Christianity has had a significant presence in Kerala,

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1 Women and Religiosity Dalit Christianity in Kerala P Sanal Mohan The everyday life of the congregations of slave castes involved the active support of women, right from the mid-19th century when Dalit communities began to accept Christianity. Prayers in the family and in congregations were occasions in which women were substantially involved, wherein hymns/songs became powerful articulations of the critique of caste slavery and prayer was used as an effective tool to resist instances of caste oppression. However, relatively blurred gender hierarchies in the pre-christian phase among the slave castes were transformed by the conscious intervention of the missionaries in favour of the secure family structure with an assertive male head. The author would like to acknowledge two research projects that helped develop the ideas presented here, namely, the project titled From the Lord s Prayer to Invoking Slavery through Prayers: Religious Practices and Dalits in Kerala, India ( ) funded by the Social Science Research Council, New York, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. The author would also like to thank Janaki Nair for her encouragement to write this paper. P Sanal Mohan (sanal.mohan@gmail.com) teaches at the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. 50 Christianity has had a significant presence in Kerala, even before the arrival of the Portuguese and other subsequent colonial powers. The legendary origin of Christianity in Kerala is traced to the Apostle, Saint Thomas, who is believed to have landed at Kodungallur, an ancient port town that was connected with the Indian Ocean world, in 52 CE. The apostolic origin of the church puts it on par with the claims of Western Christianity, where the Christians of Kerala are distributed along the lines of various denominations. Although not accepted by historians as a historically verifiable fact in the absence of corroborative evidence, the Christian community holds the arrival of Thomas as a historical truth. However, there is definite historical evidence to suggest the arrival of the Christians of West Asian origin, under the leadership of prominent merchants who had settled down in Kerala in 345 CE. Ecclesiastically, they followed the Eastern Christian tradition. In subsequent centuries, with the coming of other Christian groups, there was a proliferation of Christian settlements in the port towns of Kerala such as Quilon (Kollam), testified by the copper plate inscription famously known as the Syrian Christian or Tarisapalli Copper Plates. These were issued by the local ruler in lieu of granting special privileges to the Christian merchants, including assigning the services of different working castes specialising in different occupations to them, including slave labour to till farmlands. 1 Until the Portuguese intervention, the traditional Christians do not seem to have faced any challenge to their privileged position. 2 However, with the coming of the Portuguese and, with them, Catholicism, the Jesuit missionaries began evangelising thousands of souls for the church from among the lower-caste fisherpeople along Kerala s coast. Riding high on the spirit of the inquisition, the Portuguese wanted to purge the already existing Christian practices of its local accretions. This led to severe contests between the traditional Christians and Roman Catholicism represented by the Portuguese Catholic hierarchy, with the schisms becoming particularly significant in the 17th century. The fallout of the mid-17th century development was the firm decision of one section of the traditional Christians to resist the ecclesiastical power of Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Church finally had to accept the traditional Christians, regrouped as Jacobite Christians. The ascendancy of the Dutch made matters easy for the non-catholic Christians to get their Bishops from West Asia, to oversee their spiritual affairs, including the consecration of Bishops, as the Dutch were Protestant. With the coming of OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos EPW Economic & Political Weekly

2 the English, there were further changes in the history of Christianity in Kerala, as this period witnessed the genesis of Anglicanism with the arrival of the Church of England. Missionary organisations of the Anglican church became very significant as they worked among a range of social groups and established modern institutions. The late 19th and the first half of the 20th century witnessed new churches emerging due to a variety of reasons revivalism and reformism among others that made Christianity very complex. Prevalence of reformist churches like the Mar Thoma Church owes its growth in part to the influence of the European Protestant missionaries. Similarly, we observe the flourishing of the Salvation Army, Brethren Church, Pentecostal Church and numerous small sects and congregations in the 20th century that show a very different social dynamic, as some of them are exclusive Dalit churches. Christianity existed alongside other religions and world views, contributing to the formation of a pluralist social fabric in Malayali society. The significance of the maritime trade 3 that had prevailed for a long time offered the early Christian traders of West Asian origin proximity to the native rulers, prompting the latter to provide special status and privileges to the early Christian settlers and converts. With their affiliation to the Eastern tradition of Christianity and enduring status as a part of the dominant social elite, Christians in Kerala never evinced anything like missionary zeal. As a result, the missionary Christianity that came along with the Europeans was a novel phenomenon. The coming of the Protestant missions related to the Church of England in the first decade of the 19th century facilitated the outreach of Christianity to the oppressed, slave castes of Kerala. Being an agrarian society, the dominant castes Hindus and Syrian Christians owned a substantial part of the cultivable land by the mid-19th century. The upwardly mobile lower caste Ezhava was also coming to prominence as a landowning agrarian class. However, the castes even below the Ezhavas have historically been slaves in Kerala s agrarian structure, and were owned by both upper-caste Hindus and Syrian Christians. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) 4 missionaries began working among the traditional Syrian Christians in 1816 to win them over to Anglicanism via modern education. However, that experiment came to an end in 1836 given the Syrian Christians opposition to Anglicanism. Yet, a small section of the Syrian Christians continued their association with the CMS, and it was this group that came to be the dominant and often, socially conservative force within the CMS. In spite of this, there were some Indian missionaries from this group who, on the instruction of British missionaries, worked among the slave castes. The late 1840s onwards, the CMS s correspondence reflected overwhelming information on the slave castes of Kerala, especially the Parayas, Pulayas and Kuravas. This was abetted by two factors: first, that the CMS had officially committed to work among the slave castes, and second, that their corresponding secretary in Madras, a priest, T G Ragland, wanted the native missionary George Matthan to work among the slaves. Ragland had once witnessed, to his great shock, a Pulaya slave being harnessed to a yoke along with a bull and REVIEW OF WOMEN S STUDIES forced to plough the field. This particular incident marked a historic turning point as far as slave castes and the CMS mission were concerned. However, the news of this association and the news of slave castes being admitted to schools specially opened for them enraged both the Syrian Christian and Hindu landlords. The landlords opposed this move, fearing the collapse of the agricultural economy if the slaves were educated and, eventually, liberated. What followed was brutal persecution at the hands of the Christian and Hindu landlords, leading to savage physical torture and killing of slaves, and the destruction of slave schools that also functioned as chapels. Ordinary Dalit Women and Religiosity In the mid-19th century, in response to an enquiring missionary, two Travancore Pulaya slaves had opined that until they heard about Christ and Christianity they had been worshipping demons, consecrated in stone idols placed beneath trees, near which no woman or child would ever venture (Hawksworth 1853: 6). In the course of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in 2015 among Dalit Christians in the village of Parakkappara, Kannur district, Kerala, one of the informants related about the black magic his grandfather copractised even as they were Christians, to which no woman could bear witness. Similarly, many religious practices among the Brazilians that brought together the hybrid nature of Christianity and native religious practices ascribed significant participation to women (Voeks 1977; Matory 2005). The males of the family participated in the ritual and would eventually consume the toddy and other offerings made to the deities. Women were never allowed to partake in it. Although there are references to women, especially the wives of the mooppans (elders) of certain Dalit communities such as the Pulayas, occupying a position of importance in the kin group, they do not seem to have acquired any significant position of leadership in local Dalit communities. In the late 19th century, in the aftermath of the legal abolition of caste slavery, the mooppans were entrusted with the task of providing labourers to the landlords. Oral traditions convey the fact that sometimes the mooppan s wife was given the additional burden of safeguarding young slave women workers, when they went for seasonal works, such as harvesting in the paddy fields of the great backwaters (Neena 2015: 36 37; Pillai 2012: 37). Yet, we do not come across evidence to suggest that the mooppan s wife occupied any ritually significant position. While missionary ethnographers and historians write at great length about men who are ritual specialists, whom they variously refer to as devil dancers (Hunt 1918: 196) and sorcerers (Mateer 1883: 53), we hardly come across women performing ritual dances. Literary descriptions of the pre-ritual preparations divulge information on women s contribution in various processes, including pounding rice to make special offerings on such occasions (Mateer 1883: 55). In certain other narratives of mantravadam (or black magic in missionary parlance), 5 we come across examples of women of the household witnessing the rituals and partaking in the meals, though they are not involved in the rituals in any manner (In a Tapioca Garden 1928: 7 8). Although Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos

3 separated temporally by more than a century, the examples quoted above provide us important insights into the manner in which Dalit women figured in religious rituals and practices before they came into contact with various missionary organisations. However, things would take a decisive turn with the coming of the European missionaries of the Protestant missions, such as the CMS and London Missionary Society from the early decades of the 19th century, that eventually ascribed a significant position to slave-caste women in local congregations. In many instances, the active participation of women became decisive in the formation of the local congregations of slave Christians. This paper seeks to analyse the role of Dalit women in the mission congregations that eventually bestowed them with agency, quite different from what they were used to in their pre-christian phase. Women in Precolonial