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Abstract

Dalit conversion to Christianity has a long history, predating Dr Ambedkar’s call for conversion in 1935. The contexts of conversion are many; however, the strong urge among Dalits to escape the oppressive, dehumanizing socio-spiritual condition remains the chief motive. The colonial administration, and even before that, the missionaries, were the first to make interventions in the lives of the Dalits, providing access to education, employment, healthcare, and mobility. Consequently many Dalits converted to Christianity en masse. However, post conversion, they became “doubly marginalized” (Omvedt, 2009) both in terms of caste and religion. Several attacks on Dalit Christians in colonial as well as post-independence India illustrate these two bases of victimization. A few writers, such as Bama, Imayam, and Raj Gouthaman, have attempted to explore the lived experience of Dalit Christians with a focus on caste within the Catholic Church. Kalyan Rao’s Telugu novel Antarani vasantham (Untouchable Spring) is the first novel that seriously engages with the complex of Dalit conversions and in an epic fashion explores the lived experience and struggle of Telugu Dalits and Dalit Christians in history from the colonial times to the present. The primary focus of this article is to explore Kalyan Rao’s representation of Dalit experience using the optics of mission history and liberation and Dalit theologies, which I argue, enable us to contextualize the novel’s representation of Dalit habitus.

Keywords

Dalit theology Dalit Christians postcolonialism conversions Dalit historiography

Introduction

Dalits have been systematically relegated to the margins of Indian society and have been always under erasure, be it in history, literature, culture, or the narratives of the nation. G. Kalyan Rao observes that the Dalits are absent in history, for it has been the preserve of the brahmanical sections and the “upper castes”. He further notes that they do not figure even in the historiography of Kosambi or Romila Thapar (2008: 114).¹ Even the Subaltern Studies scholars, claiming to interrupt the grand narratives of history, do not really accommodate the Dalits. A similar evasion is also characteristic of diaspora studies that leave out Dalit experience. Some significant interventions, such as Braj Ranjan Mani’s Debrahmanising History (2005), to an extent attempt to interrupt this dominant tendency in historiography. Yet the ways in which colonialism impacted Dalits have not yet been explored comprehensively by postcolonial studies. In postcolonial-inflected readings of colonialism, Dalits figure chiefly as passive subjects and victims, and their varied negotiations with colonialism are either ignored or relegated to the margins. It is now important to ask what colonialism meant or means to the Dalits.

The colonial administration and European missionaries were, in an important sense, the first to make interventions in the lives of Dalits, and to engage with the question of caste. In numerous dispatches, reports, and journals, missionaries in some way or other recorded the lived experience of Dalit communities. What must be noted here is that generally, missionary writing is conflated with empire and not much distinction is made between various kinds of missionary writings — Canadian, American, and British (Johnston, 2003). There is also a general tendency to imply a causal relationship between missionary activity and colonialism. This is more pronounced in certain sociological and postcolonial studies, which see caste as a colonial invention mediated by missionary writings (Dirks, 2001; Ganguly, 2006; Pennington, 2005). This tendency, which is gaining much circulation especially among savarna² academics, is a consequence of a long process of brahmanization of India studies in Western academia, whereby the dehumanizing, oppressive, and divisive nature of caste — in history as well as contemporary experience — is deftly masked and evaded. Postcolonial scholars in the West afflicted with the guilt of empire approach colonial history with the mediation of, to use Gopal Guru’s category, the “top twice-born” Indian academics and hence see missionaries’ engagement with caste as a part of colonial strategy (Guru and Sarukkai, 2012: 16–20). Since the postcolonial position is influenced by these diasporic “twice-born” academics, the relationship between colonialism and missionary interventions in the sphere of caste is seen within the framework of “civilizing mission”, not taking into account the perspective of the victims of caste oppression. As a corrective it is necessary to see caste, to use the Saidian argument, from the “standpoint of its victims” (Said, 1979).

