An Ethnographic Memoir

Fatal Fieldwork Flaws To be a good social anthropologist, one must be ready to live life to the extreme. I would often tell my students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, of the time that Michelle Rosaldo fell off into a ravine, and died while studying the Illongot tribes in the Phillipines. It used to distress them and me, but we understood the nature of the craft, the exacting definitions of being objective social scientists, inspite of the dangers and the risks. My own experiences in the “field” have been marked by placidity except for occasional turbulence. Physical discomfort is ofcourse a byword for the sociologist at work. Insect bites have been frequent, though I must admit it was surreal when a scorpion climbed up my leg in the vice-regal lodge, IIAS, Shimla while I was researching on Lord Dufferin. Then there were also handbells that rung all through the night without reason and I could make no sense of it, since I was the only person occupying that particular wing of the mansion that night, and pages need not be written on the matter, so long as the technical data collected in the fields or the archives is relevant. The first time I went to the “Field” I was 23 years old, and while I was quite despondent at traveling alone for the first time in my life, my uncle met me at the station. It was four a.m in the morning, it was pouring rain and my compartment was so far out from the main station hall, that all my books and my typewriter ( my father’s Remington) got soaked. The next day, I swore independence, and set out with my luggage to catch a bus by myself. The porter put my luggage in the bus, and it took off without me, while I was paying the auto driver. We chased the bus, with me yelling myself hoarse, and luckily, a police van passing by, with fiercely mustached officers, stopped the bus, and I got in. The conductor sternly castigated me for being slow. Recently while traveling in Kerala over potholes which delayed our journey by three hours, a similar conductor asked my sister and me, paternally whether we were not in the habit of reading newspapers. There were only four passenger in the Pallakad Trichur section, others not daring to go by road after the monsoon had destroyed the metalled roads!(“Paper Vayakathillae?”) We also climbed one hour up a mountain in the night and then came down for the plain reason that no passenger was waiting for the bus at the top. A huge plaster of paris imitation of Michael Angelo’s Pieta was visible from various sides of that hill. The driver was efficient and taciturn and drove at break neck speed, refusing to answer our diffident query, “How much longer?” The most startling of travel episodes was when my uncle dropped me to the station to catch a train to Katpadi in 2005. He was now twenty seven years older and so was I, since my first field trip in 1980. At that time, he had said laughingly, “You must have committed some grave sin to be caught in such a down pour at 4 o’clock in the morning!” He had, since then, spent many years in the Gulf, and was accustomed to fast cars eating up the distance, so he told my aunt and me, that we needed just six minutes to get from their home to the station. Since all my life, he had always turned up to meet the trains I was on, and had waited hours at stations for my children and me to disembark, I believed him, though I was a little anxious. However out of courtesy to my father’s brother, I waited for him to finish his phone calls. My train was at 5.40 p.m. He started the car at 5.30 p.m, and we reached the station at 5.36 p.m. He said “ I’m 70 now, so I’ll walk with your suitcase a little slowly, you climb the bridge and wait for me on the platform.” Since he is grand- patriarch to all of us since my father died, and I’ve always obeyed him, I shot up the bridge and came down in nervous haste, idly wondering how he would come. Platform ticket and a suitcase…maybe he knew some short cut. Just then a train came in, and I thought it was mine. I was carrying my handbag which had everything significant in it like tickets and money. I got into the train. The whistle blew. My uncle appeared with my suitcase. It was now 5.37 p.m. The train began to move, my uncle said, “But that’s not your train!” I can still remember the expression on his face, puzzled and annoyed just like it used to be when I was five and did not count in sequence…Ofcourse being a local resident of Alwaye, he knew that trains are usually late, and had never imagined I would jump into the first one that chugged in. The train picked up speed and kind Malayali men going to Bangalore (which was where the train was headed, not to Katpadi where I was going!) begged me not to jump off. Any way there was no point, since it was a Superfast. In minutes we had crossed the Periyar river.We could not find the chain to pull either, so I gave up, and rang my aunt,on my mobile for advice. My uncle had already told her on his mobile what to tell me if I called, which was to get off at Trichur and catch the right train this time. On my next field work trip I collected my suitcase from my aunt and uncle, remembering gratefully that the previous time, when my uncle had met me at the busstop on the road outside his house and taken my suitcase from me he had laughed and said, “Travelling Light?” That’s what I do. The sequence of events which terrify me when I think about it,( which is not often,) is the time, when I had with many professional commitments behind me, gone to a book launch and then caught the 10 o’clock train to the South. It was on Sufi Inayat Khan’s daughter, a resistance warrior in France during the second world war. I bought a copy of the book, and was looking forward to reading it on the 36 hour journey. My taxi dropped me at the station, and I sat down to wait two hours for the train, which can be so boring unless one is truly tired, like I often am, and then it is quite therapeutic.. Atlast the train trundled in. I waited for the lights to come on in the cabin. They did not. Everyone was busy putting their luggage in. So I did too, in the pitch dark, with only the station lights for illumination. My bag was next to me on the seat. I was shifting my luggage under the seat, when I felt a slight presence behind me but I thought it was someone putting his luggage on the berth above. Then suddenly I looked, and my hand bag was no longer next to me. So I leapt out of the train, and looked, sure enough there was a man running. I ran after him, and he jumped into the next compartment. There were two army jawans who barred his way as he tried to disappear into the aisle. He was holding my hand bag clutched against his chest. I took it from him, saying “Why did you steal my bag?” and he replied “I did not!” and kept repeating it in a staccato tone. I felt sorry for him, he was such a weevil, a drug addict with runny eyes and very small (generations of starvation there) and hungry and mean. Immediately people appeared from nowhere and started beating the man. I said, “Don’t beat him, call the police!” but the citizens wanted to teach New Delhi Station train- robbers a lesson, and just kept on beating him. The train attendants and the police guards and the ticket checker stood there with odd expressions on their faces. Why were the cabin lights not turned on? Why did the Railway police not act? Why did the attendants look bemused? I went back to my compartment, none of the other passengers seemed to have noticed that I had been gone ten minutes. The only time that I went by bus to Tiruvannamalai from Kerala was also very traumatic. I had longed to miss that three a.m disembarkation which is one’s lot if one goes by train from Kerala, and which is so exhausting, though I must admit that as a station Katpadi is very safe. I had presumed that the lovely tarred roads from Chennai to Thiruvannamalai would be found everywhere else. Alas the truth is that the peasantry is served awfully by the most demented pothole roads. In the next installment I will describe that journey. 11 I caught a bus from Pallakad, a lovely town on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. I got to Coimbatore in comfort, in an express bus. I presumed that it would be connected to Thiruvannamalai, but I am disappointed. I must travel to Salem. In Salem the bus was rolling along well enough through the congested city, where suddenly the bus stopped. Tyre puncture. Fortuitously, or was it intentional? The bus stopped directly near a tyre puncture repair shop. The driver and conductor had been setting off on a five hour journey, without a stepney or a spare tyre apparently. So we all got off. And there we stood helplessly in the sun. Finally it was fixed and we took off again. We passed the most marvelous forests, mainly bamboo, which were dark and sullen and in some odd way, pristine and prickly. I’d never seen forests like that before and the Annamalais rolled into view with the lovely agricultural land around it. Tamil villages are verdant in winter with rice and fruit and flowers and vegetables riotous in the fields, amassed in the markets. Half the population goes to build roads in metropolitan towns, and the other half grows food. At Harur, some three hours from Tiruvannamalai, and 50 kms from Salem, the road was piled with granite, rubble and full of potholes, and the tyre which had been patched up with water and glue and spit and hope, gave up again. Once more we were close to a tyre repair shop. Clearly, punctured tyres are great business in small hamlets. Immediately a mechanic came, efficiently unplugged the huge tyre and rolled it off. We sat in front of a locked- up temple, dedicated to Durga and ate our lunches. The bus driver put us in a country bus and with difficulty we all got into an already packed bus. I put my carry- all bag on top of a sack of rice blocking the alleyway. Two hours down the road, the rice merchant picked up his sacks, roaring at every one in the way, and in the melee, threw out my bag as well. I clambered off the bus and got it back. Frightened to death I sat quietly next to the sweet faced swami, ancient and creased in his new white clothes, going to Arunachala temple for the first time. The bus went on for hours, since country buses have no fixed route. And atlast at 6 p.m when it was night, and all the lights of the temple town were lit, we got off at Arunachala temple. All the people struggling in these over packed buses, what do they hope to achieve? The theorists of pilgrimage have always argued that the journeying is the most important ritual. To me it seemed that losing my bag was a moment of sheer fear, (loss of identity). I love carnival and market, and much of my work in the last twenty seven years has been marking these in descriptive terms, first for a Christian hamlet, and now for Hindu ones in Tiruvannamalai and Pallakad. However there are elements of this carnival space in ritual towns which can be quite disquieting. I will close this reminiscence with one such encounter. When I first visited ‘Thiru’, as it is called by frequent visitors to the town, it was a “small” town. Now it has burgeoned by the influx of pilgrims (5000 visit the temple every day, according to the local chemist who has a shop next to the Arunachala Temple ) and the numbers multiply geometrically as the years pass. It seems to have become the hub of priestly and commercial activities. Television has contributed much to the missionising appeal of Saivism. The descriptions of market, temple and pilgrims remain fairly constant in the anthropological literature whether it be Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Religion and Commerce, with the possible yeast of politics, makes a town what it is. In Tiruvannamalai, there is faith, but fortunately no communalism. To me as a theoretician of dialogue between religions, non-dualism is the answer to varieties of discord which we see as everyday occurrences in a globalised world. Non dualism is the space in which everyday pluralism surfaces. It is an existential quality, which allows the myriad nature of the world to be ever present. As individuals we enter a space of communitas, as Victor Turner argues, and this involves