Arcot Lutheran Mission, Tiruvannamalai:Dalit Re-Negotiations

Notes for Dalit Renegotiations: Arcot Lutheran Church in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Religion is an epiphenomenon. Caste identity is a substratum. This listing or labeling is a process of social exclusion. Religion is about two generational or three generational choice about belongingness. Thus there may be Hindu or Christian Dalits in the same family. Rituals can be shared, or participated in across religious boundaries. Food associated with ceremonies can cross borders, as can choice of marriage partners. Ideology as Social Fact and Cultural Representation Caste has many commonalities with Race primarily in terms of how individuals are identified with domination or servility. Those who dominate others can use any excuse to do so and often use tradition or the collapsing of time across hundreds of years (‘This is how it always was’). Money, ritual hierarchy, political clout all work to underline hierarchy. Therefore, Dalits are assimilated into working class configurations because the Master class demands it. Within this, there is the further socialisation within the lower caste to accept their humiliation, and to engage with the master class with the paraphernalia of a learned passivity. Didier Fassin writing of the dangers of being black, young and living in the suburbs of Paris, argues that running from the police, even when not guilty, is the embodied memory that teenagers have of being caught, interrogated, and possibly imprisoned. They do not know why they are running, but this very act of escaping is a collective phenomenon, for they expect to be ill treated (Fassin 2013: 9,10). This embodied memory of hunger, deprivation, joblessness, lack of access to institutions and the privileges of citizenship is what Dalits carry with them. However educated they become, however respected professionally, they communicate that they come from communities which have been continually suppressed since time immemorial. Films like Patal Lok, Jai Bhim and Article 15 look at the plight of the poor in relation to the coercive power of the police or the State, representatives of whom enter into vituperative dialogues to communicate warrior hood and domination. This language is renegotiated with the appearance of the compassionate policeman, the discerning lawyer and the keen journalist. Each of them is able to document the everyday violence that the poor experience by charting a course of life and work, which uses the trope of the charismatic actor in Weberian terms. Such a person uses the charter of normative rules to carve a path different from those who believe that violence is a given in traditional society, having ritual or ecclesiastical legitimacy. In this respect allegiance to Periyar is something which goes along with a deep belief in Christological themes of deliverance. Dalit family histories are extremely evocative suggesting generations of toil before the family can achieve assimilation into blue collar or white collar status. Biography as Social and Historical Mnemonic Paul’s mother went to Malaysia by ship in the 1930s. Her husband died there. She was advised by people to return to Tamil Nadu. She had a son born in Malayasia, and was destitute, so she came to Lebanon, a Destitute Widows’ and Children Home in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Her son and his wife came to Tiruvannamalai out of poverty, they were farmers who came because the village was hierarchical, and Dalits had to live in a different quarter. Paul’s father was a teacher in Saron, a boy’s school set up by Arcot Lutheran Mission (ALC) and Paul came there with his parents at the age of four. He has deep love and admiration for the Danish Mission. “We are Christians. For other Christians, Palestine and Jerusalem are the holy places, but for us, it is Denmark.” He went to Europe for three months as a scout leader, spending one month in Sweden, and two months in Denmark in 1987. Tamil Nadu has made the mobility of Dalits possible because of education. Education is the only way by which liberation can be sought. Paul says his grandmother owned only one saree. She washed it in the pond, and waited for it to dry, before wearing it. That is what his father told him. Through education, and the state’s support through salaries and pensions (he retired three years ago at the age of 60) he is able to have a level of prosperity that he could not have imagined as a child. He never thought he could own a house, build his own house. Tamil Nadu has been supportive to farmers and displaced labour. He says that they receive 20 kilogrammes of free, (or very low priced) rice from the ration shop per month. For him, his memories of his grandmother, whom he had never seen, come to him from his father. His father said that she was very strong. Paul has a photo of hers, a small post card - stamp sized one, which a Danish mission lady sent him. He told her his grandmother’s name, and the village she was from. He said, “I have never met her, since she died in 1959”. The Danish missionary recognized his description of her, then sent him a photo of her which was in her files, which he had enlarged and framed. She looks sharp featured, about 50 years old, wearing a silk saree. As for the stigma of being Dalit, he shrugs, and says: “They will not marry us, but we farmers will not marry cobblers’ daughters or fisherpeople’s daughters or Irulas so how are we different? Every community sticks to their own.” Gabriel Dietrich writes in this general context that : “It is very difficult to understand how