Nicholas Dirks’ work on caste and colonialism is illustrative of the pitfalls of postcolonial frameworks in interrogating caste in the context of colonialism and missionary enterprise. He argues that the missionaries who produced a great deal of the knowledge of caste saw it as an integral part of Hinduism rather than a social practice. These missionaries were thus responsible for introducing a split between the religious and the secular, which was later picked up by the colonial administration (Dirks, 2001). Dirks observes:

Caste was refigured as a religious system, organizing society in a context where politics and religion had never before been distinct domains of social action. The religious confinement of caste enabled colonial procedures of rule through the characterization of India as essentially about spiritual harmony and liberation. (1987: xxvii)

According to Dirks, missionaries after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny exploited the idea that the revolt was sparked by caste practices, and impressed on the colonial administration the importance of initiating measures against such practices. In Dirks’ view the knowledge produced by the missionaries resulted in the reification of caste, and was used by the colonial administration to indirectly control the natives. Much of the postcolonial scholarship on caste and religion hinges upon this thesis, barring few exceptions (Copely, 1997; Mani, 1998; Pennington, 2005). Rupa Viswanath’s The Pariah Problem (2014), for instance, situates the Dalit question within the framework of “agrarian slavery”, landlessness, and Dalit agency. She argues that the colonial administration, the native elite, and the missionaries “downplayed” the need for structural changes to alter the condition of Dalits and focused on the religious and social rather than the economic aspect of caste. Yet like most postcolonial studies, Viswanath’s work locates the question of untouchability in the missionary and colonial administrations’ “misrepresentation” of caste. Untouchability is seen in economic terms as forced labour and a condition of landlessness. How a landless Dalit comes to be “untouchable” vis-à-vis a savarna or sudra landless labourer is not explained. The analysis is not very different from certain strands of Marxist analysis which unsuccessfully try to explain caste in terms of class. The only difference is that Viswanath shifts the agency from the missionaries to the Dalits, emphasizing the ways in which they could negotiate with missionaries and the colonial administration.

The intervention of the missionaries, especially their compassion and acknowledgement of the humanity of Dalits, and their efforts to provide access to education and healthcare, attracted many “untouchable” castes. Conversion appeared as a means of escape from spiritual and social marginalization. As a result there were mass conversions all over India, especially among the chuhras in Punjab, pariahs in Tamil Nadu, and madigas and malas in the Telugu region (Pickett, 1933; Webster, 1992). These conversions elicited a hostile response from the upper castes who wished to keep the Dalits within the Hindu fold, since conversions not only altered the religious demography of the villages but also, and more importantly, altered their economies and power hierarchies. Dalits, post conversion, refused to continue in their traditional “polluting” occupations and ways of life like scavenging, removal of carcasses, carrion-eating, and beating drums before village deities (Prashad, 2001: 40–3). Contemporary missionary records and reports catalogue a number of attacks on converts (Missionary Herald, 1872: 122). Dalit conversions continue to evoke violent responses from Hindutva forces in contemporary India (Balagopal, 1991; Narula, 1999 Robinson and Kujur, 2010). Not many Dalit writings so far have engaged with questions of colonialism and conversions in any sustained manner.

The novel

The theme of Dalit conversions figures in a minor way in many novels in the bhashas as well as Indian writing in English. Unnava Laxminarayana’s Malapalli, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and K. Sivarama Karantha’s Choma’s Drum offer us an “upper-caste” gaze within a Hinduized nationalist imaginary. Writers like Raj Gouthaman, Imayam, and Bama, meanwhile, are preoccupied with the contemporary Dalit condition within Christianity and fail to connect it to the larger dynamics of the Hindu social order. To understand this limitation, it is necessary to grasp the peculiarities of mission history in India. On the one hand, Catholic missionaries, in their attempt to gain “upper-caste” converts, permitted the practice of caste among the converts. Consequently caste hierarchies continued post conversion, and Dalit converts became the victims of oppression and discrimination within the church. The Protestant missions, on the other hand, opposed caste and for that reason there were very few “upper-caste” converts; thus the Protestant church came to be predominantly Dalit. Many commentators on the Dalit condition within the church fail to understand this aspect of church history. It is also important to note that savarna commentators on Dalit literature cleverly contain the agency and radical dynamics of Dalit conversion, either by invoking colonialism or by foregrounding the oppression of Dalits within the Church and the “futility” of conversions (Jain, 2016).

