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South Asia Research

http://sar.sagepub.com Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering: Theorizing Slavery


Sanal Mohan South Asia Research 2006; 26; 5 DOI: 10.1177/0262728006058760 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/26/1/5

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SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH


www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0262728006058760 Vol. 26(1): 540 Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London

NARRATIVIZING OPPRESSION AND SUFFERING: THEORIZING SLAVERY


Sanal Mohan
MAHATMA GANDHI UNIVERSITY, KOTTAYAM, INDIA

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the particular process by which memories of the slave experience of Pulayas, Parayas and similar castes are kept alive in contemporary Kerala by followers of the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha, a social and religious movement of Dalits started in 190910 by Poyikayil Yohannan in central Travancore. The article shows how, over time, the Christian orientation of the movement was modied by its Dalit leaders, making intricate use of re-memorizing the slave experience. The outcome is that new myths and concepts were developed, evolving into new practices and discourses, including prominently the narrativization of oppression and suffering and rememory of slavery as part of initiation rituals into the movement.

KEYWORDS: Adi-Dravidas, Dalits, identity, Indian Christianity, Kerala, missionaries, slavery

Introductory Overview
The Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha is a social and religious movement of Dalits started in 190910 by Poyikayil Yohannan in central Travancore.1 Before going into details of their distinct rememory of the slave experience,2 a brief contextualization of this movement will be useful. Yohannan belonged to the Paraya community and many of his followers and front ranking leaders were drawn from the Pulayas and Parayas, who used to be agrestic slaves engaged in agricultural production at the bottom of the agrarian hierarchy in pre-colonial and colonial Kerala. Referred to by different names regionally, they shared certain common features recorded by colonial ethnographers (Mateer, 1991: 3359). In the 20th century powerful social movements emerged, spearheaded by leaders of these communities, that helped them to negotiate colonial modernity. Before this phase of social movements, protestant missionaries had worked among them from about 1850 onwards and thousands had joined Protestant congregations. For example the Church Missionary Society in central Travancore, by the turn of the 20th century, had more than 35,000 Dalit Christians, more than half of their total membership.3 The social movements of the 20th century thus took place in the

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context of emerging colonial modernity among Dalits as a result of protestant missionary activities. The spread of Christianity among Dalits in Kerala and similar social groups elsewhere was not a passive phenomenon as is made out in conventional historiography.4 Right from the beginning of missionary activity among them, Dalits in Kerala showed an intense desire to redene their social selves by following a variety of practices, albeit under the inuence and control of missionaries. Mention may be made particularly of their acceptance of changed spatio-temporal notions and new conceptions of the body. There were denite instances of reorganization of the space in which Dalits were located, including their small huts and places of dwelling and the newly constituted sacred space of the Church and the slave school: spaces which were not mediated by caste hierarchy. The new notion of time was available in connection with daily prayers, attendance in Church and school.5 This coordination was besides the usual practice of labour, intensely familiar from pre-colonial times. Modernity marked severe contests in all these realms. The people who joined the missionary Church began to introspect their position in it and the local society as they were gradually coming out of their agrarian slave past, though their everyday life was still dependent on the local landed gentry and in many cases their lives were not better at all. While they remained halfway between modern agricultural labour and slave labour peculiar to caste formation in Kerala, they had the desire to break away from such a labyrinthine existence. They were disturbed by the existence of caste distinctions within the Church notwithstanding missionary assurances to the contrary. Over the years these discontents acquired subversive potentials within the Church, leading to contests over access and proximity to the sacred space and objects, as well as radical movements couched in religious idiom articulating both religious and mundane themes. In this context the religious movement of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha, sometimes referred to in missionary writings as a heretical movement, developed in Tiruvalla in central Travancore, Kerala. Poyikayil Yohannan, a Paraya Christian who was initially with the Marthoma Syrian Church and other Churches like the Plymouth Brethren, founded the new sect in 1909. During the early phase of the Sabha it imbibed the Christian worldview and was largely upholding Christian cosmology, as testied by oral traditions and documents of that period. After the death of the founder in 1939, the second rung of leadership took over and gradually schisms evolved within the Sabha. In 1950, one section of followers under the leadership of Yohannans second wife Janamma declared themselves to be Hindus in a public meeting near Tiruvalla.6 Afterwards they gradually transformed the biblical themes and metaphors in their songs and the Christian practices in their everyday existence. One section of followers who considered such practices contrary to the teachings of the founder, under the leadership of Njaliyakuzhi Simon Yohannan, the president of the Sabha after the death of Yohannan, sued Janamma in court and obtained a verdict in favour of their argument that the Sabha was Christian and not part of Hindu religion.7 The contest over this continued in the High Court of Kerala, which gave its nal verdict stating that it was neither Hindu nor Christian and that it was a brave

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Mohan: Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering

attempt to create a casteless society.8 This particular verdict was decisive, determining the social identity formation of this group that remained, for most of the 20th century, in a liminal space. The analysis of the foundational categories introduced through the teachings of the Sabha shows that they created their own myths once they reverted to Hinduism. All foundational concepts of their faith were transformed into new concepts that later on evolved into new practices and discourses, including the rememory of slavery.

Religious Ideologies and Social Critique


Exploring the ideology of the movement, one nds fundamental ideological ruptures in its later phases. We do not have systematic written records on the early history of the movement, the ideas of the founder and of those closely associated with him, because this was a movement primarily of illiterate Dalits and discourse was oral rather than written. But Church Missionary Society Records from 1910 onwards provide important though fragmentary information regarding the activities of the Sabha and the ideas of the founder and his close associates. Another source of information is the oral tradition of the Sabha, printed only recently (Poyikayil, 1996). This comprises mainly of songs sung during various ritual occasions of the Sabha and in the families of the followers. These songs have a history and genealogy of their own, undergoing tremendous transformation in the 1950s when the ofcial Sabha and its leadership reverted to Hinduism. All the songs, some circulated in print before 1950, were largely based on Christian themes, mostly concerned with salvation of the soul and redemption from sins. These songs deployed Christian motifs such as the Holy Trinity, the cross that saves man, and the deliverance that the Holy Spirit offers. The use of these motifs indicates that the foundational canon of faith was the belief in biblical truth, though not accepted uncritically. It is difcult to conne the faith and practice of the Sabha followers in pure categories. The doubleness characteristic of such faith arising out of religious radicalism is a phenomenon observed in the religiosity of lower classes in other historical contexts as well (Orta, 1999). In the Sabha, religious radicalism tending to the rejection of the canons of the Church was observed even during the initial formative phase. For instance, the Bishop of Travancore and Cochin, reporting to the Travancore state authorities that enquired into the alleged support of Yohannan and his followers of the Sabha to the Germans during the First World War, observed on the Sabha that, [i]t is religious, in that he proclaims himself as the new mediator or saviour and preaches that people can only be saved (whatever he means by that) by coming to him. In this way he is building up a sect, and denounces all existing Christian Churches, and calls upon all Christian converts of Pariah or Pulaya origin to leave their Churches and join his sect.9 At the same time their self-representation makes easy straightjacket conclusions impossible. For instance in one of the memoranda submitted to the Diwan of Travancore State in 1920, they represented themselves as a people,
. . . who have come together from different communities and castes, realizing the witness of the Bible and the faith in the Holy trinity expecting to realize heaven and

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existing in the nomenclature of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha thankfully acknowledge the good things that have been done to us for all these days and believe that your reign marks the beginnings of a time of relief and blessings to us and we wish and pray to God for your enduring reign and eternal blessings up on your descendants, as the minister holding central position in the administration of the Travancore state.10

In another memorandum submitted to Morris Watts, the Diwan of Travancore in 1926, it was stated:
We the people numbering 10,000 belonging to Parayar, Pulayar and Kizhakke Pulayar who have been slaves for a long time, and are in the lowest rung of the society in terms of landed property and education have come together in the witness of the holy Bible and joined together in the nomenclature of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha. We the original inhabitants of this land were for a long time steeped in slavery, and had to depend on others as we did not have our own land to stay and we lived like animals without education, social reform and such civilizational qualities. We are a poor people who subsist from the little income that we get from daily wage earning. Now in different parts of the state we have 63 parishes and there we have churches and schools for the worship of God and education of our children.11

What stands out in the above passages are the ideological positions of the Sabha that cannot be reduced to neat categories with well-guarded boundaries. The future project of the Sabha was nothing short of the agenda of modernity couched in religious idiom in which acquisition of landed property, education, social reform and other civilizational qualities became singularly important. Contemporary representations of the founder of the Sabha and the world view it projected help us understand the process of reinscription of the movements foundational categories in the postcolonial phase. The missionaries consistently characterized Yohannan as invested with superb qualities, as a clever speaker, who has caused great unrest among the backward classes, through false teaching; his success being due in a great measure to the ignorance of the people, and the lack of someone qualied to meet him on his own ground.12 They were relieved to note that his popularity was on the wane, but this turned out to be a premature conclusion. As observed in the annual report of the missionaries for the year 1916, it was around Tiruvalla that the effect of Poyikayil Yohannans false teachings was chiey felt. Two outstations had to be closed, the people having become his disciples. To counteract this mans inuence, Mr Stephens, a missionary in charge of the Tiruvalla mission station, wrote and published three leaets with wide circulation and travelled the district and Pastorates.13 The challenge put forward by the movement continued, as noted by the perceptive missionaries:
It is claimed . . . that it is the only way of salvation, that its author is the sole depository of revelation to the present generation. Some former adherents who for one cause or another left the party, gave accounts of the sermons of the leaders and the doings in the jungle which is his headquarters. But these accounts were always decried by Poyikayil and his followers. Outsiders are jealously excluded from these gatherings. If any are suspected of being present, the meeting at once

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disperses or is given an orthodox character. As far as can be ascertained it distorted interpretations of Holy Scripture and introduced a kind of rapturous revivalism, mixed with Animistic or some similar rites that constitute the doctrine and practice of the cult. It cant be said to have lost its attractive power though some who had been led away returned to the church. It attracted other Christians besides those of outcaste origin, and, as has been said drew to itself the interest of Hinduism, represented by the Ramakrishna Mission. Mr. Stephens cooperated with the Pastors and other leaders in the parts most affected, which lie round about his stations of Tiruvalla, in ghting this foe. He organised conventions in several places near Poyikayils stronghold, employed trusted men to work among the congregation and wrote and printed leaets dealing with the heresy.14

