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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