caste could have survived in the extent it did, in present day Indian society, or why even those people who are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy often stick to the system and insist on treating others as “inferior” while they refuse to question the “superiority” of those who are considered as “higher” ( Dietrich 1992:32, Kawashima 1998:169). Education and Inter Faith Dialogue Facilitation by Quo Vadis in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu Paul says that the upper castes treat Dalits badly, pay them low wages, but like their work. He knows that they as a family escaped the poverty of his forbears because they had education. The very rights that education provide, the liberation, the legal privileges: all of these are conspicuous, but without education there can be no upliftment. He has been part of the interfaith movement, called Quo Vadis, started by his friend Joshua Peter, who tried to bring people of different faiths together, exhorting them to be focused in their own religious practice, but to understand the faith of others (Visvanathan 2022.) Technology has made the world so much easier and cultures compatible. Paul believes that the kingdom of God is within us, and that it is here and now. His deep faith is about practice, generosity, the sharing of ideas, the very nature of post modern communication as a realization of our world as experiential. In The Church for Others and The Church or the World (1967) the World Council of Churches in two reports arising from consecutive meetings with church leaders argues that the concerns of secular society are increasingly important; war and peace, cybernetics, racialism, demography, class, struggle, fundamentalisms. Mission is about history, the Christ of history (WCC 1967: 14). In this task of comparative analyses where sociologists are on call, which is shared with people of other faiths, dialogue is a specialized task with the theologian in charge. Here, the central focus is on the sermon, biblical exegesis, training in discernment, meditative reflections on the contemporary situation (ibid 25). While this is the conventional view of church ecclesiastical functionaries, Joshua Peter and Paul Visuvasam, who are grass roots in their approach, suggest a more intense experiential dialogue process, where people share their faith, opinions and plans in conversational interaction where the leaders rise from the community in everyday praxis (interview 20th July 2022). Like race, caste segregation is ideologically motivated. It allows for dominant or dominating castes to impose their identity politics on lower castes, maintain them in a situation of servility. They may not sit with upper castes, eat with them, marry them, but they can work for them, maintaining the postures of subservience and tacit obedience. Paul says, if someone has money they can mingle, even marry, if two people fall in love, it is possible that their class situation will smoothen the match. However, his daughter says, ‘that it might happen, but usually such lovers get killed.’ (interview 6th July 2022) Schools run by the Lutheran mission are outside of the CSI and CNI. Lutheran mission schools are entirely Dalit, but are open to students of all religions. They were set up by Ziegenbalg, a German missionary, who got land from the British. Carl E.Ochs was a German missionary of the mid-19th century working in South India for the Leipzig Mission because he would not agree to its policy on caste (personal communication Kirsten Neumann Rajendran 21st July 2022), Simon Rasten suggests that the Danish missions were always in contestatory positions with the Nayaka rulers, local chiefs, rival trading posts and indigenous people subsumed within caste hierarchies (what Esther Fihl calls frictions) . He therefore suggests, following Neil Brimnes, that the imposition of colonial practices over the spice trade, essentially followed dialogic processes of culture. It was a constant process of negotiations and interplays at many levels, each actor wishing to encourage translation of views and cultural artifacts. They differentially sought to integrate one another into their exclusive world view. ( Rasten in Filh and Venkatchalapathy 2009: 44). Elisabeth Susan Alexander corroborates this contentious space of colonial ecclesiastical politics by arguing that the European trading posts were the site of Christian missionizing. She writes that Cuddalore was enroute to Madras, interlocked with important towns like Gingee, Tiruvannamalai and Salem. “It was also because it was a significant English settlement that Cuddalore, like Madras, was subject to constant attacks by political opponents as the rising English power negotiated and fought its way to political supremacy in South India by the turn of the 19th century.” (Alexander in Gross, Kumaradoss, Liebau 2006: 379). In such towns, local traders, dubashes, and artisans mingled. Ines Zupanov gives us a fascinating account of caste politics among Jesuit missionaries, where De Nobili’s contestatory Brahminic mode was in stark contrast with that of his contemporary Goncalo Fernandez, who was aware of the presence of the “classifiable” downtrodden and the diverse interests of the Paravas. Zupanov was very clear however that the huge literature produced by the Jesuits in the Madurai mission would percolate down as hymns, treatises, performative acts and literature ( ‘a legacy of the intellect’) to local communities, even when the denominational identity changed with Protestantism. (Zupanov, 1999: 116) Ecclessiastical Bureaucracy of the ALC All the office bearers