The anthropology of Indian Christianity has a very long history. The European missionaries who brought Christianity to India beginning in the sixteenth century were, arguably, the first to make an ethnographic object of Indian religion, dividing their attention between the complex assemblage of practices, beliefs, and institutions that came to be known as “Hinduism” and converts’ invariably localized forms of the Christian faith. Given the field's entanglement with colonial and missionary interests, scholars of Indian Christianity have long struggled to arrive at an appropriate degree of distance from their subject matter. Two recent books aptly represent the vitality of current scholarship in the anthropology of Christianity in India, showcasing the insights gained when scholars abandon the quiet judgments about whether it is “good” or not that Christianity has taken root in India, and focus on the lives of Indian Christians and their complex social worlds. Neither of these books shrinks from voicing their solidarity with Indian Catholics, most of whom are poor and lower caste, even as they expertly unpack the power dynamics of caste, class, and gender that roil Tamil Catholic communities and their relations with non-Catholics. Both represent breakthrough scholarship that will be of interest not only to specialists in Indian Christianity but also those engaged in broader questions about the relationship between power and religion.
In scale, tone, and theoretical engagements, these two studies could not be more different. Building on thirty years of ethnographic research and a deep dive into the archives of the French Catholic mission in Madurai, David Mosse's The Saint in the Banyan Tree surveys the longue durée. His account of the shifting relationship between caste and Christian culture from the sixteenth century to the present day reveals how social structures can be reproduced over four centuries, and yet implode suddenly under the weight of their own contradictions. In Possessed by the Virgin, on the other hand, Kristin Bloomer takes a microscope to the subtle dynamics of domination and subordination discernable in embodied practice. With a novelist's patient attention to detail, she investigates the habitus of lived Tamil Catholicism. After analyzing the contents and central arguments of each work, I conclude by considering their complementary strengths and weaknesses.
Mosse's history of the 400-year entwinement of Christian religion and Tamil culture reveals how the very categories of “religion” and “culture” were produced in this context. Engaging Joel Robbins, Webb Keane, and other anthropologists interested in the relationships between Christianity, colonial encounter, and modernity, Mosse urges a reconsideration of the view that secularity, with its accompanying separation of “religion” from other spheres of action, is somehow Protestant in nature, illuminating how seventeenth-century Catholic Jesuits in south India construed “caste” as a civil matter akin to the ranked ordering of European nobility and peasants and not a matter of “religion.” Mosse centers his wide-ranging investigation on the village of “Alapuram” in Ramnad, where he arrived as a young anthropologist in 1982. Chapters 1 to 4 unpack the history behind the consolidation of caste-based discrimination within the Church, which Mosse encountered in full force in the 1980s. Chapters 5 to 7 analyze the changes he witnessed in Alapuram from 1982 to 2009, when politicized Dalit Catholics and higher-caste priests energized by global currents in liberation theology together challenged this state of affairs. For, despite theological affirmations of the equality of all believers, discrimination against Dalit Catholics has been pervasive, from separate cemeteries, wedding procession routes, and seating at mass to the denial of honorable roles in ritual such as serving at the altar or reading from scripture.
Mosse begins his investigation into the historical origins of Tamil Catholicism with the missionary efforts in Madurai led by the Italian Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), with some attention to the Portuguese mission that preceded it. Building on scholarship by Ines Županov, Mosse argues that the Madurai Jesuits innovated “a culturally acceptable Tamil model of Christian holiness” that combined the “behavioral codes of the Brahman with renunciation of the sanniyāsi” (p. 33). De Nobili's Brahmanized form of Christianity was meant to attract the Indian elite, but it also led to caste-based stratification of both missionaries and converts: European Jesuit sanniyāsis in saffron robes ministered to Brahmans, while priests known as paṇṭāracāmis worked among non-Brahmans, and the even more subjugated and stigmatized Paṟaiyars, whom the Portuguese had converted in large numbers, were only visited at night, under cloak of darkness. Ultimately, the mission found the most support among the “little king” Maravar lineages of the dry plains of Ramnad and Sivagangai. Here, Jesuits successfully inserted themselves as brokers of authority and honor in a socio-ritual system of competition among lineages and castes that has been well documented by scholars of south India. Mosse argues that Jesuits “secularized” caste, seeing it as a civic or cultural matter of “social distinction” that should not be disturbed, and indeed was necessary to replicate within the Church in order to attract the right sort of convert.
Along with local Tamils, French Jesuit inheritors of the Madurai mission created a highly syncretic Tamil Catholic culture, which Mosse unpacks in fascinating detail in chapters 2 and 3. Positing that the tension between European assertion and local resistance is seen most clearly in the ways suffering and sin are dealt with, chapter 2 juxtaposes the Church-controlled ritual of confession and the spirit possession cults organized around independent Catholic shrines. In chapter 3, Mosse's ethnographic skills are deployed in a stunningly detailed description of how caste differences in Alapuram structure every aspect of village life, from the spatial layout of streets to the provision of services and funerary rituals. Engaging at a meta-theoretical level with a variety of theories of caste, Mosse's study not only argues that “more than anything, the relationship between Christianity and culture in south India has revolved around caste” (p. 96), but also shows how durable yet dynamic the category of caste itself is. Like race and racism in the United States, caste and casteism are ever-changing yet inexorable in their capacity to oppress, disempower, and at the same time call forth ingenious tactics and strategies of resistance.
