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Nation as Nostalgia: Ambiguous Spiritual Journeys of Vengal Chakkarai Author(s): M. S. S. Pandian Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.

38, No. 51/52 (Dec. 27, 2003 - Jan. 2, 2004), pp. 5357-5365 Published by: Economic and Political Weekly Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4414434 Accessed: 08/12/2010 01:17
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Special articles

Nation
Ambiguous Spiritual

as

Nostalgia
of

Journeys

Vengal

Chakkarai

Vengal Chakkarai's efforts to Indianise Christianityin the early 20th century were preceded by numerous other efforts to 'indigenise' Christianity.However, while the earlier efforts sought to contend mainly with missionary domination within the church, had to address the demands of majoritarian/Hindu Chakkarai nationalism; Christianitywas viewed as 'the last act of surrender to the foreigner'. This (im)possibility of being a Christian and an Indian Hindu at the same time appears in much of Chakkarai's writings. Much though he wished his Christianityto be recovered as Indian, majoritarian nationalismrecovered him as a Christian despite his nationalist credentials. Chakkarai's failure represents an instance of nationalism asserting itself by creating external Othersand also producing internal Others.
M S S PANDIAN primarily with missionary domination within the church. But Chakkari,in addition, had to address the demands of majoritarian Indian/Hindu nationalism. He was acutely aware of this new political context. He wrote, 'The acceptance of Christianity appears, to many sensitive minds, as the last act of surrenderto the foreigner. Why should the Hindu, who has yielded in politics and commerce, allow the sanctity of his soul to be violated by the intrusion of a foreign religious domination? Religion has for become patriotism in recent tinmes, how else can you account for the impression which Swami Vivekananda has made upon the Hindu mind?' (VC, vol II, pp 4-5 (emphasis mine)).4 In this context of nationalism, Chakkarai's writings on the Indianisation of Christianity, painfully engaged with the (im)possibility of being a Christian and an Indian Hindu at once. Grounded in national rules of difference which delineated and enforced who could legitimately make a claim on the nation, Indian nationalism refused to accommodate Chakkarai's Indianisation. While Chakkarai wished his Christianity to be recovered as Indian, majoritariannationalism recovered him as a Christian despite his nationalist credentials. This failure of Chakkarai is indeed a statement about how nationalism asserts itself not merely by constructing external Others, but also by means of producing internal Others. In unravelling this story of Indiannationalism,let me begin with Vengal Chakkarai'smanifold spiritual journeys.

Introduction
CW
riting in the HarvestField in 1917,VengalChakkarai
claimed, '...there is a growing desire for the

This nationalisation Christianity. is inevitable, of natural, and legitimate.'lIt was not only the mood of the Christian whichChakkari, ardent an claimedto be nationalist, community awareof, but he also offereda definitionof whatIndianisation his of Christianity wouldbe. Almosttextbookish, definitionran is of asfollows:'ThisIndianisation to be a translation thecontents in of westernChristianity termsof Indianreligiousthoughtand experience'(VC, vol II, p 48). declaredhis faith in the Indianisation By the time Chakkarai the of Christianity, Tamil-speaking region,whichhadwitnessed in of conversion lowercastesto Protestantism the 19th large-scale was alreadyfamiliarwith a numberof effortsto 'indicentury, aChristian As genise'Christianity. earlyas 1857,Arumainayagam, brokeaway shanar who carriedthe honorifictitle Sattampillai, of fromthe Societyfor the Propagation Gospel andestablished churchof an independent churchknownas the Hindu-Christian LordJesus.2 Threedecadeslater,in 1886,PulneyAndy,thefirst Indianstudentever to registerfor a Britishmedicaldegreeand of a Freemason, formedtheNationalChurch India.TheNational tobe of Asianorigin,deniedthe need Church claimed Christianity to align itself with any westernChristian creed, and took New Testament its exclusiveguide.3Thesetwo effortsin theTamil as region,along with the foundingof the ChristoSamajby Kali and Charan Banerjee J C Shome in 1887 in Bengal,are treated churchesin India. to as the firstever attempts createindigenous It were Butthetimesof Chakkarai different. was thehighnoon that of anti-colonial nationalism a nationalism was increasingly of andexplicitlyHindu.The projects 'indigenising' Christianity and set in motionby Saltampillai Pulney Andi had to content

II Spiritual Journeys
Born in 1880 in a Hindu upper caste Chettiyar family, Vengal Chakkarai, whose original name was Chakravarty, graduated from the Madras Christian College in Philosophy and finished a Bachelor of Law degree from the Madras Law College in 1906. In 1907, he attended the annual session of the Indian National

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Congress at Surat and became a follower of B G Tilak. Active in the Home Rule Movement, he came under the influence of M K Gandhi in 1920 andjoined the Non-cooperation Movement. He was a Madras city councillor for almost a quarterof a century from 1924 to 1948. He was elected the mayor of Madras city in 1941. As an active member of the Indian National Congress, he was involved in the activities of the Madras Presidency Association, a non-brahminenclave consciously promotedwithin the Congress to arrest the influence of the non-Brahmin South Indian Liberal Federation or the Justice Party. He was also a member of the Madras Legislative Council from 1952 until his death in 1958. One of the pioneers of trade union movement in India, he served as the president of the Madras Provincial Trade Union Congress from 1943 to 1958 and the president of All India Trade Union Congress from 1949 to 1957.5 In fact, the later part of his public life - which was characterised by alienation from the Congress politics - was confined to trade unionism. If these details of Chakkarai's chequered public life are mostly forgotten even in the nationalist literature of the present, his spiritualjourney from Hinduism to Christianity and his lifelong engagement with Christian theology have been and is remembered only among a miniscule Indian Christian elite. But those forgotten spiritual journeys of Vengal Chakkarai are of critical importance to understandhow Indian nationalism constitutes its internal Others. Chakkarai's childhood was spent in a milieu of upper caste non-brahminHindu religiosity, surroundedby temples, religious processions, pilgrimages, sanyasis and stories from Ramayanam and Mahabharatham. His maternal grandmother, of whom he writes with much fondness, was a key figure in moulding his early religious life. When he returned from the school in the evening, she made him read from the volumes of Ramayanam and Mahabharathanm which he was given a small payment for in cash. Soon he 'learnt to love these stories, the endless procession of holy men and women, the wicked rakshasas and their final doom...' (VC, vol II, p 126). Formed under the caring guidance of his grandmother, Chakkarai's religiosity was quite intense. As he recounted an incident from his early life: 'One of my earliest recollections goes to the temple of Kali in the street in Madras where I was born and lived very long even after my baptism. With some boyish grief in the heart I betook myself one day to a 'side-chapel' in that big temple - not one of the biggest in south India; and, fixing my eyes on the idol of Subramanyathere, I cried and wept to give relief I don't know now from what...' (ibid, p 125). In the late 19th century Tamil region, it was hard to protect such religiosity from outside influences. From the 1840s onwards, Tamil Nadu was home for western rationalist literaturecirculated by anti-ChristianHindu groups. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, W K Clifford's Supernatural Religion, Bradlaugh's and Annie Besant's Free Thinker'sTextBook, and Ingersoll's Anti-Christian Pamphlet did their ideological work - often silently and sometimes raucously - to counter the missionary propaganda against Hindu texts and practices.6 But the life of these texts at once produced- inadvertentlyperhaps- a ground for a rationalist subculture among the English-educated Tamils. For example, Rev Henry Rice, referring to the uses to which young men put Bradlaugh and Ingersoll, wrote, 'Missionaries are driven... in self-defence to maintain a firm and aggressive attitude against the cultured infidelity which is honeycombing the upper and middle classes of HinduSociety.'7 He characterisedthe condition in south India as one of slipping away from a state of 'gods many and lords many' into utter godlessness.