An article published in the Diocesan Record under the title Concerning the Heresies pointed out that Travancore was not the only mission eld of the Christian Mission Society (CMS) to encounter heresies.15 The radical dimensions of the teachings of Yohannan in Kerala made the missionaries and the Church hierarchy in Travancore view it as heresy. Considered in the context of such movements the trial in Travancore was not strange.16 The article exhorts the Church to be prepared to resist strange heresies that might arise among believers. Regarding heresy, it was observed that psychologically such phenomena should appear where masses of primitive people had been transformed from heathenism to Christianity. Centuries of animism were bound to produce certain instincts of which animism was itself the product or expression. The transfer of an animist people to Christianity with its totally different outlook and implications produced mental and emotional ferment.17 The sudden transfer of an animist people to the practice and teachings of Christianity offered them space for constructing their own ideological hybrid alternatives. This is only reluctantly admitted by the missionaries who asked themselves whether the new spirit of Christ had completely dethroned and abolished the old animist instincts. The second reason attributed to heresy was that the Sunday Services often seemed humdrum to mass converts and the Christian discipline appeared irksome. A more tangible reason apart from caste and race feelings may have been the resentment of the have-nots against those who have, reected in observations to the effect that these poor sheep dimly feel that they are more likely to get what they want by following some leader of their own.18 Prophecies were not deemed strange and the Church hierarchy identied personalities like Poyikayil Yohannan and Venkotta Yohannan19 in Travancore along with heretic prophets from Africa. While the Church would like to dismiss them as insignicant, Travancore heretics, like many others, were blending Christianity with non-Christian philosophy. There was an unwillingness to accord the status of heretic to Venkotta Yohannan beyond the point that his ideas are just self-willed choice and it was not deemed t to extend the privilege of being heretic to either of the Travancore prophets. Missionaries in charge of the Tiruvalla mission made all possible efforts to understand the teachings of Yohannan, sometimes by trekking through intractable stretches of jungle.20 In one such instance in 1916, missionaries sent three men to the jungle where Yohannans clandestine convention took place. They crept up

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closely to listen and observe. On the third evening their presence was detected and the preacher brought his discourse to a premature close.21 The three therefore revealed themselves and had an interview with him. They had observed that Yohannan generally gave his discourses on religious themes and when he suspected outsiders listening, he would muddle the themes by discussing matters that would appear obscure to those not from the lower castes. He would refer to the historical experience of Dalit slavery in Kerala. In the latter phase of the Sabha, particularly after his death, some of his followers derived further notions of the slave experiences of Dalits in Travancore based on themes introduced by Yohannan. During the early phase of the Sabha its worldview was a pastiche of Christian themes and a strong component of the historical experience of slavery and oppression. Writing in The Harvester Field, the Travancore missionary W.S. Hunt (1919) tried to give a contemporary assessment to the mass movement of Yohannan. He had observed fundamental changes among Dalits that encompassed diverse spaces, such as manner of worship, demeanor of outcaste converts, and a passing of the old simplicities. For a good many years, indeed, complaints of their uppishness have been heard and certainly the community has been displaying the awkwardness of adolescence (Hunt, 1919). There is a striking parallel to this missionary perception in the approach of the Travancore government to Dalit problems. Regarding the desire for social development, the Travancore Government also felt that the Dalits were extremely eager to move upwards and that their eagerness would endanger the status quo. In reply to the address presented to him by the Pulayas of central Travancore in 1914 requesting him to grant them puduval (fallow cultivable lands) registered to them, the Diwan Bahadur M. Krishnan Nair replied:22
Every measure intended to ameliorate your social condition has to be thoughtfully conceived and delicately applied. Government are convinced that the healthy wellbeing of the state depends a good deal upon your social and economic enfranchisement and they will only continue to push forward the history of your community that has already been written. But I may be permitted to remind you that it is not in the interest either of the state or of yourselves that in the hurry to go forward, the pace of progress should be violently forced ahead and your interests brought into collision with those of the other communities whose active good-will and sympathy are so essential for your progress. Your community should clearly bear this in mind and also remember that many a stronghold of prejudice and conservatism can be stormed only by time.

The paternalistic attitudes of the missionaries made them read meanings into the modernist desire for social transformation as awkwardness of adolescence. It amounts to reading into the social selves of Dalits phases of human biographical stages, particularly that of adolescence, an age of uncertainty before emotional maturity. Yohannan is even reported to have said that in the Old Testament, you nd God the Father at work in the world, in the Gospels God the Son and in the Acts, God the Holy Ghost. But in Travancore you see no God working, yet you are sure He would not leave His children without some revelation. An argument for the rejection of the book becomes that it was written to Romans, Corinthians

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and others, but contained no messages addressed to the Parayas of Travancore. Hence, [a] man must be commissioned to deliver that message (Hunt, 1919). As God appointed Moses, so has he appointed Yohannan, a Paraya, to deliver the Travancore outcastes from the bondage of the Christian Church. Yohannan sought to be placed within the ideological world of the Church, but at the same time transcended it when he derived his own critiques, including an alleged preference of God for younger sons that necessarily gave agency to his Dalit followers (Hunt, 1919). The image of a deliverer like Moses and the long struggle of the Jews under captivity was a potent imagery, repeated endlessly in missionary observations on the position of Travancore slave castes. Similar readings appear even today in the discourses of the Sabha.23 Similarly the favour that younger sons may receive is a potential metaphor that reworks the notion of preference that the despised would receive in the Kingdom of God which, translated locally, refers to the position of the socially inferior lower caste Christians in Travancore society. Yohannan attached immense importance to certain passages, usually interpreting them with a mixture of extreme literalness and fancifulness. The other heresiarchs tended to do this, too, and the tendency spread among the outcaste Christians. The term generations was to assume extraordinary signicance in the later discourses of the Sabha that introduced notions like the present generation to refer to the people contemporary to Yohannan. Similarly, during his lifetime the ambiguous notion of descendants was introduced. After his death it was interpreted to mean his own sons who would lay claim to reign. Hunt (1919) felt that some of his teachings and acts were frankly antinomian.24

The Ideological World as Reected in Songs


Having discussed the ideological aspects of the movement, we can now explore more intimate aspects of religious life in the prayer songs of the Sabha of that period (Poyikayil, 1940). These prayer songs open up a signicant terrain for analysis by social scientists and elucidate the history of the sect. These songs were composed in chaste Malayalam, quite different from the everyday language of Dalit communities. The use of modern language by subordinate groups in the context of colonial modernity and missionary Christianity has been identied as an instance of linguistic modernity by social scientists in similar contexts (Robbins, 2001) but is different from the process referred to as creolization in other contexts. Language plays a crucial role in constructions of the images of slavery and builds primarily on social memory. In the example of the Sabha, the songs of the oral tradition as well as those that were printed and circulated are in modern literary Malayalam retaining ne lyrical qualities. This language would be quite different from the daily language used among Dalits during the rst half of the 20th century when many of those songs were composed. This shows the instance of linguistic modernity. Social historians have argued that it is necessary to treat [l]anguage as an object, a resource, for historical enquiry in its own right, rather than as just a window on to the past (Porter, 1991: 2). Similarly, it has been

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observed that the deployment of holy tongues, especially perhaps transcendental and numinal, offered small, weak and marginal religious groups the only mode of authority they could realistically seek to command: the Highest (Porter, 1991: 3). The composition made use of modern Malayalam imaginatively, to be recounted as ritual songs, even though it was not a holy tongue. This was denitely important when considered in the context of collective cultural identity and history (Porter, 1991: 10). As noted in other situations in struggles for identity, emancipation and mastery, language ceased to be merely a medium of clear communication and became key to the collective soul. The use of modern Malayalam by the Sabha assumes signicance here in that language becomes a semiotic cultural eld in which negotiations take place. To analyse the intricacies of worldview, we consider here the songs in circulation among the followers of the Sabha from its early phase, though the version that is cited here was only published in 1940. Most of these songs (Poyikayil, 1940) focus on the Christian theme of salvation. In this period the Sabha existed in a liminal space without as yet dening itself against the agenda of the nation state and being either Hindu or Christian. At the same time, some of the practices of the Sabha made missionaries think that they were not Christians and contradicted the Bible. Missionaries could not understand the doubleness characteristic of the movement. These early songs deal with Christian themes that were completely erased in the later history of the Sabha.25 The foundational category here is Jesus Christ and the faith reposed in him as the saviour. The ideas are expressed in a variety of tropes deployed to create a world of its own; giving control over language and imagination. Their signicance lies in that these people were slowly becoming literate and able to use the modern language more competently. The text begins with a song recounting the creation of the earth, followed by the story of Adam and Eve drawing on the book of Genesis. The song further develops their life and the eventual fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden forever, introducing the concepts of sin, redemption and eternal salvation (Poyikayil, 1940: 1). Because of its familiarity, this story has lost its esoteric character. But what should have been the impact of such a story on the lower caste Christians who came under missionary instruction? For the rst time the notions of sin and salvation percolated into their minds through such stories, so that such notions became part of their life world and began to provide them a measure to arrange their everyday life and social validation.26 This has a direct bearing on the validation of the social selves of the people, evident in one of the songs that they used to sing (Poyikayil, 1940: 3):
Oh! Lord in the High! You are Great! Up on this earth I am small You can do any thing on your own I can not do any thing on my own.

Though the rest of the song is on creation, every stanza recalls the position of men and women vis-a-vis the power of God. Signicant for us is the category

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with which the image of man is constructed in these lines. While it can be generalized as the condition of man/woman as a whole, in the context of their agency it can be suggested that it refracted the condition of the people who sang such songs. While the might of God is narrated, the position of man is juxtaposed as equivalent to the insignicance of Adams son. God is depicted in the song as owner of the whole universe, the Holy Being without sins, eternal, the strongest, whereas mans corresponding position is that of a slave, sinner, nite and nally equivalent to earthly dust. There is no doubt that these songs were composed using already circulating metaphors and metonyms prevailing in the songs current among other Christian congregations and evidently provided some categories of thought to the people, the fullest local extent of which became evident in course of time. One recurrent theme of the songs is the sufferings of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of all human beings and the salvation offered by the risen Christ (Poyikayil, 1940: 45). The songs celebrate the fact that even if people are suffering in this world, there is space for them in heaven where they will enjoy eternal happiness. The introduction of categories such as suffering and salvation assumed deeper meaning in the vocabulary of the Sabha as well as in the project of Yohannan. When describing the birth of Jesus Christ, the songs depict it as the coming of the Lord in the garb of the wretched leaving behind the legion of trumpet blowing angels. The garb of the wretched went on to assume importance as an icon that evoked memories of slavery once the discourse of slavery was introduced in the later phase of the Sabha, and then the phrase transformed as the garb of the slave. The image of suffering human beings is superimposed on Christ who suffered torture and died on the cross. Certain other songs are concerned more with the eternal joy that accrues out of divine love as a blessing of the Holy Spirit. Such songs characterize the eternal blessings that God gives to the poor and lowly, widows and orphans, and they came to occupy a central position in the Sabha discourses. The axiomatic representation of the orphaned slave children and their sufferings as their parents were sold to different landlords is foundational to the faith of the Sabha today, elevating the discourse of sufferings to a higher plane. This concept has a surplus meaning when read in the context of the social sufferings of Kerala Dalits. It is this particular aspect of suffering that is deployed in the songs sung in the exclusive Dalit congregations (Poyikayil, 1940: 68). Some songs in the volume focus on salvation, offered by the son of salvation who has opened the door of salvation for everyone and admits those who are saved into it (Poyikayil, 1940: 11). Those who are saved experience the ecstasy of joy and sing hallelujah. He brings together people from the four corners of the world and in the abode of Trinity they will interdine. Death is not there anymore. No more is sorrow and wailing and he would wipe out tears with his merciful hands (Poyikayil, 1940: 12). The intertextuality of the lyrics quoted here indicates that the theme is familiar; the reprieve that salvation offers to the despised Dalits of Travancore becomes the key issue. They realize that happiness is denied to them in the prevailing structure of the society and are hopeful of the interdining that awaits them in heaven. Its political signicance becomes clear when one recalls