In chapters 4, 5, and 6, Mosse addresses the fluidity of caste as it is conceptualized and negotiated by Tamil Catholics from the nineteenth century to the present day. In chapter 4, he focuses on how ritual honors function in Catholic festivals, tracking the performance of the festival of the guardian saint Santiyakappar (St. James) from the 1860s to 2010. Santiyakappar was both the family deity (kula tēyvam) of all of Alapuram's Roman Catholics and the primary village deity (kirāma tēyvam) for both Hindus and Christians in the village. As such, his annual festival functioned for centuries as “‘a meta-social event’ involving the self-representation of the village (according to those in power) as an order of ranked castes, as well as the principal occasion for contestations that remade that order” (p. 107). In 1936, the festival became a more specifically Christian (and “religious”) and less a village (and “political”) affair, with the Hindu headman officially excluded from receiving honors. Ironically, the disembedding of the church from village power dynamics created an opening for formerly excluded “untouchable” castes to start contesting their position as Christians who deserved to be treated as equals within the Church. Pallars and Paraiyars henceforth fought (sometimes with each other) to be recognized as respectable members of the community by participating in the festival as donors. As Mosse demonstrates with particular clarity through his historical account of the Santiyakappar festival, caste is always both a religious and a civil institution, but which aspect of it is stressed at any particular historical moment opens different opportunities for actors—Dalit and non-Dalit, Christian and non-Christian—to mobilize, jostle, and negotiate their status anew.
With the struggle for independence, India saw the emergence of a critical discourse around caste launched by activists like Ambedkar and Periyar. Mosse examines how the secular critique of caste discrimination as a violation of equal citizenship interacted with a religious critique of caste as a violation of Christian universalism. Chapter 5 traces the history of Dalit mobilization from the 1960s to the 1980s, while chapter 6 brings the study into the era of dominant Hindu nationalism. Just as Dalit Catholic activists were influenced by secular political activism, so has the national (and at times international) movement for Dalit human rights gained ideological clarity and institutional structure from Dalit activism within the Church. Indeed, Mosse argues that it was the clarity of the contradiction between Christian teachings and the realities of discrimination against Dalits within the Church that sparked activist fury and led to a radical reconfiguration of Tamil Catholicism. The two parts of the book are neatly brought together as Mosse shows how de Nobili's seventeenth-century Brahmanization of Catholicism collided in the twentieth century with the Dalitization of Tamil Catholicism by Dalit theologians. In chapter 7, Mosse concludes his sweeping historical survey with a “return visit to Alapuram” that illustrates how Tamil Catholics in neoliberal India are fighting not over who gets to receive first ritual honors, but who can gain admission and employment in the thousands of schools and colleges run by the Church, in a context in which, rightly or wrongly, educational achievement is seen as the most reliable vehicle of social mobility.
Focusing on a forty-year rather than a 400-year time period, Bloomer's Possessed by the Virgin is an intimate examination of gendered power dynamics in three families, which are upended when Mātā (“Mother,” as the Virgin Mary is locally known in Tamil Nadu) begins speaking through the body and voice of an individual. In the spirit of self-reflexive feminist anthropology and comparative theology, her account continually turns inward as Bloomer explores memories from her own Catholic childhood sparked by encounters with Marian possession in the field. Even the accident-prone nature of fieldwork is laid bare, as Bloomer describes how serendipitously anthropologists arrive at both scholarly insight and the very path toward their research subjects. One of the central arguments of Possessed by the Virgin is that while women are enmeshed in hegemonic patriarchal structures that suffuse both Tamil Christian culture and Tamil culture more broadly, hegemony is never complete (p. 26). Given the complex ways in which hegemony is constituted by the actions of people guided by internalized scripts for acting that operate typically below the threshold of consciousness (Bourdieu's habitus), hegemony can also be destabilized or modified through actions. Focusing on three women of different socioeconomic classes and caste statuses, Bloomer depicts how each one is constrained by normative expectations surrounding docile wifehood (or daughterhood) and self-sacrificing motherhood. And yet these women are able to use their “gift” for being possessed by Mātā to improve their own lives and those of others.