When Chakaraiwas in the fourth or fifth form in school, tracts of Braudlaugh and Ingersoll fell into his curious hands. Their effect on him was instantaneous. Chakkarairecollects his school days thus: 'The names of the great free thinkersof the west became magical to us; we came to know something of Mrs Besant... of Huxley, Darwin, Clifford, and August Comte. I rememberthat, after having read Huxley's attack on what he called the Mosaic cosmogony, I bombarded my Bible teacher...with questions when we read the first chapter of Genesis. He could not answer them... though a brilliant graduate...' (VC, vol II, pp 126-27). He was also part of an atheistic students' club wherein the members described themselves as agnostics for they thought the term atheistic was violent, and agnostic, philosophical. Chakkarai,however, returnedto his Hinduism soon. His revisit to Hinduism from his shortlived sojourn with rationalism, was the result of Swami Vivekananda's visit to Madrasafterhis return from the Congress of World Religions in the US in 1893. Swami's visit was greeted with overwhelming response. Chakkaraireminisced, 'The enthusiasm of Madarasis knew no bounds; we unyoked the horses and drew his coach; we shouted ourselves hoarse; we listened to his silvery eloquence in rapt admiration.' The impact of his visit on Chakkarai was instantaneous: '...it wrought a more profound change, that is, a change that cut sheer through our superficial irreligion. A saying of his ever haunted my mind - an Indian can never be an atheist or agnostic. I cannot say how it was but my attitude to religion changed suddenly and even violently' (ibid, p 127). The magic of Besant, Huxley, Darwin and Comte vanished from Chakkarai's life. As a student in Madras Christian College, his spiritualjourney took a different turn- a turnthat was to traphim in irreconcilable predicament throughoutthe rest of his life. He became interested in the Bible and read the writings of John Henry Newman whose conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 shook the Anglican church and community in England. Newman's influence on Chakkarai was vast, though, as we would see, he reinvented it in the context of anti-colonial nationalism.8 Later in his life, Chakkarai of wrote, '...alongside of the religious literature India..., next to the English Bible and Shakespeare, none has exercised so potent an influence on the inner springs of my life as Newman whose writings I began to study from my college days' (ibid. p 63). The influence of William Miller, the most well known principal of the Madras Christian College and a Christian liberal who joined hands with the Indians in their social reform initiatives, was also lasting on him.9 In 1903, he took baptism at the chapel of the Madras Christian College and joined the Free Church of Scotland (VC, Vol I, pp 2-3). Though his family resented his taking baptism, he continued to live in his 'Hindu home' for six years after his conversion to Christianity. Explaining the reasons for such tolerance in his family, he noted,
'...this unusual phenomenon was a result of various causes,

among which I may mention the fact that my Hindu relatives at home are not the usual orthodox type, and that the caste association to which I belonged was so indifferent that it did not excommunicate my family' (VC, vol II, p 18). Later influenced by Indian nationalism, Chakkarai led a Young Liberals' League that discussed social and religious questions common to Indian Christians. This group reconstituted itself as the south Indian Christo Samaj in the 1910s and explored the possibilities of Indianising Christianity. Chakkarai also edited the nationalist Christian journal Christian Patriot from 1911 onwards.10 Before I proceed to discuss Chakkarai's moves to Indianise Christianity,a couple of comments on his conversion are in place. His conversion to Christianity was quite different in character

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from that of the lower castes in the 19th century Tamil Nadu. The lower caste conversions - in particularby the 'untouchable' Parayars,Pallars and Shanars - were not often individual, but took place on a mass scale at the level of community. This had given rise to the term 'mass movements' in the missionary literature.In addition, the lower caste conversions were, at an importantlevel, motivated by the desire to negotiate collective injuries based on caste and hence grounded in certain critique of the actually existing Hinduisms. As several studies have shown, it is hardly possible to make sense of their conversion within the binary of spiritual vs material that was central to the 19th century western Protestantism.11 The story of Chakkarai's conversion to Christianity stands in sharpcontrast. It was clearly individual, spiritually-inclined and not based on the kind of critique of Hinduism made by the lower caste converts.12 may note here that the upper caste converts usually foregrounded their putative spirituality in distinguishing themselves from the lower caste converts.13 Chakkaraiwrote of his conversion thus: 'The image of the Lord grew in my mind slowly, while the figures of my Hindu bhakti retreated into the shadows without being dismissed as either phantoms of a troubled imagination or as delusions of the Evil One. That is to say, the supremacy of Jesus in my life took place without those violent upheavals of psychological conversion with which the records of the Indian Christian converts are so full' (VC, vol II, p 129). Then this is a statement which is only partly true. As we shall see at the end of the essay, it was an afterthoughtof a nationalist.

III

Pluralising Christianity
Can Christianity, which according to Vengal Chakkarai is western, be Indianised? This was one of the basic questions that Chakkaraihad to confront as a nationalist. He was well aware of the possible universalist critique of Indianising Christianity. He wrote, 'Why should you, still say some of our critics, labour to Indianise Christianity?Is it not a universal religion? Can there be an eastern and western Christianity?Their demand is to banish all these differentiationsof east and west on the score of a common christianity.' He responded to his universalist interlocutors thus: 'In their judgment; our religion (Christianity) is an unchanging and unchangeable deposit, once for all delivered to the saints of the old. And the duty of modem saints is to roll it up in silken clothes and hand it on to the saints yet to be. We cannot add one jot or title to this common deposit nor take away from it' (ibid, p 45). Chakkarai consciously and thoughtfully summoned up the history of Christianity in the west to counter any doubt about its mutability in time and space. He posed, 'Was it not the great historian, Gibbon, who said that if St Paul came back to revisit the glimpses of the moon and visited the churches of Rome, Geneva and Canterbury and beheld the stately ceremonial and heard the interpretationof his own words, he himself would be at a loss to understandwhat god was being worshipped in them.' This historicity of western Christianity had, for him, already produced an array of different Christianities: 'If it is true that Christianity were one and the same, ...why should not Rome and Canterbury unite in the celebration of the common faith?' (ibid, p 46). Moving back from the west to the local context, he cited the instance of the divide between the South Indian United Churchandthe Anglicans in Indiaas a case of Christianity's plural being. In the same vein, he treated the Bible as an open book amenable to multiple interpretations (VC, vol I, p 8). In Economic and Political Weekly