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that interdining was also a matter of much concern in the programme of nationalists in the Gandhian phase. To the despised Dalits, songs woven around the theme of salvation celebrate it as a grace of God. Only those who are saved could know the true meaning of salvation. All those who are saved are made members of the Sabha and they build it together with the Holy Spirit. The full meaning of salvation is revealed only in the end and is preserved without being tainted. The song reafrms the faith in salvation and the patient waiting for it. The nal pronouncement is that they should not forget God. Closely following the notion of salvation is the concept of cleanliness,27 one of the central tropes deployed in the missionary discourse and subjected to social scientic analysis in other contexts. In Kerala its signicance lies in that cleanliness takes on the unclean mind and body of the untouchable Dalits. The concept of cleanliness is fundamental to the project of salvation. The Christian thought on salvation is interwoven with the presumption of cleanliness. God is the embodiment of justice and purity; He is the one who puries humans. Living in the communion of the saints and being clean, one enters the communion of the sacred saints. This is ultimately the great message of salvation that words fail to explain. This song shows complete refuge in the divine project of salvation. There is an inadvertent allusion to the cleanliness of mind and body in the song (Poyikayil, 1940: 1315). The signicance of these lines become clear when we consider that in the course of the movement a lot of practices were devised to keep the mind and body of the people clean. Another song empathically proclaims that believers are saved when God hears their tragic nal cry. In the next stanza the question is raised what one should pay as a price for the salvation that is offered, and if not a price, what else one should offer? Then the realization dawns on the singer that s/he is saved without being asked for payment. The song continues by proclaiming to the Lord that they could never forget His love for them. The Lord took them in His hands when everyone forsook them. And this love of God was unexpected (Poyikayil, 1940: 14, 16). There is an imbrication of the spiritual quest and the material everyday reality of the Dalits in Travancore in this song. This redeeming love takes into account the despised as valuable human beings. For people who realize the love of the Lord it has redeemed them from sin, eternal damnation and death and gave them heaven. When one beholds the holy face of God and of Jesus, ones foot does not sink to the ground and the burden of suffering is reduced. The thought of the power of the Holy Spirit lls their heart with tranquility (Poyikayil, 1940: 1718). Thinking of the Kingdom of God makes them forget their life in this world. In these songs the theme of salvation through Jesus Christ is endlessly repeated. The expectation is that whatever be the condition on this earth, they would be resurrected like Christ, leaving this earthly body to enter the eternal kingdom. In another song there is explicit mention of the waning caste distinctions that are leading to the merger of various castes, with reference to a puried caste from which the clan of priests emerges. There is another song that validates this as a practical necessity. This song, titled as Eternal Priesthood, begins by stating that Jesus is the high priest and hence we all belong to the clan of priests. It further says

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that with purity anybody could be in the lineage of priesthood (Poyikayil, 1940: 31). In a different context, Hill (1986: 126) argued that the doctrine of priesthood for all believers, of the sovereignty of informed consciences, became subversive when taken over by groups normally excluded from political life. In the case of the Sabha, this subversive element was present as soon as there was a body of Dalit religious men and women engaged in propagating the truth of the founder, Yohannan. In the later phase of the Sabha they were instrumental in transforming it into a dialogic interpretive community. In such a context Dalits, otherwise excluded from political life, began to construct alternative structures of power. The following stanzas develop the contrast between the priesthood of the Old and New Testament. It recalls the processes by which Christ liberated priesthood from rituals of the Old Testament and proclaimed it as open to everyone who has a pure saintly heart. This notion refers to the priesthood that must have been developing from among the Dalits themselves as they remained a separate congregation, despised as unclean. The validation of priesthood is sought in the lineage and practices of Christ himself. The new priesthood can be authentic as Christ had united them, and henceforth they do not require myrrh and frankincense as their prayers bear fragrance and illuminate the world, making lamps and olive oil unnecessary. In the later phase of the Sabha the legitimacy of this new priesthood is sought in the Adi-Dravida past, as discussed further below. In the context of afrming the faith, another stanza speaks of the decline of caste differences and distinctions of groups, living united with great happiness in one God. In a song titled Praise to Jesus the wretchedness of the lower caste self is read in the image of Son of God, born in a stable in the garb of the wretched. Describing the second coming of Christ, another song alludes to the Kingdom with no caste distinction and group rivalry. They expect a place where there is no sorrow and loud cry (Poyikayil, 1940: 39). The notion of cleanliness is carried forward to the extent of equating it with the cleanliness of the soul that nds nal refuge in the communion of saints. The gender dimension is surprisingly worked out in a song titled A Song of Christian Sisters, where the Christian sister of low caste origin experiences spaces of equality in domains least thought about (Poyikayil, 1940: 42):
Lucky, Lucky, I am lucky, I am lucky It is luck that heavenly King Jesus Was born on this earth Sin crept in through Eve So salvation came through women In this worldly reign the feminine gure But in heaven equal to angels The secrets of heaven without distinction Luckily imprinted on my heart

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It is luck to sing in ecstasy In heaven in front of the saviour To have kept thus far alive Upon this earth, is my luck.

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It was blissful for her to have experienced the heavenly blessings as she rejoices in the Lord. While she continues to be a woman living the ordinary life of the lower caste social world, she is hopeful of achieving the status of angel once she reaches heaven. She was equally endowed with the heavenly secrets that would have given her insights into the ways of the Lord. God willed this without any consideration of gender distinctions. It may be considered here that this new religious subjectivity provided some kind of agency to Dalit women in Kerala. The signicant theme of last judgment and the second coming of Christ assume canonical status in the later history of the Sabha, when this notion is adapted to the image of Yohannan as Sree Kumara Gurudevan, as constructed by the Sabha. He comes to offer salvation to the souls of the descendants of slaves who escaped from the thralldom of slavery and suffering. That is a time when all the powers of the worlds shall be shaken. But what remains without being shaken will be the plan kettidam (properly planned building) that is built according to the plan of Yohannan (Joseph, 1994: 64). Its importance lies in that Yohannan himself was claiming a certain kind of revelation for his own people, combining elements of prophetic revelation with pragmatic social intervention. While this contradicted some of the Bible teachings, it squarely reworked the Biblical notions to stake his claim over the minds of his people. In all these songs we hear the voice of the saviour who calls upon his people. Yohannan was deploying prophetic power to transform the peoples self-perception and the way they perceived him (Poyikayil, 1940: 545):
The God who has great knowledge Gave great knowledge and consciousness Removed ignorance completely And thus came knowledge in me The Holy Spirit resides in me This is the abode of the saviour In this earth we are bought and sold like animals The owner had willed Removed slavery entirely for us Let us never forget the love of the owner We were accused as wretched On the earth by the elite The God from the heavens willed To nurture and remove the wretchedness.

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It is extremely important to see why and how the above song is different from the genre of songs discussed so far. Here we nd the theme of slavery introduced as part of the Dalit experience in Kerala, textualized along with other themes. The distinction is sharply brought out when the song laments that they were bought and sold like cattle until the owner willed to remove slavery out of his love for them (Poyikayil, 1940: 545). While many of the sources cited in previous sections of the article provide clues that the notion of slavery as the lived experience of Kerala Dalits was present, such themes were not clearly articulated in the early songs. But the oral tradition of the Sabha, as well as testimonies given by a number of informants, refers to the prevalence of the theme of slavery in the discourses of Yohannan (Vijayakumar interview, 2001). The central question here is the foundational character that the discourse of slavery achieves in the later phase of the Sabha, reinscribing itself onto the foundational categories of the discourses and songs that dominated till the 1950s. It is at this point in time that the social memory of slavery was actively reconstituted to serve a different purpose. This phase stands out uniquely as the phase of narrativizing the history of slave suffering.

Narrativizing the History of Slave Suffering


This part of the article analyses in more detail the processes and discourses by which slavery was theorized by the followers of the Sabha. Insights drawn from contemporary social theory that explores similar contexts provide us a vantage point in understanding the constructions of the Sabha. Gilroy (1993) theorizes slavery and slave sufferings in the contexts of ethnicity and resistance movements. He situates slavery in relation to modernity and foregrounds it as a problem that modern social theory has to deal with, suggesting a radical recasting of the modernity debate and the project of cultural studies to engage with the question of slavery. Gilroy argues that Black slavery and resistance to it produced distinctive countercultures to modernity that could evolve a critique also of capitalist social relations. Black musical culture is identied as one of the prominent artefacts that was libertarian and at the same time offering a great deal of courage required to go on living in the present (Gilroy, 1993: 36). The philosophical inner dynamic of the counterculture is identied and the connection between its normative character and its utopian aspirations of a politics of fullment which is simultaneously cultural, political and economic is visualized. It puts forward a notion that a future society will be able to realize the social political promise that present society has left unnished (Gilroy, 1993: 37). Reecting on the foundational semantic position of the Bible, this is a discursive mode of communication. Though by no means literal, it can be grasped through what is said, shouted, screamed or sung (Gilroy, 1993: 37). Equally signicant is the notion of a politics of transguration. This refers to the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations and modes of association within racial communities of interpretation and resistance and between a particular group and its erstwhile oppressors. This politics, according to Gilroy, exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced and acted, as well as sung

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and sung about; it would express the conspicuous power of the slave sublime. The failures or fullment of promises are located in the bourgeois civil society that has to live up to its promises (Gilroy, 1993: 37). This particular interpretation is signicant for understanding the shouts, screams and songs that have been uttered and sung by followers of the Sabha in Travancore. Evidence of the politics of transguration is expressed in willfully damaged signs that transcend modernity and construct both an imaginary anti-modern past and the postmodern yet-tocome. Gilroy (1993) considers this as a counterculture and not just a counterdiscourse that deantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere. It would be difcult to argue that such politics of fullment and politics of transguration are fully discernible in Kerala. My contention is that we certainly come across new desires, social relations and modes of association of Dalit political and social articulation in Travancore, occurring in the religious and social spheres and bearing the markings of fullment and transguration. According to Gilroy the politics of fullment plays occidental rationality at its own game, necessitating a hermeneutic orientation that can assimilate the semiotic, verbal and textual. The politics of transguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative (Gilroy, 1993: 38). It is in this context that, according to Gilroy, the memory of slavery is actively preserved as a living intellectual resource in an expressive political culture by Blacks, helping them to search for answers to problems they face in western modernity. It is at this level that Gilroys theorization is helpful in unpacking the agenda of social transformation in Kerala in relation to the history of the Sabha. Slavery itself and its memory helped to enter the domain of enquiries on the foundational aspects of modern social thought and to critically engage with it (Gilroy, 1993: 39). Even though not comparable to the rened intellectual production of Black critical thinking, the Sabha experienced a critical engagement with slavery, while mainstream social sciences and literature downplay such themes in Kerala. Gilroy also argues that Black critical thinking is above all other critical theories on society, particularly Marxism, because of the primacy given to lived crisis, even when the choice is between lived crisis and systemic crisis. It is due to the fact that the process of self-creation is accomplished not exclusively through labour. For the descendants of slaves, work signies only servitude, misery and subordination. This theoretical position is appropriate in understanding the social situatedness of the lower caste slave labourers of Kerala in the 19th century and their descendants in the rst half of the 20th century. As far as lived crisis is concerned, the memory of slavery was later available to the erstwhile slaves only to a limited extent. There was initially no recalling of the slave memory to make it a resource for resistance. This does not mean that the collective memory of slavery was not present even during the early decades of the 20th century. We nd the rendering of the memory of slavery in the discourses of the Sabha, rendered on countless occasions, so that it enters the minds of the descendants of slaves and creates somatic effects.