both respect and sharing. On the other hand, technological imperatives (such as the megaphone) can be very rude interruptions in the quiet and sacred spaces that Nature allots us, and which is confirmed by cultural or theological formulae. Tiruvannamalai, eleven years after my first visit in 1996, provides such a sense of shock and rupture. Trucks bringing agricultural produce and other merchandise, buses bringing pilgrims by the hundreds veer through a traditional street with enormous noise in its wake. The Gods during carnival time are taken around in tractors which spew the most horrible smoke. The pollution levels, because of diesel and firecrackers during festival occasions has to be seen to be believed. In December 2006, the sound of firecrackers and megaphones disturbed ashramites so much that being present in that hallowed spot seemed to be a mistake which only says something about one’s nerves and not one’s ability to transcend or record. The woman in the room next to mine was a publisher’s wife from Germany, who had come to visit Ramanasramam in memory of her husband who had been a devotee of Ramana and whose works on Ramana were well known to the Librarian. Yet within three days, inspite of commitment to theology and her nostalgia for her first visit decades before, she left looking for a quieter room. The previous nights neither of us had slept, having been kept awake by a megaphone, where a piping child’s voice yelled continuously for hours and hours “Pathu rua Pathu rua pathu rua!!” a cry which never stopped. “What are they saying?” she asked me the next morning, looking haggard. She wanted to know if it was a political speech. “Ten rupees.” I said. It’s the cost of a packet of puffed rice and dates which the merchant wanted pilgrims to buy before setting off on the circumambulation around the Holy Hill. On the third night, my patience having worn thin, and fearing a nervous breakdown, I went downstairs at eleven O’clock. The ashram’s inner compound was dark and silent, only one pilgrim was returning from the circling of the hill. “That noise! Can’t anyone do anything?” “What to do?” I went and accosted the merchant. ”Put that off!” He nodded smilingly. He had not heard a word of what I had said. His ear was next to the megaphone. “Is money the only mantra you have?” I yelled. He still could not hear, and smilingly, serenely pointed me to his assistant who was packing the dates and puffed rice. “It’s illegal to have a megaphone in a residential street. I’ll call the police tomorrow.” The word ‘police’ seemed to penetrate, and he lowered the volume, so that he could hear me. “I’m from Delhi, and megaphones are illegal, and you must switch it off!” He smiled and nodded and agreed. It went off that night, and Beatrice was relieved, “I was praying and praying that you would go, since you know the language, and could speak to him!” she said in the morning. For her it was a miracle of Ramana Maharshi, that I had gone off, coincidentally, just then to bellow at the merchant. Next day however the megaphone was on again, and consequently Beatrice found a room far away from the main commercial road on which Ramansramam is now located. From being part of a jungle to being now in a road lined with gemshops, hippy clothes, junk and fastfood, foreign currency-changing shops, ticket offices, inter- net offices; it’s a very great change. The rustic road with its local shops of bananas and tea and newspapers has now been replaced by the kitsch and mélange of the post modern and the traditional. And every day is a festival in this ancient town, because every day is a holy day. Every day brings to pilgrims, honours and rewards, both material and spiritual. And who can be exluded? The numbers only increase. As a result there are problems of discipline and order. Residents of the Ramana asramam are forced to become aggressive bouncers who keep the crowds at bay, using only their eyes, linked arms or speech to keep the crowds from hurting each other or damaging the shrines. But I’ve resolved the dilemma about crowds by telling myself that each person in the crowd thinks the “other” makes up the crowd, but indeed, I too am part of the crowd. Susan Visvanathan

18th Frances Collins Memorial Lecture at CMS College, Kottayam, Kerala 18th August 2026: Tropes of Gender, History, Autobiography and Religion

Women and Literary Fiction in English: Tropes of Gender, History, Autobiography and Religion Dr Susan Visvanathan (Formerly Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, New Delhi) Introduction There are two aspects of writing that feminist authors have always used: one is documentation in existential terms, the other is critique. Sometimes description is sufficient to elaborate the veracity of both, as Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald showed us. Both pitted themselves against their indulgent but provocative, and in some ways, treacherous husbands. They had to prove themselves larger than their husbands’ opinion of them, which as a subtext outran their support and kindness. In Virginia Woolf’s case, the diagnoses of madness was an experiential space on which rested the fictional case history of Septimius Smith enclosed in the novel Mrs Dalloway. Who else could it be, but the fatal footsteps of Dr Savage, visiting the patient, that stalks the novelist’s memory? Anyone who has read Scott Fitzgerald’s novels knows of Zelda’s appearance in them in a mimetic form. Let us look at Slayer Slain or Stharikavadam (1864) as a form of the novel which still echoes the treatment of women and slaves almost a century and a half after it was written. Mrs Frances Collins in her act of novelistically presenting what she called “Syrianisms”, (acts of cruelty of St Thomas Christian farmers /landlords against their lower caste attendant communities, had as husband, Reverend Richard Collins, who as Principal of CMS College lauded her writing, saw to its serialized publication, and completed it after her death. All three cases of women’s writing mentioned above, then, presumes that women writers became visible because of the support of their husbands. Even plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. The support of men to women’s causes is a stance that the Oral History Workshop took in the 1970s where women argued that feminism needed the support of men. However, in this lecture, I am interested in how questions of contradiction arise in the treatment of women as a unit of analyses in certain frequently read literary texts. The Spiritual Search and the Exclusion of Women Let us take the case of Nikos Kazantzakis. His autobiography “Report to Greco” takes a novelistic form. He has an autocratic father, who while very typically Greek in terms of his close patrimonial authority and coerciveness, yet gives his son freedom, and also educates him, though he is ashamed of his lack of warriorhood, and his inability to take on that other available known familial role, that of the pastoral robber baron. Nikos will then be a school teacher, his father prophecies. Kazantzakis however has a strong streak of mysticism which leads him to search for God. The autobiography very vehemently represents pilgrimage, travel and vicissitudes of following the trail of known adventurers, saints and monks. What a powerful imagination it is, then, which compellingly sees women as the problem. They might be amanuensis, lovers and possibly conjugal partners, but in the end their degradation abounds, just as in Homer’s Odyssey, where the sailors constantly face sirens, seductresses and princesses who spell their doom. In Homer’s Odyssey, there is one young girl, who rescues the robber baron from the sea, wraps him in a towel, and takes him to her royal parents. Not surprisingly Kazantzakis Odyssey too, is a tale of horror, revenge, laceration both physical and mental. The place of women is to either be cannibalistic, swallowing up male achievements or to be deluded and defeated. However, Penelope is the dormant impulse of women to wait patiently, carry out household duties, and wait for the roving seaman husband to kill the suitors who eye his property and his wife. Kazantzakis is so afraid of women, as a mystically inclined scholar, who works hard to struggle with texts to read and analyze, that he abhors women, and so do the Orthodox monks whom he meets in distant monasteries. They all view women as eminently dangerous, bound to bring about their downfall. The nursing mother, who exposes her breast while feeding the child is as suspect as the painted ladies (whores) and lovely women who adorn their path, hoping for an alliance with men seeking God. In one case Kazantzakis, at the end of life’s journey, in a text (protected by his wife, who writes the preface) speaks of his meeting a young woman called Frieda, in Vienna. While there is mutual attraction and a promise to meet, the young student finds his face swelling, turning yellow, exuding pus. When he goes to meet his psychotherapist, the doctor laughs and tells him, it is the ascetic’s disease, and as soon as he leaves Vienna, and forgets Frieda, the disease will disappear. And indeed it does. Meanwhile, Kazantzakis who had explored theologically Greek, Buddhist and Christian religions, (while embedded in sufism, dervishes and the trauma of Turkish colonization) conducted interviews, and writes novelistic versions of St Francis, Jesus, and Odysseus. He writes his last work, an autobiography, Report To Greco, delineating the horror and fear he feels for women, just as he does for Turks and lepers. It is this mass of materials, presented novelistically that allow us, as readers, to understand how hard it must have been for women to overcome this instinctive fear and dread that men had for women. Jung’s Concepts of Anima and Animus In this sense, Jung offers us two concepts, anima and animus to allow us to withdraw from this anxiety. These concepts permit us to dwell in that space of ambiguity, which third gender identity has used to fulfill itself. Anima is the female principle, animus the male. There can be no stereotyping of either as conciliatory and aggressive respectively. Society does stereotype men as aggressive, and women as passive, but Jung’s concepts allow for the notion of co-existence of each in every human. Thus, we find that the concept of androgyny becomes very meaningful, with respect to freedom, and rights to life and work, and if one wishes, procreation. Umberto Eco and the autobiographical connotations of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a very well known account of the fortunes of a library in the hands of 14th century medieval monks who propel secrecy as the only way to promote knowledge. Eco uses the banishment of laughter as the means by which one can understand the terror and spite that induces the monks in their search for knowledge, to coexist with a seeming venality (jealousy and rivalry) which is indeed manifested as outright evil, because murders abound in the monastery. In the later novel, published in 2004, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco uses an interesting and very febrile space to rework time and memory. His protagonist, in a compelling recovery of memory, uses parallel narratives (his friend’s recall of a shared childhood) to reconstruct a juvenile past. That 1950s’ experience of adolescence haunts him in his amnesia, as he recovers from a cerebral stroke. In the novel, his father during the Second World War is away in the city at work, appearing only on holidays. The city of Milan remains the book end of this work, always hanging in the fictional reconstruction with the names of friends, pedagogic institutional appearances and fragmented chronologies. At the age of 60, the successful old trader of antique books returns to the childhood home in a village. His grandfather’s housekeeper, now quite ancient herself, welcomes him with an abandonment of joy and recognition. Her familiarity with the house and its secret, locked portals, propels him to visit the attic. As the grandson who visits the family home, he is able to claim the school notebooks and comics of the 1940s. Consequently, he is drawn to a suppressed and haunting memory of his first