The Reform and Integration of Local Customs
The Reform and Integration of Local Customs
Azariah also believed that some dimensions of Hindu culture and institutions ought to be incorporated into indigenous expressions of Indian Christianity, particularly in order to attract more caste people to a faith they were initially inclined to dismiss as an `outcastes' religion.' Incorporating certain spiritually neutral, culturally familiar elements from Hindu ritual and custom into Christian life and worship thus became another of Azariah's central preoccupations in Dornakal.
Azariah drew from Hindu and, occasionally, Muslim traditions in devising indigenous new forms of liturgy, music, drama, architecture, festivals, and Christian expression in his diocese. He devised a new Christian marriage service that adapted Hindu symbols (rather than circling a fire, the bride and groom walked around a cross), and advocated use of the Christian tali (a small gold cross, anchor, or heart fastened by a string round the neck of a married woman) as a substitute for the western wedding ring.62 This service was intended especially to satisfy caste converts who objected to the brevity of the Christian marriage service. As one missionary recalled, `A Brahmin wedding goes on for five days. What is twenty minutes in a church?' Bishop Azariah's new wedding service accommodated these traditional sensibilities `by having plenty of singing and processions round the church (which) made the service last for two hours.'63
Hoping to provide a substitute for the Hindu festival of Divawli, Azariah instituted a Festival of Lights in which families lit oil lamps in church and then distributed the light throughout the village, symbolizing that Christ was the light of their homes, of their hearts, and of their fami- lies.64 Although the bishop required the cutting of the juttu, he permitted use of a vermilion cross on the forehead as a substitute for traditional caste markings.65
Azariah balanced his condemnation of caste and other undesirable Hindu practices with a willingness to integrate other elements of Indian culture into Christian life so that the church might serve a dual role as an agent of both cultural change and cultural continuity. Indo-Anglican Christianity had little direct cultural impact beyond the untouchables and low-castes in Andhra (except in the important area of education, where many students came from the upper non-Brahmin and Brahmin castes). But within the lower strata of society from which Azariah's con verts came, the church played an increasingly important role as the bearer, not only of the Christian religion, but also of what Azariah called `civilization.' The bishop claimed that Christianity possessed `power to bring cleanliness, power to civilize, power to drive away degrading habits, power to raise the economic status, to instill righteousness, and to make the illiterate villager an effective witness.' Azariah's gospel message contained not only the `power of God unto salvation' but also `a power of God unto rural up-lift, unto economic freedom and unto social advance.' In short, it contained the `secret of national regeneration.'67
By 1935, the Dornakal diocese, with 250 ordained Indian clergy and more than 2,000 village teachers,68 was sponsoring an extensive network of schools and medical dispensaries, cooperative societies and banks, printing presses, agricultural settlements, and industrial projects, in addition to leading the worship and providing pastoral services for over 218,879 Anglicans.69 The church initiated a wide range of activities aimed at improving living conditions for its converts. Azariah frequently referred to the `four Demons - Dirt, Disease, Debt, and Drink' - which plagued the rural villages of his diocese. He urged clergymen and missionaries to look for opportunities to introduce cleanliness and sanitation, to start cottage industries for the augmentation of daily wages, to `wage war incessantly against drink,' and to promote literacy. `Educate, educate and educate every child and adult that you can get hold of.'70
In sermons, literature, and activities, Azariah's church condemned and apparently succeeded in reducing a wide range of practices it considered to be un-Christian. Smoking tobacco was discouraged.71 Lying, quarreling, cheating, and taking bribes were condemned and reduced,72 and crimes like theft, cattle poisoning, and murder were constantly denounced.73 The church also encouraged thrift,74 resisted costly weddings and dowries,75 established programs of direct assistance as well as cooperative credit societies to free converts from debt,76 and arbitrated land disputes.77
In an effort to help new congregations become self-supporting, the diocese adapted in 1912 the indigenous system of inam or endowment lands in which a small piece of arable tax-free church land (3-4 acres) was purchased and provided with a house, a plow, and a pair of bullocks. Christian teachers were allowed to cultivate this land on the condition that they lead village worship and conduct evening classes for children and adults.78 Furthermore, the church bought land to establish special Christian `Villages of Refuge': the aforementioned Vedanayagapuram for persecuted converts,79 and Kiritipuram for famine relief victims who converted to Christianity.80