Slave Society Before analysing the place of women in the missionary churches, it is appropriate to trace the life of women in the slave-caste communities. Occupying a central position in agricultural production, women undertook the most arduous tasks of transplanting, weeding and harvesting, among other crucial works in the wetlands as well as drylands of Kerala. In addition to this, it was their job to process the day s wage of one or two measures of raw paddy after they reached home from work and prepare the daily gruel for the household. There were other tasks, such as acquiring adequate quantities of firewood and water and, most importantly, the fire required for cooking. Sometimes, there could be embers from the previous night if they had used a sufficient quantity of paddy chaff as fuel. Otherwise, it was the task of women to bring fire from the neighbouring house to light the hearth. Processing raw paddy involved boiling it until it reached the stage of breaking its chaff, followed by frying it dry and, then, pulverising it. This routine was repeated every evening, wherein it was the duty of the women to prepare and cook rice to feed every one. Oral sources confirm that household members young and old would get any food only by midnight. Women bore the additional burden of species reproduction egged on by the landlord-owners who were concerned about the reproduction of their slave workforce. An increasing number of slaves added to the landlord s income as he could either sell them for profit or rent them out to other landlords who required additional labour; the income from such transactions would add to his wealth. Oral traditions that date back to the 18th century refer to the landlord who first purchased a healthy Pulaya girl and subsequently, bought a Pulaya man as husband for her so that they could procreate and add to the workforce of the landlord (Narayanan 2003: ; Kurup 1984: xxviii xxix). An interview by the British missionary John Hawksworth on 19 August 1853 of two Travancore Pulaya slaves, named Thaiwattan and Cherrady, referred to in the beginning of this paper, reveals that one Syrian Christian landlord family named Wattacherry forced Pulaya slave women to separate from their husbands 52 and accept men chosen by them as husbands. All accounts show that these women and men would report for work before daybreak and continue to work until sundown. On several occasions, it was observed that they would also work on moonlit nights 6 (Pillai 2012: 63) while menfolk of the slave caste would watch over crops at night (Mateer 1883: 41). Children were entrusted with the task of grazing the landlords cattle. Missionary narratives and texts of the 19th and 20th centuries express their deep concern for the children, especially the girls, of the slave castes (Bishop of Travancore and Cochin 1912). The life of the large majority of the slave castes continued without too much change even after they joined the missionary churches. The concept of moral economy may offer limited use in thinking about the life and conditions of slaves in precolonial Kerala. However, available historical information does not allow us to make full use of the notion of moral economy, since the slaves remained permanent outsiders due to caste pollution, economic marginality and oppression, unlike the peasant communities of England (Thompson 1993: ) or those of South East Asia (Scott 1978). All the available sources native landlord records, colonial accounts and missionary reports unanimously agree that the wages paid to the slave labourers of untouchable castes were very meagre. In the mid- 19th century in Travancore, the wages paid to a male slave were three-quarters of an edangazhi, which was a measure of 600 grams. Women would be paid even lesser. In such a situation, the slaves used to pilfer standing crops of rice or some tubers or roots for their survival, which was ignored by landlords in certain contexts as they knew very well that such acts were necessary for the survival of the slave labourers. Missionary Christianity offered the slave castes a critical new language for internal deliberation. The mission also functioned as a disciplinary institution with the deployment of concepts such as sin. The idea of sin made slaves re-evaluate earlier practices of pilfering crops during times of hardship and scarcity, which the landlords also accepted as a survival strategy. For the converted slaves, it became a practice that went against the grain of their new faith. On many occasions, the landlords themselves noted that the slaves had stopped the practice of cutting standing crops of paddy in the night, even in the most oppressive conditions when they had to starve. In the first half of the 20th century, in many parts of the Travancore region, money wage began to substitute wages in kind, particularly paddy. This made the life of the labourers even more miserable as they had to buy rice with the money wage. In the context of scarcity on the one hand and hoarding on the other, it was often very difficult to procure rice as the landlords waited for prices to escalate to extract maximum profit. Multiple sources of information unequivocally point to the fact that the slave used to be punished and that owners had the power to flog, maim or even inflict capital punishment. In fact, a missionary source of the 19th century speaks of the beheading of a slave for stealing a yam. All these examples show the degree of domination that made even a subsistence-based moral economy almost impossible in the context of caste slavery. OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos EPW Economic & Political Weekly