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Similarly, the nature of work in relation to lower caste slaves also underwent transformation. Given the civilizational dislike shown by dominant castes towards manual labour, when the modern proletariat emerged, it was structured on the basis of caste and related notions of work and leisure. The narrativization of oppression is accomplished through the deployment of chronotopes used in the construction of the past.28 The notion of slavery as chronotope emerges in the songs and discourses of the Sabha as singular and decisive; through it we can read signicant moments in the Dalit history of Kerala. It appears that the notion of slavery and sufferings emanating from it constitutes a unit of analysis for studying texts according to the rational nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented (Bakhtin, 1981: 425). The notion of chronotope is used here as a means of studying the relation between any text and its times, and thus a fundamental tool for a broader social and historical analysis (Bakhtin, 1981: 425). The texts analysed below clearly identify slavery as the central organizing theme. This particular feature reaches the realm of performative ritual and religious discourses in the practices of the Sabha. The rituals were instrumental in dening the social world of the religious community by providing organizational myths. Following Barthes (1989), we consider myth as a semiotic system that generates its own language.29 This particular insight helps in decoding the semiotic language that the ritual discourses and practices introduced. In the Indian context, Aloysius (1998) examined the signicance of religious discourses among Dalits in the colonial period; focusing on the emancipatory potentials of lower caste religious ideology. The process of narrativizing history is accomplished by invoking memories of oppression in a dramatic manner that touches upon the inner space of people. To the oppressed, the oppression itself becomes central to the cognitive-volitional life of the excluded and nonprivileged sections of the society (Aloysius, 1998: 7). The consciousness of oppression rst of all leads to an epistemological shift. All things social appear to be oppressed under a new light; they themselves become a homogenous collectivity, unjustly subordinated and subjugated; the various social phenomena hitherto accepted as neutral, given or having thing-like quality, now appear as emanations of exploitative social relations. Society itself is viewed as constitutive of two groups, the oppressed and the oppressor, locked in conicts (Aloysius, 1998: 7). Consciousness of oppression develops a different social praxis that enables a critique of historical and contemporary experiences. This nds further articulation in the formation of the religion of the oppressed, contingent upon the overall life situation, as a new interpretation, or selective appropriation or modication, or even total rejection of old beliefs (Aloysius, 1998: 7). The notion of oppression is stretched further to include problems that fall beyond the pale of social classes and economic sphere, extended imaginatively to include conicts arising out of language, territory, ethnicity, race and religion, so that economic oppression sometimes manifests itself in certain cultural forms (Aloysius, 1998: 7). We can build here on such insights in analysing the notion of oppression and sufferings that certain forms of Dalit religiosity tried to develop in colonial and post-colonial Kerala.30 Oppression in a larger context includes oppressions in the non-economic sphere, particularly in the realm of cultural practices. This does not

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mean that cultural practices are uncontaminated by the economy. The mutuality of the economic and the cultural are taken care of by arguments on oppression that foray into the cultural eld. Growing consciousness of oppression leads to realization of the existence of cultural, religious and other cleavages in society. It has been observed that such cleavages surge forth in society particularly in times of substantial socio-economic change. In the present analysis, this process is observed to be necessarily non-linear, sporadic and even haphazard, leading to the non-uniform and uneven nature of the consciousness of oppression at a given historical time (Kleinman et al., 1997: 9). Memories of oppression necessarily build on the notion of the suffering body of the untouchable, contrary to pre-colonial notions of the untouchable body as the site of evil and pollution. By the time such discourses became prominent, the idea of the suffering body had gained acceptance. It is evident in the writings of the missionaries that in the process of salvation they required a sanitized body of the untouchable or that the process of salvation itself sanitizes the untouchable body. This appears from the elaborate treatment of the living conditions of lower caste untouchables that were undergoing transformation.31 Another important source of theorizing the notion of the suffering body and oppression is found in oral tradition, talking of observable social contradictions in an intimate manner.32 Ong (1988: 74) observed that in most religions the spoken word functions integrally in ceremonial and devotional life. This holds true for the practice of the Sabha, too, as over decades it evolved emotionally charged discourses of slavery and similar themes. In some of the songs sung in Travancore we nd the elaborate rendering of the sufferings and pains of the untouchable agricultural labourers (John, 1998: 334):
Yoked with buffaloes and bulls We plough the elds Plough the elds Father is sold . . . thinthara! We all wept . . . thinthara! Mother is sold. . . . thinthara! We wept disconsolately . . . thinthara! The elder one is caught . . . thinthara! Plantain was dug out He was thrown in the pit Covered with dried leaves and set on re . . . thinthara!

The children who saw these cruelties ran into the forest. They asked the goddesses of the forests about their parents, but no answer was forthcoming. When the young suckling child cried out for milk, the elder children sang (John, 1998: 334):
We have nobody To feed breast milk

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To give shelter in a corner To give a spoonful of gruel We have nobody . . . thinthara! We have nobody . . . thinthara!

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Here we nd the interplay of two distinct streams of theorizing oppression. The rst draws upon the missionary worldview of equality, while the latter is precolonial and draws upon common sense or the traditional conception of the world held by the oppressed masses (Gramsci, 1971). Missionaries noted in detail the living conditions of the lower caste masses that perpetuated their sufferings, highlighting the lack of adequate food, dress, shelter and their emaciated body vulnerable to diseases, making their everyday living and survival a great problem.33 The missionaries tried to cultivate a strong sense of hygiene among the lower castes. Their initiatives in health care, referred to as medical mission show the importance attached to modern medical practices. The narrativization of oppressions by Dalits goes further back in time. At a later stage the representatives of Dalits in the Sree Mulam Praja Sabha (Travancore Popular Assembly), placing before the government the problems of their people, sometimes provided graphic representations of everyday sufferings of their communities.34 These span from the particular role of the untouchable labourer in the processes of production to the use of public space, and the consumption of food items that are considered unclean. The present study seeks to understand how social experiences were articulated in different contexts. The most emotionally recalled experience happens to be oppressions inicted on the person of the slaves and their sufferings due to the harsh practices of slavery. The preachers of the Sabha create a real life effect of such past oppressions through the imaginative use of particular tropes in their representations of slavery. Imaginative and performative ritual renderings of slavery during occasions such as Rakshanirnayam,35 the death anniversary and the annual feast of the founder emphatically proclaim the signicance of the concept of slavery in the worldview of the Sabha. Here the centrality of the body and soul of the untouchable slave becomes explicit and we encounter gendered untouchable bodies undergoing severe pain. The following narrative presents extreme forms of physical torture that the female body had to undergo in the traditional castecentric agrarian society.36 Slave women are forced to work for many hours without any respite even immediately after childbirth. Within a day or two of giving birth to a child, the landlord comes to the hut of the untouchable labourer and asks the woman to go to the eld for transplanting of paddy or weeding; a work that involves severe physical strain. The woman labourer will have to keep herself bent for long hours in knee-deep mud and water without proper rest. She bleeds, as she is not allowed to take rest after delivering the child. A days hard labour exhausts her and she hears at a distance the loud cry of her newborn child that gradually becomes a faint sobbing. She looks at the touting breasts suffering pain from the pressure of milk not being fed to her child. The strain on the body and mind and the traumatic experience become unbearable. Picking up a bunch of paddy for

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transplanting, she feeds her breast milk to the tender mossy roots of paddy. In the evening when she returns to the child kept in a cradle hanging from the branch of a nearby tree, what was left of her beloved child were ant-eaten mortal remains. When she returns home, the elder children are anxiously waiting to see their younger sibling and ask for the child to be carried and fondled. The mother breaks down and gives the dead body of the infant to the siblings. This leads to complete emotional breakdown of those who recount the story as well as those who partake in the ritual rendering and hearing it.37 Such ritual re-memory thus invoked creates a total identication with those who were oppressed in the past. It is signicant to see what kind of transformation the ritual community passes through during such renderings. As soon as they hear the narrative of suffering and oppression, people break into tears and intense grief overtakes the ritual community. Equally important is the recollection of cruel punishments meted out to slaves. There are occasions when erred lower caste slaves were taken out to the wilderness and were implanted neck deep in pits covered with soil, only the head propping up. The slave cries aloud to his master to show him mercy. His wife and children plead with the master to set their father and husband free. But the landlord is determined to take revenge upon the erring slave and a cruel death awaits him. After implanting him, coconut oil was poured over his head, inviting a colony of black ants that will eventually eat up the slave. Other forms of punishment meted out involved being taken in country boats to the deeper recess of rivers or backwaters and being drowned by hanging stones around their necks, so that they never came up. Here again the wife and children follow to witness the murderous orgy in vain; unable to take revenge upon the landlords and their men.38 Another occasion of suffering and oppression is related to harsh work in the elds, recalled in a touching manner so as to create intense emotional unsettlement, sometimes by enacting scenes of harsh labour through verbal constructions, if not actual performance. There are songs depicting the harsh labour of lower caste slave men being forced to plough elds yoked along with oxen. Narrating the physical strain of the person thus forced to the yoke creates a mood of grief. He is unable to draw the plough keeping apace with the bullock in the splashing muddy eld and he falls down and then hears the whiplashes that leave mortal pains on his body. This pain is well recognized in the collective memory; it also nds mention in folksongs and eventually in the songs of the Sabha.39 Collective memory also recalls the harsh labour involved in reclamation of the backwaters; akin to an agrarian revolution in colonial Travancore.40 This reclamation required tremendous labour power and large numbers of labourers. In the absence of modern hydraulic management, untouchable labour became indispensable for various works related to water management, even before the reclamation of the backwaters. With reclamation the already entrenched dependence on untouchable labour power became more engrained and labour was made available through both coercion and consent. The soil for reclamation work was mined from the depths of the backwaters and transported to the work sites on country boats. Pulaya and Paraya labourers did much of this work. This particular work and its harshness nd elaborate treatment in the discourses of the Sabha.