of the Arcot Lutheran Church are Dalits,as testified by the Church /Parish Directory. Tranquebar Mission as it was called is the Tamil Danish Mission and Tiruvannamalai has the Arcot Lutheran Mission, which is a break away movement. Esther Fihl writes with Stine Simonsen Puri of the time of Ziegenbalg, “During this time another Christian mission - The Danish Missionary Society – also rooted in the Danish – Halle society found its way to the South Arcot district, a little north of Tranquebar. As social workers and educators, the missionaries mainly dealt with families in economic and social distress” ( Fihl and Venkatchalapathy , 2009: 10) Having provided the contestary background to the establishment of the Arcot Lutheran Church, it is interesting to look at the stable environment of the Saron School in Tiruvannamali (Visvanathan 2022}. Saron School is 150 years old, and has children who study in English medium, Tamil Medium and Urdu Medium. It had been established by Sofus Berg, who had arrived in India in 1887, and went on to start a mission station in Tiruvannamalai. The school led to a growing congregation. The emphasis was on spiritual growth as the Danish Missionary Society was against mass movements (Bugge 1994:68). The revivalist movements had meant that there was close scrutiny by the DMS regarding the faith of the believers. It had to be questioned, verified and ratified that the new converts were indeed believers. It is for this reason Joshua Peter had affirmed in personal conversation in 2006, and again in 2022, that there was no increase in numbers of the Arcot Lutheran Church, except by biological and natural reproductive processes. The Danish Missionary Society had been founded in 1821 by Bone Falch Ronne, who had wanted his new society to stand outside all control by the Danish Church (ibid 64). Present Circumstances of ALC Schools The new problems that Dalits in Tiruvannamalai are facing are drug abuse and suicide in the ALC schools. After Covid, the schools are bursting at the seams, more children are coming and are being accommodated. In Saron Boarding School, in Tiruvannamalai, the children are from different communities. There are four schools, and four churches belonging to the Lutherans. Arcot Lutheran Church came into existence by the fact that Tamil Arcot Mission practiced caste, where different castes were given different communion cups. So the Tiruvannamalai mission came as a breakaway mission, where 95 percent of the parishioners are Dalit ( interview Kirsten Rajendran 8th July 2022). Origin of the Arcot Lutheran Church Henriette Bugge writes that “The first missionary to be hired by the DMS was a German, Carl E.Ochs, who previously had been employed by the Leipzig mission in south India. In 1854 he had a serious controversy with the Leipzing Society because he could not agree to its policy on caste. He had subsequently engaged in a bitter and long-winded dispute against the board and his former colleagues which resulted in his retirement from the Leipzig mission. Ochs then set up a mission of his own in South Arcot, but found it difficult to run. In 1863, he approached the DMS with an offer to turn his station at Melpattabakkam in South Arcot over to the DMS. His offer was accepted with enthusiasm and soon two young missionaries fresh from his mission school, were sent out to join Ochs” (Bugge 1994:64). Dalit sense of equality of purpose enriches the community, they feel that their experiential sense of here and now is perfectly in unison. Their sense of belonging in the world is just concrete, welcoming. This was corroborated by Rekha Raj in a presentation on 6th October 2022 at a Gender and Justice conference organized by Christian Institute for the Study of Religion in Manganam, Kottayam, Kerala. She said, “Dalits have a sense of identity and feel a great euphoria. For them citizenship rights are the most important, they are truly secular for they may belong to any religion or ideology, while remaining in the same family.” Yet, as the eclessiastical bureaucrats of the ALC communicate, post Covid trauma is everpresent. Bishop Kennedy feels that children are trying to cope in a post Covid world and need protection from ganja merchants. Three boys in an examination hall were too intoxicated to write the exam. Earlier it was the problem of the colleges but now it has percolated to the schools. To this end he says that they try to rehabilitate the children who have been corrupted. The Arcot Church has planned a study centre in Quo Vadis, a dialogue centre, which had been very successful for two decades of bringing people of different religions together. The unity of the world, of humankind is premised on the assumption that difference is to be celebrated (Visvanathan 2022). The Quo Vadis Centre and Library in Tiruvannamalai Rajendran is the co ordinator of the Quo Vadis, in settting up a syllabus for interfaith dialogue. He and his wife are theologians, former teachers at the Madurai Theological College. He is a student of Gabrielle Dietrich, whose name ALC members take very often with pride. This preoccupation with continuing interest in Dalit history and Christology makes Tiruvannamalai an interesting place for them to live in after retirement. Rajendran’s wife , Kirstine mentions that her father in law was also a pastor, and that every day, he cycled from church to church to carry the Lord’s word. These were essentially poverty struck villages, where landless labourers had willingly converted to Christianity. Work, food, belongingness. these were essentially very valuable. After being shunned by others, the