4 The Missionary Effect Before the mass movement phase of conversions, there have been instances of two Pulaya women joining the CMS in the southern parts of Kerala. From available information, it appears that both of them were distressed. One of them was Kali, later christened as Lucy, a slave sold to the European captain of a ship who was to take her to Java (Hunt 1918: ). However, she escaped to the mission compound in Cochin and pleaded with the Ridsdales, an Anglican missionary family, to save her. Eventually, they allowed her to remain with them and the missionary subsequently referred to her as a person who grew in faith. Equally compelling is the fragmented information on the life of the second Pulaya woman, Kurumba, from Trichur, Kerala, who, along with a group of 25 Ezhavas, received baptism and became Ruth (Hunt 1968: 105). Although the CMS missionaries had first encountered Paraya slaves in Alleppey upon their arrival, they were yet to decide on their work among the slaves, which began only in the late 1840s. Until then, the Anglican missionaries of the CMS were more concerned with the traditional Syrian Christians of Kerala, aiming at modernising and introducing them to the Anglican faith and its practices. Missionary work among the slave castes of Travancore entailed the establishment of slave schools that functioned simultaneously as churches. The CMS missionaries gradually developed their network among the slave castes, bringing both slave men and women together in these fledgling schools, which became the nucleus of an emerging social space. A close reading of the missionary reports of the mid-19th century shows that the presence of slave women was decisive in the running of these fledgling institutions. The origins of CMS s work among the slave castes are traced to the visit of the CMS Corresponding Secretary Ragland, who was based in Madras, in Ragland had heard the singing of the Pulaya women and men working in the paddy fields not far from the gallery of the church at Mallappally, where he was residing during his visit. It is also mentioned that Ragland met the group of Pulaya women and men on their way back home from work in their master s field. The songs of the slave castes seemed to have captured the missionary imagination, and they were frequently reported on. Such singing was to assume canonical significance, as it emerged as a major feature of such congregations. Emblematic of their group life, singing remained a major feature of the Dalit social world. Conversions brought about a new signification for singing in a different soundscape, since the singing of hymns, as against the singing of work songs in the day, offered an interesting contrast. The hymns offered a different linguistic experience by introducing new words and phrases alongside new stories from the Bible, since these songs were often in modern Malayalam, as against the caste-specific language that dominated in the composition of the work songs. The significance of these songs was captured in the perceptive observation of one of the missionaries, In the evening, I proceeded to the slave school which stood in the midst of a thick jungle. But the jungle being entirely cleared away and REVIEW OF WOMEN S STUDIES paddy being sown in its room, the place presents a new appearance. I was very much amused to see several slave women working in the school compound. About 12 women stood in a line each with small shade in her hand while they lifted and threw in to the ground as if one individual was doing it. Two men followed them closely, singing and beating their drum, which tended to excite the women very much in their work. Some of these women were Christian. Of the drummers one was a converted slave named Paul. I held a prayer meeting this night with some of our slaves. (Mamen 1857b: 22; emphasis added) Sedimenting of Bible in Everyday Life We also observe the percolation of Biblical concepts and categories through the medium of songs in the Dalit context that had a larger historical significance. Following the missionary reports of the mid-19th century, it is clear that the women in the congregations played a substantial role in such cultural translations. The pedagogical aspects of the work of Anglican missionaries remain important here. Following the missionary ideology of female protectionism (Prevost 2010: 35 82) and mission education, a different, though small, group of slave-caste women began to develop, albeit they remained unknown figures for the most part. A significant presence in the local congregations, these women were as important as men in the everyday activities of the church, including evening prayers and service. In many local slave-caste congregations, people still recall the older generation of women who would work as much as men in carrying headloads of stones for the construction of new churches. Similarly, they were behind none when it came to performing physical labour for the church. In certain other contexts, some of the informants told me about home baptisms in which women baptised infants, who were born unhealthy and who may die before the family could get the service of a priest, at home. 7 In the latter part of the 19th century, the missionaries of the CMS had established boarding schools into which young girls from the slave castes could be admitted. It was believed that their life in the exclusive boarding schools was far removed from the evil environment of their homes, meant to rescue them from the dangers of moral and physical degradation. It was felt that the mission boarding schools provided the most powerful lever to achieve these ends. The effective way of moral and spiritual elevation was to be achieved through a transfer of the children from the miserable, insanitary and often vicious surrounding and train and educate them in a Christian environment and with Christian discipline and instruct both boys and girls in new ways. (Bishop of Travancore and Cochin 1912: 2 3) A variety of training could be imparted to them industrial, technical, agricultural as well as intellectual for their development. Promising young men and women, who were believed to be the backbone of the community in the future and were thought to be sufficiently committed to the mission for weal or woe, were inducted into these schools. Expressing the uncertainty involved in the process, the presence of the slave castes in the Anglican Church was thought to be the strength and glory or a dead weight and a hindrance or even a shame to the community and that the future result, in either way, depended on the present action of the church leadership Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos

5 (Bishop of Travancore and Cochin 1912). The ideology of education helped develop decision-making among parents from the slave-caste background, who would then send their girls to a boarding school run in Tiruvalla. It was reported that all the 25 girls who sought admission were taken, whereas only 15 boys out of 45 could be admitted. Writing in 1918 to the international secretariat of the CMS, the Bishop of Travancore and Cochin felt the need for uniform growth in the education of both boys and girls. The social ideology of domesticity was evident in the observation of the Bishop when he wrote: 8 I need not dilate on it. We have to raise the standard of Christian womanhood from the ignorance and degradation of outcaste life. We have to provide suitable wives for the educated young men of the outcaste convert community, many of whom will be teachers. We have to supply female teachers for the girls in the mass movement schools. Without extended boarding school training for girls, our efforts to build up the Church must be lopsided and altogether inadequate. Admitting the centrality of women to the missionary project and ideology of domesticity, the church hierarchy knew fully well that the future of the community depended on educated women. Right from the second half of the 19th century, when the CMS missionaries began to work among the slave castes, some of the missionaries underscored the role of Christian women in raising children and looking after families. A core agenda of the nationalist elites in India, the social reform aimed at women assumed greater salience in the nationalist project since the 19th century. This particular concern continued across the political spectrum, often enough leading to the construction of a new domesticity that was heavily informed by nationalist ideology and upper-caste elitism. In fact, we find here a cross-fertilisation of the ideas of domesticity and nationalism that ultimately idealised partiarchy, undermining the agency of women. More importantly, under the guise of nationalism, what was reiterated and reproduced was the core idea of upper-caste patriarchy, often masquerading as the ultimate idea of the nationalist project. 9 In order to gain admission in the boarding schools, the missionaries encouraged both the parents and children to study together. In their efforts to scale the heights of civilisation as represented by education in the boarding schools in the Travancore region of Kerala, the young girls and women from the slave castes left no stone unturned. This was in tune with the larger trend in mission work among the indigenous people globally, where the idea was to bring in elements of modernity. Educating girl children was central to this project (Jolly 1991). While I refer more to secular education here, it is possible to observe the substantial effects of religious instruction in which slave-caste women began to occupy a pivotal position. It is appropriate in this context to quote one of the missionaries: 54 In the Pulaya congregation, I baptized nearly a dozen adults in each others. (Sic) One Pulaya old woman learnt her lessons better than all, being taught by her daughter who with her husband came under our instruction twenty years ago when not a single Pulaya family joined us. Her piety is remarkable; and she is an ornament to our church. She has a grown up son who can read to her. (Mamen 1876) Contrary to the perception of the dominant castes as well as a section of the missionaries themselves, we find here the Pulaya woman learning the scriptures and evincing the qualities of a remarkably pious person. In the case of many Pulaya congregations, it may be noted that many women learned the scriptures very well, although some of them still could not read. However, their education brought their leadership qualities to the limelight, which became indispensable to the local congregations. In fact, British missionary John Hawksworth, in charge of one of the mission stations, Mallappally, referred to the particular role of slave-caste women in the fledgling community. Sometime in July 1854, he reported the visit of a group of slave men and women to his mission house at midnight. Another slave had taught these men and women in the interiors of Mallappally. They informed Hawksworth that they were leaving Mallappally in search of freedom to worship god and that they did not know where they were heading. Hawksworth stated candidly that he was surprised by the knowledge evinced even by the slave-caste women who are generally the most timid and backward and at their avowed confidence in the Lord Jesus. Piety in Slave Castes There is an exemplary tale of one such woman who faced physical torture for allowing her son to attend school and, when the physical torture of the mother was found to be of no use in preventing the boy from learning, the master of the boy forcibly took him away. Horrified at the plight of the boy, the mother went to enquire about him, but was only beaten further. Hearing her cries, her husband went to see what was happening and he was also beaten up mercilessly, leaving him unable to rise (H 1860: 94). Braving the lashes of the landlords did not end the torture. The same source refers to the whiplashes on the bare backs of unoffending women and girls as they persevered in learning. These runaway slave women were instrumental in taking the knowledge of salvation through Christ to their fellow slaves. It has often been deeply affecting to witness their emotions whilst repeating the Lord s Prayer and being allowed to address God, as Our Father. (H 1860: 95) Many upper-caste Hindus and Syrian Christians observed that in the stillness of the night they could hear in the houses of the slaves, the united sound of men, women and children praying and praising god in the most fervent manner. 