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Songs depict the everyday aspects of continuous labour such as diving into the bed of the backwaters for blocks of mud.41 Sometimes ood barriers or embankments are destroyed during the monsoon and require the round-the-clock work of several people laying fresh materials to rebuild them continuously and prevent them getting washed away by the swift currents of the monsoon waters swirling into the backwaters. This particular work sometimes lasts for days and occasionally the movement of water will be so strong that no effort will succeed in repairing a breach. Such instances have been considered in popular belief as handiwork of evil sprits that will not be satised unless they are properly propitiated. During one such occasion of breach of embankments a Pulaya/Paraya labourer came to the household of a relative who worked for an upper caste landlord. He was supposed to join for work the next day. It was then that a breach of the embankment took place. The entire workforce was alerted, but even continuous work for hours could not salvage the elds from the oods. The landlord approached the local soothsayer who diagnosed the problem to be the wrath of spirits who are to be propitiated. Fully aware of the plans of the landlord, the host labourer asked his guest to join the work. The guest was given the most arduous job of lling the breached banks with mud blocks by diving down into the space for the embankment. As soon as this labourer dived into the water, there came down upon him loads of mud blocks and other mixtures that fortied the embankment along with the live body of this untouchable worker. The days work was over and the labourers returned home. The next day they saw the oating body of the elder of the workers, who had killed himself due to grief and feelings of guilt.42 Apart from the structural features of oppression, certain aspects of everyday life are depicted in the songs sung during important ritual occasions of the Sabha. One such song graphically describes the details of everyday work of untouchable labourers who were the real force behind the clearing of forests without caring for heavy rain, biting cold and scorching heat; it was their labour that turned forests into agricultural lands. The song repeatedly intimates that no one else would have done that work. Their condition is narrated as a people clad in worn-out clothes working with a sickle hanging around the waist and the puttile (a container to store grain made of the folds of areca leaves) and pala (areca leaf ) to eat from. They are engaged in collecting grass, green manure, fodder, rewood and twigs and carry bundles of them on their heads and then go from house to house to supply it for practically nothing. Describing the kind of food they eat, the song reminds the hearers of the sometimes fermenting gruel of the previous night, mixed with curry made of leaves that is neither tasty nor nutritious. Further they eat tender leaves of chembu (colacasia), thakara, a leafy vegetable that grows in the wild, manthal or madanthal, wild roots eaten by dalits, nooron, chakon, nathu (varieties of birds), crab and shes like kari or koori and champu, the refuses of meat. They alone are the people on earth who use it much against their will (Poyikayil, 1996: 73). Reecting on themselves, the songs recall the degrading names by which they were known. The most common names were Azhakan,

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Poovan, Malan, Mailan, Chathan, Chadayan, Lechi, Maani, Thaali, Kuliri, Neeli, and Poliya.43 It is difcult to make a distinction between the narratives of oppression and narratives of suffering, as both feed on each other. In the experiences of Dalits, sufferings and direct oppression have a long history. The specic idea of the suffering body becomes prominent only when the idea of human body in the modern sense of the term emerges and we can speak of sufferings as a major experience. In 20th-century narratives we come across denite recollections of sufferings as a result of structural constraints of society as well as problems that affect everyday life. It is theoretically signicant to understand how social memories of slave sufferings were available for the lower castes in the early 20th century when these discourses evolved. We should not lose sight of the fact that even after the formal abolition of slavery in Travancore in 1855, the slave experience remained alive in peoples minds. Slavery was still very much part of the social memory of lower caste people when the movement of Yohannan began in 190910. For instance, the Travancore and Cochin Diocesan Record for the month of May 1905, the ofcial journal of the Anglican Diocese, carried testimonies given by people who were slaves, in the report of the Jubilee Celebration at Chelakkompu, held on December 13, 1904:44
The rst to speak was the oldest man in the Mettathumavoo congregation who had himself experienced the oppression. He said he was a slave of a rich landlord. He had to work from early morning to very late in the evening under strict supervision and could not be absent a single day without being punished. He had seen men yoked with a bullock or buffalo to draw the plough and afterwards chained so that they might not escape.

Then an old man from Ayroor recounted his experiences.


Every morning people would be led out to work and would not be allowed to bury their dead, even their father or mother, till the days work was over. They were sold, the father to one man, the mother to another and the children to several separate persons and would not be allowed to see one another afterwards and under such cruel treatments some have entered the forests preferring to be eaten up by wild beasts than to lead such miserable lives.

The fourth speaker on the occasion was a teacher who had collected vital information on the ill-treatment of people and their wretched condition 50 years ago:
The masters had power of life and death over their slaves. He had heard of one mans head being cut off for stealing a yam, another burnt alive for running away and a third being drowned for some triing cause. They could not walk along the roads but only through jungles. They worshipped Gods made with wood, stone or metal placed in groves, near which no women or child could approach. They were not allowed to wear clothes but only leaves and barks of trees, much less carry an umbrella or put on anything on their heads.

The sufferings were part of the overall structure of stratication in the pre-colonial period and continued in different forms well into postcolonial times when new narratives created new objects of theorization in the form of narratives of sufferings. The ultimate cause for the sufferings of Dalits, according to narratives

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of the Sabha, has been their fall from the higher position that they once possessed. The fall was instrumental in their loss of all past achievements. In the narratives of the Sabha this has a gender dimension, as the fall of their mothers to the machinations of the Aryans eventually led to their being enslaved by the marauding Aryans or dominant castes, leading to the beginning of the Dalits journey into the abysmal world of sufferings. Looking at the family as a unit, the Sabha works out the notion of sufferings. The slave trade that separated children and parents has been the root cause of the sufferings that destabilized family life and brought anomie and alienation to people (Poyikayil, 1996: 29):
Those who bought our parents Chained and dragged them away Orphaned children roamed In wilderness without anyone to help. They didnt see anyone. Infants died starving for milk Time the eternal witness alone was pained.

These lines are of fundamental signicance as they refer to the central precept of the Sabha and provide its essential theoretical moorings. It forms an essential part of the notion of history that the Sabha wants the contemporary generation to recollect as the authentic experience of Dalits. The sufferings as slaves were to last for millennia together, which is something that cannot be forgotten. The slave transaction was comparable to the transaction of cows and oxen, proclaiming the authority of masters to sell off slaves (Poyikayil, 1996: 29):
If sold it is salable again If to be killed could be transferred for it again Sold as absolute property How could we forget it? Paired with oxen and buffaloes Forced to plough the elds Oh! God how do we forget the intense grief?

These experiences should be considered as guring out the social being of the untouchable labourers. In the discourses of the Sabha, they assume canonical status as several other conceptions of slavery derive out of it, adding to the centrality that the discourse of slavery possesses in the scheme of the Sabha.45

Transformation of Slavery as Imagery


We have so far seen that slavery as a social experience undergoes tremendous transformation in the Sabha discourses and becomes an axiomatic foundationalist category. The notion of the past thus constructed enables analysis and explanation

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of past, present and future. When slavery is recalled as a historical experience, what we encounter is past. When the slave memory is recalled to negotiate the inner realm of the people, the project is oriented to the present. The linearity of the narrative posits liberation in future and critical engagement with a possible future. This transformation is facilitated by the invention of categories that produce specic emotional effects on the people who recall the historical memory of slavery. The invented categories with which the emotional effects are created include adimakkanneer (slave tears), adima yugam (age of slavery), adima shariram (the slave body), adima nukam (yoke of slaves), adimachangala (chain of slaves), adimayola (palm leaf document on slave trade) and adima bhavanam (slave family). Similar categories have been employed in creating the emotional transformation like adimamakkal (children of slaves), adima vargam (slave caste), and adima rakshakan (emancipator of slaves) and adima vimochanam (emancipation of slaves). Categories of people who bear the marks of the above-mentioned constructs are often referred to as Adi-Dravidas/Adiyar, meaning original inhabitants. Of late, there are other objective signs that have come to achieve signicance like adima sthambham, the image of a column of slaves that reminds people of the sufferings of historical slavery. Probing further what the notion of adimakkannir (tears of slaves) communicates, we nd that it refers to the tears of ancestors who experienced the harshness of slavery and the tears that rolled down from their sunken eyes. Similarly it recalls the image of orphaned children wandering in the wilderness after their parents were sold. While this is an often repeated imagery in Sabha discourses, during eldwork we were able to hear it from Yaramyavu who was 105 years old at the time we met him. He was an untouchable labourer sold to a European planter by his father when he was a boy. He spent more than fteen years in a tea plantation in Cheenthalar in the high ranges of Travancore. Yaramyavu and his parents were in the CMS church and had been receiving the catechism of the church. He recalled with intense emotions the experiences of children who became orphans due to slave transactions and how they were sold. He recalled the songs sung by the slaves who looked back to the low lying lands from where they came when they climbed the rocky terrain to the high ranges, the last point from where they could have a glimpse of the low lying countryside. One song narrates the tragic story of slave labourers who look back to their own village from afar and cry. Obviously nobody consoles them.46 The notion of the tears of slaves in other contexts is powerful enough to create feeling of intense sufferings and pain as observed in the context of ritually signicant occasions like the Rakshanirnayam. This recounting of slave experiences reminds people of the sufferings of their ancestors under historical slavery. This particular experience is part of the untold miseries that the oppressed Dalits had to suffer through ve millennia. It is at this point that discussion on the age of slavery or adima yugam is introduced. When they recollect the history of the indigenous communities, it is located in an imaginary homeland, the Indus Valley or ancient Tamilakam, and the people are referred to as Adi-Dravidas or Adiyar. Certain songs identify the land they had ruled as the geographical territory

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of Kerala. It is a nagging memory that Adi-Dravidas had among their ancestors people who were procient in arts and crafts, science, political administration and statecraft, poets and philosophers who could make rich civilizational achievements before they were enslaved. In the discourses of the Sabha there is room for a popular history of Ancient India with invariable references to scholars like Mortimer Wheeler and Sir John Marshall who conducted early archaeological studies on the Indus Valley Civilization. It has been widely believed and recalled in ritual renderings that the founder of the Sabha had prophesied the existence and eventual eclipse of Dravidian civilization much ahead of the latter day researchers who unearthed the Indus sites. This is foregrounded as an example of the cultural achievement of the Adi-Dravidas, from which position of historical glory they declined due to the cunning of the invading Aryans, reduced to the status of slaves. The other part of the story is built around the popular history of ancient Tamilakam, otherwise known as the Sangam Age, when the predecessors of the Adi-Dravidas led a highly developed social life without class and caste stratication and the condition of women, too, was appreciable as there were no gender divisions as found in later centuries. But then this idyllic society underwent catastrophic effects as the invading Aryans destroyed all their achievements by subjugating their women who were as radiant as the sun. In certain songs they refer to the particular fate of their women being infatuated by the Aryans and giving birth to what they call evil descendants. That is how the eventual fall took place. This fall leads to the age of slavery, lasting for millennia. This chain of representations provides a clear case of decline brought about by womens sexuality and the need to control it. The idea of a sharp decline of Adi-Dravidas provides room for their eventual salvation from the horrors of slavery. From the heights of glory they were all banished to the wilderness, if not, they were forced to work for the aliens. Many songs lament that there was nobody to write down the history of these experiences. This reference to a lack of history forms a major epistemological concern of the Sabha. The slave body (adima shariram) is a powerful construction that is imaginatively deployed by the Sabha and interpreted by its religious men (upadeshtakkals) who conduct prayers and perform rituals during their discourses. First, it refers to the body of the slave-caste women, men and children who had to undergo severe sufferings. In that sense it is a genre introduced to convey the trauma of suffering that slavery inicted on the body, sometimes gendered. Second, it refers to the body of the founder of the Sabha, Yohannan or Kumara Guru Devan, who had to undergo severe suffering to redeem the descendants of slaves. In the later phase of the Sabha, the notion of his taking human form in the garb of a slave becomes prominent and thus the notion of slave body achieved the centrality of an essentialized core severed from the here and now (Poyikayil, 1996: 71). The process of deication of the slave body is visible in the semiotic practices of the Sabha today. The active moments of such a practice include the adoration of the column of slaves as a site of memory, the veneration of the embalmed body of Yohannan/Kumaraguruderam as Acharya Guru and also the appearance of the religious men of the Sabha in the dress of slave agricultural labourers.47 Moreover