short, for him, Christianity already lives many - often irreconcilable - lives and its furtherpluralisation is merely an extension of its past. For him, thus there was nothing extraordinary in his suggestion to reinvent another Christianity - an Indian Christianity. Christianity could have plural existences, but it however does not follow that such plurality was a result of national re-imaginations. Chakkarai thought otherwise and once again returned to the historic Christianityof the west for his evidence. He claimed that the proliferation of different denominational churches in the west was an articulationof nationalism. He identified reformation as the critical watershed in churches breaking away from the authority of Rome and evolving into national institutions. He cited the cases of the Presbyterians of Scotland, the Lutheranism of Germany and Scandinavia, and the reformed faith of Geneva, and asked '[A]re these... national in their characteristics, Scottish, German and Swiss?' (VC, vol II, p 80). Basing himself on these western analogies, he claimed that the 'sickly and stunted growth' of Christianity in India was because it was not yet national, but remained a transplantfrom elsewhere, the west. To expect an unmodified western Christianity to thrive in India was, according to him, to 'expect the oak to flourish on the banks of the Ganges or Kaveri as the banyan tree on the banks of the Thames' (ibid). Chakkarai, however, faced the dilemma of how far it would be legitimate to relativise the plurality of Christianity. To deny a universal core to it would amount to an invalidation of the truth of Christianity. His claim for difference within Christianity on the ground of the nation undergoes an awkward change here. The 'differences based on divergent interpretationsof the same Christianity,' according to him, 'are not contradictions and negations but complementary presentations of the same Truth...' And the 'Indianisation of Christianity is to be one of the many different and converging interpretations of Christianity that the Indian religious spirit shall weave out of the material of our religious life' (ibid, p 46 (emphasis mine)). In the face of Hindu nationalism, it was not easy for Chakkaraito be at once a Christian and an Indian. His dilemma was one of how to retain his Christian identity even while being a nationalist.

IV Is What to Indianise Christianity?


The choice made by Chakkarai on how to be an Indian was almost unambiguous. He worked out an identity between the Hindu and the Indian. A comparison between a Hindu-looking Christian and a western-looking Hindu made by him in 1931 is an interesting instance to begin our discussion about the basis on which he wanted to shape a nationalised Christianity. His comparison runs as follows: Of what use is it to change externalswhich must be an expression of the inner mind, while the mind itself remainsunconverted?... Thus are those (Christians)who retain their kuduni, the tuft of hair on their head, the crown of Hinduism,but every thoughtof theirs with regardto their religion had its origin in a region far remotefromIndia.They imitated theirold-fashioned Hindubrethren in externals with a vengeance, so much so that the Anglicised Hindu looked upon them as strange monsters, probablywearing the proverbialsheep-skin to hide a more ferocious beast. This was moreimpressivewhen anomaly,for suchit appeared, rendered we saw some of our Hindu friends, who, while they affected the English twang and sportedsome shape of an outlandishhat, were so naturallyIndianin their mentaland moraloutlook (ibid, p 87).

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Chakkarai's premises are quite explicit here. Hindus, by the very fact of being Hindus, are 'so naturally Indian in their mental and moral outlook'. Their westernisation would always remain superficial. But a Christian's so-called Hindu/Indian-lookcan be deceptive, imitative and a mere masquerade hiding his/her unIndian inner self. A Christian's Indian-ness needs validation and requires conscious labour to establish. Why did Chakkaraichoose to slide the Indian into the Hindu, conflate the political with the religious? We may never get the answer. But we can certainly speculate. It could be because of Chakkarai's own Hindu past. It could also be because of the political mood of the times when majoritariannationalism was imagining the nation as Hindu. Or it could be a mere failure of imagination - an imagination trapped within the Orientalist constructionof the spiritual east- to recover the nation's multiple selves outside the religious. Perhaps, all these and other factors to contributed Chakkarai'schoice of the Indianas Hindu.However, I would note that his personal history seems surely to intervene here. For a lower caste Indian, Hinduism was not that easily available as the site to imagine the nation. It demands complex and painful renegotiations given the presence of caste. In other words, from the very beginning Chakkarai's Indianisationproject was based on fundamental estrangement with the history of the wider Christian community that was composed of lower castes, and certainly marked by his upper caste Hindu upbringing. He wrote, 'Hinduism has never been to me a prison-house from which I sought an escape...I did not and could not think, nor do I so now, that the burdenwas laid on me to destroy my Hindu religious heritage' (ibid, p 129). Again, he likened Hinduism to the figure of the mother and Christianity to new-found love: 'It was like a youth in the spring-tide of time, turning from the love of his mother to his first love. The mother is not erased in the ecstasy of new passion' (ibid). Chakkarai, in holding onto Hinduism as the ground for Indianising Christianity, represented his own Christianity as an extension of his Hindu past. He announced, 'In my individual case, my religion (Christianity), or the beginnings and solid foundation of what little religion I now happen to possess, were laid in my Hindu home...' (ibid, pp 41-42). And if he was drawn to Lord Jesus, it too was because of his Hindu background: You can hardly get a true Indian to admit that he can be taught religion,andthatby a foreigner... for it can neverbe taughtexcept when the soul has attainedthe desired state or paccuvam, as it is called in Tamil, and by a Guru. Besides, teaching the life of the LordJesus is not initiationinto transcendental mystery.In my own case, it was the mysteriousnatureof Christthat arrestedmy his attention; retiringto the mountainto pray,his suddensilences, his sadness, his detachmentfrom the world...(ibid, p 43). And, according to him, it was not so much scripture teaching in the college, but Swami Vivekananda's Vedanta, which made him a Christian: '...the mere scripture teaching would not have made any impression on my mind and lately by the advent of Swami, whose conception of the catholicity of the Vedanta destroyed my Hindu prejudices against Christianity as a foreign religion. It was he that first taught me to regard Christianity as an essentially oriental faith' (ibid, p 42 (emphasis mine)). Vivekananda perhaps would have never thought and even be shocked that his Vedanta would produce a Christian out of a Hindu. The travels of ideas are often wayward and recalcitrant. Chakkaraiinvokes time and again his Hindu past in his writings as if a refrain. Its reiteration has a quality of pathos. While it indexes Chakkarai's desire to reconcile his Christianity with

Hinduism so as to be an Indian, it also foretells that his desire might not be realisable. We have to stay with Chakkarai's Indianisationagenda a little longer, before we turnto the question of Indian nationalism.

V and WhichHinduism Why?