10 Another native missionary referred to three girls who continued regular attendance at the school, notwithstanding the displeasure of their heathen relatives. They learned by heart a hymn that Hawksworth composed particularly for the slaves. The hymn begins thus, 11 Jesus alone is our trust He will save us now and forever Praise to Jesus Here we suffer grief and pain In most meetings of the local congregations, the leading men of the congregation would come with their families and women had a decisive role to play in it. Often, the wives of the leading men would speak to the womenfolk assembled there. In the evening gatherings, there were lamps, usually a luxury among slaves, as they could not afford to buy oil. On such occasions, they would appear in neat white clothes, often provided by the missionaries. OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos EPW Economic & Political Weekly

6 In most mission stations, the missionaries in charge refer to the exemplary men and women characters from the slave castes. While an explicit mention is often made of the male converts, we also read about the slave-caste girls who could read scriptures well and on certain occasions were gifted with small coins as presents for their singing and reading. As people evincing remarkable piety, we come across slave-caste Christians from Eravipery, named Paul, Gnanaprakasam, Andrew and Naomi. The missionary recalls their meeting in the stillness of the moonlit night, which was not broken by anything except the soft singing of the slave children (Mamen 1857a: 3). The piety of slave women was not just confined to prayers and prayer meetings. In his annual letter to the CMS headquarters in 1861, the missionary Hawksworth referred to a slave girl named Elizabeth who had to endure torture on account of her faith and, finally, died of illness praying that she was going to Jesus, going to her father. The explicit deployment of women in the mission context is marked by the career of Bible women from the slave castes who were able to visit even upper-caste homes, carrying portions of scriptures, and pamphlets and other printed materials. Prayer and New Ideas of Self-worth The agency of Dalit women got articulated in the context of prayer. Protestant Christianity made it essential for people to read scriptures and learn prayers. In the last decade of the 19th century, the Book of Common Prayer was translated into Malayalam and made available in the local congregations. The Lord s Prayer had remained the central tenet of their faith. During fieldwork among Dalit Christians in Kerala, it had been observed that prayers and prayer practices brought in the notion of the sacred to their homes and the immediate environment that was otherwise thought to be the site of evil and pollution in caste society and the spatiality peculiar to it. In the homes of slave castes, they used to have a special place to keep the fragments of scriptures or pamphlets. In many cases, such texts used to be kept underneath the thatch, 12 whereas in others, they would be hung from the roof of the hut. As mentioned earlier, the soundscape of the slave settlements changed with the reading of the texts and loud prayers. Many believers thought that the sound of the prayer recital should reach all four corners of their little compound in order to exorcise the evil forces from their midst. 13 Introducing a new notion of time, the prayers began to acquire great significance in their everyday life. In the pre-christian phase, their time used to be governed by the work they had to do for the landlords. However, with their joining the missionary churches, they began to be governed by prayer time too; we read about men and women praying in the morning before they went to work in the landlord s field. 14 Similarly, ethnographic information provided by Dalit Christians shows that family prayer became significant and that many people opined that they would have supper only after the evening family prayer. 15 Conveying the idea of self-worth, the moment of blessings after the family prayers was decisive as everybody in the family REVIEW OF WOMEN S STUDIES would greet one another with words of blessings. Contrast this with the prevailing spirit of caste society in which the slave body could only be thought of as polluting, never as a sacred object. Apparently, women had a significant role in the family prayers and singing of hymns. However, right from the mid-19th century, when the CMS, for example, began their work among the slave castes, they insisted that people learn the basic tenets of faith through catechism. By creating a pool of talented men and women to conduct prayer services among local congregations, such a process developed linguistic capabilities and exposed former slaves to the power of the word of god. It is in this context that we come across women who were able to excel in extempore prayers that enabled them sometimes to become more influential in the local congregations. Ethnographic information available today refers to a number of such people who took the faith to different locations, and participated in everyday life at the paddy fields, especially when these castes went for seasonal work in the backwaters of Travancore. 