love. This love had ended in an unexplained absence. However, another relic friend from that period of adolescence, who is currently his guide into a forgotten past, tells him that his first love called to memory by associational clues, had died in Brazil at the age of 18, after leaving their school in Italy, where adolescent passions and rejections had ruled incessantly. Had he known of her premature death, he would not have carried the memory of her beauty and her irrevocability, as ‘forgotten’ romance; as a thing of the past continuing into the existential present. The intensity of his suppressed feelings for that lost love had a current mnemonic, a young woman called Sybilla, who works as his assistant in his successful Rare Books shop in Milan. The gaps in memory are coincidenatally placed, so that the assistant’s name and how she looks, becomes juxtaposed with his returning memory of that long lost first love. He also remembers that he went to his first love’s apartment, hoping to see her, heard her sing a juvenile love song, and promptly “fell out of love” for her! Connections are not important in proving coincidences. The old erudite merchant, whose existing memory is for words (he can recite by heart texts and verses) cannot now return to his home and family in Milan. He remains in the village, and the density of these emotions, and the repealing of vivid memory causes him to enter once again, the limbo of the coma victim. As a vivid act of novelistic re-creation, Eco draws us into that world, where the person cannot wake, but is aware that he is dreaming. Rather than being frightened by the descent into the black sun, Eco uses the trope of eternal dreaming, not as death, but as an experience of hell. Here, too, women are represented in the passive domain, as ever present in their roles as wife, mother of their children, and in this case the protagonist’s wife is a professional Jungian psychoanalyst and their daughters are supportive of their father’s obsessions. Conversely, women are neutralized, as bystanders or unattainable. How then do novelists deal with the ambiguity that underlines the nuances of different kinds of love? In cosmopolitan Milan, polyamorousness is not veiled, it is hinted at, and rather than secrecy, it is that which is whispered about. Like fascism and dictatorship, these emerge as suppressions and abstractions. What Eco is centrally dealing with is the impact of the platitudes that made Mussolini acceptable to families which wanted their sons to assimilate into the legal bullying by black shirts, for pedagogical purposes of occupational opportunities. It answers the questions we ask today of our own cultures and civilisations, of how bullying and threats of rape and death are tolerated. War is the vocabulary that is projected for this very rhapsody of banalization. Good grades are sought from children , Eco writes, who are then accepting of ideologies, which common sense makes them instinctively reject. To assimilate, however, they have to speak as others do. In this sullen moment of acceptance of family and educational coercion, the young boy , in Eco’s novel reacts by joining a party of those who seek a secret path to climb a rock face, (the gorge) unknown to their parents. Out of this skill, the protagonist then leads a convoy of Cossacks seeking to escape from the Black shirts of Mussolini’s army to join the Resistance fighters. This mesh of events then leads Eco to promote not just his knowledge of Fascist literature which was overpowering, but also means of translation as a symbol of the multi-currents in global literature. European and American comics translated into Italian provide a plethora of images of the masculine and feminine bodies, where warriors appear to dethrone the evil Lord. The illustrated novel, is thus the answer to the hybridization of the text, where family histories, war narratives, the routinization of eccentricity and the pale palimpsest of the ‘normal family’ appears in juxtaposition. In the next section, I shall look at dream and fiction together as the transposition of the truth and falsity principle. What is real, and how can we come to terms with the transferred probability of actual events. The dream shows us the limitless ways in which the imagination vents itself through the subconscious. We understand what we are capable of, whether good or malefic, and we forget the dream in all its intensity when we wake, unless we record it as soon as our eyes open, which is hard unless we follow Jung’s notion of ‘directed thought’. This enigma of the continuously active brain, which alerts us to all the impossibilities of action, is the ferment that also entrances. We know that works of the imagination are real, but not necessarily true, unless proved as prophecy. There are dreams we cannot wake up from, and those threaten life itself, as we may struggle evading death, but are not successful. When it concludes in the struggle which cannot be described on awakening, we can presume that we are dead. Who can we tell, then? The Subversive Realities of Fiction Fiction is the dream time when the subconscious is excavated. It does not happen by will, or wish. The story alights on one’s shoulder and becomes a captive friend. It is constantly using its terrestrial power (things we have seen, heard or done) replicating themselves through memory. It is not a fog of half remembered elements dazzling us by their luminescence in a forgotten past. On the contrary, it is a jumble of odors and sounds and images, each of which then capsizes into frequently unimaginable situations though, being at the same time, immensely persuasive. That is the paradox, for the fiction writer uses facts to dissemble. Every author has to agree to a contract that submits to the reader, on the first page, that all resemblances are coincidental. Yet, the blurring of life, reality and projection are all buttressed by the experiential sense that the writing produced through an act of voluntary discipline, (including seclusion) and is finally performed/expressed/ articulated through inscription. Austin and Ricoeur both saw inscription as the final way by which word becomes flesh. Whether it is the dream time of legend, or the production of narratives, the transmission of images is from the mind of the author to another/others’ minds, sharing a common assemblage of words, symbols and meanings capable of being further translated. This catapulting is what allows the texts of history and event to enter the narrative record. Think of Heloise and Abelard, written about in the fictionalized form. We know that they became lovers through contiguity (he was her tutor, her uncle his ecclesiastical patron). When they were secretly married, (or naturally cohabited ) they had to escape to the forests, where Abelard’s students followed him, to the Left Bank of the Seine, which was the birth of the University as we know it now. Abelard’s essay on transubstantiation and the Eucharist is still accessible through the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Hastings. So one understands that carnal love is dangerous, and that there is a price to be paid for it. Following this, according to the fictionalized account, the uncle sends assailants to castrate Abelard, Consequently, Abelard and Heloise are now separated for fear of death. Heloise joins a convent, and they continue to write letters to each other. If this is the legendary account, who is to prove its worth, factuality or value? Thus, there is only the commitment to interest, entertain and educate that the novelist has. Does venom entertain? We know from the current ‘Vampire – Stories’ loving generation that these versions of fantasy have empowered an age set to accept the co existence of evil as an ever present existential category. How do they deal with it? They recognize evil and they respond to it. It might be as Kangana Ranaut the actress does, in cyber space, or it might be as young men and women from the Cockroach party respond to the hegemonic and mythic forms in which religion seeks to exhort towards virtue, but the cost is denigration of women, and excluding them from many worlds,, specifically education. Literature therefore has cross currents, and the feminist force which Frances Collins uses in The Slayer Slain is to typify the autocratic landlord who coerces his workers, and behaves in the cruelest way possible. Is that a fictionalized account? Dalits have, time and time again, said the cruelty they received at the hands of the landlord was not imaginary, it was real. The Dream Time of Fiction The Collins couple, a missionary wife, and her powerful husband, together created a tapestry of events that survived 165 years. By publishing an English novella, and translating it into Malayalam, it became a powerful tool for the anti caste sentiments that the CMS (Church Missionary Society, Kottayam, Kerala) wished to promote. However, it served that cause only partially, since caste remained entrenched in marriage and commensality; and as with the allied Mar Thoma, there were separate churches known as Nazrani churches (for upper caste Christians) and Pulaya churches, for the Dalits. This segregation was not just prevalent, it continued till contemporary times, when the opening up of all churches for interdenominational sharing of eucharist has become a possibility by the Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical of May 2026, asking for a unified church which emulates the re-building of broken walls in the manner of distinct traditions of Nehemiah’s walls, as opposed to the creation of the megalomaniac Tower of Babel. Out of the standardized ritual of ‘facing the people’ imposed on Kerala Syro Malankara Christians who followed Orthodox patterns, as they traditionally faced the altar, during the Eucharist, came negotiations with the Pope, and revoking the order for standardization. The entire pursuit of standardization and the manifestation as Christ’s body through bread and wine has reached a point where rather than conflict; dialogue and permission entered a new phase in inter church ecumenical interactions. It is indeed a new ladder in theology and symbiosis between different cultures. Are theological dictums to be read interpretatively? Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical of May 2026, which has been widely read, presents with great clarity and bibliographical finesse, the reading of previous texts and tenets, in the new light of possible human extinction that we face globally. Clearly, there is a notion that the lay and ecclesiastical readers must be aware that the monolithic structure of the church is at variance with the federal nature of human life and belief. The terms of dignity and human rights are drawn by Pope Leo XIV to mean that grace is understood in terms of the love that God gives each human, regardless of ethnicity, race, class or gender. In this understanding of transcendent love, which rises above sin and error, all are bequeathed this great and universal love. The abstractions of theology overcome political transgressions, but offer the idea of mercy and virtue as constant reminders to move towards justice and truth. Within this, the idea of human rights, the concentration on the worker not merely as an exploited unit in capitalism, but a living human being who must be understood (not merely in terms of the ‘minimum wage’ convenient for capitalism), but within the larger motif of the needs of the family. While the Catholic Church tries to mediate between capitalism and war, where pushbutton technologies don’t count either the costs of labour or of death, the narrative of the Encyclical of May 2026 proceeds in an extremely fascinating way. Who will bell the cat? Pope Leo X1V follows the principles of Social Doctrines laid down by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. This was an abiding commitment to the issues that afflicted human beings, where they were treated as less than human. By returning to the principles of human rights and ethics and morality as a measuring rule for a good society; where human life was not devalued, but in fact, celebrated, the current Pope returns us to a sense of responsibility, or what he