The choice of Hinduism on which Chakkaraiwanted to model his Indian Christianity was very specific. It was a model of searchingfor individual salvation throughpersonal spiritualquest. He wrote, 'The Indian mind is still individualistic in its bent, and every man has ultimately to work out his own salvation. Temple worship therein, all the rituals and theologies, can never lead to ultimate moksha. It is the quest of the lonely soul, helped in the lower stages by these... in the higher reaches of the atman, individualism is the supreme principle...' Given his emphasis on the personal, he characterised his idealised Hinduism as free of institutional scaffolding. He claimed, 'There is no desire to have anything like the shepherding system (in Hinduism). No centralised conciliar or papal authority;no solicitude to safeguard the purity and integrity of the doctrine' (ibid, p 206). Chakkarai's choice of such a Hinduism devoid of institutionalised practices, was indeed on purpose. There were other models of Hinduism surely available to him. For example, from the middle of the 19th century, Hinduism was being reorganisedinstitutionally in the Tamil region: 'In the SadurVeda Siddhanta Sabha [of the 1840s]... all of the basic features of a modem ideological movement were developed - printing press, newspaper, tracts, distribution network, meetings, membership lists, mufassalagent, andorganisedcampaigns to influence 'ptblic' opinion...'14 Its members imitated 'Christianworship with icripture reading, preaching, singing and Trinitarian benediction (invocation of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva)...'15 Similar efforts were once again afoot in the 1880s. In 1881, the Hindu Preaching Society was founded. In 1887, Sivasankara Pandiah, a Gujarati brahman,founded the Hindu Tracts Society. J S Chandler of the American Madura Mission, for example, wrote in 1898: 'They (the Hindus) preached Hinduism in the streets; give religious instructions in their schools and even open their schools with prayers to their gods...In imitation of the mission boarding school, the great Hindu temple in Madurai has opened a religious boardingschool in which the childrenaretaughttenetsof Hinduism at the expense of temple funds.'16 A sensitive political mind as that of Chakkaraicould not have missed this model of Hinduism which, in deeply ambivalent ways, was an already 'Christianised' Hinduism.17But he shunned such religiosity as un-Indian. Thus he claimed that his reluctance to discuss personal mattersrelating to his religiosity was because the Indian 'shuns publicity in religious mattersand to whom compulsion of any sort in religion is utterly un-Indian' (VC, vol II, p 44). As we shall see, it was certainly the issue of publicity - or of visibility - was the key criteria behind Chakkarai's choice of this particular form of Hinduism. Taking such personalised Hinduism as the model for Christianity, he made a series of suggestions about Indianising Christianity. First and foremost, he discounted the importance of church as an organisation. Invoking his personal history of growing up 'in an atmosphereof non-institutional religion, where the largest freedom for worship and speculation is tolerated...,' he declared, 'In my humble life, the Lord Christ has been always first and last, and the church nowhere...' (ibid, p 25). He made a distinction between Christianity and 'Churchianity' - a

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distinction which was fashionable at that time among some (ibid, p 29n). Apart from the fact that Chakkarai's Indianisation demanded a retreat of Christianity into the realm of the personal, therewas anothercontext that informed his critique of the church organisation. It was the control of the church organisations by the European missionaries. He found their presence a hindrance to free debate (ibid, p 28). However, he also tried to reinterpret the demand for greater participation of Indians in church affairs within his model of personal-spiritual-quest-as-Indianisation. For him, such demands were not about redistribution of power or a revolt against western missionary domination. He asserted thatthey were an 'outwardmanifestation of the longing for deeper realitiesthancivilisation, cultureandconventional morality which have been mistaken for Christianity' (ibid, p 29). But he too was aware that what he terms 'Churchianity' would not disappear that easily. It was an essential part of Christians as a community. Given this he suggested that the church should give up all visible marks of external difference. He lamented, 'Alas! Today it is a very cold, formal, and even lifeless affair through the medium of a church building, pastors, their robes, their language and music - all foreign with none of the association of our Indian heart and sentiment...' (ibid, p 84). He, 'in the interestof real Indianisation,' wanted the liturgical Tamil, church music, ecclesiastical architecture,the vestment of the pastors, and the rites and ceremonies, to be changed (ibid, p 83). We may recall here that, for Chakkarai,adoption of things foreign would not make a Hindu un-Indian. But a Christian's Hindu/Indianlook could not always be trusted. Yet, the only solution that he could offer to the dilemma of negotiating the hyphenated identity of an Indian Christians was to make a plea to assume a Hindu look: '...Instead of kneeling, let us prostrate - Sastangam and Askiangam. Let us burn camphor, break coconuts and consume ghee. Instead of bread and wine, substitute rice and water' (VC, vol I, p 10). Thus an Indianised Christianity had to abandon all public and visible marks of difference. In the place of Church-centric Christianity, Chakkarai suggested the model of bhakti for the Indian Christians. Of the Christian worship in churches, he complained, 'All day long we have been trained to sit, kneel, and stand up with the regularity of an automaton till we have forgotten that our longing for the Lord there are elements of intoxication that the more staid of our western brethrenwould look upon with ill-conceived horror' (VC, vol II, p 88).18 Drawing up a list of signs of true bhakti from the-writingof Arumuga Navallar of Jaffna (a virulent antiChristian who modelled an institutionalised Saivism which mimicked Christianity) such as tears of happiness, trembling of the limbs, hair of the body standing on end, feeling in the throat, and stammering speech, he argued, 'I do not think that western preachers should try to banish from Christian life the characteristicnatural elements of Indianbhakti.' According to Chakkarai, such personal bhakti was not against the spirit of Christianity: 'Bhakti, in India, recall the experiences that St Paul described in his Corinthian letter, the singing, the dancing, the ecstatic trances and utter abandon of this kind of religion, known to the Saivite and Vaishnavite cults' (ibid).19 In furtherpushing Christianity into the domain of the personal, he opposed religious debates by Christian preachers. He argued that rationalconsiderations in religious matters would not appeal to the Indian mind. He asserted categorically, 'The logical victory of Christianityis impossible...' (ibid, p 36). If the Hindusemployed rationalarguments against Christianity, it was because they were forced 'to borrow weapons from the armoury of anti-Christian publications in the west' in the face of Christianpreachers' attack