16 Notably, a number of prayer songs were especially composed for singing in the slave congregations in the late 19th century by the celebrated pastor, Mosa Valsalam. Translated by the famous missionary, Samuel Mateer, into English, the slave songs capture the spirit of the times when the slave castes were looking forward to liberation through their new faith (Mateer 1883: ). However, it is important to note that in much of the articulations, we come across the image of an emasculated community of slaves, where a highly developed gender hierarchy was largely absent. Historical and ethnographic data shows that often the gender hierarchy was more pronounced in the ritual context as noted above in this paper. When it came to the everyday context of work, gender hierarchies were more blurred and less rigid. In certain cases, the skills of women were prized and became central. The reason for this was captured in the evocative phrase of one of the missionaries, that years of patient toil are needed before the people who have been so cruelly degraded can rise to the dignity of Christian manhood. Although the writer does not explicitly define Christian manhood, judging from the fact that it was written in 1916, one could surmise that he was referring to the ideal Protestant Christian man who would be the head of the family, assuming the duties of a husband and father. The missionaries would argue on a number of occasions that it was essential to create a spirit of masculinity among the slave-caste men so that they could defend themselves and their family. However, caste slavery also made it impossible for the development of an identifiably patriarchal family structure, which required the conscious intervention of the mission. Although appearing as a contradictory situation, it seems that the liberation from caste slavery and establishment of a secure family structure demanded that the slave-caste communities transcend the abjection of emasculation and attain manhood to articulate their desire for social advancement. It appears as a major project in which slave-caste women were deeply engaged. Economic & Political Weekly EPW OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos

7 Religion, especially Protestant missionary Christianity, was the sphere in which it was articulated. In the course of ethnographic fieldwork among Dalit Christians, it was noted that a substantial investment was made in the religious sphere, which is not often considered important in the social science discourse. One significant aspect of this missionary moment is that extremely ordinary women could achieve worth and self-fulfilment on account of their resourcefulness that derived from their role in prayer meetings, among other things. Explicitly recalled in the context of local resistance to caste oppression, these women evinced a leadership role that spurred even men in the local community to confidence. Exemplary Leadership of Dalit Women The everyday context of the perseverance of such women becomes explicit when the local communities were confronting crisis situations. One recalls the exemplary leadership that Dalit women gave to the Dalit Christian community in Karikkottakkari village, Kannur district, in the aftermath of the violent mobilisation against the E M S Namboodiripad ministry in Kerala in 1957, infamous as the Liberation Struggle in Kerala. Dalit Christians who were members of the St Thomas Church in Karikkottakkari, part of the Syro Malabar diocese of Tellicherry in Kannur district, had to face caste violence, marginalisation and humiliation in the church at the hands of the upper-caste Christians and had to leave in protest. As the menfolk had to take refuge elsewhere, in the nearby town of Iritty, with the support of the communists, it was the Dalit Christian women who led the resistance and cared for the families. On several occasions, they had to wield sickles to ward off the attackers who had the support of the church. Finally, it was with the coming of Italian Jesuit missionary Joseph Taffrel on the invitation of Dalit Christians from Karikkottakkari in 1959 and the establishment of the exclusive Latin Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes at Kottukappara that the caste violence against Dalit Christians began to subside. 17 The exemplary leadership qualities evinced by ordinary Dalit Christian women helped the community withstand the crisis. Such leadership could be seen in resolving individual or familial crises too. The central question here is to ascertain the source of the power of Dalit women that was decisive in the sustenance of the community in the context of oppression. The author has come across examples of situations of social conflicts in which prayer was used as an effective tool to resist instances of caste oppression. In such situations, women s interventions were crucial. In the local congregations, we come across individuals like Rahel Mathai who has integrated the critique of caste slavery, articulated in hymns/songs sung in the congregations. Retaining the critical insight against experiences of caste slavery drawn on the social memory of slave castes, a new theology of liberation was sprouting in the Dalit Christian community in several parts of Travancore (Mohan 2015). Women played a decisive role in many of the struggles for claiming access to public spaces in the late 19th- and early 20thcentury Kerala. This aspect of women s intervention is crucial 56 when we consider practices that inscribed defiance in their attitudes. Dalit Christians, irrespective of denominational differences, recall the fact that they were not allowed to walk on the road wearing their church clothes and, in most cases, they would walk to church in rags and change into their Sunday best in the church compound. 18 Apparently, even as late as the 1940s and 1950s, such restrictions on the sartorial practices were common in various parts of Kerala. 