In this context, G. Kalyan Rao’s Telugu novel Antarani vasantham (2000), translated as Untouchable Spring (2010), acquires the distinction of being the first novel to engage with the complex dynamics of Dalit conversions in history and their contemporary significance. Kalyan Rao is one of the most powerful writers in Telugu, and is a political activist. A Dalit, he is a member of the Revolutionary Writers’ Association (VIRASAM). Untouchable Spring, hailed as a landmark in Telugu literature, is a complex narrative, which resists easy generic categorization. It is a hybrid of varied genres such as journal, song, sermon, myth, mission reports, church records and letters, and various mnemocultures, which Kalyan Rao imaginatively weaves into a powerful lyrical narrative which is realist in the sense that it is able to connect characters and events to historical dynamics and social processes, and incorporates many historical events and characters from “real” life. Using orature alongside a rich and diverse textual archive, the novel creates an alternative to dominant historiography that has ignored Dalit lived experience. The narration is splintered, such that although Ruth is the principal narrator and the focalizing character, there are multiple narrators in the novel. The novel tells the story of seven generations of Dalits — Sinasubbadu, Errenkadu, Ellanna, Sivaiah (Simon), Reuben, Immanuel, and Jesse — and their struggle for dignity and emancipation. This has prompted some to immediately see parallels with Alex Hailey’s Roots. Among many things, the novel is an epic that narrates the chequered course of Christianity in the Telugu region, in terms of the Dalit condition, from the work of missionaries in the early nineteenth century until the recent present. The narrative traverses different time frames and geographies, encompassing colonial rule, the freedom struggle, independence, the Telangana peasants’ armed struggle, the Srikakulam Naxalite Movement, and Karamchedu.³

The novel begins with Ruth recalling her late husband Reuben’s narratives about his past and his ancestors. Ruth is a nurse in the Mission Hospital, and Reuben the hospital chaplain. Reuben is raised as an orphan in the mission compound, and his search for his roots takes him to the land of his ancestors: Enneladinni, a tiny village where the Dalit communities are in a state of perpetual bondage under the rigid caste system and feudal agrarian economy. Reuben reconstructs the past of his ancestors through fragments of information he gathers from various sources. Ruben’s narrative focuses on the story of his grandparents, Ellanna and Subhadhra. Ellanna is a weaver of padams (songs), who from childhood has been attracted to song and dance. He sees the performance of erra gollas (a shepherd caste) from a distance, as the malas and madigas (“untouchable” castes) were not allowed to come near other castes, both “lower” and “upper”. Tempted to have a closer look at the performers, despite his aunt Bhoodevi’s warning, he is found out and beaten, running for his life as they hurl stones. He reaches a nearby village where another performance, this time by the malas, attracts him, and the chief performer, Naganna, gives him shelter and offers to teach him dance and song. Naganna, who turns out to be a relation, takes Ellanna back to Enneladinni, where Ellanna’s father Errenkadu allows his son to pursue his passion. From Naganna, Ellanna learns of the non-brahmanical traditions in literature and religion.

Through Naganna and Ellanna, Kalyan Rao brings to life the rich song and dance cultures of Dalits that have been denied a space in the literary and cultural historiographies policed by brahmanical gatekeepers. At a key turning point in the narrative, Naganna and Ellanna defy age-old conventions of performance by inviting the headmen of the Dalits, the peda mala and peda madiga, along with the headmen from the upper castes. The “upper castes” resent this affront, and warn Naganna of dire consequences. Deeply crushed by this turn of events, Naganna refuses to perform any more, gradually sinking into dejection, and dies. Humiliated and angered, Ellanna leaves the village in search of answers to tormenting questions prompted by Naganna’s death. Ellanna’s wanderings introduce him to the song and dance cultures of the yanadis, pichuka guntlas, gollas, and various other castes. He becomes known as mala bairagi, and his songs travel far and wide. Peda Koteshwarudu, a poet from the potters’ caste, visits Ellanna to write down his songs — but Peda Koteshwarudu is brutally murdered by the upper castes, and his “record” of Ellanna’s songs is consigned to flames.