Medical and health assistance was an integral part of the church's work. Vaccinations were distributed with gospel tracts, inoculations with magic lantern talks about Jesus. As Azariah wrote: `God's servants cannot be messengers of God and of His salvation without also being ministers of health and good-living.' The church sponsored an annual `medical evangelistic tour' which it viewed as part of its broader commission to further health propaganda and preventative work.'81 Its workers provided for the sick a combination of Christian prayer and western medicines such as quinine, eye drops, and dysentery remedies. Interestingly, Christians often accepted western remedies but continued to go to village medicine men for native cures for ailments such as jaundice or when it was believed that diams (possessing evil spirits) were responsible. Christians in Dornakal today apparently continue to visit a Hindu woman for treatments.82
In addition to making medical care available at several hospitals and dispensaries,83 an IMS missionary, Dr. J. S. William, traveled frequently throughout the diocese giving talks on disease (leprosy, yaws, and cholera were particularly prevalent) and sanitation while dispensing medicines and vaccinations.84 He established a Rural Medical Relief Association which sent trained workers into the villages with medicines, and hosted an annual Health Week for all diocesan workers.85 During a cholera epidemic in 1928, the church distributed chlorogen (a water sterilizer) and assisted officials in disinfecting water reservoirs and wells. While the epidemic strengthened the faith in some villages, it caused others to renounce the faith by joining non-Christians in making vows to `Maramma, the cholera goddess.' Azariah observed: An epidemic of this kind is a searching test to many a religious profession.... it confirms one village in the faith, and drives back another to Hinduism. It tests the teachers: one runs away and another suffers with his people.'86
The diocese integrated health education into its training for village teachers and for clergymen. Azariah argued that `village sanitation, personal hygiene, conduct during epidemics and the like are as essential for village service as `Principles of Education' and `Child Psychology.'87 Village dais (midwives) were trained and equipped with boxes of necessary equipment, and the use of bore-hole latrines was advocated.88 Christian villages developed the tradition of having an annual `house whitewash,' and Azariah exhorted converts to commend Christianity to Andhra by, among other traits, a `clean and well cared for body, home and village.'89 Although the persistent problem of impure water was not solved, diocesan records suggest a marked improvement of sanitation in Christian vil- lages.90 Before conversion in one village
In the area of marriage and sexual morals, the church faced the difficult task of trying to impose its standards upon a great variety of local practices. Bishop Azariah addressed the complex subject of adapting the Christian law of marriage as defined by the `Table of Kindred and Affinity' included in the Book of Common Prayer to Indian conditions and to sometimes divergent civil and ecclesiastical regulations. The handbook on marriage he published for Anglican clergy and religious workers in India92 traced the origins of Christian laws of marriage to universally applicable natural laws (`the need to secure the preservation of the human race'), to Jewish laws, and, finally, to christological and apostolic injunctions. He argued that peoples in India had `trespassed' against these laws with child marriage, which violated both the natural law of mutual consent and the Christian tradition of free consent between marriage partners. He saw divorce and remarriage as violations not only of a natural law demanding lifelong partnership but also of declarations by Christ and the apostles concerning the permanence of marriage. Several widely practiced unions in India (a man marrying a sister's daughter or a deceased wife's sister) also violated the unions declared permissible under Anglican guidelines.93
Azariah stressed that the Anglican church in India forbade marriages of Christians with non-Christians even though such `mixed' marriages were deemed legal under the Indian Christian Marriage Act of 1872 (which made the children of such marriages legitimate and qualified them for property inheritance). This was one of several areas in which the church decreed excommunication as the penalty for a marriage that was technically legal. As Azariah wrote in 1941:
Regarding child marriage, the church adhered to standards set by the 1872 Act, which required parental consent in cases where either party was under 21 years, and the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 (the Sardha Act), which prohibited marriages of men under 18 years and of women under 14 years in British India.95 Azariah also called for the aboli tion of the dowry system and its `bargain marriages' in order to foster harmonious Christian family life.96
Azariah and fellow church leaders in Andhra had more difficulty changing marriage practices than any others. When the IMS missionaries conducted their first Christian marriage ceremony in the Manukota pastorate in 1917, they ran up against three local customs that were particularly deeply rooted. By insisting on the English tradition of reading the banns of marriage on three consecutive Sundays before the wedding, they went directly against the village custom of having the ceremony as soon as possible after the completion of marriage negotiations (and in accordance with an auspicious date set by a Brahmin priest usually less than a week in ad- vance).97 By requiring marriages to be held in the village place of prayer, they took the ceremony out of the family home. By insisting that marriages be held during the day, they defied the custom of night marriages. These last changes proved so hard to accomplish that Azariah sometimes sent Christian teachers with musical instruments to homes where a wedding was imminent, with instructions to provide evening `entertainment' and thereby insure that no ceremony could be held until the following morning.
