pulaya girl was also his illegitimate daughter, making Kunjakko’s relation with her incestuous and sinful in Christianity. The father had warned Kunjakko against having any relations with the Pulaya girl, but was left speechless, when Kunjakko replied that he was not planning to marry her. It was as if Kunjakko was reliving his father’s past, as the Pulava girl’s mother had faced the same injustice at the hands of the father and the father’s younger brother. The story reveals the complicated innards of caste abuse embroiled in the sexual violence against Dalits and Dalit Christians in Kerala, and it was finally God, who revealed this secret to the ghost in the story, calling her a ‘sinner’ whose nakedness was unveiled by her own brother. But Ayyappan challenges and ridicules the casteist and violent nature of Christianity in Kerala through the way the ghost retorts to God: “Old fool! How can a Christian have a Pulaya girl as his sibling?” This question leaves God speechless “as if he had swallowed a whole plantain. His eyes bulged, and he bowed his head” (Ayyappan, 2011: 354). Ayyappan mocks the casteism prevalent in the churches of Kerala that fail to promote between Syrian Christians and Dalits, retaining Syrian Christians’ upper caste status claiming apostolic origin through Brahmin conversion. For him Christianity is unable to bring to life what it preaches—equality amongst all of its believers.

The story finally reveals that Kunjakko had no soul, and whether the author means to question the absence of any soul for all Syrian Christians and Syrian Christianity at large, remains unanswered. Ayyappan’s use of a ghost as a narrative medium or character in the story differs from the traditional methods of using a ghost in a novel or play. As Freedgood puts it, the ghostly referent recounts an injustice, an unpunished crime or murder that must be avenged for the ghost to return to his or her proper sphere. But what is interesting about this genre is that the ghost is often easily appeased, the crime becoming readily available for public understanding (Freedgood, 2014: 49-50). In the popular theyyattam33 stories of region of Kerala, lower castes punished with death for violating caste and moral restrictions get deified, and theyyattam becomes the annual ritual performance where the lower caste performer, while possessed with the deity, gets revered by people of all castes (Menon, 1993: 189). Unlike the deities of the theyyattam stories who have become a part of the

32 It is not stated very clearly. But it is mentioned that she stuck to him. 33 refers to annual ritual worship performances that happen in Kerala’s northern districts like Kasargod, , Kozhikode and Wayanad as well as parts of . Most of the performers are men, and the performances are popular, as well as crucial, in retaining the cultural memories of ritualism and folkloric religious expressions in the region.

72 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 55-77 ISSN 2414-863 cultural memory of the region, the ghost in Ayyappan’s story is not respectable for the Syrian Christian family in spite of her similar unjust death. The chance of the Dalit girl becoming a saint for the Syrian Christians is also bleak.

In “Ghost-speech”, the intricacies of the plot are unveiled only through the speech of the ghost. Also, while the ghost does not take active revenge, it expresses strong contempt for casteist exploitation. The ghost’s speech is an act of assertion – not that of a mere victim, but of a rebel who questions the caste system and God who sanctions it passively. Ayyappan’s attempt to employ the narrative voice of the ghost, as mentioned in one of his interviews, possibly stems from an appreciation of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Ayyappan, 2008: 181).34

Conclusion

Understanding Dalit conversions in the context of European and missionary Christianity in Kerala, represented in vernacular literature in Malayalam, as yet remains an incomplete task. The liminal space occupied by Dalit Christians cannot really be well-encompassed by Bhabha’s analytical imagery of a stairway that seeks to present the social acceptability of the Indian Christian identity. The upper caste status of the Syrian Christians in Kerala and the impossibility of transcending one’s caste identity even through conversion create this uncommon experience. On the other hand, what was lost in the course of conversion leads to further dilemmas for the convert, generating concerns about the Gods, myths, legends and the different histories of their slave past. For instance, CMS missionaries claimed that the Hill Araan tribe in Kerala demanded of missionaries to destroy their traditional worship places and idols, so that they could learn to pray to the Christian God (Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society, 1852- 53: 130), and it also became evident that the European missions wanted to benefit the Syrian churches and not the Dalit and converts in Kerala.

The object of the Mission was expressly to benefit the Syrian Church—not to interfere with its liberty to “ordain rites and ceremonies,” but to encourage and aid it to reform itself— “not to pull down the ancient Church and build another, but to remove the rubbish and repair the decaying places” (Church Missionary Atlas, 1879: 98-99).

The social status Syrian Christians enjoyed, along with their legends of an apostolic origin, could have made them a worthier target group in the missions’ perspective.

Dalits definitely experienced a loss of ancestral religion while embracing Christianity, and hence, the acts of conversion and the nature of post-conversion

34 Tutuola (1920-97) was a Nigerian writer, whose narrative techniques and style received wide appreciation and criticism in the postcolonial literary scene. The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was his most famous novel, where he employs western and native Nigerian fantastic and mythical elements to depict the story of a person who visits the land of the dead in search of his dead palm tapper.