The destruction of this “record” is set in the context of C. P. Brown’s project of recording Telugu literary forms through Brahmin scribes and scholars: Untouchable Spring narrates the way Brown’s project was monopolized by the Brahmins, who excluded Dalit art forms from the archives. The great famine of 1876 comes, Ellanna sees people dying all around him, and seized by fear of dying before seeing his wife and parents, he sets out on a journey to return to his village. After many wanderings, he is finally reunited with his wife Subhadhra, but only briefly, as both die moments after their reunion. Ellanna’s son Sivaiah and his wife Sasirekha move out of Yenneladinni to escape the famine. At this point Kalyan Rao inserts historical events and characters into the narrative. Notable among these is the Reverend Clough, popularly known as Clough dora (dora in Telugu means landlord or master, but sometimes refers exclusively to the white man), a figure central to memories of the great famine for the Dalits of the region.

Clough: The “Lone Star”

Reverend J. E. Clough, a charismatic and radical missionary of the American Baptist Mission, arrived in 1865 in Ongole along with Reverend Jewett, to revive the Telugu Mission which was to become famous in mission history as the Lone Star Mission. Donald Downie in The Lone Star: History of the Telugu Mission (1893) gives a detailed account of the mission that saw mass conversions of the Dalits, especially the madigas. Though many were sceptical about Clough’s mass conversions, it needs to be pointed out that the mission’s successes were also affected by the zeal and labour of native converts like Rangaiah, Lakshmaiah, and Periah. Periah was one of the first madiga converts, and Downie makes a special mention of his baptism in his history of the mission:

In March, 1866, Mr. and Mrs. Jewett, Mr. Clough and Canakiah made a visit to Ongole, having special reference to seeing Periah, who wanted to see the missionaries and to be baptized. He was not in Ongole, as had been expected, but returned in a few days. So eager, indeed, was he to do this that he left a meal unfinished, at which he was seated when the intelligence of the arrival of the missionaries came to him. In relating his experience, Periah said: “Four years ago, I went north to Ellore, and there heard for the first time the gospel from Mr. Alexander, of the Church Mission. After that I went to Palacole, and heard from Mr. Bowden, and saw the native Christians. After my return, the Lord enlightened my mind, and I began laboring for the conversion of my family. After eighteen months, my wife was converted, and several others were awakened.” (Downie, 1893: 62)

Clough acknowledges Periah as the patriarch of the native preachers, and this is significant insofar as it undermines the myth of the passive convert that is circulated in many works on conversions (Clough, 1882). Clough’s mission performs an important function in the tripartite structure of the novel. The first section deals with the lived experience of the Dalit communities; Clough’s intervention begins the second section, which deals with the transformation of Dalits in the context of missionary interventions. The third section engages with the post-missionary Dalit condition.

The novel brings alive the dynamics of conversion through the character of Chinnodu. Chinnodu, a Dalit, is beaten mercilessly by the landlord china Kapu and his men because he refuses to stand up in his presence, as is demanded by custom. While others see the punishment as one more instance of their fate or karma, Chinnodu views it differently. Kalyan Rao describes Chinnodu’s act as “a confrontation. A silent revolt against something he hated” (2010: 158).⁴ It is at this point that Chinnodu encounters Clough, somewhat epiphanically:

Just then his life took an unexpected turn. There was a new tent outside the village. Everyone was talking about it as a strange thing. He went there. A white man mounted on a white horse came there. Chinnodu looked amazed at the white man and the white horse. It appeared as if the white man noticed his surprise. He signaled him to come near. He went near him in trepidation. The white man held Chinnodu’s hand. He placed his other hand on his shoulder. Chinnodu’s heart beat rapidly. What was happening in front of his eyes, he could not believe that such a thing would happen. The white man held his hand. He touched his hand. He placed his hand on his shoulder. He touched his shoulder.

Until now, from the time he knew things, a madiga had touched him, a mala had touched him.

A brahmin had not touched him. For him his body was untouchable. A reddy had not touched him. For him too the same the same for the rest of the castes.

But the white man touched him […] He said his body was not untouchable, he did not say it in words; he said it with his touch. He shed tears even as he looked. The white man said “those tears were those of Christ”. (158)

A body that was considered “polluting” and “unclean” was acknowledged and, more importantly, touched, by the white man. That the white dora, whom even the “upper castes” accepted as their superior, should find his body touchable was beyond Chinnodu’s experience. The act of touching restored the human dignity to the body that was otherwise despised, loathed, and feared. The white man’s God is undefiled by a Dalit’s touch, and for Dalits who have been made to believe in the untouchableness of not only their bodies but even their shadows, this act of touching was liberating and humanizing. Whatever racial superiority the colonizer putatively claimed in colonialist terms, it was simply set aside in these acts of touching by the missionaries.