ability to feel they belonged was the greatest gift that they received. Caste Hierachies and their Transmission The acclimatization of Ziegenbalg and Plutschau to the caste practices of Arcot was seen as something which was in keeping with respecting cultural codes. Ziegenbalg established a printing press in Tranquebar in 1713 and the first Tamil book to be printed here was a collection of sermons: then came Luther’s Catechism and a translation of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament” (Bugge 1994: 58). These were not met with pleasure by the adversaries of Ziegenbalg such as the Jesuit C.J. Beschi in Madurai. Infact Ziegenbalg was ridiculed for using a lower class Tamil instead of a higher class Tamil. This was thought to be a serious mistake which would alienate the powerful upper castes from Christianity (ibid 58). It would imply that the missionaries were lower caste people, and unclean, who would pollute the upper castes. A century after Ziegenbalg, Abbe Dubos argued for translations of the Bible as summaries, without references to Jesus keeping company with fishermen, carpenters, and no doubt free women, traditionally referred to as ‘loose’ women (ibid 58). The South Arcot District, consisting of the rural towns of Tiruvannamalai Tindivanam,Villipuram, Tirukoilur, Kallakurichi, Cuddalore, Vriddachalam, Chidambaram ( ibid 14) had its proportion of rural poor, who became a source of mobile labour for the purposes of railway, dam and other colonial construction in the British period. It is to this outcaste population that the DMS worked for, providing them with religious instruction, as well as food, medicine and education from 1860 onwards, when Ochs of the Leipzing mission station merged with the DMS. The Liberal World View of Present Day TLC Theologians Joshua Peter said that “Yes, food is important to the hungry. The symbolism of the Lord’s body as food is ultimately significant. Bread is food, and the hungry are replenished.” The Quo Vadis group essentially keeps the principle of dialogicity alive through songs, conversations and meditational practice. They feel that they can present through lyrics their theology of coexistence. Human rights, freedom from hunger and distress, social inclusion…all of these are immensely important to the community. Church services are well attended bringing in the robust population of believing Christians to Saron church every Sunday. The ardour of women is represented through the choir, and the immediate responses to the parish priest. Women fill in the liturgical services, and the bible reading fragments in loud clear voices. They are able to find the passage requested by the priest in seconds. Evelyn Christensen writes that the unifying dimension of prayer, the presence of life cycle rituals, and the collectivity found in shared worship, because friends, clan members and neighbours are needed at family reunions or crises moments. Faith is the essential binder, and with it the understanding that God answers prayers. ( Christensen 1985: 110) The results of prayer are unity, wish fulfillment, support , transcendence of distance, and cultures, and the ability to forgive (ibid 128). Within the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church, and its burearucracy, the priest has a predominant position in terms of his direct relation to the place (sacred sites) and people. Gabriel Dietrich writes that the priest is “supposed to be in some sort of perpetual institutionalised communion with God and as such functions as an intermediary between the people and god. …serves to perpetuate and to institutionalize religion by the performance of rituals, the formulation of religious theory and sometimes by the foundation of religious institutions, and therefore gives continuity and stability to religion . While the existence of priesthood is very important for safeguarding the continuity of religious traditions and often also for the transmission of knowledge and education, there are certain inbuilt mechanisms in the priestly profession which tend to make it a conservative, stabilizing force, but also often anoppressive and retarding force. The very privilege of being in communion with God gives the priest an opportunity to bestow on or withhold from people the benefits of the communion.“ (Dietrich 1991:17). Kirsten Rajendran draws attention to the fact that Arcot Lutheran theology draws deeply from the Nayanmar traditions of South India. Underlying the practices and beliefs of the local community are a sound understanding of how Saivite worship, and the understandings of the Siddhis, as poets, inform people’s religious practice. (personal communication 18th July 2022) Pastor Daniel said that the Covid years affected the poor in the community very terribly. Yet, there was a prayerful generosity which came from those who whole heartedly came out to help those in circumstances more difficult than their own. They were able to support families which were stranded in their town during Covid. Part of the problem of the breakdown between the federal aspects of democracy and the rule of the Centre can be understood in terms of the failure of bureaucracy, and the alliance between vested political interests in government and the bureaucrat. Dalits and Survival during Covid All over the subcontinent the bureaucrat/clerk has a bad reputation. Files are always pending, money changes hands, there is too close an alliance between bureaucrats and politicians, and women are usually marginalised. When criminality is rampant, then bribes are seen as being only that ‘mild an event’ as tax