on Hinduism (ibid, pp 35-36). Only way in which Christianity would grow in the non-rational spiritual soil of India was by the way of Jesus becoming the Istadeva of the Hindus. He was indeed confident about this possibility: 'He will become the Ishtadeva of many, as already He is of some even today...' (ibid, p 53).20 In all this, the influence of cardinal Newman is more than evident. As Gauri Viswanthan notes of the non-evangelical mode of religiosity proposed by Newman: 'In calling for a more direct, unmediated relation to experience, Newman's idea of belief as disembodied subjectivity, detached from an enclosed interpretive community that commands assent, converged with a notion of dissent as resistance to consensual thinking and institutional subordination.'21Chakkarai's attempt to model a Christianity on bhakti as personal spiritual quest, parallels with the ideas of Newman. It was not for no reason, Chakkaraiwrote of Newman as 'one of the great masters of Atma Gnana, spiritual wisdom...' (ibid, vol II, p 63).22 If Indianisationof Christianity meant rendering it invisible and make it to retreat into the domain of the personal, what would be the role of Christians in the public life of the nation? After all, Chakkaraihimself was an active nationalist. He was undoubtedly for a larger participation of the Christians in nationalist politics of the time. He faulted them for being indifferent to the political and social problems of India: If we looked a little more carefully into the social and political conditions of India, we would find that the circle of Christianity seldomcuts theorbitof nationallife at any visible points,so remote and foreign is the genius of Christianityand its operation.It has to a large extent concentratedupon sin, and redemptionfrom it; but the social and political problems which are engrossing the attentionof Hindus do not appeal to Indian Christianity,which has till now, undertheguidanceof missionaries,pursuedthe lonely path (ibid, p 37). The lonely path of the Christians may not merely be a result of missionary guidance. Missionaries did participate quite extensively in discussions and debates about politics. In not recognising this history, Chakkarai was to offer the Christians another way of being in politics. For him, Christians should be part of the political, but by renouncing their Christian identity. He outlines this solution in a two-part article appropriately entitled, 'Should the Indian Christian Community Continue?' published in 1932 in The Guardian, a Christian periodical from Madras. His answer was it should not. In this article, he insists on the 'absolute necessity of extinction of the Indian Church Community as a separate communal and political entity, preferably its speedy extinction' (ibid, p 100). If the Christian community chooses this path, 'it will be a new venture in India, that is,.a religious communion should renounce separatist claims and take its place within the body politic' (ibid, p 104). Here he distinguishes the Christians from the Muslims: 'We have no extraterritorial patriotismbased on religion like Muslims. Though Christians in India may sympathise with and be in religious communion with churches in the west, it does not follow that they would regard western nations with the same feeling though nominally Christian,as they would their own countrymen' (ibid). Then such a move would have its own consequences for Christians as a community. Chakkarai posed, 'But will not this be followed by the weakening, if not the wholesale withdrawal of many forms which have been till now regarded as hall marks of Christianity?' His answer was clear-cut: 'Assuredly, such a result will be inevitable, and even more so in the case of Indian Christians' (ibid). He was not bothered about such a loss, despite being aware of the complex and often violent histories that

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mediated the formation of Indian Christian communities. Thus being in community and still being national was not a possible solution for the Christianof Chakkarai.Only in its death, Christian community can reach the destination of nation. He approvingly quoted K T Paul that Christians should be like salt, only useful as it is dissolved (ibid, p 100). Elsewhere he wrote, 'If Christianity is to win it must die in India. It must deny itself and take up its cross' (quoted in VC, vol I, p 11). Chakkarai's desire to attune the Christian practices, institutions, and community to the ideal of invisibility was yet another moment of his estrangement with the Christian community at large. As William Connolly has argued, '...what appears from one side as the means by which attunement is fostered often appearsfrom anotheras the terms through which painful artifices of normalisationare enhanced and legitimated.'23 Chakkaraiwas awarethathis solution would be opposed at least by some sections of the Christiancommunity. Chakkaraisimply characterisedthem as 'conservative and communal' (VC, vol II, p 105). In illustrating the nationalist pressures to which Chakkarai is responding, let me quote an obituary on K T Paul, a nationalist and the first Indiangeneral secretaryof the Young Men's Christian Association, by M K Gandhi: ...His Christianityappearedto me to be broadand tolerant.It not only did not interferewith his being a thorough nationalist;on in thecontrary, his case it seemedto havedeepenedhis nationalism. In nationalistcircles it will always be remembered,to the credit of the diseased,thathe stoutlyopposed the demandfor any special concessions for ChristianIndiansin the forthcomingconstitution, and believingas he didthatcharacter meritwouldalwayscommand not only proper treatmentbut respectful attention...24 This statement by M K Gandhi made in 1931, precisely the time when Chakkarai was contemplating on the dissolution of the Christian community, points to twin nationalist demands placed on the Christians. First, their nationalism had to be proved and endorsed by the Hindus. Interestingly, Gandhi's approval of K T Paul's nationalism was still marked by traces of doubt. His Christianity still only appeared to be tolerant, and seemed to have deepened his nationalism. Second, the Christians should renounce their religious identity in politics. Chakkarai was in fact responding to these demands of nationalism.

VI of the Nation Revenge


In this last section, let me turnto anotherChristianityof Vengal Chakkarai- a Christianity that was not under pressure from the nation. That Christianity comes through in remarkableclarity in an exchange on the question of baptism Chakkarai had with O Kandaswami Chetty. Born in 1867, Kandaswami Chetty, like Vengal Chakkarai,was educated at the Madras Christian College and was deeply influenced by William Miller. He worked for a while as the secretary of Miller and wrote a biography in praise of him. He taught English literature at the college for 32 years (1892-1924).25 During his student days, he became a believer in Christ, but refused to join the church and take baptism. In 1915, he was invited by the missionary conference to present a paper on his choice of remaining merely a Christian at heart and outside the church. Kandaswami Chetty gave his paper a suitable title: 'Why I am not a Christian - A Personal Statement.'26 In the course of the paper, he openly expressed his faith in Christ: 'It is true that I believe in Christ as the saviour of men.'27 Then he rejected the need to declare his faith in Christ to the