Reflecting on the centrality of touch in Christianity, Derrida in On Touching: Jean Luc Nancy observes:

all the Gospels present the Christ body not only as a body of light and revelation but, in a hardly less essential way, as a body touching as much as touched, as flesh that is touched-touching. Between life and death. And if one refers to the Greek word that translates this touching, which is also a divine power and the manifestation of God incarnate, one can take the Gospels for a general haptics. Salvation saves by touching, and the Savior, namely the Toucher, is also touched: he is saved, safe, unscathed, and free of damage. Touched by grace. (2005: 100)

Dalits embraced Christianity as it was a “touchable” and “touching” religion, in the sense that Christ is viewed as someone not defiled by the touch of people considered “untouchables” or “impure”, be it Dalits, Samaritans, lepers, or menstruating women (Ilaiah, 2009: 182–90; Prasuna, 2010). Chinnodu’s conversion echoes Ambedkar’s description of conversion as at once spiritual and material (Ambedkar, 1936). Chinnodu converts for dignity. He finds the white man’s touch comforting and empowering, an act acknowledging and affirming his humanity. Chinnodu is christened Martin and begins to assist Clough in his mission, along with his wife. His conversion in turn brings a transformation among other Dalits, who begin to assert themselves through shunning hereditary “polluting” occupations, refusing to eat carrion, and through their clothing. In the caste system, Dalits were forbidden from wearing decent clothes or footwear; Dr Ambedkar’s sartorial statement with suit and hat in contrast to Gandhi’s “simple” loin cloth was an affirmation of the dignity of Dalits who were denied clothes throughout history. The “upper castes” begin to take note of the changes and see a threat in Martin’s activities among the Dalits. Meanwhile, Martin comes to the rescue of Ellannah’s son Sivaiah when he runs away from Enneladinni to escape the famine.

Clough and the great famine

The famine of 1876, also known as the Madras famine, which took place in the southern states and, according to some estimates, killed almost ten million people, is invariably associated with Reverend Clough and the Buckingham Canal (Davis, 2002). As mission documents and reports as well as Clough’s own accounts make clear, Clough’s relief work during that period was extensive (Asheervadam, 2014: 114–20; Craig, 1908: 23–27), and the freshwater navigation canal known as Buckingham Canal was primarily conceived to provide relief to those afflicted by the famine. David Downie in his history of the Mission writes:

In addition to gifts and loans from personal friends, Mr. Clough took a contract to cut some four miles of the Buckingham canal as a relief work for the Christians of the Ongole field and their friends. By this means, hundreds and thousands were saved from starvation and death. The engineer in charge complimented Mr. Clough for the manner in which his work was done. He said: “Of the thirty-five miles under my charge your portion of the canal is the best”. (1893: 102)

Emma Clough also records the details of the relief work:

The preachers came and went with careworn faces. They knew something of the activity in the mission bungalow, of appeals for help sent to America, of correspondence with the Government in Madras. Ere long they were sent out with a message that all could earn cooley and enough to eat if they came to Razupallem, where the Missionary had taken a contract for digging. The English Government was undertaking relief work of various kinds. The Buckingham Canal, extending from Madras north to Bezwada, on the East Coast, offered relief work on a large scale. The Ongole Missionary had taken a contract to dig three miles of this canal. The relief camp was to be at Razupallem, ten miles east of Ongole and near the coast. (1899: 274)

It is important to note that Clough suspended all baptisms during the famine years lest people convert out of necessity to escape from famine. This fact is recorded in several contemporary mission reports (“Editorial”, 1866: 4–7).

When Sivaiah and Sasirekha flee Enneladinni to escape famine, they hear about the relief work of the government and reach the canal site. Sivaiah tries to enlist himself for the work, but when they learn that he is a mala they start attacking him, and just like his father Ellanna, Sivaiah along with his wife runs for his life. This discrimination against Dalits even in the face of a great calamity does not find mention in mainstream narratives of the canal work. Kalyan Rao writes:

Untouchable people, untouchable labour. A specific place for that work. An expanse of four miles. No energy to laugh. Not enough strength to cry. That was a tiny truth. That very tiny truth, man had forgotten. That was in the depths of this land. In the very depths. For the research that excavated Mohenjo-Daro this very tiny truth that protruded was not apparent. It did not strike the great intellect that searched for civilization in the heart of Harappa to get rid of the mud around and wash the filth around this tiny truth to pronounce that such a thing happened in this country, and specially on this Telugu land. Did not find the necessity.