evasion. Nepotism and clan loyalties are seen to be normal, as is favouring of friends and loyal subordinates. Satish Saberwal argued in Wages of Segmentation that bureaucracy in India is enmeshed in village and caste and clan loyalties, that because industrialisation was imposed on us in the 19th century, the real adaptative process never took place. The partisan bureaucrat, when acting in a friendly and intimate fashion, can reorder reality by promoting the good of some people over the good of the citizens whom he purportedly serves. Since the process of going to the courts is a disruption of daily duties and obligations, the bureaucrat as robber baron, who has government employees as lawyers working for him, can create tremendous obstacles to the real issues surfacing. Since bureaucracy and its contracts are linked with personages and with codified or inscribed materials, the robber baron bureaucrat is well able to relieve honest officers of their duty or to transfer them, where they cannot be of harm to him/her/they. Yet, even with digitalisation of files, all materials are up for scrutiny, and so opaque and self gratifying acts become visible to all, unless we are functioning in an oligarchy. With this framework in mind, we can well understand why food distribution to people in camps or villages was not made possible during Covid, why 44,000 crores of rupees was made unavailable for this purpose, and millions of workers were forced to walk back home. Redistribution of Food as Ethics of Coexistence During Covid 19 in Arcot Lutheran Church There was a circus which had come to the town, with artists and animals. During lockdown 2020 -2021, they were stranded in Tiruvannamalai with 60 crew members and their animals. Pastor Daniel, parish priest of the ALC, felt really sad for them, but when they asked for help (money), he agreed to provide them three meals a day with the help of his parishioners. No one in his parish had money, but they collected food, and Rev Daniel saw to it that they were fed for two months of their incarceration. The circus manager locked all the artists into separate camps, all the young girls were put into one tent, and not allowed to go out. They were literally self incarcerated there for two months, but luckily neither they nor their animals suffered any fatalities. Poverty is something Dalits remember well, and worse, destitution, but their ethic is to surrender to fate, and to remember those who had helped them. In turn, when they are able, they immediately provide what they have to others to share. It is like Christ’s story of the old woman who shared everything she had, giving away her only coin to help others in destitution. Lebanon: Weavers, Widows and Sanctuary for the Destitute Thyagarajan is the manager of the Destitute home in the Arcot Lutheran Campus of Lebanon. His family came to Tiruvannamalai on the invitationof Dan Mission in 1959, when he was ten months old. They were farmers, from the caste of goldsmiths, invited in to farm the land, and because they were poor, they agreed, and were given a small house on the Lebanon campus. They stayed on, and joined the community, and served the church. They were Hindus, but converted to Christianity, though he says that there was no compulsion or requests. Of the dozen weavers under his care, most remain Hindus. Thyagarajan manages the home for destitute women three days a week, and returns to his home in Cuddalore, 100 kms away. He introduced me to the weavers whom he supervises. They make cotton towels, bedcovers and bags from yarn procured from Chennai or Kanchipuram. Their wages are meager, the church is not permitted foreign funds, the tourists who would come from Denmark, and Germany and USA stopped arriving after Covid 19. The work went on, though the abject condition of Dalitness does not go away. The women, came in to Lebanon as widows by invitation, brought up their children on campus, the children grew up, found jobs and got married, having children of their own, and jobs in nearby cities like Bengaluru and Chennai. Nothing really changes in their lives, they do not see Christianity as opening new doors to prosperity, but atleast they feel that they are free from caste abuse, and have a room of their own with free water and electricity, with frequent hand outs of garden produce. After many decades, Lebanon is beginning to start organic farming, and they produce some vegetables, coconuts and fruits. But now, they are keen to begin rice cultivation. The well which is 150 years old, like the school and home for destitutes, can actually provide water for cultivation. But that too, is hard work, requiring a pair of bulls, or a tractor. Once they find the funding they will be able to start farming in earnest. Thyagarajan says that Dan Mission’s logos has always been “For God and India.” He understands the right to be Indian as something intrinsic to the life they have in Lebanon. There are prayers, hymns, Eucharistic services, Sunday School in the Lutheran church, but the destitute women are only witnesses to the hardwork of the missionary women Miss Else and Miss Lindenmayer who worked immensely hard till old age and death overcame them as the trustees of Lebanon campus. These widows have never thought to leave the campus. Their children grow up, find menial or low paid jobs in the city, marry, bear children. They may or may not come to collect their mother, and take her with them, but often the women remain where they are fearing the consequences of being trapped in smaller living spaces in urban ghettos, and losing what little freedom they have. Sometimes, out