Christian Outcasts: Dalit Theology

by Winnie Varghese

“You should not make friends with an elephant keeper, unless you first have room to entertain an elephant.” (Dr. Jaffery: City of Djinns , William Dalrymple, Penguin, New York, 1993, p.224)

“O God, you are so . . . very, very big.” (John Cleese, The Meaning of Life , 1983)

Who speaks for the outcast in the Anglican Communion?

The Dalit (formerly called “untouchable,” those who are so collectively despised by society as to be without “caste” identity) Christian community in India tells the following story of conversion: The British did not bring Christianity to their community. Missionaries had hoped to convert Brahmins – the elite. The Dalits, however, “beat down the doors of the churches” to be allowed in because they believed the church could be a source of liberation.

The missionaries of the time planned their missionizing very carefully. The strategy in the colonies was to convert the powerful, or to cause the converted to become powerful by giving them access to an English language education and jobs in government – a kind of trickle-down church growth strategy, which worked in many of the British colonies. In India it was clear that if you allowed Dalits into churches, no other kind of person would come in, and the British believed that caste was too entrenched in India to be reversed by access to education and the usual tools of empire building.

To their consternation, the Indians who the missionaries approached were not interested in becoming Christian. The elite, in particular, found Christianity odd, bloody and foreign. Western missionaries found the ancient Christianity it found in India perverse and tried to eradicate it. Islam had encountered Christianity before in Asia, repeatedly, and arguably both religions had blossomed and rigidified in relationship to one another. Hinduism could allow space for new teaching, but no great school of Hinduism seemed to see any point in relinquishing the practices of the past. Despite the occasional conversion of a family, Christianity did not make significant inroads into Buddhist, Jewish, Jain, Parsi or Sikh communities either.

The Dalits were and are defined by Hinduism but also as outside of Hinduism, Some from these communities had become Buddhist or Muslim and thereby lost the stigma of lack of caste identity, but many had not, instead living on the fringes of Hindu villages, dependent upon the village economy. Their position was so precarious that rape, mutilation, poisoning and public humiliation were expected life experiences that could not be avoided.

The Dalit Christian community story of conversion is that the message of God's love for all people, even those despised by the powerful of society, meant personal and communal liberation for them. The gospel message of freedom was so clear and compelling in the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that parts of the Dalit community demanded access to and embraced a faith into which they were not at first welcomed.

The Good News made itself known despite Christians, the church and its ministers.

I wonder if much has changed today in how the church in the West – Canterbury and all the rest of us – think about engaging the church in developing countries. We are still in conversation with a supposed elite, many of whom we have trained in our seminaries and placed in power with international support.

I wonder if much has changed today in how the church in the West – Canterbury and all the rest of us – think about engaging the church in developing countries. We are still in conversation with a supposed elite, many of whom we have trained in our seminaries and placed in power with international support. We don't know how to find or hear voices around the world, minority groups of all kinds, including groups as mild mannered as church women's groups, writing and speaking out, aghast at the presumption and/or hypocrisy of those in power who claim to speak for them.

A friend told me recently of being in the state of Tamil Nadu in South India and visiting a small church in which the local priest had opened the doors to hijras and sex trade workers. A hijra is an ancient category in India, someone who is neither male nor female, either physically or in affect. Hijra is not equivalent to gay. Hijras are more like transgender people. They include men who have been castrated, transvestites, transsexuals and inter-sexed people – people who many of our gay and lesbian groups in the Western church would be horrified to find in their meetings. These people are a church.

Why, in a Hindu country, would transgender people and others marginalized because of issues of sexuality choose to come in to a church?   Because it is already a church of outcasts, of people historically considered by their birth and in their bodies unclean. Can you imagine the radical-ness of our hospitality if that were our community's starting point?

What do we mean when we say “in the image of God” if not the image in which we are born? In our church in the U.S. we have been arguing whether being gay or lesbian is in the image of God, a created order and therefore a practice of affectional orientation that is blessed. This humble parish priest in rural Tamil Nadu has decided the question is much more basic. He simply accepts people as they come to him as whole, fully in the image of God and essential to the community that calls itself church.

Would that we, even in our more progressive communities could even imagine so radical a welcome. Essentially, the disgust of the larger community is the sign of the chosen people of God.  

