The Search for an Indian Episcopal Identity
The Search for an Indian Episcopal Identity
He soon felt apprehension over the secrecy surrounding the plans and wondered how he and his wife would fulfill the many expectations being thrust upon them. He worried that the IMS would think he was ignoring his responsibilities in Dornakal by spending so much time with Bishop Whitehead. He also worried about the burden that would fall on his wife who was coping with four young children, `a conservative, old, superstitious mother,'2 the recent death of their baby boy, and an impending move to rural Dornakal. He wrote to her from the Whiteheads' hill station home:
If Azariah had worries about his own abilities to be a bishop, he did not express them. However, his concerns for his wife's ability to perform the official duties of `a big person' within the Raj probably reflected his own worries.
As a new, highly visible symbol of Indian Christianity, Azariah would set precedents for future Indian bishops in every aspect of his demeanor. Azariah got a first taste several months after his consecration when he participated in the consecration of the new Bishop of Lahore in Simla. Azariah was the center of attention at this event, as the Metropolitan wrote shortly thereafter:
As the first Indian bishop at the centre of Empire,' Azariah would become an important symbol of Christianity's growing presence in India, of the church's liberal views on Indian leadership, and of the Raj's success in winning loyal subjects. His every move would be carefully observed - sometimes even by the Raj's highest officials. In 1909, the meaning of this future was just beginning to dawn on Azariah as he trained for ordination with the Whiteheads in Ootacamund.
During the difficult period of uncertainty leading up to his consecration, Azariah was confronted with the challenge of defining, for himself and for India, a suitable identity for a first Indian bishop. One of the first steps in this process of identity construction was to decide what clothes he should wear. This challenge was made more complex and per sonally embarrassing by the well-intentioned but domineering efforts of westerners. The Whiteheads were particularly anxious that Azariah, their symbol of the new age of church indigenization, should establish Indian norms distinguishing him from his English colleagues.
Dinner that night seemed to Azariah something like a costume parry for which he had reluctantly `dressed up.' Isabel ignored his `pleadings to excuse' and pressured him to don a `grand' outfit that offended Azariah's every sensibility, not so much because of its western appearance as because of its expense and pretentiousness.
Worse than her initial directive to dress like Bishop Whitehead were her subsequent directives to wear Indian dress. Mrs. Whitehead pressured Azariah to add a turban, the classic symbol of oriental dignity in the West, to his episcopal attire. The West's sentimental attachment to the turban was well illustrated by an article of 1896 in which a European writer lamented its replacement by a modern round cap:
Azariah and most of his peers wore exactly such `loathsome and intensely vulgar' modern round caps during their student days at Madras Christian College. Although many South Indians still wore turbans for a wide vari ety of functions, many students chose alternative (or no) headgear, possibly because of the turban's association either with the rustic cloths wrapped around the head by coolie workers for protection from the sun, or with India's princely, martial, or elitist, Brahmin-dominated traditional culture.8
The ambitious Isabel persisted, however, in searching for other Indian models for episcopal dress. She studied the existing indigenous episcopal attire of bishops from the Syrian Orthodox churches (even though most of them came from the Middle East rather than India) - prompting Azariah to write from the Whitehead home in September 1909:
We had quite an exciting time over the visit of the Patriarch of Antioch. His Holiness the Patriarch, His Grace Mar Dionysius of Malabar, and their Chaplains came up this afternoon for tea. I acted as chaplain receiving them at the doorstep. I was serving tea also.... Mrs. Whitehead was all the time engaged in noting their dress to suggest what the dress of Indian Bishop [sic] should be. It seems when the Bishop was consecrated he spent £500 on dress alone. I am saying all along that the expensive English episcopal dress should not be imported to India.'0
To fully appreciate Azariah's concern about importing expensive British episcopal clothing standards to India, the modern reader must recognize that, with five hundred pounds sterling - equivalent in those days to 7,500 rupees - Azariah and his wife could have bought a three-to-four bedroom house.