calls the ‘evangelicalism of the poor’. We must understand that the strategies of survival and co -operation are what are most combined in this new theology of unanimity, which weaves people together regardless of their ideologies, religious beliefs or status. In this concern to bring people together in the current contexts of misery and dread during climate change and expanding zones of war, the Pope demands that we understand the significance of “subsidiarity” as the corner stone of a developing theology. This means that rather than thinking of monolithic structures, we must remain loyal to the needs of those who are at the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Only when we understand their needs, can we have a constructive theology that helps people live out the myriad social crises. Subsidiarity is the understanding of community needs, voices, networks and organizational facets of actions. It means that it is not Utopia to want better living conditions, it is the responsibility of the agents of change to re-vitalise the way in which human endeavor for justice and -good governance are rightfully projected. Utopia is a distant dream, but grass roots activism and support of the poor allows them to a chance to life. In this context, the Pope cautions us that dependence on AI as a necessary tool has its dangers. Efficiency by itself cannot provide the essential elements of empathy, care and catalysts for human interaction and exchange. In fact, according to Pope Leo XIV, it raises the problem of detachment from the craft of work, to leave it to the machine. Here, in abdicating responsibility to efficiency rather than creativity, much is lost. How can humans make sure that their own knowledge systems are not impeded by a parallel structure of consciousness? Much of this problematic of thinking about war, equality, and questions of gender interrogate concepts in a direction which demand tranquility and meditation. None of its good intentions can be disputed. And yet, we know that the category of women and third gender is side lined in the Papal Encyclical by demanding that murder, abortion and contraception be treated at the same (equal) level. Further, within patrimonial structures, the Church while apologizing for slavery and antisemitism in previous centuries has not been able to change the connotations of everyday extremism and traditional consensus either in the case of war in its demonic and commercial aspect, or rights to freedom and life. Sufficient that the infallibility of the Pope had been undermined decades ago, and we can only accept the valour with which Pope Leo XIV offers us lucid possibility of a universal society based on love. If we return to The Slayer Slain, where the missionary husband and wife sequentially discuss dowry, caste hierarchies, violence and death, we see that nothing much has changed. Women still agree to marry within the definite boundaries of their community, with all the inbuilt hierarchies and transactions. To question these, would mean loss of membership in the church and community. Paulose the slave, loses his grandson to murder, (an act by the cruel landlord who in a fit of anger dashes the child to the ground) but Paulose saves the murderer’s daughter from a death by drowning, saying to the cruel Nazrani Landlord, words to the effect, “ You killed my child/I saved yours”. Then he disappears but the penitent land lord hunts for him to say he deeply regrets his crime. When at the end of the novel, in the section reconstructed by Reverend Collins, (after his wife Frances’ death) Paulose, being the truly loyal slave that he is, accepts the heartfelt apology of his master, and they are united in the Protestant Church of the CMS. The native Catechist who had caused the accident , which almost drowned the Landlord’s daughter, Mariam, in the first place, admits to the strong river current which took his boat out of its propelled route. He is a friend of the Landlord, and plays an important part in the narrative, probably a Nazrani too. His apprentice marries the Landlord’s daughter, and a complex story emerges. The hitherto cruel landlord’s wife is a Brahmin woman, who had been lost in Benaras and been adopted by Missionaries who had returned her to a school in Kerala. The Landlord’s marriage to this lost and found child, (whom he truly loves and never scolds!) and then her conversion to Christianity, had been arranged for her, by the CMS missionaries and so their children are able to discern the similarity between their mother and their Namboodri neighbour who had till now hidden his blood relation to them. Much of this fictionalized documentary evidence shows us the flexibility of the CMS in the mid 19th century. There were marriages made across borders, nothing was as was fixed in time and custom, or as was expected. All that was required of women was obedience, and devotion to the husband, and an acceptance of his will, and the loving patrimonial governance of women in the family. Where the novel shines is when the Landlord’s daughter objects to the proposed marriage between a rich neighbour’s son and herself. She fights for her rights to refuse the arranged match, as she has become literate, and can read the Bible. It is for this right that she contests her cruel father whose vulnerability, fortunately, is that he adores his eldest child. The fact that she wins that battle for autonomy and self worth is what the novelist couple attribute to the new domain of their influence. From this time on, the fluidity of the boundaries between lower caste and upper caste Christians dissolve, as the holding of hands between the Brahmin uncle of Mariam and the Dalit labourer Paulochen is made possible only because of the acceptance that in this life too, as new Christians they can be equals. The description of slavery and death, of possibilities of change in world view were thus proposed by the missionary couple in their novel. Conclusion The Pope’s 2nd Encyclical of May 2026 is a very dramatic and well argued statement against current day existence of slavery. It takes into account corporate overlordship as responsible for the lack of freedoms and rights to life, world over, among the working class. It highlights the way in which people are deprived of everything when they are forced to leave their homes due to geological and climate crises, or due to war or occupational force of circumstance. We have to emphasize that this concern is central to the Encyclical and offered as a continuing Social Doctrine of the Church representing 19th century Pope Leo X111 call to freedom, onwards to the confirmation of these ideas by Saint Pope Paul, and to Pope Frances, all of whom are extensively referred to. Just as a novel (Slayer Slain) highlighted the familiar practices whereby neglect and cruelty are everyday practices, so also the wisdom of elders may be transmitted through texts which assure us that peace and love can prevail. The fear that AI can take over the thought processes and abilities of individuals to the extent that ‘it‘ thinks entirely on our behalf and is promoted for its efficiency and its applicability strikes a chord of fear. Pope Leo XIV demands an enquiry into the provenance of workers and operators in the deep web, and the manner of their occupational conditions as they follow orders. Logic by the machine, automatism as a cannibalistic force is seen to be a totalizing force. It lacks empathy, though it can simulate it. Pope Leo XIV , who writes in detail about these fears, asks us can we evangelise to AI? This is in essence the problem. If we take the Christ, whose followers were the poor, then how can we understand the wedge the Catholic Church places into the system which world over places priorities on weapons, war and trade? Here the Pope uses an advaitic route to suggest that each one represents the Christ, who before his death offered bread and wine as representation, transubstantiated, of himself. If this is the case, the discernment of a shift in theology has taken place, which allows for inter -eucharist relations to be established, and for those outside the church to be integrated, without danger to either. Hope is a fiction, and we must absorb what we can, and leave the rest to fate, which is non partial.

Heterogeneity in Reading as A Methodological Device in Culture Studies

Women and Literary Fiction in English: Tropes of Gender, History, Autobiography and Religion Dr Susan Visvanathan (Formerly Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, New Delhi) Introduction There are two aspects of writing that feminist authors have always used: one is documentation in existential terms, the other is critique. Sometimes description is sufficient to elaborate the veracity of both, as Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald showed us. Both pitted themselves against their indulgent but provocative, and in some ways, treacherous husbands. They had to prove themselves larger than their husbands’ opinion of them, which as a subtext outran their support and kindness. In Virginia Woolf’s case, the diagnoses of madness was an experiential space on which rested the fictional case history of Septimius Smith enclosed in the novel Mrs Dalloway. Who else could it be, but the fatal footsteps of Dr Savage, visiting the patient, that stalks the novelist’s memory? Anyone who has read Scott Fitzgerald’s novels knows of Zelda’s appearance in them in a mimetic form. Let us look at Slayer Slain or Stharikavadam (1864) as a form of the novel which still echoes the treatment of women and slaves almost a century and a half after it was written. Mrs Frances Collins in her act of novelistically presenting what she called “Syrianisms”, (acts of cruelty of St Thomas Christian farmers /landlords against their lower caste attendant communities, had as husband, Reverend Richard Collins, who as Principal of CMS College lauded her writing, saw to its serialized publication, and completed it after her death. All three cases of women’s writing mentioned above, then, presumes that women writers became visible because of the support of their husbands. Even plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. The support of men to women’s causes is a stance that the Oral History Workshop took in the 1970s where women argued that feminism needed the support of men. However, in this paper, I I am interested in how questions of contradiction arise in the treatment of women as a unit of analyses in certain frequently read literary texts. The Spiritual Search and the Exclusion of Women Let us take the case of Nikos Kazantzakis. His autobiography “Report to Greco” takes a novelistic form. He has an autocratic father, who while very typically Greek in terms of his close patrimonial authority and coerciveness, yet gives his son freedom, and also educates him, though he is ashamed of his lack of warriorhood, and his inability to take on that other available known familial role, that of the pastoral robber baron. Nikos will then be a school teacher, his father prophecies. Kazantzakis however has a strong streak of mysticism which leads him to search for God. The autobiography very vehemently represents pilgrimage, travel and vicissitudes of following the trail of known adventurers, saints and monks. What a powerful imagination it is, then, which compellingly sees women as the problem. They might be amanuensis, lovers and possibly conjugal partners, but in the end their degradation abounds, just as in Homer’s Odyssey, where the sailors constantly face sirens, seductresses and princesses who spell their doom. In Homer’s Odyssey, there is one young girl, who rescues the robber baron from the sea, wraps him in a towel, and takes him to her royal parents. Not surprisingly Kazantzakis Odyssey too, is a tale of horror, revenge, laceration both physical and mental. The place of women is to either be cannibalistic, swallowing up male achievements or to be deluded and defeated. However, Penelope is the dormant impulse of women to wait patiently, carry out household duties, and wait for the roving seaman husband to kill the suitors who eye his property and his wife. Kazantzakis is so afraid of women, as a mystically inclined scholar, who