73 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors life was not easy, as Dalit Christian literature reveals. It led to a series of attempts and initiatives within Indian churches in the1980s to systematically articulate faith through a relevant and caste-conscious theology, forming the context for newly emergent Dalit aspiration for liberation (Prabhakar, 2006: 202). Dalit Christian literature and theology has not just led to the redefinition of Christian hermeneutics in India that responds to Dalit perspectives, histories and experiences, but also strongly critiques the idea of Dalit Christianity as ‘little traditions’, opposed to the ‘great tradition’ of upper caste Hindus and Brahmin or upper caste Christians (Appavoo, 2006: 112).

The meta-narrative of an Indian Christian theology is hence reformulated by the Dalit religious experience that is openly expressed in Dalit Christian vernacular literature. And the search for the Dalit Christian’s daily bread and their struggle against caste oppression, poverty, suffering, injustice, illiteracy and the denial of human dignity and identity, as expressed in vernacular literature, contributes to the formulation of a . It thus becomes an act of deliberate Dalit theological activism to compare Dalit liberation in India with that of the ex-slaves of Israel. Thus, from the Dalit literary and theological perspective, conversion to Christianity is considered an exodus to liberation from the clutches of the caste system, and from Hindu society and religion. The emphasis on this ‘exodus experience’ is inspired from Black theological formulations in a similar context.

In the Old Testament, the liberation theme stands at the center of the Hebrew view of God. Throughout Israelite history, God is known as he who acts in history for the purpose of Israel’s liberation from oppression. This is the meaning of the Exodus from Egypt, the Covenant at Sinai, the conquest and settlement of Palestine, the United Kingdom and its division, and the rise of the great and the second exodus from Babylon (Cone, 1970: 52).

For Black theologians, Christianity offers exodus and liberation from racial violence and subjugation. Meanwhile, T. M. Yesudasan proposes the distinct notion of ‘religious ascension’ while dealing with Dalit conversions in the light of the missionary activities. To quote: “Till the time and Protestant religions sanctioned the entry of converts into their fold in the 19th century, the Dalits of Kerala were not even part of any recognizable organized religion. Hence, it is not right to say that Dalits ever converted to their religion. The notion here, of Dalit religious ascension, is more apt, since it denotes ascension into a better state from a disorganized and helpless situation. Dalit conversion was therefore not a shift of loyalty from one organized religion to another; it was religious ascension” (Yesudasan, 2010: 3).35 Yesudasan’s argument need not be considered as a dismissal of the existence of Dalit religions during those days, but as problematizing the notion of distinct organised religions as we understand them now. The fluidity of religious practices, rituals and identities in the social context of caste becomes relevant here.

This approach of Dalit Christianity and Dalit conversion in 19th and 20th century Kerala, analysed through Dalit Christian vernacular literature, dismantles various

35 Translation mine

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Hindutva theories of forced conversions and enticement that imagined European missionaries as luring Dalits into converting (Bauman, 2008: 189). Neither can conversion and Christianity be universally celebrated as liberating or patronizing. Yesudasan notes the very few references to Dalits within the C.M.S. records for the seventeen years between 1818-35, when missionaries were awaiting favourable response from the Syrian Christians (Yesudasan, 2010: 16-18), with the exception of Kali, a slave girl, who was baptized by her own insistence and desire to convert in Cochin in 1827-8, after running away from her European master (Yesudasan, 2010: 49-50).36 Hence, the religious conversion of Dalits viewed as ascensions is on par with Ambedkar’s conversion to Navayana Buddhism37. Quoting from Yesudasan again: “The slaves had gone in search of missionaries. The strategy of conversion used by slaves to attain freedom, at least in a limited sense and to further develop this freedom already attained, is what make Dalit religious ascension an active and creative thought” (Yesudasan, 2010: 51).38

Michel de Certeau theorizes the power of everyday resistance, through an elaboration of small and mundane tactics. While strategies are grand in nature, often legitimized through governmental, and the dominant community’s sanctions, tactics refer to smaller, more quotidian and common individual attempts that use available structures to subvert and democratize grand strategies (de Certeau 1988: xix). Hence, the slave girl’s attempt to embrace Christianity using whatever available opportunity she had, represents an ordinary person’s resistance and attempt to establish an alternate order through tactics, separate from grand strategies. Bringing all these diverse literary accounts of Dalit Christians and their conversions together, the arguments for and against the more grand-scale missionary ideas emphasizes a plurality in attitudes and aims. And these plural aims, emotions, personal stories and literature that demonstrate an everyday and painful negotiation with social oppression and structures of caste hierarchies, question the linear logic of modernity and development that the missions proposed. Not only were the reasons and motives for conversions plural, so was the missionary intervention, and this diversity can be well addressed through the literary approach and methodology, enabling an analysis of Dalit Christian literature and theology that presents the experience of conversion as a multi-religious entanglement.