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in the songs of the Sabha, there are references to the suffering slave body across time and space, creating a case for a particular theorization of the somatic slave body. At this point the slave body becomes transhistorical, but with its own particular history and sociology of construction. Images like the slaves chain (adima changala), yoke of slaves (adima nukam) and adimayola, the palm leaf document of slave transactions, are powerful icons that symbolize the dreadful practices of slavery. The chain of slaves found expression in the logo of the Sabha that depicts the hands of the slaves with broken chains. In descriptions of the conditions of slavery, the chained parents of orphaned children act as a powerful metaphor. Similarly, when the image of God is recalled, He is construed as the one who had undergone sufferings as He was chained as a slave. The yoke of slaves (adima nukam) has a peculiar signicance as it refers to Dalit labourers being forced to plough the elds harnessed to the yoke along with draught animals, as discussed above. During the ritual performance of discourses by religious men of the Sabha, Dalit labourers ploughing the elds are depicted and/or narrated in detail to invoke memories of hard labour. The entire scene is graphically recreated in all its gravity. The artefact of labour is gradually transformed into something capable of invoking historical memories, creating a different icon of history. Similarly on the annual feast of the founder, theatric performances enact scenes of slave labour. Various aspects of slave sufferings are thus represented in theatrical mode. The category of adimayola, documents of slave trade, also achieves a potential that is comparable to the semiotic potential of other icons. The Sabha in its publications quote from certain historical documents that describe slave transactions or documents containing details of slaves held by landlord families or the state familiar to academic historians. The function of such writings is to foreground the fact that, historically, slavery existed in Kerala and they are bent upon providing powerful documentary proof for it. Adimayola is a much-repeated phrase that is able to provide a rational justication for the critique of caste and slavery that the Sabha indulges in. Another important aspect of such documentation is that Dalit labourers entered the domain of representation mainly due to the violence of the system, both physically and epistemologically. Physical violence is easily understood, as the practice of slavery mentioned in the documents frequently refers to separation of families and groups. Epistemic violence refers to the fact that the events pertaining to the lives of lower caste Dalit labourers enter the recording machinery as something that helps the violent transmutation of the knowledge they constitute as a social unit. Why did they nd entry into the documents? It is mainly to afrm that such individual slaves were the property of this or that landlord and that the ownership right has been transferred to another landlord. We may not obtain further information from such documents, but they are relied upon in an altered context to highlight the violence that the system perpetrated. This emphasis on the documents of slavery provides the necessary ground for the theorization of history for the subaltern Dalits. Documents on slave transactions are used here to evolve a powerful critique of slavery itself, thereby radically rephrasing a possible history.

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It is difcult to argue here that such a project of history is emancipatory, as the categories and modes of thinking of such histories are not entirely free from the dominant conceptions of history. The notion of adimabhavanam (slave home) is used to mean three distinct, but related identities. As a category constructed in ritual usage, at a primary level it refers to a slave family with father, mother and children. Such a family is then dismembered due to the sale of family members. Secondly it refers to the macro-identity of all Dalits who had undergone the slave experience and more specically it refers to the congregation of the Sabha or the people who have been able to experience the truth of Yohannan or Gurudevan in the course of the Rakshanirnayam. It is through the ritually signicant practice of the Rakshanirnayam that an individual becomes a member of the Sabha. Those who have received the truth of the Sabha and Gurudevan eventually merge in the larger family of the faithful that may be referred to as adimabhavanam in a transformed form. At this point, the term no longer refers to the dismembered family under slavery, but the merging of liberated souls who have come together in a ritual community. Third, it refers to the family of the founder of the Sabha, including himself, his wife and two sons, referred to as the sons of the era of reign. This is the promised family that metaphorically stands for the reinstallation of all the families erased from memory due to slavery. The categories of adimamakkal (children of slaves) and adimavargam (slave class) are usually employed to refer to Dalit communities that experienced slavery. The former stands for the macro-identity of all descendants of slaves. Similarly adimavargam is a collectivity constructed out of the emancipatory discourse of the Sabha. Both categories are rooted in social and political praxis. The former refers in Christian terminology to acceptance of the hitherto neglected Dalits as the children of the incarnate, who has come with a special message to redeem them from slavery. In both these invented categories, the prex adima is later reinterpreted in a radical manner. Similarly the notion of agency bestowed upon the founder of the Sabha as adimavimochakan or adimarakshakan (saviour of slaves) draws upon multiple meanings. This discursive domain opens up possibilities for developing and using categories like Adi-Dravida and the derivative Adiyar, which necessarily poses possibilities of bringing together the separated and dismembered jatis of Dalits.

Slavery as a Foundationalist Category


This part analyses further how slavery became a foundationalist axiomatic category in the discourses of the Sabha. The basic argument is that the everyday discourses of slavery facilitated its transformation as a foundationalist category. Similarly, it was introduced as an essentialist category when there was a gradual break from the earlier Christian cosmology that the Sabha had been sharing. The process of displacement and erasure of the Christian worldview led to the introduction of the category of slavery as foundational. This foundational status offers strategies that were not otherwise available to agents in the eld. For instance, even during the lifetime of the founder of the Sabha, notions like Adi-Dravidas and early

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problems of slavery were referred to in the songs sung during Sabha congregations. But the image of slavery was marooned in the enveloping Christian themes, as the songs of that time testify. After the break with the Christian cosmology, it still required powerful substitute concepts that would hold people together, offering them a possibility of rationalizing the past, engaging with the present and visualizing a possible future. Slavery becomes a foundationalist category through the ritual rendition of the history of slavery, which, as a result of peculiar investments made in the composition and rendition of songs, achieved canonical status in the theology of the Sabha. The notion of ritual stands here for the thoughts and actions that constitute the whole. Through the practice of peculiar rituals in an everyday manner a particular historical validation is created and in turn helps the reinforcement of articulated notions of slavery. This perspective offers a slightly more elaborate analysis of the environment that gave rise to the new rituals. In the post-Christian phase the Sabha took to the resources of the community itself instead of the Christian theological resources. This particular phase was marred by many tensions and internal struggles on the fundamental tenets of the Sabha. Under such circumstances the reinvention of categories took place. Here we may concentrate rst of all on the central rituals of the Sabha, without which initiation into the congregation never takes place. The central indispensable ritual for membership in the Sabha was and is the Rakshanirnayam. It used to last for months during the early phase of the Sabha and in course of time was reduced to a week. The faith and teachings of the Sabha are intensely communicated to young people in this period of initiation. During the Christian phase of the Sabha, the Rakshanirnayam was akin to conrmation of ones faith in the resurrected Christ. In the later phase, Christian spirituality and practices were erased. As the new conception of the founder of the Sabha himself as God who has come to redeem the orphaned children of the enslaved parents emerged, the central precept of the Sabha also underwent transformation. During this period Rakshanirnayam began to proclaim the theme of slavery as an essential marker of identity. While during the early phase of the Sabha the prayers and preaching were mainly centered on biblical themes and were open, later meetings used to be held in secluded places lest they should be attacked by the upper castes. In such meetings, leading to the initiation of large numbers of people into the Sabha, the founder used to give expositions that sometimes contradicted Church teachings. As some of our informants told us, he used to connect Biblical events with the lives of the Dalit people in Travancore. This curious mixture of Christian teachings with the perceptions of Dalits became a major element of the prayers of Rakshanirnayam. In the period after the death of the founder, the Rakshanirnayam was further changed radically by introducing new themes in the weeklong prayers and preaching. During this time the notion of re-memorizing slavery enters the discourse as a major theme. Today it has undergone further changes due to the renements that the discursive notion of slavery seems to have achieved. On the ritual occasion of Rakshanirnayam the history of the Adi-Dravidas is now recounted in the form of prayers.48 The construction of slave experience and the linguistic skills that make

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it possible have a pounding effect on the selves of the audience. During such theological discourses slavery is identied as the central problem of Dalit communities. From this primarily historical slavery the Sabha derives seven types of slavery and ve types of original sins. The seven types of slavery include slavery of caste, spirit cults, nation, slavery in the name of God, slavery of other religious paths and religion, slavery that denies freedom to soul and body, and slavery of the power of maya. The concept of ve types of sin includes original sin, sin of Karma, advice (by which the secrets of the society were lost), sin of worshipping the Gods of the Other (Aryans) and the sin of desire for other men (which AdiDravida women felt). We intend to analyse here the two dimensions of the process by which slavery becomes a foundationalist category. The ritual enactment of slavery at the time of Rakshanirnayam is the most decisive moment that informs believers of the slave past. From this it follows that the ritual enactment of slavery in everyday life creates the necessary conditions for the re-memory of the slave experience. It is through these twin processes that the reied concept of slavery is articulated as part of the ideology of the Sabha. After detailing the historical achievements of the forefathers and mothers of Adi-Dravidas, we hear the recounting of their eventual decline due to the fall of their mothers to the inuence of Aryans. This theme is endlessly reproduced to remind the people of their own history. The re-enactment of the slave trade, leading to the transaction of parents to different landlords and the separation of their children, creates a highly charged emotional environment recalling the horrors of slavery. The Upadeshshtavu who conducts the ceremony holds an infant close to his body in the course of the sermon. This is the infant who became orphaned as the parents were sold. From the ritual community a male and female come forward to act as father and mother, along with them come children who are to act their respective roles. Two elderly people take the role of landlords who have come to purchase slaves and there will be another person to enact the role of the original slave owner. The tragedy is of course that the father and mother are sold to different landlords who eventually take them to two different directions. As the moment of separation becomes a reality, the father gives his children the last handful of rice that he could feed them. He does so by saying that henceforth he will not be able to give them any more balls of rice and tells his children that the gods alone will be there to take care of them. He entrusts to the elder son the task of looking after the younger ones and especially the infant. Father and mother hug each other and the fatal parting cry is cried aloud. Then the mother feeds breastmilk to the infant telling him or her to suck out the last drop of milk as there will not be any more breastmilk for the child. Then she leaves the infant under the care of the eldest child. Crying aloud she stands motionless to be dragged away by the landlord who bought her. The parting of the parents made the children weep and wail. They spend the night in the wilderness beneath a huge tree praying to the goddesses of the forests to guard them and also to the wild animals to spare them. At last, hearing their cry a female hawk ying afar in the sky descended on the ground. She consoled the young children and promised to redeem them. The believers of the Sabha