works hard to struggle with texts to read and analyze, that he abhors women, and so do the Orthodox monks whom he meets in distant monasteries. They all view women as eminently dangerous, bound to bring about their downfall. The nursing mother, who exposes her breast while feeding the child is as suspect as the painted ladies (whores) and lovely women who adorn their path, hoping for an alliance with men seeking God. In one case Kazantzakis, at the end of life’s journey, in a text (protected by his wife, who writes the preface) speaks of his meeting a young woman called Frieda, in Vienna. While there is mutual attraction and a promise to meet, the young student finds his face swelling, turning yellow, exuding pus. When he goes to meet his psychotherapist, the doctor laughs and tells him, it is the ascetic’s disease, and as soon as he leaves Vienna, and forgets Frieda, the disease will disappear. And indeed it does. Meanwhile, Kazantzakis who had explored theologically Greek, Buddhist and Christian religions, (while embedded in sufismm, dervishes and the trauma of Turkish colonization) conducted interviews, and writes novelistic versions of St Francis, Jesus, and Odysseus. He writes his last work, an autobiography, Report To Greco, delineating the horror and fear he feels for women, just as he does for Turks and lepers. It is this mass of materials, presented novelistically that allow us, as readers, to understand how hard it must have been for women to overcome this instinctive fear and dread that men had for women. Jung’s Concepts of Anima and Animus In this sense, Jung offers us two concepts, anima and animus to allow us to withdraw from this anxiety. These concepts permit us to dwell in that space of ambiguity, which third gender identity has used to fulfill itself. Anima is the female principle, animus the male. There can be no stereotyping of either as conciliatory and aggressive respectively. Society does stereotype men as aggressive, and women as passive, but Jung’s concepts allow for the notion of co-existence of each in every human. Thus, we find that the concept of androgyny becomes very meaningful, with respect to freedom, and rights to life and work, and if one wishes, procreation. Umberto Eco and the autobiographical connotations of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a very well known account of the fortunes of a library in the hands of 14th century medieval monks who propel secrecy as the only way to promote knowledge. Eco uses the banishment of laughter as the means by which one can understand the terror and spite that induces the monks in their search for knowledge, to coexist with a seeming venality (jealousy and rivalry) which is indeed manifested as outright evil, because murders abound in the monastery. In the later novel, published in 2004, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco uses an interesting and very febrile space to rework time and memory. His protagonist, in a compelling recovery of memory, uses parallel narratives (his friend’s recall of a shared childhood) to reconstruct a juvenile past. That 1950s’ experience of adolescence haunts him in his amnesia, as he recovers from a cerebral stroke. In the novel, his father during the Second World War is away in the city at work, appearing only on holidays. The city of Milan remains the book end of this work, always hanging in the fictional reconstruction with the names of friends, pedagogic institutional appearances and fragmented chronologies. At the age of 60, the successful old trader of antique books returns to the childhood home in a village. His grandfather’s housekeeper, now quite ancient herself, welcomes him with an abandonment of joy and recognition. Her familiarity with the house and its secret, locked portals, propels him to visit the attic. As the grandson who visits the family home, he is able to claim the school notebooks and comics of the 1940s. Consequently, he is drawn to a suppressed and haunting memory of his first love. This love had ended in an unexplained absence. However, another relic friend from that period of adolescence, who is currently his guide into a forgotten past, tells him that his first love called to memory by associational clues, had died in Brazil at the age of 18, after leaving their school in Italy, where adolescent passions and rejections had ruled incessantly. Had he known of her premature death, he would not have carried the memory of her beauty and her irrevocability, as ‘forgotten’ romance; as a thing of the past continuing into the existential present. The intensity of his suppressed feelings for that lost love had a current mnemonic, a young woman called Sybilla, who works as his assistant in his successful Rare Books shop in Milan. The gaps in memory are coincidenatally placed, so that the assistant’s name and how she looks, becomes juxtaposed with his returning memory of that long lost first love. He also remembers that he went to his first love’s apartment, hoping to see her, heard her sing a juvenile love song, and promptly “fell out of love” for her! Connections are not important in proving coincidences. The old erudite merchant, whose existing memory is for words (he can recite by heart texts and verses) cannot now return to his home and family in Milan. He remains in the village, and the density of these emotions, and the repealing of vivid memory causes him to enter once again, the limbo of the coma victim. As a vivid act of novelistic re-creation, Eco draws us into that world, where the person cannot wake, but is aware that he is dreaming. Rather than being frightened by the descent into the black sun, Eco uses the trope of eternal dreaming, not as death, but as an experience of hell. Here, too, women are represented in the passive domain, as ever present in their roles as wife, mother of their children, and in this case the protagonist’s wife is a professional Jungian psychoanalyst and their daughters are supportive of their father’s obsessions. Conversely, women are neutralized, as bystanders or unattainable. How then do novelists deal with the ambiguity that underlines the nuances of different kinds of love? In cosmopolitan Milan, polyamorousness is not veiled, it is hinted at, and rather than secrecy, it is that which is whispered about. Like fascism and dictatorship, these emerge as suppressions and abstractions. What Eco is centrally dealing with is the impact of the platitudes that made Mussolini acceptable to families which wanted their sons to assimilate into the legal bullying by black shirts, for pedagogical purposes. It answers the questions we ask today of our own cultures and civilisations of how bullying and threats of rape and death are tolerated. War is the vocabulary that is projected for this very rhapsody of banalization. Good grades are sought from children , Eco writes, who are then accepting of ideologies, which common sense makes them instinctively reject. To assimilate, however, they have to speak as others do. In this sullen moment of acceptance of family and educational coercion, the young boy , in Eco’s novel reacts by joining a party of those who seek a secret path to climb a rock face, (the gorge) unknown to their parents. Out of this skill, the protagonist then leads a convoy of Cossacks seeking to escape from the Black shirts of Mussolini’s army to join the Resistance fighters. This mesh of events then leads Eco to promote not just his knowledge of Fascist literature which was overpowering, but also means of translation as a symbol of the multi-currents in global literature. European and American comics translated into Italian provide a plethora of images of the masculine and feminine bodies, where warriors appear to dethrone the evil Lord. The illustrated novel, is thus the answer to the hybridization of the text, where family histories, war narratives, the routinization of eccentricity and the pale palimpsest of the ‘normal family’ appears in juxtaposition. In the next section, I shall look at dream and fiction together as the transposition of the truth and falsity principle. What is real, and how can we come to terms with the transferred probability of actual events. The dream shows us the limitless ways in which the imagination vents itself through the subconscious. We understand what we are capable of, whether good or malefic, and we forget the dream in all its intensity when we wake, unless we record it as soon as our eyes open, which is hard unless we follow Jung’s notion of ‘directed thought’. This enigma of the continuously active brain, which alerts us to all the impossibilities of action, is the ferment that also entrances. We know that works of the imagination are real, but not necessarily true, unless proved as prophecy. There are dreams we cannot wake up from, and those threaten life itself, as we may struggle evading death, but are not successful. When it concludes in the struggle which cannot be described on awakening, we can presume that we are dead. Who can we tell, then? The Subversive Realities of Fiction Fiction is the dream time when the subconscious is excavated. It does not happen by will, or wish. The story alights on one’s shoulder and becomes a captive friend. It is constantly using its terrestrial power (things we have seen, heard or done) replicating themselves through memory. Its not a fog of half remembered elements dazzling us by their luminescence in a forgotten past. On the contrary, it is a jumble of odors and sounds and images, each of which then capsizes into frequently unimaginable situations though, being at the same time, immensely persuasive. That is the paradox, for the fiction writer uses facts to dissemble. Every author has to agree to a contract that submits to the reader, on the first page, that all resemblances are coincidental. Yet, the blurring of life, reality and projection are all buttressed by the experiential sense that the writing produced through an act of voluntary discipline, (including seclusion) and is finally performed/expressed/ articulated through inscription. Austin and Ricoeur both saw inscription as the final way by which word becomes flesh. Whether it is the dream time of legend, or the production of narratives, the transmission of images is from the mind of the author to another/others’ minds, sharing a common assemblage of words, symbols and meanings capable of being further translated. This catapulting is what allows the texts of history and event enter the narrative record. Think of Heloise and Abelard, written in the fictionalized form. We know that they became lovers through contiguity (he was her tutor, her uncle his ecclesiastical patron). When they were secretly married, (or naturally cohabited ) they had to escape to the forests, where Abelard’s students followed him, to the Left Bank of the Seine, which was the birth of the University as we know it now. Abelard’s essay on transubstantiation and the Eucharist is still accessible through the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Hastings. So one understands that carnal love is dangerous, and that there is a price to be paid for it. Following this, according to the fictionalized account, the uncle sends assailants to castrate Abelard, Consequently, Abelard and Heloise are now separated for fear of death. Heloise joins a convent, and they continue to write letters to each other. If this is the legendary account, who is to prove its worth, factuality or value? Thus, there is only the commitment to interest, entertain and educate that the novelist has. Does venom entertain? We know from the current ‘Vampire – stories’ loving generation that these versions of fantasy have empowered an age set to accept the co existence of evil as an everpresent existential category. How do they deal with it? They recognize evil and they respond to it. It might be as Kangana Ranaut the actress does, in cyber space, or it might be as young men and women from the Cockroach party respond to the hegemonic and mythic forms in which religion seeks to exhort towards virtue, but the cost is denigration of women, and excluding them from many worlds,, specifically education. Literature therefore has cross currents, and the feminist force which Frances