Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863-1937

Mallampalli, Chandra

doi:10.4324/9780203390870

Cited by 95 publications

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“…The suffering Christ becomes a recurrent motif in the novel: the imagery of the cross, crown of thorns, betrayal, arrest, and Passion are woven into the novel’s representations of Dalit suffering and experience; what P. Raj Kumar calls dalithos (Rajkumar, 2010), in the colonial period as well as after independence. Dalit converts to Christianity faced the wrath of the “upper castes” in spite of the missionaries’ “protection”, and in fact the colonial administration was in many ways indifferent and even hostile to converts, and especially Dalit converts (Mallampalli, 2004). In Untouchable Spring , Kalyan Rao represents the attacks on Dalit Christians that were frequent in various parts of Ongole, while emphasizing that “upper-caste” Christians were exempt from such attacks: the reddys, kammas , and brahmins whose conversion in many cases, the novel also suggests, was a matter of convenience to protect their interests by gaining access to the administration through the missionaries.…”

Section: Dalit Theology In the Novelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonialism, missionaries, and Dalits in Kalyan Rao’s Untouchable Spring

Christopher

2017

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Dalit conversion to Christianity has a long history, predating Dr Ambedkar’s call for conversion in 1935. The contexts of conversion are many; however, the strong urge among Dalits to escape the oppressive, dehumanizing socio-spiritual condition remains the chief motive. The colonial administration, and even before that, the missionaries, were the first to make interventions in the lives of the Dalits, providing access to education, employment, healthcare, and mobility. Consequently many Dalits converted to Christianity en masse. However, post conversion, they became “doubly marginalized” (Omvedt, 2009) both in terms of caste and religion. Several attacks on Dalit Christians in colonial as well as post-independence India illustrate these two bases of victimization. A few writers, such as Bama, Imayam, and Raj Gouthaman, have attempted to explore the lived experience of Dalit Christians with a focus on caste within the Catholic Church. Kalyan Rao’s Telugu novel Antarani vasantham ( Untouchable Spring) is the first novel that seriously engages with the complex of Dalit conversions and in an epic fashion explores the lived experience and struggle of Telugu Dalits and Dalit Christians in history from the colonial times to the present. The primary focus of this article is to explore Kalyan Rao’s representation of Dalit experience using the optics of mission history and liberation and Dalit theologies, which I argue, enable us to contextualize the novel’s representation of Dalit habitus.

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Section: Dalit Theology In the Novelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonialism, missionaries, and Dalits in Kalyan Rao’s Untouchable Spring

Christopher

2017

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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“…A rich scholarship now exists on the expression and contestation of religious community identities through personal law among Hindus (Denault 2009;Kasturi 2009;Newbigin 2013;Shodhan 2001;Sturman 2012;Subramanian 2010;2014, pp. 137-98), Muslims (De 2009;Jones 2012;Purohit 2012;Shodhan 2001;Stephens 2013Stephens , 2014a, Christians (Chatterjee 2010b(Chatterjee , 2011Mallampalli 2004Mallampalli , 2011, and Parsis (Sharafi 2007a(Sharafi , 2014. The history of the civil marriage option (through the Special Marriage Act) sits outside of personal law, but defines itself through community nonetheless (Chatterjee 2010a, Mody 2002.…”

Section: Current Themes In Indian Legal Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

South Asian Legal History

Sharafi¹

2015

Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci.

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Since the late 1990s, there has been an explosion of scholarship on South Asian legal history. This article situates the new literature within the longer tradition of postcolonial South Asian legal studies, focusing on work written by lawyers and historians. The first wave of South Asian legal studies emerged in what historians would call the long 1960s from a group of American lawyers and social scientists working on the legal profession and the experience of dispute resolution in India. The second wave, which has concentrated on the themes of gender and religion in British India, has been shaped by different influences, namely developments in the Indian women's movement and in Indian legal education during the 1980s and 1990s. The survey considers whether the new scholarship is overly focused on elites, the state, the colonial period, and English-language sources. It also identifies regional crosscutting themes that have generated research on South Asia beyond India, particularly constitutionalism, states of emergency, and the legal profession; Buddhist legal studies; gender; and rule-of-law development efforts.

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“…87 But neither was this declaration of universal intent completely hollowed by state imperatives to retain ascriptive status in law in general 88 or, in particular, its need to protect the Hindu social order. 89 While there were indeed powerful Indian voices seeking the ear and arm of the colonial regime to sustain, or (as Washbrook has suggested) create 'traditional' social orders, there remained the search for the universal, which, however muted, added a dynamic to the system. The historical role of the Indian Christians was not just to expose the hollowness of the unsubstantiated universal, but also to incite a quest for making it more substantive.…”

Section: Law Commissions and The Debate Over The 'Lex Loci'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India

Chatterjee¹

2010

Mod. Asian Stud.

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One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a 'uniform civil code' which would override the existing 'personal laws' or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of 'religious laws', then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and 'native' law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the 'British' were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws.

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Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863-1937

Cited by 95 publications

References 0 publications

Colonialism, missionaries, and Dalits in Kalyan Rao’s Untouchable Spring

Colonialism, missionaries, and Dalits in Kalyan Rao’s Untouchable Spring

South Asian Legal History

Religious change, social conflict and legal competition: the emergence of Christian personal law in colonial India

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