Azariah won this battle, but continued to construct his new identity under the Whiteheads' well-intentioned but intrusive gaze. In good colonial ethnographic fashion, the Whiteheads photographed every scene of this fashion show at their hill station residence. The Azariah family photo album today contains one photo of Azariah in English bishop's clothes topped with a turban (and standing next to Bishop Whitehead), another of Azariah alone in the simpler cassock he chose but still wearing the turban, and, finally, a noticeably more relaxed picture without any turban and in his preferred cassock (standing once again next to the traditionally attired Bishop Whitehead).12 Paradoxically, westerners had urged an Indian to indigenize according to Indian paradigms that the Indian believed inappropriate; and the Indian adopted western dress opposed by orientalizing westerners.
The Whiteheads' campaign to orientalize their first Indian bishop forms a fascinating but hitherto unreported chapter in the British Raj's crusade at the time of the great Imperial Durbar of 1911 to enliven civic rituals through the introduction (or reintroduction) of orientalized cos tumes and regalia.13 Indian compatriots at different levels of the civic polity were being pressured to adopt European ideas of proper Indian dress during this time, and they creatively negotiated solutions that defined a newly emerging and highly complex Indo-British code of manners and respect. Through Azariah, the Indo-Anglican church also contributed to this process of bolstering the dignity of the Raj through orientalization of its official religious institutions. That Azariah's particular solutions to the problems of whether to wear a turban or western dress did not satisfy his British mentors suggests that, at least in some cases, this process of orientalization was less successful than has generally been recognized.
Although Azariah had successfully rejected the turban for his episcopal uniform, the Whiteheads continued to pressure him to wear turbans for public functions, especially outside India. In April 1910, he embarked with Mrs. Whitehead on his first trip to Europe and Great Britain to speak at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference. Mrs. Whitehead persuaded him to purchase two turbans (one brown and one white silk) for his trip, but he conceded in a letter to his wife from aboard the outgoing R.M.S. Otranto that he `had not had the courage to show them out yet.'15 As if to heighten his own embarrassment at donning what he regarded as an artificial Indian costume for the benefit of his English mentor, those in charge of the ship sponsored two fancy dress balls for which European passengers also dressed themselves up as Orientals. Azariah was not invited, but described this bizarre event:
Eight days later, Azariah wrote again to his wife:
As Azariah assisted fellow passengers in acting out their imaginary perceptions of the Orient, his anxiety about his own identity grew, and he became increasingly annoyed by Mrs. Whitehead's attempts to impose her ideas on him.
Mrs. Whitehead comes often to my chair in the deck and talks for a long time. She's full of plans for England and I am afraid rather tiresome in her plans. I am feeling more and more that while in England it is better for me to be independent. She rather wishes me to be directed by her ideas. I am afraid this will make it often unpleasant for her as well as unpleasant for me. I am praying much about this. Please pray also that God may guide me to behave tactfully.18
Azariah must have shown extraordinary tact, because Mrs. Whitehead wrote to Anbu from the ship that `[Azariah] has been so kind to me, and it is very nice to have a friend on board, though I don't see much of him.'19 But Isabel Whitehead was clearly insensitive to her effect on Azariah. What seemed to her a scarcity of conversations seemed to Azariah a virtual bombardment.
Isabel Whitehead was a domineering woman, even by the already domineering standards of many British memsahibs. She had a penchant for annoying other Britons as well as Indian Christians. Edwin Montagu called her `a beastly woman' after a 1913 meeting, and blamed her for blocking Bishop Whitehead's chances for promotion to the Metropolitan see. Her personality prompted Montagu to ruminate in his diary on the generic problem of the formidable memsahib:
Isabel Whitehead's self-appointed role as mentor to the new Indian bishop intensified her domineering tendencies. Subconscious racial prejudices and imperialist sympathies may have contributed to her patronizing relationship with Azariah,21 but her well-intentioned orientalizing was an even more obvious cause. At times, Indian Christians like Azariah felt as oppressed by their visionary liberal benefactors as by die-hard reactionaries.