36 Kali insisted on conversion in order to avoid going to Ceylon with her family. The sources describe how she stood firm, holding the gate of the missionary’s bungalow, refusing to leave unless taken in. 37 Navayana Buddhism was a version of Buddhism, that Ambedkar believed would prove useful for Dalits to liberate themselves from the caste system and Hinduism. Ambedkar, along with a large number of followers, converted to Buddhism on 14 October 1956 at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur. 38 Translation mine

75 Mathew / Fighting Caste and Losing Ancestors

References

Abhilash, V. V. (2013) Colonial Modernity and Neo Religious Identities in Travancore: A Critical Study of the Evolution of the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha. Diss. Hyderbad: English and Foreign Languages University. Anilkumar, T. K. (2004) Malayala Sahithyathille Keezhala Pariprekshyam. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi. Appavoo, James Theophilius. (2006) ‘Dalit Religion’, pp. 111-21, in Indigenous People: Dalits, edited by James Massey. Delhi: ISPCK. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. (2000) Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Ayrookuzhy, Abraham, and Paul Chirakkarode. (1995) Dalith Saahithyam: Oru Padanam. Tiruvalla: Christava Sahitya Samithy. Ayyappan, C. C. (2008) Ayyapante Kadhakal. New Delhi: Penguin Books and Manorama. Ayyappan, C. C. (2011) ‘Ghost-speech’, pp. 350-355, in No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu. New Delhi: Penguin. Bauman, C. (2008). ‘Postcolonial Anxiety and Anti-Conversion Sentiment in the Report of the “Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee,”’ in International Journal of Hindu Studies. Vol. 12, No. 2: 181-213. Web. 6 Sept. 2020. . Bayly, Susan. (1992) Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Chirakkarode, Paul. (2000) Dalith Christhavar Keralathil. Tiruvalla: Christhava Sahithya Samithy. Chirakkarode, Paul. (2011) ‘Eli, Eli, La’ma Sabach Tha’ni?’, pp. 395-402, in No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu. New Delhi: Penguin. Church Missionary Atlas, The. (1879) 6th ed. London: Church Missionary House. Collins, Frances Wright. (2011) The Slayer Slain, edited by Susan Varghese and Sobhana Kurien. : CMS College. Cone, J. (1970). ‘Black Consciousness and the Black Church: A Historical- Theological Interpretation’, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 387: 49-55. Web. 6 Sept. 2020. . de Certeau, Michel. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall. Berkley: University of California Press. Freedgood, Elaine. (2014) ‘Ghostly Reference’, in Representations. Vol. 125, No. 1: 40-53. Web. 11 Dec. 2019. . Houtart, Francois and Genevieve Lemercinier. (1978) ‘Socio-Religious Movements in Kerala: A Reaction to the Capitalist Mode of Production: Part One’, in Social Scientist Vol. 6, No.11: 3-34. Web. 16 Jul. 2020. . James, S. E. (1984) Samvatsarangal. Kottayam: Sahitya Pravarthaka Co-operative

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Society Ltd. Kodencherry, Vijayan. (2007) “Avatharika.” [Introduction], pp. 11-18, in Pullelikunju. 1st Papyrus ed. Calicut: Papyrus. Kooiman, Dick. (1991) ‘Conversion from Slavery to Plantation Labour: in South India (19th Century),’ in Social Scientist. Vol. 19, No. 8/9: 57-71. Web. 22 Apr. 2020. . Koshy, Archdeacon D. D. (2007) Pullelikunju. 1st Papyrus ed. Calicut: Papyrus. Kunhambu, Potheri. (2004) Saraswativijayam. Special ed. Kottayam: D C. Lankina, T., and Getachew, L. (2013). ‘Competitive Religious Entrepreneurs: Christian Missionaries and Female Education in Colonial and Post-’, in British Journal of Political Science. Vol. 43, No. 1: 103-131. Web. 6 Sept. 2020. . Loomba, Ania. (1998) Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Madhavan, K. (2008). ‘Formation of Dalit Identity in Kerala’, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. Vol. 69: 764-770. Web. 6 Sept. 2020. . Menon, D. M. (1993). ‘The Moral Community of the Teyyattam: Popular Culture in Late Colonial Malabar’, Studies in History. Vol. 9, No. 2: 187–217. Web. 6 Sept. 2020. . Mohan, Sanal. (2005) “Imagining Equality: Modernity and Social Transformation of Lower Castes in Colonial Kerala.” Diss. Kottayam: University. Mohan, P. Sanal. (2015) Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nag, Moni. (1983) ‘Impact of Social and Economic Development on Mortality: Comparative Study of Kerala and West Bengal’, in Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 18. No. 19/21: 877-900. Prabhakar, M. E. (2006) ‘The Search for a Dalit Theology’, pp. 201-213, in Indigenous People: Dalits, edited by James Massey. Delhi: ISPCK. Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society. (1851-52) pp 145-146. London: n.p. Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society. (1852-53) pp. 130-146. London: n.p. Rajan, D. (1987) Mukkany. Kottayam: D. Rajan. Shah, Apoorva. (2010). (Rep.). American Enterprise Institute. Web. 5 Sept. 2020, . Swamy, V.V. (2011) ‘Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha: Historical Absences and the Other Text’, pp 594-608, in No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu. New Delhi: Penguin. Tutuola, Amos. (1993) The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. New York: Grove Press. Vaduthala, T. K. C. (2003) “Achanda Vendinja Inna!”, in Chankranthi Adayum Mattu Pradhana Kadhakalum. Kottayam: DC Books. Weber, Max. (2005)The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Yesudasan, T. M. (2010) Baliyadukalude Vamshaavali. : Prabhath.