Collins uses in The Slayer Slain is to typify the autocratic landlord who coerces his workers, and behaves in the cruelest way possible. Is that a fictionalized account? Dalits have, time and time again, said the cruelty they received at the hands of the landlord was not imaginary, it was real. The Dream Time of Fiction The Collins couple, a missionary wife, and her powerful husband, together created a tapestry of events that survived 175 years. By publishing an English novella, and translating it into Malayalam, it became a powerful tool for the anti caste sentiments that the CMS (Church Missionary Society, Kottayam, Kerala) wished to promote. However, it served that cause only partially, since caste remained entrenched in marriage and commensality; and as with the allied Mar Thoma, there were separate churches known as Nazrani churches (for upper caste Christians) and Pulaya churches, for the Dalits. This segregation was not just prevalent, it continued till contemporary times, when the opening up of all churches for interdenominational sharing of eucharist has become a possibility by the Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical of May 2026, asking for a unified church which emulates the re-building of broken walls in the manner of distinct traditions of Nehemiah’s walls, as opposed to the creation of the megalomaniac Tower of Babel. Out of the standardized ritual of ‘facing the people’ imposed on Kerala Syro Malankara Christians who followed Orthodox patterns, as they traditionally faced the altar, during the Eucharist, came negotiations with the Pope, and revoking the order for standardization. The entire pursuit of standardization and the manifestation as Christ’s body through bread and wine has reached a point where rather than conflict; dialogue and permission entered a new phase in inter church ecumenical interactions. It is indeed a new ladder in theology and symbiosis between different cultures. Are theological dictums to be read interpretatively? Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical of May 2026, which has been widely read, presents with great clarity and bibliographical finesse, the reading of previous texts and tenets, in the new light of possible human extinction that we face globally. Clearly, there is a notion that the lay and ecclesiastical readers must be aware that the monolithic structure of the church is at variance with the federal nature of human life and belief. The terms of dignity and human rights ate drawn by Pope Leo XIV to mean that grace is understood in terms of the love that God gives each human, regardless of ethnicity, race, class or gender. In this understanding of transcendent love, which rises above sin and error, all are bequeathed this great and universal love. The abstractions of theology overcome political transgressions, but offer the idea of mercy and virtue as constant reminders to move towards justice and truth. Within this, the idea of human rights, the concentration on the worker not merely as an exploited unit in capitalism, but a living human being who must be understood (not merely in terms of the ‘minimum wage’ convenient for capitalism), but within the larger motif of the needs of the family. While the Catholic Church tries to mediate between capitalism and war, where pushbutton technologies don’t count either the costs of labour or of death, the narrative of the Encyclical proceeds in an extremely fascinating way. Who will bell the cat? Pope Leo X1V follows the principles of Social Doctrines laid down by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. This was an abiding commitment to the issues that afflicted human beings, where they were treated as less than human. By returning to the principles of human rights and ethics and morality as a measuring rule for a good society; where human life was not devalued, but in fact, celebrated, the current Pope returns us to a sense of responsibility, or what he calls the ‘evangelicalism of the poor’. We must understand that the strategies of survival and co -operation are what are most combined in this new theology of unanimity, which weaves people together regardless of their ideologies, religious beliefs or status. In this concern to bring people together in the current contexts of misery and dread during climate change and expanding zones of war, the Pope demands that we understand the significance of “subsidiarity” as the corner stone of a developing theology. This means that rather than thinking of monolithic structures, we must remain loyal to the needs of those who are at the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Only when we understand their needs, can we have a constructive theology that helps people live out the myriad social crises. Subsidiarity is the understanding of community needs, voices, networks and organizational facets of actions. It means that it is not Utopia to want better living conditions, it is the responsibility of the agents of change to re-vitalise the way in which human endeavor for justice and -good governance are rightfully projected. Utopia is a distant dream, but grass roots activism and support of the poor allows them to a chance to life. In this context, the Pope cautions us that dependence on AI as a necessary tool has its dangers. Efficiency by itself cannot provide the essential elements of empathy, care and catalysts for human interaction and exchange. In fact, according to Pope Leo XIV, it raises the problem of detachment from the craft of work, to leave it to the machine. Here, in abdicating responsibility to efficiency rather than creativity, much is lost. How can humans make sure that their own knowledge systems are not impeded by a parallel structure of consciousness? Much of this problematic of thinking about war, equality, and questions of gender interrogate concepts in a direction which demand tranquility and meditation. None of its good intentions can be disputed. And yet, we know that the category of women and third gender is side lined in the Encyclical by demanding that murder, abortion and contraception be treated at the same (equal) level. Further, within patrimonial structures, the Church while apologizing for slavery and antisemitism in previous centuries has not been able to change the connotations of everyday extremism and traditional consensus either in the case of war in its demonic and commercial aspect, or rights to freedom and life. Sufficient that the infallibility of the Pope had been undermined decades ago, and we can only accept the valour with which Pope Leo XIV offers us lucid possibility of a universal society based on love. If we return to The Slayer Slain, where the missionary husband and wife sequentially discuss dowry, caste hierarchies, violence and death, we see that nothing much has changed. Women still agree to marry within the definite boundaries of their community, with all the inbuilt hierarchies and transactions. To question these, would mean loss of membership in the church and community. Paulose the slave, loses his grandson to murder, (an act by the cruel landlord who in a fit of anger dashes the child to the ground) but Paulose saves the murderer’s daughter from a death by drowning, saying to the cruel Nazrani Landlord, words to the effect, “ You killed my child/I saved yours”. Then he disappears but the penitent land lord hunts for him to say he deeply regrets his crime. When at the end of the novel, in the section reconstructed by Reverend Collins, (after his wife Frances’s death) Paulose, being the truly loyal slave that he is, accepts the heartfelt apology of his master, and they are united in the Protestant Church of the CMS. The native Catechist who had caused the accident , which almost drowned the Landlord’s daughter, Mariam, in the first place, admits to the strong river current which took his boat out of its propelled route. He is a friend of the Landlord, and plays an important part in the narrative, probably a Nazrani too. His apprentice marries the Landlord’s daughter, and a complex story emerges. The hitherto cruel landlord sife is a Brahmin woman, who had been lost in Benaras and been adopted by Missionaries who had returned her to a school in Kerala. The Landlord’s marriage to this lost and found child, (whom he truly loves and never scolds!) and then her conversion to Christianity, had been arranged for her, by the CMS missionaries and so their children are able to discern the similarity between their mother and their Namboodri neighbour who had till now hidden his blood relation to them. Much of this fictionalized documentary evidence shows us the flexibility of the CMS in the mid 19th century. There were marriages made across borders, nothing was as was fixed in time and custom, or as was expected. All that was required of women was obedience, and devotion to the husband, and an acceptance of his will, and the loving patrimonial governance of women in the family. Where the novel shines is when the Landlord’s daughter objects to the proposed marriage between a rich neighbour’s son and herself. She fights for her rights to refuse the arranged match, as she has become literate, and can read the Bible. It is for this right that she contests her cruel father whose vulnerability, fortunately, is that he adores his eldest child. The fact that she wins that battle for autonomy and self worth is what the novelist couple attribute to the new domain of their influence. From this time on, the fluidity of the boundaries between lower caste and upper caste Christians dissolve, as the holding of hands between the Brahmin uncle of Mariam and the Dalit labourer Paulochen is made possible only because of the acceptance that in this life too, as new Christians they can be equals. The description of slavery and death, of possibilities of change in world view were thus proposed by the missionary couple in their novel. Conclusion The Pope’s 2nd Encyclical of May 2026 is a very dramatic and well argued statement against current day existence of slavery. It takes into account corporate overlordship as responsible for the lack of freedoms and rights to life, world over, among the working class. It highlights the way in which people are deprived of everything when they are forced to leave their homes due to geological and climate crises, or due to war or occupational force of circumstance. We have to emphasize that this concern is central to the Encyclical and offered as a continuing Social Doctrine of the Church representing 19th century Pope Leo X111 call to freedom, onwards to the confirmation of these ideas by Saint Pope Paul, and to Pope Frances, all of whom are extensively referred to. Just as a novel (Slayer Slain) highlighted the familiar practices whereby neglect and cruelty are everyday practices, so also the wisdom of elders may be transmitted through texts which assure us that peace and love can prevail. The fear that AI can take over the thought processes and abilities of individuals to the extent that ‘it‘ thinks entirely on our behalf and is promoted for its efficiency and its applicability strikes a chord of fear. Pope Leo XIV demands an enquiry into the provenance of workers and operators in the deep web, and the manner of their occupational conditions as they follow orders. Logic by the machine, automatism as a cannibalistic force is seen to be a totalizing force. It lacks empathy, though it can simulate it. Pope Leo XIV , who writes in detail about these fears, asks us can we evangelise to AI? This is in essence the problem. If we take the Kautskian Christ, whose followers were the poor, then how can we understand the wedge the Catholic Church places into the system which world over places priorities on weapons, war and trade? Here the Pope uses an advaitic route to suggest that each one represents the Christ, who before his death offered bread and wine as representation, transubstantiated, of himself. If this is the case, the discernment of a shift in theology has taken place, which allows for intereucharist relations to be established, and for those outside the church to be integrated, without danger to either. Hope is a fiction, and we must absorb what we can, and leave the rest to fate, which is non partial.