world. He asserted, 'Communicating it (his faith in Christ) not by mere words which, too often springing from no experience on the part of the speaker and unrelated to the experience of the world at large, convey no meaning such as thrills and throbs through a man's being - words, words, words, which serve as shibboleths in the war of organised religions and serve rather to alienate than to enlighten.'28 Instead of words he chose testimony through reform work in the Hindu community as his way of being in the world as a believer in Christ. At the cost of brevity, let me quote Kandaswami Chetty, So long as thebeliever'stestimonyforChristis open, andas long as his attitude towardsHindusociety in generalis criticaland,towards social andreligiouspracticesin consistentwith the spiritof Christ in particular, protestant practicallyprotestant, allow him to is and I struggle his way to the light, with failure here and failure there perhapsbut with progressand success on the whole. The spiritof Christis peace-destroying spirit,I may assureyou. If you cooperate with thatspirit,yourChristianbelieverin Hindusociety will come out all right in the end. He may not join your churchbut he will the prepare way fora movementfromwithinHindusociety towards a Christwho shall fulfil India's highest aspirations impartthat and life of freedom for which she has been panting for ages.29 Given this agenda of reforming the Hindu society as a believer in Christ, Kandaswamy Chetty expressed his contempt for those who chose 'to cut themselves off from those whom in their duty to be in touch with...'30 In other words, his duty was towards the Hindus and there was no need for him to join the church, despite being a believer in Christ. Chakkaraicountered his friend Kandaswami Chetty in a forceful essay written in defence of his own conversion and the need to accept baptism. First, he was quite critical of Kandaswami Chetty for not accounting for the history of suffering and isolation faced by vast sections of the converts to Christianity and treating them with contempt (VC, vol II, p 20). Further, he insisted that a Christian needed to publicly declare his faith to affirm his difference in a society that is predominantly Hindu: My friend may be surprised that I regard the rite of baptism as even more importantin this country than it is anywhere else... If Christianitycould grow within Hinduism, then it would become part and parcel of the prevailing philosophy of India and ultimately lose its distinctiveness. The only remedy is to foster Christianity beyond the pale of seductive atmosphere of Hinduism, and therefore the disciple is obliged to ally himself with an organisation outside his own society (ibid, pp 21-22). He too wanted the Christian community to grow in numbers. Writing about the enthralling kalachebams delivered by a new convert to Christianity,.Aiya Dorai Bagavatar, he appealed to his Christian god, 'May<he Lord bless his work and bring many others like him from Hiniduismto make Christianity the religion of our people' (ibid, p 24). In short, Chakkarai's Christianity, before its encounter with nationalism, acknowledged Christians as a distinct community, evinced interest in its growth and sought a place for marks of differences in the public. We have seen at lengthwhatnationalismdid to thisChristianityof Chakkarai.It forced him to seek a place to silence it. In interesting ways, his nationalisedChristianityaligned itself with Kandaswami Chetty's 'Why I am not a Christian'. If Kandaswami Chetty declared, '...words, words, words, which serve as shibboleths in the war of organised religions and serve ratherto alienate than to enlighten,' Chakkarai,in Indianising his Christianity, claimed 'The Guru teaches without words, as the Vedanta says, by the gracious eyes, the mind and the touch, just as the fish, the tortoise, and the hen respectively hatch their eggs... The Christian must

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become the Guru but it is far more trying and difficult than teach the Bible with the help of a commentary' (ibid, p 43). Despite the similarity between their war against words, there were deeper and substantial differences. Chakkarai being a Christian, his war against words was an incitement to silence. All those several thousand words he published were to plead with the Christian community, in the name of nation, to contain their words to the domain of the personal. In other words, what nationalism laid out for him as his legitimate role in politics was to prove to the majoritariannation that his commitment is not divided between the Christian community and the nation. The realm of his politics could not be expansive enough to accommodate a range of public issues. For instance, when he wrote of the Hindus, he could only talk of them never critically but in the most idealised terms. And the issue of caste which turned out to be an important site of politics in the early 20th century Tamil politics eluded his writings, though he had a brief sojourn with the Justice Party in 1927-28.31 In contrast, Kandaswami Chetty being 'not a Christian,' his silencing of words about his faith in Christ could translate into active intervention in the Hindu social domain. He was radically critical of Hindu social practices which spawned a range of inequities. As a strong advocate of social reform, he edited Social ReformAdvocate and aligned himself with the Justice Party. He used the Madras Christian College Magazine as a vehicle for his nonbrahminism.32 Interestingly, he was one of those who disrupted the meeting organised by the Congress to form the Madras Presidency Association in which Chakkarai was very active.33 Later in his life, he joined the Indian National Congress, without giving up his critique of the Hindu practices. In concluding this essay, let me cite an instance of Chakkarai unwittingly transgressing the boundaries of politics set for him by nationalism.As a nationalist and a non-brahmin,he was active in the Madras Presidency Association. He, as a member of the MPA, laboured a lot to contest the right of the Justice Party to represent the non-brahmins and sought reservation of electoral seats for the non-brahmins.Chakkaraiwas indeed applauded for his nationalism by the Hindu nationalists. When the final award of seats was declared by Lord Meston in 1919, it was much lower than the number of seats offered earlier by the Tamil brahmin nationalists and the governor of Madras Lord Wellington. The brahminnationalists did not resent the minimalist Meston award but lapsed into silence. Like othernon-brahminCongressites such as PattuKesava Pillai and Thiru Vi Kalyanasundaram,Chakkarai too expressed his resentment.Characterisingthe brahminsas 'one of the most clannish oligarchies in the world,' he and Kesava Pillai claimed, 'He (Meston) came to bring peace but he has left behind a sword in the shape of this award. The cleavage between the two sections of the people is wider today than ever it has been in the past...'34 That was, for majoritarian nationalism, a moment of Chakkarai the role assigned to him in the nation-in-the-making. transgressing His right to represent the non-brahmin interests was attacked, for he was a convert to Christianity. Under the column, 'Peeps into Public Life by An Intruder',Annie Besant' s New India wrote, 'It is truethatMrChakkaraiis a member of the MadrasPresidency Association. But this Association was formed of all "nonbrahmanas"- those who are not brahmanas - at a time when there was no clear idea about the electorates that were to be formed. But now that separate representation has been granted to the Indian Christiancommunity - Mr Chakkaraihimself takes an active part in Indian Christian meetings - one cannot understand what right Mr Chakkarai has to be a spokesman of the

non-brahmana Hindus in the matter of reservation of seats...Mr Chakkarai, I am afraid, has no place in the award controversy.'35 At the very moment when Chakkarai moved beyond his assigned political mandate by majoritarian Indian nationalism and broke his silence, Indian/Hindu nationalism recovered him as a Christian and denied him the right to speak about and for the rest of the nation.36 Chakkaraiconceded the most to Indiannationalism by reducing his Christianity to great invisibility and making it a nonproselytising faith. But however much Chakkaraitried to subvert his Christian identity, it continued to produce at least residues of difference with the Hindu nation. His Christianity may not be in the public, yet it existed in the personal; his Christianity is Indian, yet converged towards the universal Christian truth; Christians may not have extraterritorial patriotism based on religion, yet they may sympathise with religious communion with churches in the west; Hinduism could be his mother, yet he did not give up his first love. Nationalism took its revenge based on these residues of difference.37 At the same time, the mode in which Chakkarai sought to fashion a nationalised Christianity made him an inconsequential figure in the Christian community. Writing about Chakkaraiand his Madras group, for example, it was noted, 'It was largely critical of organised Christianity and stood ratheraloof from the aspirations which animated Indian church leaders at that time.'38 Comparing church leaders such as the Bishop of Dornakal V S Azariah (the first Indian to be ordained a bishop who, rooted deeply in the Christiancommunity, introduced within the church indigenous forms of worship and evangelism) with Chakkarai's group, Sundkler notes, 'They were not charmed by the academic romanticism which thought out Indian forms in theory and in vacuvo.'39In other words, Chakkarai's Indianisation of Christianity failed to transform itself from being an epistemic project to produce a set of practices for the Christians to be in a new way in the world.40 Thus it could never become ontic. Such a transformationis only possible if the epistemic projectis grounded incommunity.41 as we have seen all along, Chakkarai's But Indianisation was based on an estrangement with the community. His marginalitywithinthe widerChristiancommunitywas thus intense. The nation as mother is no ordinary mother. She demands undivided love and when it was not forthcoming, she could devour her own children. If Chakkarai realised it, he kept it to himself. He continued to seek his nation in his Hindu past. Nation was at least nostalgia for him. Even as nostalgia, it was not available to the vast sections of the lower caste Christians whose spiritual journeys began in a critique of Hinduism. Chakkarai was untouched by them. Abandoning the community and constrained by the nation, he was one of the many lonely figures Indiannationalismhad spawned in its 'marchto freedom'. Despite fundamentally differing historical contexts, Chakkarai's fate as a convert was in strange ways not different from that of his guru Cardinal Newman, another convert. Newman's conversion to Catholicism made his nationalism suspect in ProtestantEngland. His final resolution of the dilemma of negotiating contradictory demands of English nation and religious difference did not differ much from that Chakkarai. As Gauri Viswanathan captures for us this inelegant resolution of Newman: Caughtbetweentheconflictingdemandsof secularnational identity and local religious differences, Newman turns his back on conversion as a dynamic principle of change - the action of belief upon the world. Insteadhe embracesconversion as an act of selfconfirmationand discovery of what is already latently present as religious teleology. The radical revisionist possibility of