The expanse of the untouchability Coolie space was four miles. What was the length of Buckingham Canal? Its width, its expanse? Those who knew that fact would not say. Those who wanted to say it did not know the numbers. (148)

Martin rescues Sivaiah and Sasirekha from the attack, and takes them to the mission camp where Dalit families working on the canal take shelter. Sivaiah and Sasirekha become a part of Martin’s family, and Sivaiah too embraces Christianity and becomes Simon. Martin tells Sivaiah of the significance of his name, how Simon of Cyrene carried the cross to Golgotha when Jesus became exhausted. The novelist elaborates on the significance of the cross for Dalits:

In truth,even if the Sivaiahs did not convert into Simons,when did they not bear the Cross?They were born only to carry it…they wereborn only to be pierced by spears.

Bearing the cross was not something new.

Climbing on the cross was not something new.Giving up their life was not something new.

With Martin who bore the cross,Simon who bore the cross,went along talking about Christ who bore the cross.(165)

The cross becomes a major symbol in the novel, just as Joseph Prabhakar Dayam (2009, 2010) argues it is central to Dalit Christian experience and becomes the locus of Dalit theology. Kalyan Rao, in other words, articulates the Dalit experience in the language of Dalit theology.

Dalit theology in the novel

Dalit theology is a contextual theology that takes the Dalit experience as its starting point, and is in many ways opposed to mainstream Indian Christian theology that interprets Christianity in brahmanical terms. The term was coined by Reverend A. P. Nirmal, who saw the need for a theology that rejects the privileging of brahmanical categories and engages with the condition of the Dalits.

While Dalit theology is to some extent inspired by Latin American and Black liberation theologies, it replaces the emphasis on race and economics with caste. Like other liberation theologies, Dalit theology foregrounds God’s “preference” for Dalits and does not imply any exclusivity (Barua, 2014). As Gustavo Gutierrez in his Theology of Liberation observes: “the great challenge was to maintain both the universality of God’s love and God’s predilection for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history. To focus extensively on the one or the other is to mutilate the Christian message” (1973: xxv–xxvi).

The Christology of Dalit theology sees Christ as a Dalit, drawing on the prophet Isaiah’s image of a “suffering servant”. It looks at the ministry of Christ among the outcasts of the society — lepers, prostitutes, Samaritans, tax collectors, the poor, and the illiterate — as signifying the Dalitness of Christ. According to Nirmal, the theological concept of pathos (divine suffering) as opposed to apathos (impassibility of God) has great meaning for Dalits. It makes them see that God is not above or distant from suffering but participates in their pain and suffering, manifested in Christ’s Passion and crucifixion. Pathos, he argues, is therefore “an epistemological starting point for dalit theology that leads to the praxis of liberation” (Nirmal, 1991: 141).

In recent years, Dalit theology has been drawn to the work of Dr Ambedkar and Jotirao Phule (Clarke, 1998; Forrester, 2010; Massey, 1996). Dalit theologians now acknowledge the neglect of these two thinkers by Indian savarna theologians, and the need to engage with their work in relation to inequality and oppression. In Gulamgiri (Slavery), Phule presents a very different concept of Christology by identifying Christ with Bali Raja. In the Marathi popular traditions, the non-Aryan king Bali Raja was the “enlightened one” who ushered in a just world — “The Kingdom of God” — but his kingdom was usurped by the Brahmin Vamana. Subsequently, Vamana destroys the egalitarian principle and replaces it with the law of caste, converting the natives into “untouchables” and shudras. Phule tells us that in rural Maharashtra, the ordinary village folk still long for the return of the righteous rule of Bali Raja. He further argues that Bali Raja’s disciples, the English, came to India to rescue the Dalits and Shudras from Aryan or Brahmin hegemony (Phule, 2016: 95).