Like Mosse, Bloomer is interested in the hybridity of Tamil Catholic culture, which she explores through the lens of possession, a pervasive feature of Tamil Hindu religiosity. Her keen attention to gesture and tone reveals how the embodied codes that mark altered states of consciousness—swaying, crying, raised hands, loosened hair—combine Pentecostal, charismatic Catholic, and local Hindu forms of both benign and malignant spirit possession. As Bloomer demonstrates, with its capacity to improvise alternative scripts for social action, Tamil Catholic possession by Mary provides an ideal arena for evading or mitigating the oppressive weight of hegemonic institutions, from domestic patriarchy to higher-caste dominance to the Roman Catholic Church's ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Seeking to determine the conditions necessary to authenticate possession in this environment, Bloomer concludes that it is complicated. For example, the story of Rosalind, an educated, middle-class, single mother in one of Chennai's less savory neighborhoods, reverses the usual Tamil Hindu pattern where women's bodies are assailed by pey, and men's bodies honored by serving as vehicles for the divine. Rosalind-as-Jecinto Mary provides a kind of this-worldly miṭpu (salvation, rescue) through her reassuring, healing touch. Even though Rosalind has won a vast following of lower-class residents of postcolonial Chennai, Bloomer shows how Rosalind's authenticity can still be undermined by a parish priest's snide criticism, demonstrating how important clerical sanction is for this kind of religious leadership. Indeed, through a combination of personal contacts, family support, and savvy marketing, Rosalind's mission has received abundant support from the clerical hierarchy. This is not so for Nancy, Rosalind's “double,” an unmarried Dalit woman from a neighboring part of Chennai. Nancy claims to be possessed by the same form of Mātā, Jecinto, and also experiences bloody stigmata on her hands when entranced. Her caste, gender, marital status, and lack of family support contribute to her possession claims being interpreted as mental illness.
Bloomer begins and ends with the story of Dhanam, a rural resident of a tiny Catholic Paraiyar hamlet in Sivagangai district (the neighboring district of Mosse's Alapuram). Dhanam's career illuminates how the Mātā channeled by this illiterate mother and agricultural laborer challenges hegemonic Tamil conceptions of proper womanhood by adopting fierce forms of divine femininity available in Hindu culture. The statues that represent Mātā in the village chapel—Our Lady of Fatima and Aṭaikkala Mātā—depict Mary as meek, mild, and white. But the Mātā who comes to Dhanam to heal those physically and emotionally tormented by the manifold threats of rural poverty is a pey-fighting warrior along the lines of Mariamman or Icakki-Amman, wielding a dirty broom to beat out ghosts. Through conversations with families helped by Dhanam, Bloomer reveals how pey-affliction, which is authenticated by being treated by a medium like Dhanam, affords village women the space to negotiate difficult relationships with husbands and in-laws. Moreover, having a deity “come” to her considerably elevated Dhanam's status within her family and her family's status within the community. Two of her sons have been ordained, one even studying at a seminary in Agra. Bloomer attributes this honor to the prestige and widely celebrated piety of their mother, whose ministry revitalized the faith of thousands in her region, making the institutionally powerful clergy dependent on her for filling the pews.
The two books’ shortcomings are bound up with their strengths and ambitions. Bloomer's novelistic description makes the reader care about people described (both the informants and the anthropologist herself), but its self-reflexive turns can at times feel intrusive. One longs for more sustained engagement with the scholars mentioned in the footnotes. It is an engaging read, however, and would be effective in undergraduate courses on gender and religion, Indian Christianity, or possession and trance phenomena. Mosse, for his part, demands a lot of his readers. Jumping back and forth in time throughout the text, he assumes knowledge of a wide range of scholarly conversations on Tamil Nadu history, the anthropology of Christianity and modernity, social anthropology, and development studies. The Saint in the Banyan Tree exceeds the reach of most undergraduates but would make an excellent addition to graduate courses on religion and politics in India, historical anthropology, or the Dalit experience in India. For this reader, some of Mosse's most original and powerful insights come in his book's final chapters, based on his fieldwork among Dalit Jesuit activists. Here, Mosse lets slip the dispassionate tone of a social scientist, giving voice to a full-throated condemnation of a changing amalgam of practices and beliefs that has caused so much suffering. After a lot of talk about discourse, it is refreshing to read that “caste is a lived reality whose truth is in experience, and in emotion (fear, anger, outrage, shame).… Caste is where it ought not to be: in Catholic institutions of learning, among priests and nuns, in the very spaces that should represent the Christian negation of caste” (p. 214).
One lacuna in Mosse's meticulously documented and subtly argued text is gender. Besides a brief discussion of the Virgin Mary in the context of the pantheon of Tamil Catholic saints and a few mentions in the footnotes, gender is not a significant category for Mosse. In contrast, gender is a central category in Bloomer's Possessed by the Virgin, and while caste differences are regularly mentioned, they are not explored in depth. For example, one could argue that the honoring of two of Dhanam's Dalit sons by ordination was due less to their mother's status than to the Dalitization of the Catholic Church in the 1990s and 2000s, and Dalit assertion in Tamil society more broadly, which Mosse probes in detail and Bloomer only touches on. Bloomer and Mosse's “division of labor” is understandable, but unfortunate given the way caste dynamics, inevitably, intersect with gender. While these ground-breaking studies will be of great interest to scholars of Tamil Catholicism, the field awaits scholarship that brings a fully intersectional approach to the intertwining of caste and gender.