of their tiny stipend they save money to visit their children, and in turn, their children sometimes help them financially. Paul Gilroy writes that “race and nation, the higher and the lower become integrated in this vocabulary in the life of the camps, The dominant varieties were bound to the subordinate by their shared notions of what nationality entailed. The forms of nationalism that invoke that mode of belonging exemplify camp-thinking. They have distinctive rules and codes, and however bitterly their various practitioners may conflict with each other, a common approach to the problem of collective solidarity is betrayed by shared patterns of thought about self and other, friend and stranger; about culture and nature as binding agents and about the technological institution of political collectivities to which one can be compelled to belong.” (Gilroy 2000: 82) If Dalits have survived on subsistence farming traditionally or on foraging, today they feel that their children have needs for education and for social mobility. A glance, a kind word from the camp manager is highly valued. A sense of tactility is also missing and deeply sought. Words are comforting, as is the presence of the superintendent, who had 9 siblings all of whom grew up on the Arcot Lutheran Campus. Where church institutions are denigrated by the state, and the term ‘rice christians’ used with contempt, Arcot Lutheran missionaries remember Else Kroj with affection. She came as a young woman and took care of all of them. She was a school teacher from Denmark, who spent her life in Tiruvannamalai in charge of the Saron school, and living in a missionary house in the campus of the home for destitute women. She did not set herself above the poor whom she ministered to. If children were naughty and the teachers complained, she said “ Let them be, don’t overburden them, teach them, and in the holidays, let them go home” (interview Paul Visuwasam 9th July 2022) She was the great Mother, the presence of the great comforter, who lived in austerity and in the company of the poor. A lot of the anger against Christian missionaries is because it is felt that they are taking people away from Hinduism. However, the poor are considered to be outcaste. As a result, their suffering and affliction is not considered worthy of interest. It is believed that because of their karma in their past they have been reborn as the lowest of the low. However, they have a sense of self worth, coming from community identity, something which the collater of Ambedkar’s collected works, Vasant Moon, described in detail as the charms of living in the chawl (Moon 2001). Living in Tamil Nadu, Dalit Lutherans feel that the state is supportive. The state provides a sense of well being and succor. Rations are freely available to each family, and mission schools like Dan mission also provide state supported salaries to the teachers, with pensions when they retire. What happened to Fr Stan Swamy in Maharashtra could never happen in Tamil Nadu, according to them. There are church quarrels, and church skirmishes, but these are quickly handled in a rational fashion. Theologians trained in Lutheran theological colleges in Madurai or Chennai return with a sense of self confidence, a mastery over liturgy, hymns and scriptures. Sermons and hymn singing, prayer and meditation are thought to have tremendous power in each life. The Hymns of James Theophilus Apavoo Zoe C Sherinian writes that her fieldwork among Dalit Christians showed that their struggles were represented through the lyrics composed by Reverend James Theophilus Appavoo At Tamil Theological Seminary, Madurai. He observed that the classical Carnatak music to which hymns had been transposed, did not make sense to contemporary Dalits working emotionally with their sense of being crushed, continually excluded. Apavoo used his music lessons in the seminary to integrate students around the questions of equality and freedom. He used folk songs and the parai drum to break down the hierarchies between musical forms. He wished to integrate psychology, the environment, gender and spirituality to traditional Marxian concerns for economics, politics, social structure and ideology. Women’s rights became integral to his composition of hymns and liturgies. His classes involved true dialogue, learning from rural students about music practices traditionally known and understood by them and feeding into the liturgies that he wrote. It helped them to have pride in their dalit identity and history, evade superior Brahmanical hegemony, and to represent their desire to repudiate exploitative practices. (Zoe. C Sherinian www Galeacademic one file..Annual 2005 Women and Music, Vol 9 University of Nebraska Press accessed on 23rd July 2022) The ability of the pastor to communicate with his flock is the sense of belongingness in Christian community, where parishioners impervious to their class sit next to one another in the pews. Here, too, there is an acceptance of the state, so that both fealty and the right to protection are seen as equivalent. The Dravidian State has the power to communicate its rights to survive and provide for its people. It does not see itself as anything but carrying on a long legacy of the self respect movement. It can take on right wing fundamentalism and provide the Dalits a sense of citizenship and rights. But hierarchies do not disappear, poverty does not vanish. Race is about phenotypical characteristics genetically passed down. Racism is something else, it is about hierarchical domination which seeks to subjugate the outclassed, the declassed. Being