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between of as a is conversion reversed, achievingpoint compatibility to the and Catholicism Englishness challenge the replaces earlier of posedby his conversion.42 desirability nationhood It is an irony of history that the revenge of anti-colonial nationalismwas not different from that of the coloniser's nationalism.I2
Address for correspondence:

mssp@eth.net

Notes
[Firstand foremost I should thank Y Vincent Kumaradoss,but for whose generositywith substantialsource material,this paperwould not have been written. An initial version of this paper was presented at a seminar on 'Discourse, Democracy and Difference' organised by the departmentof English, University of Baroda, and Shahitya academy, New Delhi. The comments offered by Shail Mayaram,Deepak Mehta, E V Ramakrishnan andSusie Tharu,duringthe seminar,were extremelyhelpful.The initialdraft of the paperwas readand commentedextensively upon by AnandhiS, Vijay Baskar,Theodore Baskaran,RajanKrishnan,Vincent Kumaradoss, Aditya Theircommentshave greatlyhelped me NigamandRavindran Vaithesspara. in revising the paper. I am indeed grateful to all of them.] 1 P T Thomas (ed.), Vengal Chakkarai,vol. II (Bangalore:The Christian LiteratureSociety, 1981), p 28 (hereafter VC, in the text). 2 Foranexcellent accountof the historyandtheology of the Hindu-Christian Churchof Lord Jesus, see Vincent Kumaradoss,'Negotiating Colonial Church of Late Nineteenth Century Christianity:The Hindu-Christian

Tirunelveli,' South Indian Studies, No 1, January-June1996. See also 'The HistoryandTeachingsof the HinduChristian M ThomasThangaraj, CommunityCommonlyCalledNattuSabaiin Tirunelveli',IndianChurch History Review, vol V, no 1, June 1971. The Christian 3 KajBagoo, Pioneersof IndigenousChristianity (Bangalore: Institutefor the Study of Religion and Society, 1969), pp 1-2 and 7-10. For more details on the National Churchof India, see Bengt Sundkler, Church of South India: The Movement Towards Union 1900-1947 (LutterworthPress, London, 1953), pp 26-27. 4 ThoughHinducommunalmobilisationin theTamilregionduringtheearly 20th century was never as intense as in north India and was marginal to the mainstream politics, therewere surelyattemptsat such mobilisation. For the activities of Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabhain Tamil region, see S M Abdul KhaderFakhri,'Caste,EthnicityandNation in the Politics of the Muslims of Tamil Nadu, 1930-1967,' (Cambridge University, PhD thesis)),pp 76-106. Similarly,though Cambridge,1998 (unpublished the scale of communalviolence in the Tamil region was not comparable with that of north India, there was instances of such violence. See J B P More, The Political Evolutionof Muslims in Tamil Nadu and Madras 1930-1947 (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1997), pp 93-102. 5 These details are primarilytaken from D Veeraraghavan,'The Rise and Growthof the LabourMovement in the City of Madrasand Its Environs AD 1818-1939' (Department Humanitiesand,Social Sciences, Indian of Institute of Technology, Madras, 1987 (unpublished PhD thesis)), pp 441-42. 6 GeoffA Oddie,'Anti-Missionary FeelingandHinduRevivalismin Madras: TheHinduPreaching TractSocieties c. 1886-1891' in FredW Clothey, and Images of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South India (New Era Publications,Madras, 1982), pp 219-20. 7 Rev Henry Rice, Native Life in South India being Sketchesof the Social and ReligiousCharacteristicsof the Hindus(The ReligiousTractSociety, London, 1889), p 123.

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Economicand Political Weekly December27, 2003