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consider this to be Yohannan, the founder of the Sabha, who has achieved divine status and came to redeem them. In the course of the Rakshanirnayam, it may be observed that much of this is re-enacted along with singing of thematic songs that make the community of believers undergo tremendous mental stress and strain leading to total breakdown. On one such occasion in the course of eldwork we could observe the loud cry of women. One of them swooned as if in ts, continued to make loud cries and then became unconscious. Evidently, the recounting and rememory of the slave experience is still a powerful and potential theme that transforms people and their perceptions radically and makes it a most active moment. When slavery is articulated as a foundationalist category, the entire validation of the selves of the community and the individuals are rmly grounded on it. The other important context when the notion of slave past is imaginatively reworked is the innumerable occasions of every day life ranging from day-to-day conversations to important occasions like marriage and ceremonies in connection with birth and death. Also in the course of prayers the memory of slavery is invoked to provide sufcient energies to people to resist the powers of oppression and dominance in their present social structure. It has been observed in other contexts that it is necessary to place the essence thus created in the context of strategies of resistance. It has been observed that prayers play a crucial role in shaping the ideology of the religion of the oppressed. The critical reading of the prayers and songs of the Sabha shows that most of these songs and prayers allude to the slave experience. For instance even during funeral services the community of believers recounts the slave experience along with the hardships that their forefathers had to endure. These recountings of extreme forms of sufferings were necessary to the predetermined design of redemption that the Sabha proposes for its oppressed people. Though there is no explicit commitment to life after death, these prayers and songs assure the faithful of the promised salvation. Similarly, in ceremonies connected with marriage the message of slave past is conveyed so that the spouses pass on this perception to their offspring, making the theme of slavery part of the embodied history of the oppressed from which they could search for liberationist potential.

Essentializing Slavery in the Context of Religion and Jati


Here we may bring in briey the notion of religion as a means by which people rationalize the external world. This is more so in the case of the religiosity of the oppressed. In the context of colonial Kerala, for the oppressed Dalits it was religion that opened up an early site of social and political praxis that helped negotiate the structures of dominance. For Dalits who joined the Christian missions from the mid-19th century onwards, the slave experiences were a powerful memory for recollection, corroborated by missionary sources that speak of the popularity of the story of the Egyptian captivity of the Israelites under the dispensation of the Pharaohs. The stories of the Exodus provided the most suitable examples to compare the condition of enslaved Dalit labourers in

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Travancore. Similarly the activities of missionaries in certain cases amounted to liberative acts to the exploited masses. The religious sphere was considered as the major site where negotiations had to take place and it is not relegated as a site of tradition, as generally thought of. We therefore consider religion as one of the sites in which the question of modernity and social agency was considered in Kerala particularly in the context of Dalits. It holds good for the missions in general, but when we come to the case of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha we nd new elements emerging as they carve out an autonomous space. It is this process that led to the creation of new ideas and discourses. This section further explores the potential of the essentializing aspect of the notion of slavery as propounded by the Sabha, tagging an essential Dalitness onto slavery. Here we can draw upon contemporary debates on essentialism, which focus on its dual nature. The rst one revolves around the question of the essential in the context of social movements. It refers sometimes to a xed ahistorical essence such as woman-ness, blackness, lesbian-ness or gayness. The demand in this context is to focus on liberation and restoration of these essences, all of which had been suppressed and colonized by diverse forces of domination (Smith, 1994: 172). Similarly in the discourses of the Sabha, the essential aspect of Dalit identity was initially suppressed and colonized by the oppressors who subjugated them. The essential identity therefore had to be rephrased so that it became available to the collective imagination of the ritual community. The introduction of categories such as Adi-Dravidas is to be considered in this light. The second aspect of the essentializing feature of identity is the possibility of the existence of multiple identities beneath an apparent overarching singular identity. It is possible to break open the categories to bring to the fore the multilayered nature of the identity being constituted. In the empirical example analysed here, a notion like Adi-Dravida is constituted by bringing under control all other contending identities in terms of the further micro-categories such as jatis. Mobilizations that take care of a category like Adi-Dravida will always have to face the onslaught of jati identities. The signicant question that emerges here is the problem of the irresistible potentials of micro-identities, such as Pulayar or Parayar, to mobilize people around caste identities while projecting the shared memory of Adi-Dravida that intends to bring together subordinated categories. It is analytically important to see that these categories were able to create lots of contradictions as they were trying to negotiate with one another. These are identities with divisive potentials, given the history of the Dalit movements in the rst half of the 20th century. In this context we consider the possibilities that an essentialized notion of slavery offers. The discourses around this category constitute the Sabha as a dialogic religious community that conveys a new meaning to its people. It attempts to recast their history as well as their self-perception through a liberative praxis. It is impossible to have a pure and complete essence, and essence can be located only in the terrain of contingency rather than necessity (Smith, 1994: 173). Privileging slave experience as an essential marker of identity can be contextualized in the terrain of contingency brought in by social movements

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under colonialism that initiated the discourse of slavery. It is valid in the context of the Sabha to follow the argument that essence should always be placed in terms of their particular context of particular strategies, such as the struggle against domination, rather than be considered in abstraction (Smith, 1994: 174). Slave experience is deployed as a resource to resist domination and to situate the history of the people without history in Kerala. It provides deniteness, concreteness and boundaries to the social groups that claim the essentialized identity. The essentialized notion of slavery helps the heterogeneous experiences of oppression to be strategically reinterpreted as a singular phenomenon. The circulation of these concepts and the ideas generated by them make the Sabha and the people following it what Paul Gilroy (1993: 181) calls an interpretive community.

Conclusion
Among Dalits in Travancore, the experience of slavery eventually became through various strategies a foundationalist category used to legitimize new claims on the resources of the state as well as to contest reigning power structures within society and the Church. Through the process of rememorizing slavery and its sufferings, an essential identity of the historical slave is made out and the invented category of slavery and several other derivatives are overplayed to evoke memories of the social experience that slavery was. It is appropriate at this juncture to put forward certain observations on the experiences of the Sabha in order to obtain a larger picture of the resistance movements that problematized issues beyond the concerns of the nationalist discourse. It is important to understand such movements without privileging the nationalist constructions so that we are informed of the complexities of colonial modernity. The Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha in Kerala tried to carry forward the agenda of colonial modernity in Travancore without the support of missionaries by creating alternative structures. For example, there were efforts to acquire land and other resources, modern education, and also to create their own congregations or community of believers. Yohannan, the founder of the Sabha, himself coordinated this community of believers during his lifetime with his associates and pastors. This aspect of the movement provided historically oppressed and powerless people with new structures and political agency capable of creating new discourses on such vital issues as social transformation. The politics of fullment and transguration had a decisive effect on the people who were and are part of the ritual community of the Sabha. Such a ritual community and community of sentiments are constituted by the public ritual rendering of history. Slavery and the sufferings it generated and the constant reminder of being in pain are the resources with which the community of sentiments is being made. Here one may nd some broad parallels with the situations to which Gilroy (1993: 197203) refers. In the discourses of the Sabha we nd a new worldview emerging, however ephemeral, by making recourse to the history of slavery and its imaginative recovery through expressive cultural practices.

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This happened in the context of modernity when a people who were hitherto enslaved resorted to rise on the scales of civilization by acquiring education and articulating their social visions. This is an unnished journey, the history of which is in a double bind. In fact the whole project itself was characterized by doubleness. This is one of the dominant features of the Dalit liberation endeavours in the context of colonial modernity. There were trends within the Sabha to go beyond the teachings of the missionaries, but they remained within a fuzzy world by critically engaging with Biblical teachings and creatively interpreting them. At least till the 1950s, this situation continued and never demanded their explicit avowal as either Hindu or Christian in the conventional sense or they knew where they were located. In fact it was this hybrid rootedness that provided a critical space for the Sabha that was no longer there in the same way when a predominant section declared themselves as Hindus in 1950. The foundational categories that were resorted to since then have transformed the perceptions of the people. But this opened up another terrain of enquiry by problematizing the slave experience that remained dormant or unconscious and was brought to the active present due to new discourses. The liberative potentials of these transformations were never absolute, as it had many internal constraints. Nonetheless, the experiences of the Sabha show the possibilities of returning to the sources of the community and redeploying the past in such a manner that historical experiences, however despicable they are, become a resource for imaging a social praxis of liberation.

Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the Charles Wallace Trust for selecting me as Visiting Fellow in History, giving me the opportunity to collect valuable materials in libraries in the UK, some of which were used to develop the arguments presented in this article. An earlier version of this essay was presented at SOAS in early 2002. I thankfully acknowledge the scholars who gave me insightful comments, particularly Avril Powell, Rachel Dwyer, Peter Robb and James Chiriyan Kandath. Some of the ideas presented here have been drawn from my presentation in the internal faculty seminar of the Cultural Studies Group at CSSS Calcutta. I have benetted from the comments of Gautam Bhadra, Anjan Ghosh, Partha Chatterjee, Raziuddin Aquil, Dawaipayan Bhattacharya, Janaki Nair, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Lakshmi Subramanyam, Joyati Gupta and Tapati Guha Takurta. A stimulating discussion with Saurabh Dube helped me to rethink some of the larger issues. I also acknowledge my discussions with Nizar Ahmed and T.M. Yesudasan. However, I am alone responsible for any shortcomings in the article.