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Book Review

Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros SJ in Malabar (16th-17th Centuries). By Antony Mecherry, SJ. Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu. Volume 79. Rome, 2019. l + 494 pp. ISBN: 978 88 7041 379 3. Price: € 60.

Antony Mecherry, SJ is a professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute (Scienze ecclesiastiche orientale) in Rome, a rising scholar who promises to be for decades to come one of the leading historians of the Society of Jesus in India. Impressively detailed scholarship underlies the book, a mastery of sources in the required Western and Indian languages, including archival materials, letters and texts that have never been printed. It is a paradigm of meticulous scholarship, valuable even for its bibliography, which runs to thirty pages. The book makes a fresh contribution to familiar and much discussed issues with respect to Christianity in Asia. Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation is highly recommended for readers interested in nuancing the story of the arrival of in India, and in seeing the complexities of what the missionaries were up to.

The context is this. The early members of the Society of Jesus who reached Asia engaged in many pastoral, intellectual, economic and political activities. But aside from St. (1506-1552), those most remembered today were the missionary scholars among them. These were committed missionaries who were determined to understand the cultures around them, with the sensible view that they could communicate the Gospel successfully only if they understood those cultures, their languages, and social structures. They explored all available religious beliefs and practices, even if they were disposed from the start to dismiss the possibility that those beliefs were entirely true or practices entirely good. Figures such as Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606) in Japan (but with jurisdiction over the mission across Asia), Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) in China, Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) in India, and Ippolito Desideri (1684-1733) in Tibet were all pioneering figures in learning languages, reading indigenous texts, responding to the new cultures they encountered, and reshaping the practice and purpose of Christian mission.

De Nobili, the figure relevant for this review, became famous as an innovative scholar. He learned Tamil well enough to write books in the language and enough Sanskrit at least to read classic religious texts. He adapted his clothing, diet, and way of life to be more acceptable to Brahmins, since he was convinced that only

78 Clooney / Book Review by winning converts among the Brahmins would the Jesuits have much chance of a steady and enduring mission among the rest of the south India population. Conversion was his goal, and for that purpose, he was as innovative as he could be. By his adaptations many of the obstacles to mission were removed, and he was able to win friends among the local intellectuals, but also to engage Brahmin intellectuals in discussion and debate, often in fierce arguments. De Nobili was successful in making many converts, and in establishing a high caste mission alongside the wider Catholic and Jesuit mission to fishermen and villagers often of much lower castes or Dalit identities. Nevertheless, other missionaries, including many Jesuits and Church officials in Goa, were uncomfortable with his strategy. While de Nobili traced his methods to the early Church’s adaptation to Roman culture, some accused him of watering down the Gospel, catering to paganism, or even becoming an idolater himself.

The general story of de Nobili is well known, but Antony Mecherry SJ makes a welcome fresh contribution by reassessing de Nobili’s missionary strategies against the background of intra-Christian debates in the generation preceding his arrival in India. He does this by linking the story of accommodating Brahmins with the other great challenge that came with the arrival of Western, Latin-rite Christians in India: the difficult relationship with the older Syriac Christian churches — “the Malabar Church,” the churches of the Mar Thoma Christians tracing themselves back to Thomas the Apostle — established in West India long before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498. One approach of the powerful and aggressive Western Catholics arriving in India was impatiently to marginalize the older forms of Christianity, forcing the Syriac churches to become Roman Catholic in liturgical language and ritual form. On occasion, this was implemented by brute force. A quite different approach was accommodation, the fashioning of ways for the two Christian traditions to live in harmony: unified in faith and doctrine, but distinct in what were judged to be cultural factors.

While accommodation thus had to do with varying ways of being Christian — in unity, with some differences — the analogy had an unanticipated life of its own. That is, the reasoning goes, if the Catholic Church could accommodate Syriac Christians by allowing cultural differences without demolishing Christian unity, then the same surely could be done with Brahmins as well, for the sake of conversion: “While the Brahmin Christians wanted to retain their cultural symbols after their conversion to Christianity, the Thomas Christians wanted to maintain their ancient traditions after their formal union with the Catholic Church, sharing at the same time common cultural rites that in a way protected their caste identity” (xiii-xiv). For both Thomas Christians and Brahmins, “caste identity remained independent of their religious allegiance” (xiv). de Nobili’s key contribution was to appropriate “the existence of the Thomas Christians in that cultural field as an effective case in point to prove the feasibility of his accommodation among the non-Christians, who did not want by any means to

79 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 78-81 ISSN 2414-863 lose their shared cultural identity” (xiv). As Mecherry sees it, it makes sense to see the mission to the non-Christians of south India as extending the accommodation exercised with respect to the Malabar Christians. He very meticulously builds his case over the first four chapters, in the concluding chapter offering a brilliant recontextualization of de Nobili’s mission.

Mecherry’s special focus is on one of de Nobili’s greatest supporters, Archbishop Francisco Ros (1559-1624). Ros is frequently mentioned in books about de Nobili, but never until this book has he been the center of attention. Ros was a Catalonian from the Jesuit province of Aragón who arrived in India in 1584. In 1599, he was appointed the first Latin bishop of . Mecherry does ground-breaking work on Ros and on the controversies around Roman Catholic- Syriac Christian relations and he gives us a fresh and new perspective on the basis of which to think about de Nobili, and the inspiration for his mission.