Elsewhere in Andhra, Telugu Baptists found that, whereas idols were often destroyed eagerly, child marriage could be regulated only with strict discipline.98 A study of Christianity in formerly Methodist areas of Andhra also recognized that, despite all legislation, child marriages still persisted among Christians and that mixed marriages were more common than unmixed ones. Indeed, Christians were more inclined to marry nonChristians of their own jati than Christians of different jatis, demonstrating the relative importance of traditional caste allegiances in comparison with introduced religious affiliations.99
Although articles in Azariah's Dornakal Diocesan Magazine claimed that the church had successfully introduced Christian marriage rites and celebrations free of alcohol consumption in a community free of `early marriage,'100 church disciplinary records reveal many violations. The Church Censures for the years 1914 to 1945 contain more excommunications for improprieties connected with marriage and sexual relations than for any other type of sin. Among the volumes' 6,347 entries (giving name, offense, and punishment), the most frequently mentioned transgressions were `heathen marriages,' `arranging, contracting, conducting or abetting heathen marriages,' and `adultery.' Other offenses mentioned were 'marrying wife's sister,' `living in sin with a heathen,' `living in sin with a married non-Christian woman,' `living with a man without any legal marriage,' and `fornication.'
Azariah was perfectly frank when addressing his clergy about the average number of excommunications that occurred each year (about 200) and the general nature of the offenses (of 972 excommunications during a four-year period, 425 were for `non-Christian practices', 281 were for 'living in adultery,' and 255 were for `apostasy').102 By `non-Christian practices' the bishop explained that he meant `non-Christian connections' associated with sexual immorality:
Azariah reported in 1941 that this seemingly large total number of excommunications for `immorality' (i.e., 281 for adultery and 425 for nonChristian connections) represented a great improvement over previous years.
Continued child marriage among Christians in Azariah's diocese is also suggested by examination of surviving marriage registers. The register for the IMS Telugu mission reveals a large number of marriages involving partners of age 14 and 15 - just over the legal limit of 14 for girls. One entry in 1924 involved a wife of 11 years, another in 1925 a wife of 10 and a husband of 14.105 Individuals still living in Dornakal confirm the continuance of this practice. One elderly Christian woman and sweet seller in Dornakal described how she became a Christian at the age of 5 (changing her name from Venkamma to Nama Ruth) and was married at the age of 10 to a Hindu (who subsequently became a Christian and changed his name from Narsaiah to Jeremiah).106 Another pastor who worked under Azariah confirmed that Christians and non-Christians continued to intermarry despite church prohibitions, prompting the bishop to compromise by allowing such marriages if non-Christians were first baptized.107 It is evident that both child marriages and mixed marriages were reduced but were by no means eradicated in the diocese.
Other areas of reform were accepted more readily by Dornakal's converts, chiefly because they satisfied the moral scruples of western missionaries without offending higher-caste Indian notions of defilement via certain forms of ingestion. Azariah scored one of his biggest successes by opposing alcohol consumption in the villages. On this issue, Indo-Anglican bishops were influenced by western temperance movements.108 They joined critics of the government's liquor laws and condemned the exploi tation of indigenous demand for liquor to increase revenues via taxes (abkari), a practice inherited from pre-Raj times. The problem of liquor consumption in India was not an indigenous problem, according to an article published in the Madras Diocesan Magazine in 1918, but was created by British self-interest.109 The Indo-Anglican leadership adopted a moral position of opposition to alcohol consumption and supported (although not unanimously) new prohibition decrees instituted by Congress ministries in provincial legislatures in 1937.110
Through the Dornakal Diocese's enthusiastic support for prohibi- tion111 and its establishment of a popular temperance society, the Andhra Christo Purushula Samajam (ACPS), the church achieved notable successes in lowering the rate of alcohol consumption among its adherents in Andhra.112 Founded in 1914, the ACPS boasted 1,142 branches by 1941, with a total of 10,486 adult members and 1,673 junior members. 113 Upon admission, ACPS members promised to abstain from drink and to witness to the power ofJesus Christ through both their improved moral lives and their conversations with friends and family. Each member received a cross and a prayer card which recorded their date of admission.114
The ACPS became the diocese's most important social improvement agency, sponsoring about sixty-three conferences per year in which the virtues of temperance were presented alongside the claims of the gospel. Its members engaged in activities such as street and house cleaning, visiting sick people, tutoring in reading and writing, discouraging the use of indecent language, and assisting the village teacher by promoting regular attendance at morning prayers and participation in evangelistic activities such as the `week of witness.'