The week that the Archbishop of Canterbury‘s office released a letter about the embodied/incarnate reality of gay and lesbian people not being a reality in many parts of the Anglican Communion, an email petition went out from Bangalore in Karnataka in South India from a large coalition of social work and activist groups, urban and rural. They were organizing to overturn the section of the Indian penal code – directly adapted from the British penal code – on the criminalization of certain kinds of sexual activity including acts of “homosexual” sex, citing the discriminatory ways in which the law is applied and the high incidence of suicide among lesbian couples across India.

We are not simply supporting our brothers and sisters in the wider communion when we remain silent and acquiesce on organized attempts to control sexuality and reproduction around the world. The “unity” of the church does not have huge impact on our day-to-day here, but the legitimacy we are giving to radical conservatives in the developing world has a direct impact on social services, medical services and the shape of the church in the developing world now and in the future. The hijra church will not survive in this new order in which we are all publicly heterosexual to the satisfaction of those who check such things.

There are issues of respectability and legitimacy being argued in some parts of the church, particularly in Muslim countries, but in India it is not respectable to be a Christian. You cannot have sex correctly enough times in your life to make yourself more respectable if you are a Dalit.

If you are an Anglican in the U.S., you have probably met an Indian, at a church function of some kind, with my last name: Varghese (possibly spelt differently). My name, in India, marks me as a Christian. In my home state, it marks me as from a particular community, but in the rest of India I could be Anglo-Indian, of mixed-race in some other way, a pathetic holdover of failed colonial ambition, and probably Dalit. In India, all of those categories are shameful, or at least lesser, in the eyes of the caste Hindu mainstream. Over sixty percent of the Church of South India is Dalit. To say that you are Christian in most of India is by definition to align yourself with the despised, the outcasts, and the losers in modern Hindu fundamentalist India.

[T]o be an Anglican in the larger Indian community means to quite literally place yourself with the despised. That is what it means to me to be a Christian. I don't know if it is possible to explain that well enough. Not skin color, or money, or job, but religion – and not because of the content of my religion.

My parents disagree. They grew up in the enclave of the Syrian Orthodox Church in South India, known for their claim to an ancient lineage and the wealth and power they have in a few towns in Kerala. But even there, the privilege of a peaceable existence is defined in language of being “allowed” to be in this place, regardless of how many hundreds of years you've been there or how magnificent home may be. I cannot claim that the Syrian Christian community in Kerala is oppressed. But having left that community to live outside of it and outside of it's ghettoes in other parts of the world, to be an Anglican in the larger Indian community means to quite literally place yourself with the despised.

That is what it means to me to be a Christian. I don't know if it is possible to explain that well enough. Not skin color, or money, or job, but religion – and not because of the content of my religion. Not because it is the great Western religion. It is not because of envy or even the legacy of the Crusades or the Holocaust. Those are stories of the West. It is rather that the absolute least and despised are those who are known to have become Christian, and no matter how they regulate their behavior or acquire education or wealth, in this generation at least, no one forgets where they have come from. This is the strength of the United Churches of North and South India, and it could be lost by who is empowered in the re-organizing of the church communion that we are undertaking.  

Dalit theologians argue that we are in the image of God, all of us, in our bodies, not just in our thinking or our creative capacities or our prejudices. Because it was their bodies, their shadow, their smell, that supposedly contaminated others. They know the power of the love of the body in the image of God. In Dalit theology there is no danger of confusing the issue.

I don't believe for a second that any church member is an outcast because they choose to despise me or any of my brothers and sisters on this planet. We all know who is truly outcast. We know it by our discomfort, our disgust, our tentativeness about whether the new issue being brought to us will sidetrack our agenda. We know it when we are told we could become “defined” by a particular unpopular issue. And yet those whom we allow to be subject only to the prosecution of the law and never its protection by the grace of God continue to approach our doors, and may we love God enough to let the Spirit, in all of Her troubling, through.

The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the Episcopal chaplain at Columbia University in New York City. She is a contributing editor to The Witness and is involved with the church's 20/20 initiative and numerous other programs focused on growing the church with an inclusive ethos. Winnie may be reached by email at wsvarghese@aol.com .