I mentioned that de Nobili and others were famed for their missionary scholarship. But Mecherry modifies the frame of that learning. He asserts that it is for the sake of missionary accommodation, not for the sake of a more modern quest for mutual understanding for its own sake: “although Jesuit accommodation in mission is often treated as a question of profound knowledge and exchange of languages and cultures required of the missionaries, it was, in fact, a mission method by which the Jesuits in their respective mission lands tried to ensure either conversion or reconversion of the local people to Catholicism” (xvi). According to Mecherry, this means that “knowledge for its own sake” is not the goal, nor is interreligious understanding. But “deeper knowledge of the mission and its languages” mattered in that it helped missionaries “to comprehend in detail the hidden and interwoven dynamics of the cultural and liturgical symbols of their respective mission arenas, which seemingly shared the same cultural traits” (81-82). This practical knowledge enabled them to sort out primary and secondary aspects of the traditions involved, and to interpret old practices and symbols in a way that would allow them to be maintained by converts to Christianity. This strategy is already clear and explicit in de Nobili’s own treatises, which appeal more to the model of Christian accommodation in ancient Rome rather than the negotiations between Roman and Malabar Christians. But Mecherry is convincing in noticing that the same manner of inquiry and same balancing act are operative first in the Catholic-Syriac encounter, and then in the Catholic-Brahmin encounter. It is this parallel which surely would have caught the attention of everyone involved in the debates over adaptation. Learning to treat the churches of the East with respect and tolerance created a disposition to go as far as possible in honoring the other religious cultures encountered in India. What is still needed, of course, is a review of all these issues from Indian and Hindu perspectives, as concerned observers watched the Portuguese and their missionaries do their work in two different but obviously connected contexts.

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Mecherry clearly admires Ros and appreciates his responsible efforts to work out the Malabar-Roman relationship even while also defending de Nobili’s experiment. But as a historian, he does not want to take sides too strongly: “This book neither makes a moral judgement upon nor advocates for Jesuit accommodation. Conversely, it tries to address, without judging the agents or the opponents of this mission approach, the underlying reasons that prompted Jesuits such as Francisco Ros and Roberto de Nobili to embrace a different of accommodation in South India that apparently led their companions in mission to employ a spirit of participation in the customs and symbols of their respective mission field” (xvi). At the same time, he is sympathetic too with de Nobili’s opponents, who saw accommodation with Syriac Christians as vastly different from accommodation with pagan Brahmins, a step too far. Indeed, Mecherry is also providing the grounds for a more traditionalist reading of de Nobili: no longer a radical prophet of interreligious dialogue or even an early religious pluralist, but rather a more traditional missionary who insightfully extended a mode of Christian accommodation into the uncharted territory of the Catholic-Brahmin encounter. There is a tone of disappointment to one of Mecherry’s few comments on the contemporary strategy of adaptation in India: “In fact, the present-day endeavours of evangelization, practised especially in a multireligious and multicultural context, disregard accommodation as a mission method, tending to focus, instead, on the approach of inculturation and interculturation as guiding principles in the process of promoting faith and justice…” (xvi). My guess is that Mecherry is really defending accommodation as the better, more faithful, and more modest strategy that Catholics and Jesuits in India should still follow today.

In the end, Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation proves to be interesting for a range of reasons It sheds new light on Christian mission in India and reshapes our thinking about a key early period in the Western arrival in India; it connects the history of Christian encounters in Western India with interreligious encounters in south India, events and controversies most often considered in isolation from one another. It sheds fresh light on both the genius and indebtedness of Roberto de Nobili’s new missionary method. Readers of this volume will realize that Christian mission in the colonial era was a complicated affair, that even its defenders found it difficult to explain and implement. The stage is now set for further, nuanced studies by Hindu scholars of Christian mission seen in light of this particular history.

Reviewed by Francis X. Clooney, SJ Harvard University, [email protected]

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Book Review

Pankaj Jain. Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora. London and New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), 2020. Pp. viii +149. ISBN 978-1-138-56545-6. Price: $ 38.98.

The real objective of Professor Jain’s short and highly readable text is not very clear. The main title reads Dharma in America, that is, Religion, and the explanatory subtitle is “A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora. But the Contents page lists topics about the socio-economic and-cultural achievements and contributions of the diasporic Indians—Hindu and Jain. His targeted readers are presumed to be aware of who the Hindus and Jains are. He never discusses the religious texts and tenets of these people he writes about, despite his brief and interesting personal autobiographical notes. Consequently, he does not tackle the vexed issue of the distinct or derivative identity of the Hindus and the Jains. The erstwhile editor of the Times of India Girilal Jain opposed Jain separatedness. The Bharatiya Janata Party president Murli Manohar Joshi boldly declared in Antwerp in August 1992 that “Jains are the best Hindus of all.” Sādvī Dr. Sadhana of Ācārya Sushil Kumar Ashram, Delhi declared that “Jains and the other Hindus are the inheritors of a common heritage (Koenrad Elst, “Who is a Hindu?: Hindu Revivalist Views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Other Offshoots of Hinduism” [2001], ch. 7. koenradelst.bharatvani.org/books/wiah/ch7.htm. accesssed 2/22/2020).

