156

Book reviews / Religion 00 (2004) 156173

communicate to the public, in an unmediated way, directly through important secular and religious texts. *Paul E. Ivey School of Art University of Arizona Tucson AZ 85721-0002 USA E-mail address: pivey@email.arizona.edu (P.E. Ivey). *Corresponding author.
doi:10.1016/j.religion.2003.11.008

Sathianathan Clarke. Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, viii+247 pp., $12.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 19 565130 8.
Sathianathan Clarkes rst book, based on his Harvard dissertation, oers the world yet another liberation theology, but with a decided twist. Based on his experiences with and reections upon the Dalit (Untouchable) Paraiyar community in Tamil Nadu, Clarkes writings are in conversation with, yet pose a challenge to, a variety of contemporary Christian theologies. The primary symbol featured throughout the book is the drum. For the Paraiyar, the drum is a multivalent expression of their identity and a conduit for divine power. For Clarke, it provides a foundation for building a reconstructive and liberative theology and for advancing what he refers to as advocacy scholarship (p. 181) for Dalit Christians in general and the Paraiyar community in particular. Since most of Clarkes writing is theological and speculative, representing, as he puts it, a constructive experiment, the book will be of greatest interest to theologians. Appealing to a wider audience and interspersed throughout the book are anecdotes and eld data based on Clarkes three-year stint as a community organiser with numerous Church of South India (CSI) parishes in Chingelput district. In his third chapter, The Resistive and Constructive in Paraiyar Religion, Clarke relates mythologies describing the relationship between the non-Christian Paraiyars and their main goddess, Ellaiyammam, and illustrates a spectrum of ritual drumming styles and occasions. Both the goddess Ellaiyammam and the drum, he argues, provide an important means for these Dalits to distinguish themselves from caste Hindu society and to promote a sense of dignity amid caste oppression. Although Clarke is critical of caste Hinduism throughout his book, repeatedly demonstrating the ways in which the Paraiyars have been relentlessly demeaned by the system, his statements often provide a segue into his critique of Indian Christianity. Clarke argues that Indian Christianity has been formulated to appeal to a minority elite and thus it is often inaccessible, irrelevant and potentially damaging to the larger, predominantly Dalit, Christian population.

Book reviews / Religion 00 (2004) 156173

157

More concretely, Indian Christianity purportedly provides false hopes for social uplift, or sanskritisation, in which Dalit converts are provided with the illusive feeling that Christianity is liberative since it incorporated them within the one complete and undivided pan-Indian theological framework (p. 44). By becoming Christian, Dalits often aspire (usually fruitlessly) to enjoy the trappings of caste Hindu society, meanwhile disdaining their own heritage. Thus enters the drum, a complex and often contradictory symbol of Paraiyar identity and a means for religious expression. Within the caste Hindu context the cowhide drum is often derided as a symbol and as a means of transmitting ritual pollution. The Paraiyar are linked with the drum and its negative associations for a number of reasons, the most apparent being their traditional, often indispensable, role as drummers during caste Hindu funerals. In spite of this negative association, the Paraiyar continue to use the drum for their own ritual purposes. The fact that the drum represents a body that is disdained by dominant society yet is maintained and celebrated as sacred by those rejected makes it an apt symbol for religious paradox. In addition to using elements from Paraiyar Hindu and Christian culture as a means for building his theology of the drum, Clarke laboriously makes his case in light of contemporary Western theologies as well. His nal chapter presents the reader with his crowning metaphor: Christ as Drum. Drawing from the christologies of theologians Kaufman, Hodgson and Taylor, Clarke congures Christ [and the drum] as the emancipatory immanental presence of God that draws creation towards the human and humane through the dynamics of resistance and reconciliation (p. 191). Clarkes insistence that his theology and Christology be built through reection on the drum rather than, as would be more conventional, Scripture is supported by his argument that Paraiyar culture is based on orality, not literacy. Christianitys traditional focus on the Word, he argues, must be balanced by modes that are meaningful to the wider Christian community. In an interesting slant in logic, intimated above, Clarke places the weight of the blame for this orientation not so much on Indian Christianitys Word-centered tradition as on its historical interest in conforming itself to literacy oriented Brahmanical Hinduism. While there may be some truth to this view, it seems to me that Clarke might have reected more thoroughly on the ways in which Protestant Christianitys emphasis on Scripture and literacy has built a corollary disdain for certain material forms of religious expression. I think it safe to say that this disdain for material (i.e., nonliterary) expressions and manifestations of sacred power and divinity does not exist in Hindu traditions nearly to the extent that it does in Protestant Christianity. Articulating a particularly strident example of this problem is Clarkes central theological symbol, the drum. I found myself convinced by Clarkes presentation of the drum as central to Paraiyar religious identity and as a potentially liberatory symbol for Dalit Christians. Yet it came as a surprise to learn, seemingly in passing, that the drum, precisely because it is so religiously resonant for non-Christian Paraiyars, has been traditionally o-limits for Paraiayar Christian converts. Surprising to me was not so much the news that Christian leaders have prohibited the use of the drum as the delivery of it by Clarke in such an ohand manner. Clarkes critique that (Protestant) Christianitys assimilation of elite Hindu values is midirected and ultimately problematic cannot be denied. A similar critique could be and has recently been, made of the widely acclaimed, largely Roman Catholic ashram movement that celebrates elite forms of Indian religion and overlooks the majority expressions of the non-elite. Beyond ocial liturgies and the ashram movement, Indian Catholic and Orthodox pilgrimage and festival events organically reect Clarkes coveted symbolic interactions between non-elite Christian and Hindu