outside the system, Dalits feel that assimilation is a primary requirement. How can this belongingness to the State be brought about? Part of the difficulties come from wanting to be mobile, to share the privileges of a global economy. More than anything, they want to share in the fruits of modernism. As long as education is sidelined, and funds and money diverted there is no hope for mobility. The Wrath of the State When Stan Swamy canvassed for the rights of 3000 undertrials who had been locked away, the police saw in him the great dangerousness that come from activists for human rights and education. The contributions he made to the survival strategies for tribal communities in Jharkhand were huge. The Investigating officer who interrogated him on the suspicion that he had engineered riots during Elgar Parishad commended him on his work with migrants returning home to tribal villages during Covid. What was this work that his work station provided access to? He says to the NIA, recorded for the reader in “I Am Not a Silent Witness” published by the Indian Social Institute, Bengaluru : About the activities of Bagaicha, we recently have started a Migrants’ Desk, and its intervention during and after the recent lockdown, due to the coronavirus pandemic was significant. It was necessitated by the sudden declaration of lockdown, throwing millions of migrant workers out-of-work, shelter, food and forcing thousands of them walk on highways and railway tracks for hundreds of kilometres. Our Migrants’ Desk (MD) is linked with governments, NGOs and human rights groups, to reach out to the migrants to offer immediate relief in the form of food and shelter and help them to reach their homes. We have helped at least about 6,000 persons, who were in precarious situations. Lakhs of them have reached home, but is there anything in their homes to sustain them and their families? (Swamy 2021:89-90) Distinction between Literacy and Education Education allows people to move forward, to assimilate, to join the professional classes. However politicians of ruling parties who create obstacles for the education of the poor, use the police to block further chances for upward mobility. It is this that is the entrenched reason for keeping the poor in chains. Here, all Indians become complicit in the ruling ideology of caste, based on Suvarna theory. There are oppositional forces in every post World War 2 society. They confront one another, and if not embedded in dictatorship, they are free to engage with one another in legal transactions. What we confront in India are two situations: belief in the Indian Constitution on one hand, and on the other hand, for their antagonists belief in the rule of Manu’s laws. These are not compatible, and lead to immense fury and bloody warfare. Whether it is RSS against Communists and vice versa, or RSS against Christians, Muslims, Dalits, Tribals, the violence and accusations of terrorism is no longer episodic. To even support the case of Dalits and Tribals is now infused by the wrath of the State. The interpenetration of uppercaste and /or upper class commercial deals, which have the blessing of the judiciary now takes away all the rights to citizenship given by the Indian Constitution to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Fr Stan Swamy showed that patronage to the mining companies was essentially protected by the machineries of the State, and that the Judiciary too became partisan in the provisioning of justice. Of the 3000 undertrials for whom he put in judicial petitions, only three had Maoist links. The very bases of the 5 lakh fine placed on Himanshu Singh on 14th July 2022, for petitioning against the attack on tribals, is a similar move to keep all enquiries of state violence against declassed tribals suspended. It obliterates their right from ever farming their traditional lands. The need for cheap labour to build smart cities, work in aluminium mines, and build roads has made an entire population of tribal/scheduled caste communities now available as cheap labour to contractors, by sheer expediency. Socialism, Gandhism and Right to Life and Human Rights in general are now as problematic to the State, as are ethnic communities and religions which do not convert to fundamentalist Hinduism,or form alliances with the BJP. Kerala and Tamil Nadu stand out in opposition to the Centre, and will pay the costs in terms of privileges granted by the federal obligations of the State, now masked as Hindu Rashtra. The political party which occupies the State is obviously not the State, for as Bezwada Wilson said, in a film made by Jyoti Nisha, on Ambedkar, there cannot be democracy and manual scavenging co existing. Caste as Calculated Hegemonic Device Abraham Ayrookuzhiel suggests that the exclusion of Dalits, their untouchability, their history of degradation is a consequence of continuous invasions, where the indigenous people were colonized and treated as slaves. He points to the idea of Suvarna and Avarna as categories of caste and race distinction, where the indigenous people bore traces of the Austro- Mongoloid, and the Dravidians, conquered in turn by the Aryans, specifically used their countervailing sense of authority over the defeated peoples to make them labour as barbers, fishers, tailors, cultivators, jugglers, musicians and stone cutters, road builders, grave diggers and scavengers. In this context, their conversion to Christianity gave them a semblance of freedom, because they no longer belonged to the subjugated outcastes of Hinduism, or were suppressed by the Dominant Castes. However, their