Avarna and Adivasi Christians and Missions: a paradigm for understanding Christian movements in India.

 

Robert Eric Frykenberg

International Bulletin of Missionary Research (January 1, 2008)

 

…No one culture is sacred. Yet all cultures can become sacred, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much their essentials are transformed so as to reflect everlasting verifies that are truly sacred…. –p.1

Avarna and Adivasi are Sanskritic categories of analysis and classification created by Brahmans in ancient times. As traditional and paradigmatic concepts they still define peoples who, in terms of ritual pollution, lie outside the bounds of Sanskriti civilization. These are peoples who, in moral, social, and ritual terms, are “untouchable.” They are located outside the metaphoric spectrum of “proper colors” (savarna); they are beyond the pale and, in many senses, all but invisible. –p.1

… The word “Brahman,” meaning “cosmic breath or sound,” signifies ultimate reality and sublime, supreme acuity, intellectuality, perspicacity, rationality, and spirituality…. –pp.1-2

All peoples born outside of varnashramadharma are innately polluting. They fall into two subcategories: Avarna (domesticated, or subject, peoples) and Adivasi (undomesticated, or neveryet-subdued, aboriginal peoples). Avarnas, in other words, are domesticated Adivasis–“castes” that were once “tribes.” Avarna peoples, like cattle or goats or horses or elephants, know their lowly place. Taken together, the two categories of peoples, officially designated as “scheduled castes and tribes,” amount to more than 20 percent of India’s population. –p.2

…In 1527, after forces of the Samudri Raja (Zamorin) of Calicut attacked them, they turned for help to the Portuguese. A Chettiar Christian merchant, John da Cruz, and fifteen Paravars offered an alliance. A year later, their jati thalavan (chief), Vikrama Aditha Pandya, gave the Portuguese access to the lucrative pearl trade. Families of some 20,000 pearl-fishers were baptized. In 1537 a furious sea battle ended threats from Hindu and Muslim forces, and the entire Paravar community declared themselves Christian. –p.2


Christian movements were most successful when least connected to empire. Movements occurred not because of, but in spite of, imperial expansion, in places furthest removed from imperial control. ….—p.7

…Most spectacular Christian movements occurred in principalities not directly under Indo-British rule, before they came under British rule, or in Adivasi-controlled areas, especially in mountains surrounding the Assam. –p.7

Christian movements, ironically, sometimes fared far better in domains of the Velama Nayakas of Madurai, Marava Tevars of Ramnad, Setupatis of Sivaganga, Kallar Tondaimans of Pudukottai, Maratha Rajas of Thanjavur, and the Nayar Raja Vermas of Travancore, or in tribal domains of the Nagas, Khasis, and Garos, as well as those of the Kachins, Shans, and Karens of Burma, than in areas where high-caste officials of the Raj, coming from within elite communities, could never wholly free themselves from social consciousness or prejudices of purity and pollution that were part of their heritage. –p.7

…For too long the dominant historiography has tended to be a triumphalist concentration on “trophies of grace,” that is, a focus on upper-class Christians. These biases or imbalances inadvertently produced interreligious “dialogues” among elite missionaries and scholars fascinated with Eastern religions. Much Christian literature, consequently, has been focused upon Brahman Christians, such as Krishna Mohan Banerjea, Kali Charan Banerjea, Nehemiah (Nilakantha) Gore, Narayan Vaman Tilak, and Brahmanabandhab Upadhyay. As a result, intellectual, mystical, and spiritual (bhakti) issues–along with eclectic, esoteric, literary, philosophical, and theological links with Sanskriti traditions, from which they never entirely escaped–have tended to predominate. Even Pandita Ramabai’s bhakti devotionalism did not wander far from her Brahman (savarna) identity until after her third Christian conversion and the “Holy Ghost” revival at her Mukti Mission twenty years later (1905). Indeed, even Sadhu Sundar Singh’s words seem to reflect little understanding of Avarna or Adivasi Christians. –p.7

…These ancient, high-caste, Malayalam-speaking communities of Malabar, especially Malankara Nazranis, retain such consciousness of birth and lineage, such strict sensitivity to purity and pollution, that their claims to a place within varnashramadharma remain strong. But the same can be said for virtually all Christians in South Asia. Christians of South Asia are identified not so much by nationality as by caste. Birth, caste, and community matter as much as church, denomination, or theological outlook. –p.7

…”Christian,” David Jeffrey reminds us, is an adjective, a property of something else, a concept that implies some sort of “diminishment” or positional subordination. (8) Things that are Christian–whether activities, entities, communities, missions, institutions, or individuals–are defined by relationship, by being subject to the person of Jesus Christ. –p.8

…Within India, as in the rest of South Asia today, there are no Christians that are not hybrid or hyphenated Christians–unable to escape ethnic identity as rooted in birth, family, and lineage. –p.8