158

Book reviews / Religion 00 (2004) 158175

traditions. As I see it, theological disdain for these exchanges has more to do with internaland internationalbiases against Christian popular expression than with any pandering to elite Hindu sensibilities. As such, Clarkes future work might focus less upon the problems of Christian appropriations of caste Hinduisms literacy based traditions than upon myoptic tendencies that hit closer to home. *Corinne Dempsey University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point 1780 Church Street Stevens Point, WI 54481-3516 USA E-mail address: cdempsey@uwsp.edu (C. Dempsey). *Corresponding author.
doi:10.1016/j.religion.2003.11.009

Isabelle Nabokov. Religion Against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, xiv+230 pp., $35.00 (hardback) ISBN 0 19 511364 0, $19.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 19 511365 9.
The temple of the goddess Aka aparame cuvari, located in the village of Me l Malaiyan Iu r in the South Arcot District of Tamilnadu, India, might be described as a marketplace where the people come to enter into transactions with the spirit world. This is how Isabelle Nabokov describes the atmosphere at the temple: devotees come to fulll vows, to take dars an, to pray, or to dance in the temple courtyard to the accompaniment of musicians drums. Its air thick with vibrating percussion from drumheads and metal bells and bangles, high-pitched screams, and odors of smoking incense, the temple becomes an arena impossible to grasp in its varied intensity. To enter it is like plunging into another, more urgent dimension of human yearning, one in which frantic agitation, passionate enthusiasm, and ecstatic self-absorption are permitted and encouraged (p. 78). This book is an ethnographic study of the rituals of spirit possession that Nabokov observed at the Aka aparame cuvari temple and its environs, rituals which, as she observes, [fall] somehow below or beyond village religion and its better documented inter- or intracaste ceremonies (p. 179). Nabokov describes and analyses the practices she observed as a spectrum of ritual genres, most of which bear a distinctive Tamil signier. These rituals may be briey described as follows. (1) kur Ii collutal (sign-saying): these are diagnostic seances at which petitioners, in the grip of a personal crisis, approach the goddess for help through a professional medium, a man or woman who is understood to have been chosen by the goddess for this role. (2) e val kal Iippu (removal of a command): sometimes a persons aiction is attributed to sorcery, that is, it is believed that someone with ill intentions towards another, may commission a sorcerer to place a sorcery spell or command. This ritual is designed to free the victim of such a spell. (3) pe y o * t* tutal (driving away a demon): undesirable behaviour, especially in young women, is frequently seen to be