19 In spite of the 19th-century mobilisation around the question of clothing, especially in the context of the breast cloth agitation and its eventual success, in several parts of Kerala, Dalits were not permitted to use what came to be perceived as a modern form of dressing. Such a situation prevailed despite the best efforts of the Protestant missionaries as well as the local Dalit communities to challenge the situation. Among the puzzling practices of that time was the manner in which the Dalit body became a much-contested one in the public space. In fact, the use of Sunday best by the slave castes was a powerful challenge to the prevailing symbolic order in Kerala. One might follow here the writings of the missionaries from the mid-19th century, especially in the native state of Travancore, to show how contested the situation was. In order to defy the social marking of the human body, missionaries encouraged the slave castes to wear clothes. Clothes, thus, became a great marker in addition to the consciousness it created as a challenge to other restrictions put on slave castes, including their food culture. However, what is remarkable in both these cases was the manner in which such interventions could reinscribe Dalit bodies as sacred instead of being a site of pollution and, thereby, the site for domination. In the practices of Protestant Christianity, the sacred came closer to slave castes as exemplified in the manner in which they could reimagine their houses, bodily composure, food practices and, above all, different occasions for prayer and reading of the scriptures. Following the arguments advanced by Jean and John Comaroff (1991: 199), this revolution in habits must be identified as fundamental to the slave castes in transforming them into modern individuals. The idea of the modern as closely connected with new ideas of the sacred, which they had learned from the Protestant missionaries, allows a different take on the question of gender stratification in the context of the slave castes where it had hitherto not been so marked. It is observed that in the course of time the ideology of domesticity, powerfully informed by the church, led to the emergence of gender stratification in Dalit Christian communities. Yet, their marginality in terms of the ownership of economic resources, such as landed property, made such a development relatively slow. 20 However, the elements of patriarchy were also gradually evolving. During the late 19th century, the missionaries lamented the fact that the slave families were yet to develop a powerful father figure. Emanating from the historic forms of emasculation that caste slavery had created, this lack of the father figure of authority was positive as it probably led to larger solidarities of early Dalit Christian communities that also leaned on the powers of women. There were cases of women readers in the church sometimes replacing men, as had happened on OCTOBER 28, 2017 vol lii nos EPW Economic & Political Weekly

8 one occasion in the Mittathumavu congregation of the CMS in the early 20th century. The missionary work among Dalits displayed some features of social movements in creatively mobilising women, which had far-reaching consequences. Women also became articulate and began to take active part in congregational activities, a position that was subdued only after early Dalit congregations began to be shaped by the practices of dominant castes within the church. Notes 1 For a detailed discussion on the history of the document, see Varier and Veluthatt (2013). 2 For a detailed discussion on early Christianity, see Frykenberg (2010: ). 3 The maritime trade of Kerala has received great attention of late, due to the ongoing excavations at Pattanam near Kodungallur. Historians are of the view that there have been trade relations between the Kerala coast and the ancient Roman world. For details, see P J Cherian (2011: 2) and Rajan Gurukkal (2013). 4 The Church Missionary Society changed its name to Church Mission Society in However, since this paper refers to historical texts and practices prior to 1995, the earlier nomenclature has been retained here. 5 Another word for black magic used often in Malayalam is koodothram. At times, koodothram is used as a means to wreak vengeance on enemies. 6 Personal interview with Mathai (Kuttan Karutha) Valiyakunnukalathil (aged 93) at his house in Kaviyuoor, Tiruvalla on 6 August I owe this information to T M Yesudasan, author and retired faculty of CMS College, Kottayam. 8 From the Bishop of Travancore and Cochin to Wigram, International Secretariat of the CMS London, dated 4 July 1918, CMS Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 9 For a critique of nationalist positions, see Partha Chatterjee (1993) and Tanika Sarkar (2001). 10 Annual Letter by K Koshi to the International Secretariat of the CMS London, dated 2 January 1857, CMS Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 11 Journal of Kuruvila Kuruvila (a native missionary based in Travancore) for the quarter ending 30 June 1856, CMS Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 12 Ethnographic interviews as part of the New Directions in the Study of Prayers (9SSRC/NDSP) audio-visual collection, a project supported by the Social Science Research Council, New York, located at Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. 13 See note Rev K Koshi s personal journal entries between 22 July to late September 1857, CMS Archives, University of Birmingham. 15 See note See note This paragraph relies on the information collected by Peter Mathew through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Kottukappara, a Catholic parish in Kannur district, Kerala as part of the New Directions in the Study of Prayers (9SSRC/NDSP), a project supported by the Social Science Research Council, New York. 18 See note Personal interview with Mariyam George (aged 92) by Peter Mathew on 7 March 2015 at her residence at Kottukappara, in Kannur District, Kerala as part of the New Directions in the Study of Prayers (9SSRC/NDSP), a project supported by the Social Science Research Council, New York. 20 For a debate on the linkages between the development of family and private property, see Engels (1972). 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