However, some modern-day young educated Jains are keen on forging a distinct Jain identity away from the hegemonic Hindu religion and culture. One such Jain enthusiast is a brilliant young American Jain named Nikhil Bumb. According to him, Jains and Hindus differ in their interpretations of karma, punarjanma, and mokṣa much as they do in respect of rituals, rites, and holy days. Although Bumb does not get into the Jain ethic or theology, some American experts provide shrewd scholarly discussions on the most important Jain epistemology anekāntavāda [theory of many-sidedness]. According to Nicholas Gier, “this famous doctrine of many-sidedness…contrasted with the one-sided (ekānta) views of [Hindu] Vedānta and Sāṃkhya” (Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000, 90). Yet Bumb avers unhesitatingly: “I know that the belief in one does not exclude

82 Sil / Book Review the practice of the other. And know that, ultimately, wherever I fell in the Jain- Hindu spectrum, somehow it checks out” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jain- or-hindu-finding-a-d_b_784001. Accessed 3/2/20). Our author appears to share partly Bumb’s take on what it means to be a Jain in India as well as in the diaspora.

Admittedly, Dr. Jain often tries to blur or transcend the Hindu-Jain dichotomy by equating and “homogenizing” both under the term “Indian” or “Indian American.” Thus, he talks about them in the Hindu or Indian diaspora and provides an excellent succinct account of the Jains in America (Chapter 5) but also adding two chapters (3 & 4), sensibly, on the “Indian” (basically non-Jain) contributions to medical and musical fields in the United States. It appears from the Contents page that he has deliberately refrained from discussing the two major Jaina sects—Śvetāmbara, the White-Robed and Digambara, the Disrobed— or any controversial issues surrounding the Hindu-Jain identity. The general scholarly consensus has it that —its putative founder being the first tīirthaṅkara [literally, “ford-maker,” that is, builder of passage to mokṣa or liberation], a legendary figure named Ṛṣabhanātha or Vṛṣabhanātha [literally, lord of the bull], symbolized as bull that mirrors the GrecoRoman-Persian god Mithra the bull, believed to have been born in Ayodhya and the bullborne Hindu , Mahadeva or the Great God—is an offshoot, much like Buddhism, of the religion of the Hindus (for a concise but careful account of the history, ethics, and theology of Jainism see Gier, Spiritual Titanism, 79-97).

The well-written chapter 2 that puzzlingly leaves out the Jains but deals with Indians in the US as “silent minority” appears somewhat odd as it is based almost entirely on internet sources (of the eleven endnotes eight appear to have been accessed on a single date, May 13, one on May 4, another on July 10, 2017 and one printed source with no pagination), despite his shrewd observation on the evolution of the Indians from an obscure existence in America as part of a “silent minority” to the status of a model immigrant community of most vocal, vibrant, and successful professionals (3-4). Indeed, a casual perusal of the New York based Indo-American newspaper India Abroad shows how they are reported in every issue for their triumphant achievements in economic, social, cultural, and slowly but steadily even in political spheres for which they are increasingly regarded as model immigrants.

Puzzlingly, however, the author’s dependence on an undergraduate “thesis,” leaves out many other sources that agree on the actual sources of the Hindu influence (17-18). Initially, Hindu contact with the New World emanated from the indentured sugar plant laborers imported from eastern and northern colonial

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India who were mostly illiterate but practiced their native rituals and were mostly vegans. Presumably their eating habit may have to do with their poverty back home and they continued to follow their eating habit even when they were relocated as coolies in the Caribbean. The founder of Rastafarianism Leonard Howell (1898-1981) had little familiarity with Hindu scriptures or any written texts and was thus innocent of the philosophical, theological, and soteriological concerns but adopted the externals such as ritual worship of doll-like idols of Gaṇeśa or Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa and, above all, Śiva sporting dreadlock or matted hair (jaṭā) and a drug (gāṅjā or bhāṅg) addict . Yet, Rastafarianism, actually a cult based on Christian Weltanschauung, is named after Ras [duke] Tafari, pre-regnal name of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (literally “Power of the ,” r. 1930-74), the iconic Black Christian royalty who is , ironicallly, reported to have claimed that he was African but no Negro.

In the final analysis, readers, lay as well as academic, will remain grateful to Professor Jain for his impartial, inclusive, and important study of the Indians— Hindu and Jain—in the US, the most helpful parts being chapters 3 on the Jains and 4 on the Hindus. And, despite his conscious effort to distance himself from the camp of Hindu-Jain distinction, he appears to be a follower of Hindu religion and culture when he admits his immersion (“all for the first time, in my last year of being in India”) in Indian culture through a study of the Bhāgavadgītā and several books on Indian philosophy, spirituality, and history, listening to Indian classical music, practicing yoga, and visits to Ramakrishna Vedanta Center in Hyderabad (vii), but his concluding thoughts give him away as a true Jain anekāntavādin who finds solace in the Hindu Ṛgvedic wisdom “Ekaṃ sadvipra bahudhā vadanti” [“The truth is one, sages call it by various names”] (105).