Azariah landed in Naples on 22 April 1910, where he got his first glimpse of the western world. From his small pension (ten minutes' walk from Mrs. Whitehead's more expensive hotel), Azariah could see Mount Vesuvius smoking. He visited local museums and the City of the Dead in Pompeii, but was more interested in living Italians. He described his `first impression of Europe' to his wife after twenty-four hours on shore:
Azariah traveled through Rome and Pisa, where he was `thrilled' to see sites visited by the apostles Peter and Paul, and fascinated by the historical interplay between ancient Rome and Christianity. The defeat of ancient Roman forms of worship reminded him of South Asian religions:
He saw Roman Catholicism as a new form of idolatry (`worship of Virgin Mary, making of images, altars, etc. etc. are probably all borrowed from the ancient heathen Rome') that confined religion to priests when the streets of Rome abounded in irreligion (`Theatres, Plays etc. find full attendance. Churches are visited only by a corresponding few').
Traveling on to England in a third-class compartment (Mrs. Whitehead was in the second class), he was disappointed with the appearance of Westminster Abbey, amazed by the busy London night life, and impressed by the thousands of churches that `rise everywhere' in the countryside. However, his annoyance with Mrs. Whitehead led him seriously to consider abandoning the Whiteheads and his training for the bishopric altogether by the time he reached the Edinburgh Conference in June. After talking with Sherwood Eddy, his good friend, Azariah wrote to Anbu:
His irritation with Mrs. Whitehead was one factor prompting him to deliver a radically critical speech on the subject of racial relations between missionaries and their foreign converts at the Edinburgh Conference. To the shock of the gathered crowds, Azariah argued that racial alienation infected the missionary enterprise with `a certain aloofness, a lack of mutual understanding and openness, a great lack of frank intercourse and friendliness.' He pleaded with the assembled missionaries to give up their paternalistic attitudes for true cooperation based on spiritual friendships under the sovereignty of Christ, the great Unifier of mankind':
I do not plead for returning calls, handshakes, chairs, dinners and teas, as such. I do, on the other hand, plead for all of them and more if they can be expressions of a friendly feeling, if these or anything else can be the outward proofs of a real willingness on the part of the foreign missionary to show that he is in the midst of the people, to be to them, not a lord and master, but a brother and friend....
Azariah called for friendship that would be `more than condescending love,' and it struck the missionary community `like a bomb,' Isabel Whitehead reported to Anbu. `Half the audience was delighted and the other half very angry.'28 Of course Mrs. Whitehead was part of the 'delighted' faction, little realizing that she was part of the problem. She and the bishop were pleased that Azariah had been courageous enough to reprimand conservative missionaries for racialism, and to suggest that a universal (as opposed to purely indigenous) form of Christianity was the only solution. Azariah's speech included a rousing call for interracial cooperation in the cause of Christ:
Azariah's speech drew, not just on his recent discomfort with Isabel Whitehead, but on a childhood of missionary schools and ten years of working for the YMCA. The problem of race relationships is one of the most serious problems confronting the Church to-day,' he concluded. The bridging of the gulf between the East and West, and the attainment of a greater unity and common ground in Christ ... is one of the deepest needs of our time.'31
Azariah returned to Dornakal and to the controversy surrounding his candidacy for the bishopric with a new sense of purpose and a quiet determination not to accept an English interpretation of what it meant to be Indian. But he now faced daily the awkward realization that, in being groomed for the first Indian bishopric, he was also being sculpted into a living symbol of Indian Christianity for and by westerners.
Western pressure to Indianize increased during the last decades of the Independence movement as India also focused greater attention on the meaning of clothing. Changing clothing styles were important instruments of cultural and economic identity construction in South Asia at the individual, family, caste, and regional levels. Once khadi, or home-spun cloth, was adopted by Indian nationalists as a symbol of their resistance to British rule during the noncooperation movement, clothing styles became an important component of political identity formation as well. Gandhi shed first his western clothes and then his Indian clothes down to the loincloth as an act of political defiance and identification with India's poor.