One can easily draw parallels between the figure of Bali Raja and Isaiah’s “suffering servant”. The figure of the “suffering servant” figures chiefly in Chapter 53 of the Book of Isaiah, where the servant of God submits to suffering and thereby brings healing and redemption. Christian theologians see it as a reference to the Passion of Christ. The suffering Christ becomes a recurrent motif in the novel: the imagery of the cross, crown of thorns, betrayal, arrest, and Passion are woven into the novel’s representations of Dalit suffering and experience; what P. Raj Kumar calls dalithos (Rajkumar, 2010), in the colonial period as well as after independence. Dalit converts to Christianity faced the wrath of the “upper castes” in spite of the missionaries’ “protection”, and in fact the colonial administration was in many ways indifferent and even hostile to converts, and especially Dalit converts (Mallampalli, 2004). In Untouchable Spring, Kalyan Rao represents the attacks on Dalit Christians that were frequent in various parts of Ongole, while emphasizing that “upper-caste” Christians were exempt from such attacks: the reddys, kammas, and brahmins whose conversion in many cases, the novel also suggests, was a matter of convenience to protect their interests by gaining access to the administration through the missionaries.

Kalyan Rao very powerfully depicts the attacks on the Dalits who became Christians. The persecution of these early Dalit Christians is no less horrendous than that of the Roman persecution of the early church; the difference is that the Dalit Christians were attacked not because they professed a new faith but because they refused to accept their “untouchableness”. Kalyan Rao as a realist successfully depicts, to use Georg Lukács’s category, the “essence” of this attack by connecting the specific experience of victimhood with wider social and historical processes:

Some malas and madigas wore new clothes. There was an attack on those clothes. They said they would not come to work on Sundays. There was an attack on that holiday. They asked them to eat the meat of dead cattle. They were attacked for expressing their views on “eating” such things. They started to study a little bit in Missionary schools. There was an attack on that education. Here and there, the untouchables raised their heads and looked. There was an attack on their heads. (170)

In this syncopated narrative, the narrator shows how the attack was not gratuitous but had a cruel logic and pattern; that it was an attack on the symbols of Dalit dignity, mobility, and self-assertion. Martin is presented as an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, and as a preacher who articulates the concerns of Dalit theology. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, he is fearless, full of righteous anger and speaks against injustice and oppression. He responds to the attacks by invoking the images of Christ’s Passion as well as that of the prophet Isaiah, enabling his congregation not only to understand their suffering but also to respond to it:

Attack. On the Mala people. On the Madiga people. Attack. On the Mala Christ. Attack on the Madiga Christ. It would be enough if Christ were an untouchable. There would certainly be an attack. Martin did not sit silent. He began to speak condemning the attack.

“Here I am proclaiming clearly. I am proclaiming loud enough. For the veins in my throat to burst. I am reminding you of my Jehovah’s words once again. I am placing before you Isaiah’s words, the same words Christ spoke to his people in the community shrine in Nazareth”, that was how Martin would begin to preach.

I have the Lord’s grace on me. He has anointed to spread the good work to the people. He chose me to get the people out of the imprisonment. He sent me to release the crushed people. If that was not so, why should I speak? If that were not so, why should I become close to Christ? (170)

Martin is able to foreground the emancipatory character of the scripture as to how God takes the side of the oppressed and frees them from bondage. His Christianity is not otherworldly but firmly embedded in the worldly condition of the Dalits. Martin becomes a martyr fighting for the rights and dignity of Dalits. His discipleship is the “costly discipleship” which Dietrich Bonhoffer expounds in his classic The Cost of Discipleship. His brutal murder is described in the imagery of via dolorosa with Simon, himself brutally injured, forced to carry Martin’s body.

The novelist’s articulation of Dalit Christian experience can be better understood in terms of the “Theology of the Cross”. Drawing upon Martin Luther, Dalit theologians understand God as a suffering and liberating God; as one who is present in the pathos and suffering of Dalits, and liberating them from their dehumanized existence and restoring them to dignity. As Sunil Bhanu puts it: “God in his lowliness, through Jesus Christ on the cross hears to the cries of the suffering people and identifies with them” (2014: 56). A theology of the cross, as Joseph Prabhakar Dayam observes: “opens up new possibilities in understanding the cross not merely as a way of dealing with personal sin but dealing with the dehumanizing consequences of systemic structures that exclude the marginalized communities” (2009: 2)).