Reviewed by Narasingha P. Sil, Professor Emeritus of History, Western Oregon University. [email protected]

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Book Review

Tschacher, Torsten. (2018). Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ predicament in Singapore. New York: Routledge. +Pp. 242. ISBN 9780367273033. Price: Hard Back $160.

The broad question that Tschacher seeks to explore in this book is how the Singapore state’s construct of race as a primary marker of identity impacts religious formation across racial boundaries. Specifically, he explores the question of what it means to be an Indian Muslim in Singapore where ‘Muslim’ is synonymous with ‘Malay’ and clear racial boundaries are maintained for the purpose of managing social issues and distributing social welfare services. He approaches this question by examining structural pressures from state policies that affect political identity and community.

As Tschacher points out in the introduction, race in Singapore is a political category deployed by the state to manage the population. Indian Muslims have to deal with the challenge of being a minority within a minority and decide whether to associate themselves with Indians or with Malays. Tschacher argues that while ‘Indian Muslim’ is not a social community, it is a “publicly identified and politically formulated identity” (18). In the 1980s, the Singapore state developed the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others) paradigm for the purposes of taking census and managing the population according to racial terms. Official representation, access to social welfare services and entitlements were mediated through these categories, which had clear boundaries. Based on an assumption that different racial groups were associated with certain traits, Islam became associated with being Malay. Consequently, Indian Muslim identities were blurred and they became misfits within the CMIO paradigm.

In chapter 3, Tschacher discusses aspects of identity that challenge or aid the construction of the label ‘Indian Muslims’ as a homogenous entity. He examines the common stereotype that the caste system is still very much a part of Indian Muslim culture. Although hierarchies exists in all societies, notions of inequality amongst Indian Muslims are attributed to caste because of the assumption that Islam is an egalitarian religion. Therefore any notions of superiority or inferiority must have been inherited from their primordial Indian (Hindu) roots. This idea attributed to a sense of deviance or ‘otherness’ on the part of Indian Muslims.

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More strikingly, it is part of a broader pattern of racializing social issues, which is rooted at the state level.

In chapter 4, Tschacher shows how racialization (or culturalisation) diffused potential conflicts with perceived religious deviance. If religious practices of Indian Muslims were perceived to be different from that of the majority Malay Muslims, they were ‘culturalised’ by both Indian and Malay Muslims, that is, attributed to cultural differences rather than religion. This was evident in the racializing of gendered behaviour and dressing.

However, racialisation is not necessarily true of every case. In 2007, Singapore’s first ‘self-radicalised’ terrorist was arrested for attempting to join the Taliban in Afghanistan. He had gone to Pakistan and trained with a terrorist organization there. Although he is a Tamil Muslim, Tschacher did not bring up his case in his book. Interestingly, no connections were made about his Indian ethnicity in the official media. This could be because his ‘deviance’ was too directly related to Islam and there were already Malay Muslims who were arrested for connections to terrorist activities prior to him. Thus, distancing him from Islam and racializing him would be a pointless undertaking. It would be interesting to know how Indian Muslims and Malay Muslims engaged with his case in informal conversations.

In Chapter 5, Tschacher emphasizes that although there are not much differences in popular practices between Malay and Indian Muslims, there is a tendency to interpret differences among Indian Muslims as ethnic. For example, the veneration of saints, a common practice of Sufi Muslims that can be found in all the places from where Muslims in Singapore migrated was culturalised. Although saint veneration was practiced and opposed across racial boundaries, it was perceived to be a particular religious deviation of Indian Muslims and marked as a ‘cultural practice’ associated with Indianness.

In chapter 6, Tschacher shows that since Indian Muslims do not fit the standard image of a Singaporean Muslim (which is to be Malay), they faced pressures to be ‘Malayised’, which amongst other markers, involves substituting Tamil with Malay as their main household language. Ironically, even if a Malayised Indian were to identify as Malay, the official ascription of race to patrilineal lineage in Singapore, means that he/she is still considered to be Indian.

The effects of this policy was spectacularly brought to public attention after the publication of Tschacher’s book. In 2017, Halimah Yacob, a politician from the ruling PAP party, who was popularly identified as a Malay Muslim was appointed as the president of Singapore in the first-ever ‘reserved election’. In amendments to the constitution in 2017, a presidential election was to be ‘reserved’ for a community in Singapore if no one from that community has been president for any of the five most recent terms of office of the president. The result of this

86 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 85-89 ISSN 2414-863 amendment was that the 2017 election was reserved only for Malay candidates. A public uproar ensued when it was found out that Halimah Yacob was actually categorized as ‘Indian’ based on the state’s method of determining race because her father was a Tamil Muslim and her mother was Malay Muslim. In response, state spokesmen claimed that she qualifies as ‘Malay’ based on a constitutional definition of community membership used in parliamentary elections under Singapore’s Group Representation Constituency (GRC) scheme which requires that at least one candidate be from a group designated as a minority race to ensure political representation. Under these terms, in contradistinction to the definition of race ascribed to citizens, a person belonging to the Malay community is defined as “any person, whether of the Malay race or otherwise, who considers himself/herself to be a member of the Malay community and who is generally accepted as a member of the Malay community by that community”. Amid accusations of manipulating the system for political reasons, this episode also brought to the fore the state’s dissonance in the definition of race and racial community membership.