Outside 8 Fora brilliant analysisof Newman's ideas,see GauriViswanathan, the Fold: Conversion,Modernityand Belief(Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton, 1998), Chap 2. 9 William Miller's activities were framed by the inclusivist 'fulfilment theology' which, within an evolutionist scheme, did not discount the in of religioustruths otherreligions,butsoughttheirfulfilment Christianity. Withinsuch a scheme, he discountedevangelisationbut placedemphasis on spreading 'Christianvalues' through higher education. On William Miller'scolossal influencein Madraspolitics andhis theology, see Gerald British Christians, Indian Nationalists and the Raj Studdert-Kennedy, (OxfordUniversityPress, Delhi, 1991), pp 118-19. I would also add, on the strengthof Studdert-Kennedy's importantbook, that the 'fulfilment theology' became the dominantparadigmamong the British during the inter-warperiod. 10 Bengt Sundkler, Church of South India, p 86. 11 Forexample,see Dick Kooiman,Conversionand Social Equalityin India: The LondonMissionarySociety in South Travancorein the Nineteenth New Delhi, 1989); and Eliza F Kent, 'Respectability: Century(Manohar, in ConversiontoChristianity ColonialSouthIndia',University Genderand of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1999, (unpublishedPhD thesis). mentionsan encounter ThiruVi Kalyanasundaram 12 In his autobiography, with Chakkaraion conversion to Christianity. When he approached with the news of a youth planningto convert to Christianity, Chakkarai Chakkarai respondedthat '(One) should not convert to Christianityfor thesakeof suchthingsas womanandemployment.But it is rightto become the lover of Christ on the basis of (spiritual) commitment.' Thiru Vi ThiruVIKAValkkai Kuripugal(TheSouthIndiaSaiva Kalyanasundaram, SiddhantaWorks Publishing Society, Thirunelveli, 1982), p 454. 13 This self-definitionof the upper caste converts draws its strengthfrom the missionaryclaim that the lower caste conversions was not motivated alone. To give an extreme example, Rev RobertCaldwell by spirituality wrote of the motives of the catechumenthus: 'It appearsto me to be a waste of time to ask ignorant semi-civilised heathen rustics by what motivestheyhavebeen influencedin consentingto be taughtChristianity'. (Rev J L Wyatt (ed), Reminiscencesof Bishop Caldwell (Addison and Co, Madras,1894), p 131). Such an understanding gave rise to the term 'rice Christians'in the mission literatureto refer to lower caste converts. It is theironyof thetimesthatthis missionaryconstruction whichseparates the spiritualfrom the material, is the basis on which the Hindu Right is seeking a ban on conversion today. 14 R E Frykenberg,'On Roads and Riots in Tinnevelly:RadicalChangeand Ideology in MadrasPresidency During the 19th Century,' South Asia, IV (2), December 1982, p 46. 15 Hugald Grafe, History of Chritianityin India: Tamil Nadu in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Church History Association of India, Bangalore 1990), p 158. 16 Y Vincent Kumaradoss,'ProtestantMissionary Impact and Quest for National TamilNaduExperience1900-1921,'(Madras Identity: University, Madras, 1983 (UnpublishedPhD thesis)), p 41n. 17 One need to emphsise that such instituionalisedform of Christianitywas only one among several modes in which Christianitywas practised in Europeeven in the modern period. 18 We need to keep in mind that this was no rebellion against institutional discipline broughtin by colonial modernity.Chakkarai,throughouthis and life, functioned rathercomfortably successfullyin suchinstitutionslike MadrasHighCourt,MadrasCorporation MadrasLegislativeCouncil. and 19 Gospel According to St Paul seems to have made a great influence on the educated Indian Christiansof the time. A fuller explorationof this appealis, however,going to be a theme of my futureresearch.See Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj: Imperial Mission and Missionary Imperialism(Sage Publications, Delhi, 1998), p 94. 20 He also noted, 'Afteryearsof carefulstudyandwatching,the Indianmind, today, makes a clear cut distinctionbetween Jesus and Christianity,and even between Christianityand western civilisation. This is, we believe, one of the greateststeps towardsa fuller knowledge of the Lord, highly credible to the Indian spiritual tradition.' 21 Gouri Viswanathan,Outside the Fold, pp 44-45. 22 Chakkarai disagreewith CardinalNewman's ideas on several counts did such as his Catholicism and opposition to liberalism. Despite such disagreements, his final judgment of Newman was one of positive 'And yet why find fault with him to whom the Lord gave appropriation: a bhaktiwhose elusive genius and attractivenesswill inspire many even in a land far away from his as ours?' (VC, vol II, 67).

23 William E Connolly, TheEthos of Pluralisation(Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p 14, For an excellent discussion of the relationshipbetween culture, attunementand violence, see E Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in An Anthropologyof Violence (PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, 1996), chap 7. 24 H A Popley, K TPaul: ChristianLeader(The ChristianLiterature Society, Madras, 1987), pp 241-42. Providence and the Raj, p 79. 25 Studdert-Kennedy, 26 O Kandaswami Chetty,'WhyI amnot a Christian A PersonalStatement', The Madras ChristianCollege Magazine, 1915, reprintedin Kaj Bagoo, Pioneers of Indigenous Christianity,pp 207-14. 27 Ibid, p 207. 28 Ibid, p 212. 29 Ibid, p 214. 30 Ibid, p 213. 31 He joined the JusticePartyprotestingagainstthe practiceof serving food to and students Shermadevi at Gurukulam, separately brahmin non-brahmin a nationalistschool runby VVS Aiyar. As a memberof the Justice Party, he moved the resolution in the Coimbatore Conference allowing the members of the Justice Party to join the Congress. Providence and the Raj, pp 118-19. 32 Studdert-Kennedy, Thiru Vi Ka, p 213. 33 Thiru Vi Kalyanasundaram, 34 New India, June 7, 1920. 35 New India, April 12, 1920. 36 This was not the experience of Vengal Chakkaraialone. The story of GeorgeJoseph,anotherwell knownnationalistwho labouredin the Tamil in region,was not different.His leadershipandparticipation the Vaikkam Satyagrahawhich demandedthe right of the outcastes to use the public roads surrounding the Sivan temple at Vaikkam, was opposed by M K Gandhi.He held, '(Since) the presentsatyagraha not being offered is on behalf of the untouchableChristians,the sacrifice of Messrs Joseph, SebastianandAbdulRahimcarriesno meritwith it.' This was the moment of his estrangementwith the nationalismof Indian National Congress. He too joined the Justice Partyfor a while. George GheverheseJoseph, George Joseph: The Life and Times of a Kerala ChristianNationalist (OrientLongman,Hyderabad,2003). See also Va Ra[masamy],Tamizh Periyargal (Chennai:Alliance Company, 1990), pp 60-69. 37 The story of Brahmabandhab Upadyay (1861-1907) is ratherinstructive here. His spiritualquest took him through Brahmoism, Protestantism, he Catholicism,and Vedanta.Like Chakkarai, did not give up his upper caste Hindu inheritanceand defined himself a Hindu-Catholic.It was atthemomentof his nationalism he realisedthathis Christian that identity, thoughinfused with Vedantaand hybridised,a burden.As Ashis Nandy tells us, '...he repeatedlyfaced and was deeply hurtby the hostility of some Hindunationalistspartlybecauseof his BrahmoandProtestant past but primarilybecause he was still a practisingCatholic. To finally ally their misgivings, Upadyay performedprayashchitta(penitentialrite or penance)underthe mitaksharasystem of social codes to become a Hindu again.' Ashis Nandy, TheIllegitimacyof Nationalism(OxfordUniversity Press, Delhi, 1994), p 65. 38 Bengt Sundkler, Church of South India, p 86. 39 Ibid, p 347, On Bishop V S Azariah,who disagreed with Gandhion the question of Christianconversion, see Susan Billington Harper,In the ShadowofMahatma:Bishop VSAzariahand the Travailsof Christianity in British India (Curzon Press, Surrey, 2000). 40 For a elaboratediscussion on epistemic and ontic and transformation of one into the other, see Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies, Chap 2. 41 A good contrastto Chakkaraiwould be Rev Hebert A. Popley, a white missionary who supportedIndian nationalism and tried to indigenise in Christianity Tamil Nadu.Influencedby bhakti,he was in the forefront of musicalevangelismwhereintraditional musicandperformance traditions were assimilatedinto Christianpractices.To quote an obituarynote on him, 'A Kalakshepam an Englishmanin Indiandress,playingtheviolin by and using Indianwooden cymbals, was a novelty. Everywherehe drew large audience. In Vellore, in the course of a performancehe played on theviolinandsanga song ina spirited tune-nondi sinthuwithcorresponding gestures. The whole audience broke into applause, and asked for his performancenext day also.' (Rev a Arulappan,'Rev H A Popley (An Appreciation),'TheSouth India Churchman, July 1960, p 12). This was possible for Popley because his indigenisationmove was not based on fromthe communitybuton workingwithinthe community. estrangement Popley was in fact a contemporaryof Chakkarai. 42 Gouri Viswanathan,Outside the Fold, p 72.

Economic and Political Weekly

December 27, 2003

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