Schooling, Identity and Belonging in a Tamil Lutheran Congregation
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Schooling, Identity and Belonging in a Tamil Lutheran Congregation Geoffrey L. Burkhart To appear in The Impact of Education in South Asia: Perspectives from Sri Lanka to Nepal, Helen E. Ullrich, ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 Preface: a Personal Note It is the fortunate undergraduate student who encounters a professor who markedly influences the direction his or her professional life takes. Pauline Kolenda was the first to open doors for me both to Indian studies and to anthropology with her enthusiastic, masterful teaching, and her steady encouragement guiding me to social anthropology. Over the 50 years that I was privileged to have her tutelage and friendship I came to appreciate especially several aspects of her work. Among these are her insistence on thorough documentation, her impatience with the misuse of analytical categories as answers rather than as tools for ethnographic enquiry, and her persistent concern with the dilemmas of the disadvantaged, notably women and Dalits. The last is especially notable in her writings on the lives of Chuhras, a Dalit caste in Uttar Pradesh, whom she first came to know in her mid-1950's research (1958, 1987, 1989, 1990). These guiding concerns suggest something more in regard to her presence in the field: a critical human touch in establishing open, fully engaged connection with the people she was interviewing and with how they, in their several places, make their way from day to day. In this essay, I present several case studies which I trust begin to acknowledge several aspects of Pauline Kolenda’s influence on my own field practice and suggest my debt to her teaching. 2 I Introduction Scholars of various disciplines have paid considerable attention to the reconceptualizing of locality and of groups grappling with the influences of global systems on local identities and ways of life. For example, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake problematize the relations of the global and the local by attempting to move beyond conventional framings, such as those that map center and periphery, that pose global hegemony against local resistance or that reinscribe the global as modern and the local as traditional. They comment: “. .we are witnessing not so much the death and burial of ‘local cultural originality,’ as Fanon once feared within residually colonial structures of national modernity, as their rehabilitation, affirmation and renewal in disjunctive phases and local reassertions. .” (1996: 3). Among others, James Clifford reminds us that the concept ‘native’ has paralleled a conception of cultures as unitary which has tended to suppress concerns with external relations. He advocates reconceptualizing what he calls “dwelling” in particular times and places as cosmopolitan experience, focusing on “concrete mediations” of cosmopolitan and rooted experiences (1992: 101, 115). As is well known, the surge of Protestant mission activity from the mid-19th century importantly included providing schooling, otherwise denied, to disadvantaged groups. The establishment of primary and secondary schools (and also teachers training and vocational schools) gave added opportunity to persons of the lowest castes (though not limited to these groups). These institutions operated not only as environments that facilitated, if not encouraged, conversion but also provided models of 3 family life, gender-definition and other aspects of daily life which contributed to increased respectability of families (as Eliza Kent has detailed particularly well for southern communities: 2004 and as Karen Vallgarda has detailed in her account of Danish Mission Society schools in the 19th century (2015: Chap. 1).1 In this paper I do not trace direct connections between the content of mission schooling and the ways of life of those whose education, in whole or in part, occurred in mission schools. Rather, my concern is with notions about the betterment of individuals, their families and their social circles that were formed partly in this context and that are central to the aspirations and identities of members of a Lutheran congregation in northern Tamil Nadu. My focus is on how members of that Protestant religious minority express their identities, by which I mean both self-conceptions and self-representations in speech and action within the wider socio-religious setting of small-town life.2 Keeping in mind broad methodological perspectives like those of Wilson, Dissanayake and Clifford, I am interested in the diverse identities represented among the members of a small congregation of Lutherans, an ostensibly homogeneous group. I begin with a comment on the conceptualization of Christian Indians as a distinct community by anthropologists and other social scientists. One perspective, especially prevalent in older literature, was influenced by church- and mission-related purposes and narrative genres and emphasized differences between Christians on the one hand and Hindus and Muslims on the other.3 This stance both suggested a fundamental ‘outsiderness’ of Christianity (implicitly or explicitly linked to colonialist projects) and thus Christian marginality. Consistent with concerns about an authentic Christianity was considerable attention to motivations for 4 conversion, especially with so-called mass conversions (Cederlof 2003; Frykenberg 2008: Chap 8; Manickam 1977; Pickett 1933; Robinson 1998; W ebster 1992, 2012: 156-162). Regarding the Danish Mission Society, the founding institution of the Arcot Lutheran Church I write about here, Henriette Bugge states that, in the late 19th century, their missionaries “. .were constantly on their guard against anything that smacked of mass movements. .” (1994: 68). An instructive example of “concrete mediations”, to use Clifford’s phrase, of the relation between cosmopolitan and rooted experiences is the case of Anglo-Indians, that Christian community characterized by Lionel Caplan as “a medley of different ethnic and racial strains, Indian and European,” in the sense of their being “somehow between and apart from” their original sources (1996: 745, see also Caplan 2001 and Blunt 2005). Caplan remarks: Despite sharing a common religion, Anglo-Indians [in Madras] are quick to distinguish themselves from Indian Christians and vice versa. The latter are usually differentiated on the grounds that they are converts from Hinduism, belong to or come mainly from low castes, and are primarily Tamil-speakers; Anglo-Indians, by contrast, have only ever been Christians, are a ‘Forward’ caste, and speak English as their first language. During much of the colonial period, Anglo-Indians worshiped alongside Europeans; Indian Christians had their own vernacular churches (Caplan 1996: 759, n.8). Paralleling Anglo-Indian self-representations, social scientists have usually treated Anglo-Indians separately from other Christian Indians. Caplan’s work, in treating Anglo- 5 Indians as creolized, is instructive in being drawn to heterogeneity within the Anglo- Indian community, to varied and even contradictory representations of identity. II An Arcot Lutheran Church Congregation I turn now to a congregation of the Arcot Lutheran Church (ALC) in the town of Polur, Tiruvannamalai District of Tamil Nadu.4 I carried out fieldwork there (then in North Arcot District) for eight months in 1983. My account here is of Lutheran life as I found it then. In 1983 Polur was made up of about 15,000 Hindus, 5,000 Muslims, 1,500 Roman Catholics, several families of Jains and several committed atheists, in addition to just over 200 Lutherans. (The proportion of these categories is unlikely to have changed significantly since 1983.) The ALC as a whole had some 20-25,000 members in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu.5 It became, in 1950, the successor church to that established by the Danish Mission Society (DMS). The DMS first undertook evangelism in 1864 at Melpattambakkam, South Arcot District (Bugge 1994: 64-71). The church in Polur and a school for girls had been established earlier by the American Arcot Mission of the Dutch Reformed Church in America, but in 1921, under comity, the agreement which avoided competition between Protestant missions, it turned over work in the Polur area to the DMS (Arcot Lutheran Church 1964: 79; W andall 1978: 88,144). (There were in the pastorate seven village congregations and five primary schools previously established by the American Arcot Mission.)6 Although Danish missionaries were never resident in Polur, there was regular 6 contact with them and their spouses. In Polur most Lutherans’ recent exposure to foreigners was limited to contact with the DMS missionary who managed the large mission station of Libanon at Tiruvannamalai, 30 miles to the south, and with rarely visiting Danish missionaries and with Danish engineers and architects working in mission- and church-related development projects.7 Many Lutherans are themselves individual converts or come from families which had converted in the past generation or two. I never asked anyone directly what caste he, she or a forebear had belonged to. A few Lutherans volunteered a former caste identification, in private conversations, and all of these named a middle or upper middle-level caste, e.g., Naidu, Nayakkar and Vellalar. Some people spoke of their families' having originally been Roman Catholics or members of other Protestant denominations.8 Since in South India most conversions deriving from mission work from the mid- 19th century to the present have been of disadvantaged people, as noted above, many middle and high caste persons assume that Christian Indians have so-called ‘untouchable’, i.e. Dalit (Adi-Dravida, Scheduled Caste) origins. As is amply evident, that view is often accompanied by a prejudicial opinion of Christians. While it is clear that many Polur Lutherans came from Dalit castes, it is critical to note that many people were quite reticent to speak of their caste background and that some showed irritation when others brought up this subject, directly or indirectly. For example, when I was speaking with a few people about my visit to Lutherans in a nearby village, I mentioned that some there had used the word kottu to refer to local patrilines of a set of allied families.