Narrativisation and Hybridization as Methodological Techniques for Understanding Metanoia

Narrativisation and Hybridisation Narrativisation is what we all do as part of our discipline as academics. Discursive Sociology or Anthropology presumes that the oral tradition is crucial for our understanding of tradition, and accepts the hold it has over us. Therefore, the presence of God, Gods and Godess’ is never in question for us, as we accept liturgy, dogma, belief, rituals as part of the paraphernalia of the ‘believing subject’. What is important, however, is the authenticity with which we accept the faith of others as real, or true. It’s not what they say, or feel, or think, it’s about how intensely they carry the traditions which they have inherited. The existence of the believing subject is not to be doubted, how ever much we may doubt his/ her/ their representational form of faith. In cultures of segmentalisation, we know that there can be a huge divide between the stances of worship and the statistics for child abuse, rape, or the prevalence of AIDs as a statistical reminder that celibacy has its index of deviation. To make progress, Durkheim argues that individual originality must be able to express itself. Crime is thought to be the lowest order, while visionary thought the highest. Crime is considered ‘normal’ in society, as it occurs everywhere, and is therefore not pathological. When there is an increase in crime rates or a decrease due to ideological reasons, how can we understand what is punishment? For instance, Socrates was a criminal. Freedom today is the consequence of many such ruptures. (Durkheim 1964) Through the intellectual generosity of a Jesuit pope, we see so many new ideas which grow in collaboration with interchurch symbiosis. This is one of the most dynamic moments of theological transformation and ecumenicism. So, it is not moral codes or ethics, that we are here to discuss, as these will vary from society to society. What we are concerned with is how people feel about the consequences of belonging to one faith or another, or to none at all, and how they work with questions of metanoia or transformation by the essential work of experiencing the divine (Visvanathan 2007, 2010). While much of the Sociology of Religion drew from the atheist representations of Emile Durkheim, which are very persuasive, we know that the nature of the accident of birth involves belonging to one faith or another, or some ideology which communicates that its ideas are sacred, and religious faith does not play a part necessarily (Durkheim, 1968, Ambedkar 2013). There are however questions of contiguity (where people absorb the faith of neighbours or friends, and start reading their holy books), or it may be chance encounters with those who have found a path. This path is so dramatic that it reveals itself as the way forward. This is then communicated to others through poetry, music or theatre, including dance forms. Clearly then, much of the beauty of religious expression is through art forms, which could include competitions, memorization and mastery over texts, in the form of poetry, prose or drama, or all night performances on holy days. What draws people together then is not birth membership, but the acceptance that this is the way by which they can excel. Remaining with in the enclosed and protective spaces of family, neighbourhood, state and the educational and institutional forms endorsed by them, the child is socialized to belong and act as a member of an association of believers (Durkheim). There is no question of refusal to belong, the strictures and conventions are many. As a result, they accept the expenditures involved in church festivals and life cycle rituals, and even if the family goes into debt, it is understood that membership is the most important thing in life. Without it, neither marriages, births or deaths can be registered. There is no place, in such a structure, for a floating population of believers. Everything is circumscribed, and written in stone, metaphorically speaking, or in canonical text. The ten commandments of Moses became an essential part of Church doctrine but as the genocide in Palestine showed neither the prime minister of Palestine, nor the President of America saw the memorized code “ Thou shalt not kill” as significant. However, with migration to other countries, the Kerala Christians are faced with new questions and problems. People fall in love across denominations, some join groups that their parents know nothing about, some join the groups which are free wheeling and spontaneous (Pentecostal groups for instance) but even if it is to join another religious association, tradition demands that they maintain the identity given to them by birth. They can never move away from this identity. Hybridisation is the primary aspect of conforming to traditional identities and yet affirming the need to belong to a completely different set of values. Once this hybridization is accepted, people feel more comfortable, and they understand that they are part of these osmotic structures which understand their needs. What is significant is that border crossing is hard to do, while belonging to the group that one was originally born in is overtly prescribed by family and associational pressure. This is because socialization during childhood, and the idea that free will operates in anonymity means that people don’t necessarily talk about deviation. Pierre Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice wrote about strategies and white lies. People conform, but as every adolescent knows error, negligence and destructive tendencies brought about by gluttony and boredom are rife. As a result, whether in democracy or dictatorship negligence is sometimes an attribute that is permitted or for those in authority it is permitted to ‘turn a blind eye.’ This is certainly the reason why the passivity of communities which are seen to be tradition bound, but not tyrannical allow for children to grow up in cultures of freedom and play. As children they play with one another, aware that there are differences, but they do not yet have a vocabulary of contempt, hate and hierarchy. Once they go to educational institutions, there is a difference in the way minorities are treated, or if the institutions are run by minorities, the reverse. This leads to interesting possibilities for hybridization to extend and flourish. During the Nehruvian era, which lasted from 1947 to 2000, a certain atmosphere prevailed where education was seen to be a ladder towards mobility and freedom. However, with the logo “Garv se Kaho Hum Hindu Hai” and the destruction of the Babri Masjid which has been documented extensively, Indians began to feel the emphases on caste, hierarchy, and the milieux associated with the texts which were representative of mythological and legendary accounts of a 5000 year old past. These legends were represented earlier with great artistic license, as a shared cultural space made possible by the dominant culture of Hinduism. For instance, people enjoyed the scripting of the Mahabharat and Ramayana in a way that proved that subcontinental identity depended on the ability to share a common symbolic idiom. Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger suggested that where cultural adaptation is recognized between oppositional communities, it is because some frame of mutuality exists. When there is enmity, this dialogue disappears, whether in language or in performative spaces of theatre, dance, music and painting and allied arts. Hybridisation becomes threatening, purism is foregrounded and eclectism begins to dwindle. When there is no longer the possibility of translation between these hostile groups who were once dyadic and enjoyed their traditional interchanges, there is silence and segregation. Blasphemy, lies, heresy, pollution , are all terms that are identified with disrespect to individuals, collectivites and practices. Ofcourse, people have strong feelings about that which is set apart or holy and they respond with great intensity when something which is felt very deeply is disrupted, disobeyed or reviled. The danger lies in the ritual paraphernalia which has no respect for human rights, or in other ways denigrate the freedom and sensibilities of those who are seen to be lesser. Women, the poor and those who have no influence in society, such as the young, or the very old become the target for the contempt that society imposes on them. The sacred texts in all religions oddly represent women as lesser beings, and so also those who are born in poor or low status families. This is true for all the world religions as well as the cults associated regionally with them. The disruption of this representation of women and slaves is to treat them as beasts of burden, who may not have a say in the functioning of institutions (Arendt 1958). For many decades, after the 2nd World War, women were treated as professional equals (atleast in abstract), and had access to work and occupations, outside the home. With the contemporary shift, world over, to ancient theologies which take away what was fought for and practically won in the 20th century, women feel once again that their chances for freedom and rights have been curtailed. In traditional hegemonic culture, women are seen to be the backbone of the family. Their role is to sustain and support the ambitions and work regimes of the men in the family. Today, we are at that cusp, where industrialization has brought a decline in fertility rates world over. On the other hand, young people claim that the economic situations they are trapped in do not permit them to marry and bear children. This is as old as career trajectories in the 1970s, and the proof of this is Sylvia Hewlett’s book A Lesser Life (1986) which showed that university systems in America did not provide the stability required for women to hold jobs, or to carry pregnancies to full term. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a consolidated attempt by feminists to communicate the need for institutions to be supportive to women in matters of biological functions such as menstruation, pregnancy, birth and child rearing (Illich 1980. Mies, 1986. Merchant 1980). It is because of the severe constraints faced by young people because of migrations, ‘push- pull’ factors, the difficulty of finding jobs or keeping them, and the expenses involved in maintaining the standard of life that they aspire to that many palliative systems of care abound. Yoga, meditation and prayer become routine in this search for mental stability. Here, the Church has a part to play, because it allows young people to come together regardless of religious affiliation. This very buoyant move towards syncretism, and the osmotic nature of boundaries between different denominations is a very inspiring moment. One of the interesting moments of Keralites documenting life, is Arundhati Roy depicting her life through an autobiography of her mother Mary Roy, a former tea planter’s wife, whose domesticity was disrupted by the India-China War in 1962, and her husband’s alcoholism. She needed to get her children to safety, and send them to school. She, who was a very valued member of Mar Thoma Sabha or Society, told me in an interview in 1981, that she was descended from the Pakallomattam family. These details are all part of family lore, however far one may meander from the family tree. That lady, as a successful educationist, had gone to the courts and wrested rights to ownership of property, and the right of daughters to equal share with brothers. Ofcourse, the courts decreed that would be possible if the father had died without writing a will. Immediately after the Supreme Court Judgement (1986), it is well known that men started writing wills disinheriting daughters, and the church was complicit because it had benefitted from record keeping and tithes, and the patriarchal motivation to keep property with the male line. The promotion of patriarchy in St Thomas Christian families is promoted through the social and patronage functions of the kudumayogam, where daughters in law are generally preferred over daughters, when it comes to mandatory attendance. While Roy’s earlier fictionalized biography The God of Small Things (1977) was extolled, because it was picturesque and beautiful, its real force lay in the understanding of adultery and incest being the behaviour most demeaning to the St Thomas Christians. She hoisted both on a petard, and was feted for her courage. The same ennervating space is explored with regard to herself, in relationship to her mother. Nothing is concealed, the bitterness, the fear, the acridity: underlying it all is the sense of love which is so great, so mutually forgiving, that we understand that Roy’s two novels which are connected like the moon and earth galactically, are reminiscent of shamanism as interpreted by Mircea Eliade (1964). She throws herself in a space where the rituals of renunciation, of loss, of deep seated longing are catapulted by her onto a cosmopolitan platform. The truth is that the narratives exhort us to recognize that this is her pain, not ours. She does not prescribe her behaviour, her emotions, her reactions. It happened to her, not to us. It is this which made her say that she may have written books which are a literary success, but she herself is a failure, and being friends with failure means that she can hope to achieve results which she did not, in earlier contexts. (www. Books-cinema-poetry). How valiantly she fought as a young woman to get the infallibility rule applying to judges revoked! ( see Arundhati Roy argues for fallibility of judges in supreme court, Frontline 2002 ). In the Human Rights discourse there is a clarity of listing what crime and what evil is. In religious vocabularies there is so much variation that it is hard to distinguish what is culturally legitimate as custom, and what modern human rights based judiciary, set within constitutional imperatives, sees as crime, or more importantly evil. Wendy Doniger O’ Flaherty puts it succinctly. Sin or Paap is the result of moham (delusion) or maya (deception) in the RigVeda. So, people are freed from the sense of having committed sin while they may have done evil (O’Flaherty 1976:9). Fate, free will and grace are to be found in different locations, at different times, differently interpreted (ibid 59) . She quotes Mircea Eliade to suggest that what is true of eternity is not true in time (ibid 59). Demons have good qualities, and gods might employ trickery or be unjust. Thus the conflict between gods and demons in Hinduism does not represent a conflict. Much has been said about the segmentalizing and oppositional force of good and evil in Judaism and Christianity, or