Simon’s son Reuben, like Martin, questions injustice and is sceptical of the entry of upper castes into Christianity, just as Sivaiah was perturbed by the oppressors’ entry into the fold. He sees them as wolves clothed as sheep sneaking into the fold only to prey on them:

He did not have a good opinion of white men other white man Clough. Reuben was unable to tolerate the Brahmin domination in Government offices, courts and hospitals. It seemed as if his father Simon’s fears were haunting Reuben. He hated the upper caste converts all the more. “He didn’t come for Christ. He came to dominate”, he would say. When a Reddy was appointed the headmaster of the mission school he was enraged and said, “Couldn’t they find a mala Christian, couldn’t they locate a madiga Christian, they needed a Reddy Christian”. (202)

Reuben’s son Immanuel is drawn in to revolutionary politics, and joins the Naxalite movement in Srikakulam. Though Reuben doesn’t comprehend his son’s politics fully, he is still able to empathize with his cause, as he himself spoke against injustice and oppression in his ministry: he sees no necessary contradiction between the teachings of the Gospel and Immanuel’s radical path. One can notice some parallels between Reuben’s understanding of Christianity and that of Camilo Torres — the Colombian priest who tried to reconcile Christianity and revolutionary Marxism. Torres, a precursor of Latin American Liberation Theology, famously remarked: “If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero” (cited in Wells, 2010). Reuben does not endorse his son’s path, but is able to see that his actions are driven by a sense of justice and love. He is not ashamed of his son’s activities, and when the church members begin to gossip about his arrest, he likens them to Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ. He is able to see his son’s condition in terms of the Passion of Christ. When the police officer Charles asks if he was not ashamed as a Christian for having a son like Immanuel, Reuben shoots back, saying that, on the contrary, he was proud, more proud than Joseph and Mary:

Christ is my faith. Struggle is my necessity. My child is the representation of centuries of struggle […] Take the cross off your neck. You are not on the side of those bearing the cross. You are one among those protecting those who crucify. (242)

In an epiphanic moment, while following the funeral procession of his martyred son, Reuben seems to connect his faith with his son’s struggle.

In Untouchable Spring, Kalyan Rao uses the medium of the novel to vividly trace the trajectory of Christianity in Dalit experience from the colonial period to that of our own times, in a narrative in which the egalitarianism of the church epitomized in the lives and work of the missionaries has slowly eroded. This is reflected in the characters Rosie and her husband Vandanam, novelistic Judases who help to alienate the mission properties to the “upper castes”, representing a contemporary Christianity that has deflected the Gospel away from liberation and egalitarianism towards the accumulation of wealth. Towards the end of the novel, Immanuel’s son Jesse is drawn toward revolutionary politics like his father. Unlike Reuben, though, Ruth too becomes politically conscious, and perceives her grandson’s actions as a culmination of centuries of Dalit struggle for dignity, love, and equality — ideas that Martin and Rueben preached and fought for throughout their lives. Thus, the categories of Dalit theology are not merely scattered in the novel but form a coherent texture articulating the complex experience and struggle of Dalits in history. The ending of the novel though open,might appear tendentious. However it is not a sort of deus ex machina that Kalyan Rao contrives, but through it he artistically succeeds in connecting the struggle of Dalits over two centuries with the revolutionary politics that he espouses.

Kalyan Rao’s leftist political background and Dalit experience, I argue, provided him with a unique lens through which to view the Dalit condition in the context of historical and political processes. He thereby articulated the “lived experience” of Dalits in history, in the fashion of the great realists. This unique feature of his writing is rarely seen in contemporary Dalit writing, which seems to have reached an impasse (Limbale, 2004) with its preoccupation with victimization, identity, and suffering.

Many readings of Dalit literature tend to read novels unproblematically as portrayals of Dalit experience. In this way, they are able to muffle or contain their more complex and radical engagements — in Kalyan Rao’s case, the narrative’s prime coordinates of Dalit theology and struggle, through which it mounts its powerful critique of oppressive structures. It is necessary to interrogate and interrupt these strategies of containment which savarna critics practise to integrate powerful texts such as Untouchable Spring into a hegemonic nationalist imaginary.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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