In chapter 7, he discusses the ways that the ‘Indian Muslim community’ in Singapore could make public demands and voice their concerns through public institutions. Public institutions, especially community self-help organizations are defined in terms of race and provide services like supporting the education of children. This policy paved the way for the racialization of demands in the public sphere. However, early on a problem arose when the oldest of these, Mendaki, founded in 1982, claimed to support ‘Muslims’ and not ‘Malays’ and subsequent ones like SINDA (for Indians) were based unambiguously on race. Indian Muslims were in a unique position because they were given a choice of aligning with either one or both institutions, thereby fragmenting a sense of common identity. Since demands for socio economic support could be made with either Mendaki or SINDA, Indian Muslims could focus on the domain in which they did not get much state support: religion. Under these circumstances, Indian Muslim associations took the initiative to offer religious education, including classes in Tamil.

In terms of Muslim leadership, Tschacher discloses that MUIS (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore) had limited influence over the leadership of Indian Muslims and that Indian Muslim associations were the primary mediators between state organizations and Indian Muslim communities. In 1992, a Federation of Indian Muslims (FIM) was formed to bring together, coordinate and make demands for the disparate Indian Muslim associations. Soon it gained a prominent position in Indian Muslim civil society acting as the mediator between MUIS and the Indian Muslim community. However, as Tschacher discusses in chapter 8, since MUIS does not provide avenues for structured elections of individuals to represent Indian Muslims in leadership positions, there are no widely accepted leaders among the Indian Muslim community, resulting in a sense of disunity in Indian Muslim civil society.

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As summarized by Tschacher in the concluding chapter, the increased public engagement of Indian Muslim associations from the 1990s was a reaction to the way that the state addressed specific ‘racial’ segments of the population. The official multiracialism of the state provided a means for Indian Muslims to contest structural handicaps brought about by the identification of Islam with Malay.

Tschacher’s work is a response to scholars who have usually dealt with Indian Muslims in terms of hyphenated identities, that is, an identity process in a continuum between ‘Indianness’ and ‘Muslimness.’ These scholars have accepted as given the state-constructed categories of race and religion. He asks, “why would somebody speaking either Malay or Tamil and adopting either Malay or not simply be Malay or Indian?” This question has become all the more significant after the episode involving President Halimah Yacob.

Tschacher’s work is important in that it argues against some charges levelled at Indian Muslims. One is that differences among Indian Muslims are attributed to the ‘argumentativeness’ of Indians. This charge downplays legitimate expressions of diversity amongst Indian Muslims. Another charge is that Indian Muslims identify too much with India. However, Tschacher points out that Indian Muslims have received very little resources from local public institutions. Mostly, they have had to depend on preachers and publications from India. Both of these charges put the blame on Indian Muslims while ignoring the structural constraints caused by state policies.

Tschacher ends his work with an interesting perspective on the formation and continuation of the category ‘Indian Muslim’. Drawing from Ernesto Laclau’s model that the emergence and existence of identities arise from unfulfilled demands, he suggests that paradoxically for ‘Indian Muslim’ to remain a viable categorization of identity, unfulfilled demands must continue to exist. When multiracialism is expected to produce equality based on race, demands arise when these expectations are not fulfilled. However, Tschacher’s argument is only true if the identity ‘Indian Muslim’ does not take on new meanings not associated with demands in the future.

In a final note, Tschacher suggests that dividing Indian Muslims along racial lines could actually be advantageous to the state. Engaging with Indian Muslims differentially allows the state to discipline Indian Muslims, to shift blame from potential controversies to the ‘fissiparousness’ of Indian Muslims, to take credit for acting justly and in a neutral manner when it does intervene, and look like a magnanimous arbitrator of identity when individuals cross boundaries of race. This, he says is the insidious aspect of Singaporean multiracialism. Herein lies Tschacher’s contribution to the critique of the state’s approach to multiracialism. While his point is certainly noteworthy, I would suggest a less insidious plot that prompted the division in the first place. I suspect that state had overlooked the

88 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 85-89 ISSN 2414-863 situation of Indian Muslims because the state had handed over full control of Islam to Malay Muslims to compensate for Malays being marginalized in other sectors of society, such as key appointments in the state’s political leadership, in the military, and in the financial sectors. It was a form appeasement to the Malay Muslim community that they got to decide what normative Islam in Singapore should be like. Consequently, Indian Muslims emerged as pawns in the state’s balancing act.

In sum, Tschacher’s book is a foundational and significant addition to the scholarly work on Indian Muslims in Singapore, which thus far has received very little attention. His work is backed up by rich anecdotes, archival material, and extensive fieldwork. Overall, it is an excellent piece of scholarship and a great read for anyone interested in the formulation of racial identities, the crossing of racial boundaries within a religious framework, the heterogeneity of Islamic practices and the structural impact of state management of multiracialism.

Reviewed by Rodney Sebastian Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Manhattan College [email protected]

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