Religion, development and the rights of subordinated people: Christianity and Dalit social action in India.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The Indian caste system is commonly understood as based upon Hindu religious ideas (purity and pollution). While this view of caste has been significantly revised by recent scholarship (reincorporating power, politics and colonial influences), religion is still central to strategies of protest and claims to equality. Historically, religious action against caste subordination took the form of conversion to non-Hindu religions, especially Christianity. Today, a large proportion of India's 25 million Christians are ex-untouchables or Dalits, many living in India's southern states. The question this research asks is: what today is the significance of religious identity among south Indian Dalits, and what is the role of Christianity (its thinkers, social activists, movement leaders, and international networks) in the articulation of alternative Dalit identities and in new forms of socio-political mobilisation?This question requires the examination of three interrelated processes: (1) the 'dalitization' of the Christian churches, (2) the rise of Hindu nationalism, and (3) the spread of international human rights discourse. Investigation into these ideologies (theologies), institutions and social movements is matched by field research into the village-level processes through which ordinary people engage with them, and on the subjective experience of caste discrimination, religious vocation and social activism among Dalit priests and the religious(1) It took decades for the demographics of the Christian churches (a large Dalit majority) to be expressed theologically and institutionally; but from the late-1980s, Christianity was a context for articulating Dalit rights, a new religious politics and Dalit theology, which honoured an 'outcaste culture'. This collaborative research examines how the churches generated Dalit protest and produced cultural resources for social change -- theologies, arts, political ideologies, or social movements -- which have had an important influence on wider Dalit politics. It focuses on the Catholic Church and Jesuits who have been a source of innovation and reaction in Tamil society for 400 years. (2) Christian Dalit activism takes place in a largely Hindu society and amidst the rise of Hindu nationalism which vilifies the Christian minority as colonial, foreign and anti-national, interpreting resistance from the margins (from Dalits or tribals) as 'Christian aggression' arising from internationally planned proselytism. Is the Church's affirmation of its social base (and political support) in subordinated groups a response to this threat? What (in different interpretations) is the relationship between the church and secular Dalit politics?(3) Making the church Dalit also internationalised Dalit issues, linking caste discrimination to a UN discourse on racism and human rights. This raises questions about the effect of a new discourse of Dalit human rights (and rights-based approaches to disadvantage) in re-connecting religion and development. As Dalit Christians turned Liberation Theology into Dalit Theology, European donor NGOs began to re-frame development objectives in terms of Dalit rights. This research examines the consequence of NGOs drawing the identity politics of caste and religion into developmentThe linked processes of Dalit politics, Hindu nationalism, and NGO discourse on human rights come together in the everyday experience of Tamil villages. Taking advantage of a re-visit to the multi-caste religiously plural locality that was the site of field research in 1982-4, changes in religious and caste identities (and their interaction) are examined over 25 years; asking how the potential for violent polarization of people on the basis of caste and religion is locally diffused in socially and religiously divided communities.