Notes
1 The leader was a Paraya convert whose forebears were slaves of a Syrian Christian family, still, I believe, served by this mans relations, a family to which one of the Syrian bishops belongs. Some time after his conversion he attracted the attention of the Brethren; he joined that body and soon became known as a successful preacher. After some years Yohannan left the Brethren either because of moral lapses on his part, or through pique at not being put on a level with men of higher origin (both reasons have been assigned). He was next heard of as drawing large numbers of people to night

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revival meetings (Hunt, 1919). The aspect of protest within the religious domain is spectacular when the history of the movement is considered. Rememory is something which possesses (or haunts) one, rather than something which one possesses (Lidinsky, 1994: 193). In the context of the Sabha this rememory of slavery is invoked in ritually signicant contexts, gradually acquiring a signicance far exceeding all other constructs of the Sabha. Travancore and Cochin Missions Progress and Policy Report for the Year 1913, in The Travancore and Cochin Diocesan Report Vol XXIV, No. 3 (June 1914), p. 59. For a critique of conventional historiography see Dube (2002: 8067) and Keane (1997). Rev. Koshi Koshis Journal for the Quarter Ending 30 September 1856. Entry for 22 July in Church Missionary Records No. 5 (May 1857) Vol. XXIV, pp. 13841. See Appendix IV in Baby and Baburajan (1994: 1567). O.S.No.34/1952, in Appendix IX of Baby and Baburajan (1994: 16970). A.S No.583/1962, in Appendix X of Baby and Baburajan (1994:171). Political Department, Condential File, Residents Ofce Trivandrum, 1915. IOR R/ 2/882/117 India Ofce Library and Records, p. 3 (emphasis added). Address to Diwan Bahadur M. Krishnan Nair Diwan of Travancore Vol.1 Trivandrum, 1920, p. 127. Memorandum submitted to Morris Watts, quoted in Baby and Baburajan (1994: 612, emphasis added). Minutes of the Travancore and Cochin CMS Missionary Conference. Held in the Diocesan Room Kottayam, 2628 February, 1915. In Travancore and Cochin Mission Progress Report for 1914. Travancore and Cochin Mission Progress Report 1915, p. 14. The Travancore and Cochin Mission Annual Report 1916. Evangelization, p. 4 (typed). Found in the CMS Archives, University of Birmingham, Birmingham. The CMS faced similar movements in the Niger Mission in Western Equatorial Africa and the Uganda Missions. In Nigeria one of the members of the Church, Garrick Braid, claimed to be Prophet Elijah the Second, and in the Uganda Mission a person named Malaki claimed to be a prophet. Malaki also prohibited the use of medicine and the movement was conned to the least educated members of the community. The Travancore and Cochin Mission Annual Report 1916. Evangelization, p. 4 (typed). Found in the CMS Archives, University of Birmingham, Birmingham. The Travancore and Cochin Diocesan Record Vol. XXVII, No.1 (January 1918), p.19 (hereafter TCDR). TCDR Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (January 1918), p. 23. Venkotta Yohannan is a person about whom we were not able to collect any information, except what is found in the Church Missionary Society Record mentioned here, so at present it is impossible to ascertain his ideas and the nature of his following. Beyond doubt he was a person with some kind of radical ideas that challenged the ideas of the missionaries. TCDR Vol. XXIX No. 6 (December 1919), p. 95. TCDR Vol. XXIX No. 6 (December 1919), p. 95. Address to Diwan Bahadur M. Krishnan Nair Diwan of Travancore Vol. 1 Trivandrum, 1920, p. 128 (emphasis added). In the discourses on the occasion of Rakshanirnayam the religious men of the Sabha introduce this theme particularly to prove that Israelites became slaves of Egyptians as they chose to go and live there. This, according to them, is totally against the experiences of Dalits in Kerala who became slaves in their own land.

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

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24 It was also noted that whereas the Christian missionaries demanded subscription offers and fees in order to enrich the Syrians, which means upper-class Christians, Yohannan asked for nothing but got a great deal. At harvest time and similar seasons, his people gave with great liberality and seldom went to him empty handed (Hunt, 1919). 25 This is a much-contested problem in the history of the Sabha, particularly in the context of internal ssures after the founders death. The rationalist critique of changes in the theme of the songs was articulated most forcefully by Vijaya Kumar (Baby), son of P. John Paul popularly known as Chengalam Achayan in the community, in the course of extended interviews in September 2001. This particular problem is raised in the book on the history of the Sabha after the death of the founder. For details see Baby and Baburajan (1994). In a similar vein, the history of the early phase of the Sabha was rendered by J. John, son of Njaliyakuzhi Simon Yohannan, who was second in command of the Sabha during the lifetime of Yohannan himself (interviews in September 2001). Their arguments point to the problem of the deliberate changes that were introduced in the themes of the songs, leading to the decline of Christian themes. 26 In the context of 17th-century England, Christopher Hill (1986) speaks of the signicance of the notions of sin, hell, salvation and other concepts across social groups and how they perceived it differently. In the days of revolutionary millenarianism, the notion of sin was rejected by popular classes and was considered a delimiting category, but was used to keep the subordinate classes in obedience. In the era of restoration there was a revival of the concept of sin as millenarian expectations slowly faded and it became part of the faith of the Anglican Church. The Church Missionaries in Travancore introduced the notions of sin, redemption, salvation, original sin and similar concepts among slave Christians that made them understand their actions in a new ethical way with its own inherent problems. There are innumerable instances when lower caste Christians understand their actions in terms of sin and salvation from it. 27 It is important to see that in the context of Kerala the movements of Dalits during the early 20th century raised the question of cleanliness as a major social project. Elsewhere I have argued that cleanliness itself was modernity to them (Mohan, 1994: 8). See also Burke (1996), in particular Chapters 1 and 2. 28 Bakhtin (1981). Chronotope has been dened as the total matrix that is comprised by both the story and the plot of any particular narrative (Holquist, 1990: 113). 29 The insights given by Barthes (1989) help to unpack the worldview generated by the ritual discourses referred to below. See particularly Barthes (1989: 11774) in the chapter on Myth today. 30 For a detailed study on the theoretical problems of suffering see Kleinman et al. (1997). 31 The Slaves of Travancore. Their Pitiable Condition, The Church Missionary Intelligencer. A Monthly Journal of Missionary Information. 1855, pp. 223. Also see Trivandrum District Report of London Mission Society. Council of World Mission Archives, SOAS, University of London, Journal of Rev. George Matthan for the Quarter Ending 31 December 1849. CMS Archives, University of Birmingham. Native missionaries like Rev. George Matthan made extensive reports on the conditions of the Dalits. These are rich in ethnographic information and their exploration forms part of my ongoing research programme. 32 An important recent volume (John, 1998) has brought together the oral compositions drawn from the repertoire of the social memory of Dalits in Travancore. 33 George Matthan, as in n. 31 above. See also the Missionary Journals of Rev. Koshy Koshy, Rev. Oomman Maman for 1850s to 1870s. CMS Archives, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.

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34 For details, see the speeches of the representatives of Dalits such as Pulayas and Parayas throughout the 1920s to 1940s forcefully presenting their problems, found in the Sree Mulam Praja Sabha Proceedings for various years. Trivandrum: Travancore Government Publications. 35 Rakshanirnayam is the crucial ritual by which children are formally initiated into the Sabha. Today the ritual lasts for a week and includes discourses on the history of Dalits in which the slave experience remains central. Similarly, on the day of the annual feast (17 February) and the death anniversary (29 June) of Yohannan or Kumara Guru Devan, discourses on the theme of slavery and the history of Dalits are delivered. On the death anniversary of the founder the discourses last for the entire night till 5.30 am, the time of the bodily departure (sharira mattam) of the founder. 36 Information generated through participant observation of Rakshanirnayam and other ritual occasions like the death anniversary of the founder on 29 June 2001 in Eraviperoor, the Sabha headquarters. 37 Ibid. 38 Participant observation of Rakshanirnayam discourses at Amara, September, 2001. 39 Ibid. 40 For a sociological treatise on social memory, see Halbwachs (1992). 41 Halbwachs (1992) and discussion with Illithara Krishnakumar Gurukula Upadeshtavu of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha at his residence in Chengalam, August 2001. 42 Ibid. 43 Poyikayil (1996: 73). Also participant observation of ritual renderings on 29 June 2001 in Eraviperoor. These names are considered derogatory and in the context of reforms they have been discarded for the new generation. 44 TCDR Vol. XV No. 3 (May 1905), pp. 423. 45 The teachings of the Sabha today refer to seven types of slavery as derivatives of the foundational concept of slavery. 46 Oral testimony given by Yeramyavu on 13 April 2001 at his residence in Puthuppalli, Kottayam. 47 The elder son of Yohannan was named P.J. Baby and was supposed to take care of the spiritual life of the followers of the movement. For the morning prayer services on the death anniversary of the founder the religious men of the Sabha appear in the dress of the traditional agricultural labourers sporting the cap made of tender areca leaf and a kachathorthu, the small bath towel type of cloth popular in Kerala. 48 Long sermons are given on the historical past of the Adi-Dravidas that cut across time and space to provide a neat picture of their cultural achievement as either the Indus Valley Civilization or the culture of the ancient Tamils. This is the pre-enslavement phase with unrestrained cultural achievement when the Adi-Dravidas possessed everything that they were denied in subsequent historical periods, subjected to the despicable social experience of slavery.

References
Aloysius, G. (1998) Religion as Emancipatory Identity. A Buddhist Movement Among the Tamils Under Colonialism. New Delhi: New Age International. Baby and Baburajan (1994) Thiruvithamcoore Prathyaksha Rekshsa Daiva Sabha Charithram Poyikayil Yohannanu Sesham. Ettumanoor: G.J. Printers. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. (ed. by M. Holquist, tr. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland (1989) Mythologies. London: Paladin Grafton Books.

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Burke, Timothy (1996) Lifebuoy Men Lux Women. Commodication, Consumption & Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Dube, Saurabh (2002) Conversion to Translation: Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4): 80737. Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gramsci, Antonio (1987) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (ed. and tr. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith). New York: International Publishers. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory (ed. and tr. by Lewis A. Coser). London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hill, Christopher (1986) The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume Two. Religion and Politics in 17th Century England. Brighton: The Harvester Press. Holquist, Michael (1990) Dialogism. Bakhtin and his World. London: Routledge. Hunt, Rev. W.S. (1919) Mass Movement Phenomena, The Harvester Field XXXIX (June): 20817. John, Mariamma (1998) Manikkam Pennu. Changansseri: Manusham. Joseph, Rev. P.C. (1994) Poyikayil Sree Kumara Gurudevan Jeevithavum Darshanavum. Tiruvalla: CLS. Keane, Webb (1997) From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion, Comparative Study of Society and History 39(4): 67493. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (eds) (1997) Social Suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lidinsky, April (1994) Prophesying Bodies: Calling for a Politics of Collectivity in Tony Morrisons Beloved, in Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring (eds) The Discourses of Slavery: Aphra Ben to Tony Morrison (pp. 191216). London and New York: Routledge. Mateer, Samuel (1991) Native Life in Travancore. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Mohan, Sanal (1994) Dalit Discourse and the Emerging New Self: Contest and Strategies, Lateral Studies 13. Kottayam: School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University. Ong, Walter J. (1988) Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen. Orta, Andrew (1999) Syncretic Subjects and Body Politics: Doubleness, Personhood, and Aymara Catechists, American Ethnologist 26(4): 86489. Plasa, Carl and Betty J. Ring (eds) (1994) The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Ben to Toni Morrison. London and New York: Routledge. Porter, Roy (1991) Introduction, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds) Language Self and Society. A Social History of Language (pp. 120). Cambridge: Polity Press. Poyikayil Sree Kumara Gurudeva Geethangal (1996) Eraviperoor: PRDS Publication. Poyikayil, Yohannan (1940) Golden Lyrics. Kumbanad: BPH. (Manuscript copy of the original). Robbins, Joel (2001) God is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language, and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society, American Anthropologist 103(4): 90112. Smith, Anna Marie (1994) Rastafari Resistance and the Ambiguities of Essentialism in the New Social Movements, in Ernesto Laclau (ed.) Identities and Identication (pp. 171204). London: Verso.

Sanal Mohan is Senior Lecturer in Ethnography, School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala, India. He was formerly a Fellow in History, CSSS Calcutta, Kolkata, India, Charles Wallace India Fellow in

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History, SOAS, University of London and Honorary Research Associate, Anthropology Programme of Massey University, New Zealand. Address: School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Malloosserey PO, Kottayam 686 041, India. [email: sanalmohan@rediffmail.com and sanal. mohan@gmail.com]

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