sense of self worth came from their participation in matters of church and local community as free people, recognizing among themselves the quality of equality. Their poetry would be essentially the voice of hunger and loss. In some intuitive sense, the possibility of freedom for the Dalit Christians comes from this overarching sense of their right to live in a caste less society. And yet, three generations of Reservations for Christian Dalits will bring them to the frontlines of professional and educational mobility. Dr Rajaratnam, former Director of Gurukul Lutheran Seminary in Chennai, took 7 years to compile a hymnal in use by students of the college, and published by the Gurukul Lutheran Seminary for its use. In the Introduction he wrote that “we take pride in including a special order of Worship on Dalit concerns.” (vii) He adds ”Dalit worship is unique because it is not just a cultural expression of their joy and sorrow. They are always open and there is no secret at all. Their expression is spontaneous. They communicate all their feelings even in worship as children express themselves to their parents.” (ibid 69) That soul music represented the voice of Dalits in relationship to traditional Christian hegemonic forces in Christianity in Kerala has been made forcefully by P.Sanal Mohan. The hymns represent the continuous struggle that Dalits find themselves and laments of Dalit Christians. Education in the ALC became the focused way by which parishioners hoped for change in social and economic status. In the Appraisal Report on Arcot Lutheran Church School Project (mimeo archives of Gurukul Lutheran Seminary Chennai) the Danish Mission representatives noted that the goals were child centric learning but the text books were State provided, and thus there was a huge gap between intentions and practice. The Report writer/s say” “The concept of the ALC project is captured by the motto “Educate and Elevate” . It is the assumption of the project that improved education can lead to improved quality of life, improved education is in the project related to the consequence of relevance.. i.e what is being taught has to be relevant for the life of the learners. The methodology of the project has to seek to provide improved formal education through improved infrastructure (school buildings furniture, teaching aids) and an improved teaching learning process (teaching training programmes in child-centred learning methods}. Besides, the project has attempted to improve the link between school and community through Parent Teacher Associations and contributions from the Community to the school, and to improve the living conditions of the local communities in the project area, through adult education classes, health and income generating activities, an women’s samgams (gathering). (Mimeo,no author, no date Gurukul Seminary Archives). A representative of the teaching community of ALC in Polur district said that they had a week of consultations with teacher representatives from other districts, which involved discussions on National Education Policy, where the children are meant to be graded into different streams as fast learners, mediocre learners, and slow learners, but she said after Covid 19 and two years of absenteeism, village children have forgotten everything and suffer from short span attention. ( interview 19th July 2022) Reservations for Christians according to Ayrookuzhiel would imply being assimilated in hierarchically lower caste positions when they seek to repudiate caste. He bleakly states that Dalits are being paid to remain within the fold of Hinduism as enslaved people (Ayrookuzhiel 2006:73). A young Dalit Christian woman to whom I put the question, “Do you think non Dalits can speak on behalf of Dalits, or is it a battle only to be fought by Dalits breaking away from the subservience forced on them by the master caste, replied “ I don’t believe in caste”. As Didier Fassin writes about a constant culture of cruelty (our example here is caste), is that “ Violence must be able to find a minimum of justification in the idea the perpetuator has of the person who is subjected to it and who must be made to pay.” (Fassin 2013 :136). The leap that Paolo Freire looked for was the rise of the intellectuals among the grass roots, to speak on behalf of their communities. As M.S.S Pandian argued most powerfully, in a book published by his wife posthumously on behalf of Pandian, it is for people to decide their choice of religion, not the coercive apparatus of the state (Pandian 2019) Dr Susan Visvanathan is Retired Professor and Former Chairperson of CSSS, JNU and currently Adjunct Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal. Bibliography Alexander, Elisabeth Susan. 2006. Cuddalore in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Political and Social Overview, in Grosse, Andreas, Y.Vincent Kumaradoss, Heike Liebau (Editors). Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India; The Danish Halle and The English Halle Mission, Volume 1. Halle: Frankesche Stiftungen, and distributed by Delhi: Manohar Press Ayrookuzhiel, Abraham. 2006. Essays on Dalits, Religion and Liberation. Bengaluru: Asian Trading Corporation and Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. 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Oxford University Press Delhi Acknowledgements: Grateful thanks to Gitika De, Tanweer Fazal, P.Sanal Mohan, Jesudas Athyal, Y.T Vinayaraj, Susan Elisabeth Alexander, Vincent Kumaradoss, Ramola Cecil Joseph and Anuradha Sen Mukherjea,Team Quo Vadis in Tiruvannamalai, Daffini, Komalamma and Paul Visuvasam.