of sacred and profane; but the continuum of the sacred across good and evil in Hinduism is described as malevolent or benevolent sacred (Das 1977). Hybridity or hybridization, like fiction, extolls the virtue of difference. It is not just about being different, it is about the consquences of mutation. It is long lasting, it may continue, it may crystallise. It may follow from this, that women who have been conditioned to serve and toil, to hide their pain, to live out in secluded spaces have had boundaries which were easier to cross between 1947 and 2000. Ambedkar makes a distinction between Division of Labour, and Division of Labourers, (Ambedkar 2013: 3). According to him selection is not based on spontaneousness and aptitude but caste forces occupations on individuals based on the parents’ social status (ibid 37) Women of course are the lowest in the hierarchy regardless of occupation or caste. “By not permitting readjustment of occupations caste did not permit livelihood chances”( Ambedkar 2013:37). Further, Ambedkar says the memory of feuding is preserved by caste histories(ibid 44). For him, “indifferentism” is the greatest scourge of the caste system. Association and mutual solidarity are not possible where servitude and cruelty exist (ibid 48). There is very little, he says, to choose between excommunication and death. By opening up the doors of churches in a hospitable and non-judgemental way, many young people will survive the solitude/solitary circumstances of the 21st century ( ibid 49). Ambedkar argues that there should be social endosmosis, people should be free to collaborate on many issues, to convene, and to share interests. “Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence for fellow humans” (ibid 50). Here, he says that selection based on the category of “privilege as excellence” is to demean the rest. “Selection under such circumstances would not be a selection of the able. It would be a selection of the privileged (ibid 51).” Roland Barthes insists on making a distinction between the general, individual and particular. The juxtaposition of the individual and the particular must be foregrounded. This brings us to the distinction between fiction and the literary genre of biography, autobiography and hagiography. How can we discern the truth, and what is evaded or lost in selective memory? How does the skillful fabrication of the past impede our understanding of the relation between experience and reason? (Barthes 1986: 230) The 21st century has had problems very similar to the 1930s, where women’s roles had been identified as predominantly important in kitchen, church and kindergarten. War, capitalism and conquest have currently been the main emblems of democratically elected governments. It is frightening for many young people, and either they are assimilated so that they can be part of communities and religious configurations; or they can look to join new associations, breaking free of tradition. This is just such a time. In both of these cases, the vocabulary has not stabilized. Evangelicalism has been identified along the pivot of charismatic leaders, money, and belongingness (in transcendence and miracle cures.) It is not necessarily Pentecostalism, but revivalism that follows from this interaction between different subsects. How then do religious leaders deal with this flow of people into their churches, temples, mosques, animistic sacred groves or what Durkheim (1969) called “Association of Believers”? It is all left to chance. While the responsibility is upon the practitioners (called ecclessiastical bureaucracy by Max Weber) and their parishes, the real test lies in legal issues, and strategic action, given the fact that the State may be coercive regarding “more than three people” gathering in any forum. How can young people provide protection for their families, themselves and those in adjacent relationship to them, such as clan members, neighbours and friends? It is important that the issues concerning them individually and in collectives should be addressed promptly when they rise. The earlier forms of sociability were youth groups and senior citizen meetings. Now the Mar Thoma Church is experiencing what Zygmunt Bauman calls Liquid Modernity. Here, institutions (like electoral principles, citizen identity cards, education, medical care) have all been problematized. Nothing resembles the past with regard to constitutional structures of law and decree. Party politics has divided up people into forceful ethnic and religious groups which are stridently opposed, and yet the young are signing up digitally to say they want to live, and help others to endure the crises of the state when things are openly crumbling and moving towards greater and greater normlessness. (www. CJP). What is the role of the Church? I am reminded of the interviews I held between 2006 and 2022 in Tiruvannamalai at a welfare centre called Quo Vadis. It was initiated by Joshua Peter ( an anointed Bishop of the Arcot Lutheran Church) where he and his friends opened up an emotionally non intrusive centre where young people of any religion, any denomination, any ethnic group, any country could meet at the café, sit and chat, use the Library, speak with staff who also were counsellors, and also learn various languages in order to engage in translation of sacred books to promote religious dialogue (Visvanathan 2022). Workshops involving questions of immediacy of spiritual experience, and techniques of promoting calm and effervescence were equally significant. The Church (in its variety) promotes a certain transparency through its committees, and where ever there is corruption there is widespread noting of losses. Penance follows, checks and balances are confirmed, and rights are restored. This is the way the Church returns to order. Forgiveness is also enjoined. Just as there are holy men so also there are scions of large organisations who wish to contribute to the Church through corporate social responsibility. They feel that the long history of Christian presence in India from 52 A.D must be preserved. This too brings up the line of thought that involves shared histories, as the Evangelical Movement understands only too well. Without being polemic, we can look at how the concept of hierarchy is so instilled in the St Thomas Christians that they can only speak of survival because those in power (authoritarian figures in state craft) “permit” them to exist. We are two thousand years away from the time of the Herods, but we still have to prove that we are indeed citizens, because we are Christians, and our Hindu friends and/or family members share our fate because of their sympathy for us. Rekha Raj in a pointed remark at Manganam, in a conference on Gender and Justice October 2022, said “ Dalits are free: they can marry who they choose, so in the same family there may be Hindus or Christians”. However, one of my respondents in Tiruvannamalai, a very young woman in her early twenties, said if Dalits marry outside of their caste, they may get killed (Visvanathan in Ed. Wallenhorst and Wulf 2026). One of the things we have to understand in post Covid times is that birth is dangerous and manageable, only if there is institutional and family support. Much of life is about instinctive responses, and if men are away at work, the woman has to return to her natal family to manage the different months of vulnerability and expenses involved in relation to diet and rest and visits for pre-natal and post-natal care. With the large migration of St Thomas Christian nurses to America, Gulf, UK and New Zealand, the cost of training for young men and women has gone up substantially. They are left to themselves to handle their personal ambitions, and their family’s aspirations. These are the church’s concerns now, the dwindling attendance in local parishes, as families accompany the main bread winner (often women) and old people are left alone in the care of equally fragile or decimated households in the neighbourhood. Men and women are striving to lead normal lives, and bring up children, and yet occupational stress for educated communities are immense. They can be sent home from abroad, if they succumb to age, stress or ill health, making it difficult for children who have become used to the physical comforts of living in the West, Australia or the Gulf. Tithes are an important part of status aspirations, so the ‘envelope’ to give money for education of tribal children, or to build and renovate new churches is seen as mandatory responsibility of rapidly emptying church members, as old people die, and young are not economically self sufficient. The children or grandchildren who cannot meet the aspirations of local priests just don’t turn up. They may not even have a common linguistic frame with which to learn prayers, or follow the creed. So what we see is a rapidly dissolving church structure, and paradoxically the presence of a clergy (with their wives) who understand the relevance of memorization, music, and innate intellectual grasp of complex rites and liturgies. Many of the women who become wives of priests in the Mar Thoma Sabha are able to provide total support to their husbands, by accompanying them when they go on parish duties. This is an important part of the Mar Thoma priest’s weekly duties. When serving in America for instance, glamorous though it may sound, they have to physically appear in two distant parishes on the same morning to celeberate Eucharist. It is not income, or salaried jobs, it is the spontaneous love for Christ that makes them work the way they do, recognized for their vocation by family and parishes they serve. So, in Kerala, their parishes are spread across the subcontinent, and they have to face the rigours of travelling on motorcycles with Kochamma (respectful term for priest’s wife) sitting precariously, riding pillion, in dangerous traffic. Children have to be accommodated in different schools every time they are transferred. Industrial towns, small hinterland agricultural towns, big metropolis at home and abroad; they must arrive at their work place, and at the homes of parishioners when in need, with the emotional gestures and abiding love that the priest must give to his people. The theological colleges give priests their cultural capital and the will to share complex ideas in simple ways so that parishioners feel energized and actively involved. It is important to notice that when there is a ferment in the Church, and new ways of thinking about past and present and future, the acceptance of social change becomes a dynamic perspective, a tool to draw in the youth, their parents, their parish priests with families, and the prelates who provide benediction to all. It is an exercise requiring caution, and yet excitement. It is the Tower of Babel re - organizing itself in new vocabularies of love, mutual conceptualization and translation. To accept danger as the subtext of such transformation is metanoia. The actions are known, but the consequences are not known. J. S Austin talks of mis-application and infelicity in the use of words. How can acts be unilateral? Similarly, the question here arises as to whether when the speech act is at end, it counts as its completion? (Austen 1965:37). His example is, “I am including you!” which sometimes has the response, “I don’t want to play” What is the place of consent? Why must one belong to be included? He suggests the “infelicity” of hypocrisy, or insincerity, “I congratulate you!” when you actually don’t want to wish someone, or don’t mean it. ‘Mistake’ may not make an act void, according to him, though it might make it excusable.( ibid 42). How can we, as members/well wishers/witnesses of churches, unite across many borders world over, hope to undo the mistakes of centuries? Young people want a test of authenticity. How can we accept the favours of murderous warriors, however urbane and cosmopolitan they may be? How can we continually accept and apologise for the cruelty of our forbears to others? How can we be guiltless in the counting of our blessings? Time will tell. We cannot refuse our responsibility to future generations, when war zones spell annihilation for all, equally. As Mary Douglas states, there is anamoly and there is ambiguity. Anamoly is when something does not fit in . Ambiguity is when a statement can be read in different ways (Douglas 1966:50). She asserts that a private person may change his/her/their mind, but cultural customs are more fixed. They have fixed, and sometimes immutable patterns; orthodoxy can be very rigid about conventions( ibid 49). Laughter, revelation and shock can disturb structures at various levels, but cultural categories are not private matters. Therefore, the place of symbols in social movements showing the tension between religious/ideological systems and the rise of crystallized structures responding to them ( like the current ‘Cockroach Social Movement’ in India, inviting a Kafkaesque surreal space on the young and unemployed transcending caste, class, ethnicity, race, religion, ideology, occupation ) is as important in understanding social change as the momentum to rebellion, which does not necessarily conclude in revolution. For young Mar Thoma evangelists looking for a way to understand the context of spiritual revelation, there is the work of the Gandhian, E.Stanley Jones whose ashram work and ecumenical work in Sat Tal (where he established a Christian ashram) became world famous resulting in its arrival in Manganam, Kottayam as Christava Ashram in 1938. Sometimes, only pacifists can find a way to control the zealots. References Ambedkar, B.R. 2013. Annihilation of Caste. Samyak Prakashan: Delhi Austin, J.L . 1965.How To Do Things With Words, Oxford University Press: New York Arendt, Hannah: 1958. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press:Chicago Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Rustle of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt : 2000 .Liquid Modernity .Cambridge: Polity Press Bourdieu,Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press Das, Veena. 1977. Structure and Cognition. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. 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Orient Longman 2022. The Wisdom of Community. Bloomsbury India: Delhi 2022. Work, Word and The World. Bloomsbury India: Delhi 2026. Negotiating Dalit Christian Identity In A Historical Perspective in the Anthropocene in Ed. Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf. Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene: Planetary and Plural Perspectives. Springer Nature: Berlin. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. Indiaink and Penguin:Delhi. 2025. Mother Mary Comes to Me. Penguin Random House: New Delhi.