To the dismay of Gandhi's many western Anglican admirers, Indian Christian converts from the depressed classes also often adopted western rather than Indian norms, particularly when `indigenous' models were derived from Hindu traditions to which they felt little attachment. Early Shanar (later Nadar) converts in Tinnevelly embraced western Gothic architecture, especially if church steeples were higher than any nearby Hindu temple gopuram. `Pukka' (or substantial and permanent) stone churches were preferable to any indigenous alternatives. Indian converts wanted their churches to demonstrate an elevated, distinctively Christian (and therefore, from their point of view, British) status. Thus, a stone Gothic church was infinitely preferable to the more `indigenous' thatched mud but or simple altar that was often eulogized by westerners but represented to converts little but their former poverty and ritually polluting semi-untouchability.35 Far from being a weak concession to domineering missionaries, westernization represented a symbolic challenge by longsuppressed lower classes to an oppressive indigenous social order. In this context, indigenization along the lines expected by western orientalizing indigenizers would have been viewed as just another form of oppression.
Westerners rather than Indians often championed twentiethcentury efforts to use Hindu temple architecture for Christian churches, as in the case of the church at Christukula Ashram founded by E. Forrester-Paton and S. Jesudason. But most Indian Christian converts had little interest in the Indianizing efforts of westerners such as J. C. Wins low, who modeled the Christa Seva Sangha community at Poona on Indian ashrams.36 They were proud of their new Christian (and, by association, European) identities and wanted their places of worship to reflect this distinctiveness and separation from their former poverty and stigmatization.
In the opinion of one former South Indian bishop, most twentiethcentury church Indianization had an artificial quality because it was initiated by westerners without strong guidance or support from the majority of Indian Christians.37lt was perhaps as difficult for many liberal westerners, as it was for Indian nationalists to accept that, in many situations, Indian Christians desired closer identification with the West than with their own native traditions. Christianity, in its Anglican mission-mediated forms, appeared to provide for many the most clear and straightforward path out of the demeaning cultural matrix from which converts wished to escape.
Azariah developed an increasingly secure and unselfconscious sense of his Indian Christian identity during his years in Dornakal, but he could never entirely avoid western pressure to Indianize. During the Whiteheads' regular visits to Dornakal, Mrs. Whitehead berated the bishop and his family for eating English breakfasts rather than South Indian iddli.38 When Azariah named a new Christian village in his diocese `Whitehead Farm,' the Whiteheads insisted that he rename it `Vedanayagapuram,' to give Azariah credit for its establishment and to make the settlement appear more Indian.39 The village of Kiritipuram (`crown village') adjacent to the town of Dornakal was apparently named after both King George V and Azariah, whose `crownings' were commemorated by a small stone monument which still stands in the village today.40 The association of Azariah's consecration with a royal coronation reflected the village's unmistakable pride at their bishop's prestigious position in the British Raj as well as basic sympathy for the monarchy and British rule in India. Azariah's own son George was named after the King, whose Proclamation Azariah witnessed personally during his 1910 trip to England.41
This kind of self-consciousness plagued India during the years of the British Raj. British imperial rule altered many aspects of India's self-perception to conform to western representations of India. Many Indians came to view themselves through the eyes of western philosophers, educationalists, economists, poets, and missionaries; and the self-questioning provoked by western critiques led to new Indian understandings of their national identity by the end of the nineteenth century.43 It was as if India had collectively decided to don a metaphorical `Indian' costume tailored by the West.
But a reverse process was also taking place: Indian nationalist critiques of western culture, politics, and values began to influence British self-perceptions. Critical Indian portraits of the West, and of British rule in particular, caused British Christians such as C. F. Andrews and Verrier Elwin to lose confidence in the Raj and to reject British for Indian values and customs, sometimes literally exchanging their western dress for Indian costumes. Indian nationalism influenced mainstream Anglicans to a degree that has perhaps been underappreciated.
The impact of Indian nationalism - often transmitted through western agencies - was therefore highly uneven across the Indian Christian community. To Azariah and many outcaste Indian converts, Indianization seemed more a British than an Indian idea. Azariah's western friends seemed unable to understand that Azariah was at least as uncomfortable wearing a turban as the European gentleman at the fancy dress ball on the RM.S. Otranto. The bishop's discomfort was felt in differing degrees by most Indian Christians of his generation, who were increasingly either influenced or irritated by Indian nationalism.