Where drinking remained a problem among Christians, it was treated at first as a relatively minor offense punishable by suspension from holy communion.115 However, with the introduction of prohibition in 1938, drinking and illicit distilling became causes for excommunication. In an exhortation that demonstrated Azariah's own support for the stronger regulations against alcohol, the bishop urged his diocese to pay careful attention to the newly rigorous standards of both church and state:
By 1941, Azariah reported that `about half the Pastorates say that there is still some drinking among the older people, and that too on festival and marriage occasions,' but added that much progress had been made:
Azariah's campaign against alcohol consumption satisfied the moral position against drunkenness and involved him in the tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century western prohibition crusades. But it would not have been so successful in India without existing Hindu abhorrence for the `doubly-defiling' substance of alcohol. The drinking of strong liquor was considered especially polluting to higher jatis, not so much because it was defiling in itself, but because it was distilled by jatis of lower rank and had thus been touched by polluting people. The abandonment of distillation and of drinking alcohol was a well-recognized means of jati mobility throughout Indian society, non-Christian as well as Chris- tian.118 The progress made by converts in this area can therefore also be understood as part of an effort to elevate ritual rank in the Hindu social order as much as, or perhaps more than, being simply an effort to conform to broader Christian standards as articulated by church leaders.
Perhaps no area more clearly illustrates the degree to which Christian conversion movements provided the depressed classes with the opportunity for social mobility than the area of carrion and meat ingestion. Here, many of Dornakal's converts voluntarily adopted certain eating prohibitions not advocated by the church but regarded as highly desirable within India's broad criteria of ritual purity and impurity. Although the eating of meat - any meat - was one of the main factors associated with pollution and untouchability, there was in practice a hierarchy of meat pollution, with chicken, fish, and mutton ranking as relatively less polluting, and bats, cats, rats, dogs, crows, and snakes ranking as relatively more polluting.119 Beef and pork were considered by the higher castes to be particularly defiling because the former came from the most sacred of all animals, the cow, and the latter came from swine which ate excrement. Indeed, one of the myths commonly used to explain the low position of Malas and Madigas in the caste hierarchy involved the killing and eating of a divine cow belonging to Parvati and Siva.120 Dornakal diocesan records contain numerous examples of converts forsaking carrion, beef and pork in an obvious bid to improve their social rank, as defined more by India's ritual criteria than by western or `Christian' standards.
Both western missionaries and caste neighbors disapproved of carrion-eating but for different reasons. The depressed class practice of eating carrion (tsachina mamsamu) was condemned by missionaries on the grounds that the meat of animals which had died of disease, old age, or starvation was dangerously unsanitary. In contrast, the higher castes disapproved of eating tsachina mamsamu because, as in the case of the Madigas, this almost always meant eating relatively cheap but ritually defiling beef (cattle or buf- falo).I2I Caste people felt that pollution was contracted, not through the ingestion of dead animals per se (some people of higher castes ate the carrion of other animals), but through the ingestion of cow's meat. Unlike prohibitions regarding Sunday work, participation in Hindu rituals, and child marriage, which interfered with village traditions and provoked resistance from higher-caste Hindus, the prohibition against eating tsachina mamsamu was welcomed by dominant Hindu groups and was accepted eagerly, at least by those Christian converts with adequate dietary alternatives. 122 A pastor reported in 1931 that, The Madiga Christians of L- who used to eat dead flesh have now entirely left off eating it. This is a marvellous thing.'I23 Baptist Christians of Ongole became known for sitting apart when carrion was boiling in the pot.I24
The movement against eating carrion was part of the seemingly spontaneous wider movement among Dornakal's depressed classes to abandon eating beef, pork, and presumably other defiling but unmentionable meats. Diocesan records reported that many Christian congregations (and particularly Madigas and Yerukulas) decided to abstain from eating beef and pork voluntarily, without pressure from the church, in order to remove any hindrance to caste people who wanted to become Christian. In 1928, the church reported that Christians in a Pastorate headquarters had given up pork, `so that the use of it may not be an offence to others,' and that Christians in another area had `three years ago bound themselves to give up drink, beef, pork and tobacco; and are keeping faith- ful.1125 In 1930, church representatives from an area in which Telagas and other Sudras were pressing for baptism reported:
Azariah sympathized to some extent with neighboring Baptist missionaries who continued to eat beef in order to demonstrate their freedom from Hindu reverence for the cow.128 The bishop was not a vegetarian and ate meats according to his personal tastes. (As it happened, inevitably poorquality beef was not a favorite.) But unlike the Baptists who regarded beefeating as something of a test for converts, Azariah encouraged the anti-beef (pork, etc.) campaigns in his diocese. He attested to the longterm benefits of an anti-beef campaign in 1936 when he visited a village whose Christians had been baptized eleven years before. Their voluntary commitment to giving up `drink, beef, theft and lies' had so improved their `cleanliness' in the eyes of village zamindars that spatial distance requirements had been abandoned, Azariah reported.129 Abstention from defiling meats was one of several means by which Christians attempted with some apparent success to raise their status in the eyes of higher castes. Azariah welcomed efforts of this sort, which, he believed, would demonstrate to higher castes the ability of Christianity to drive away degrading habits'130 and lead to increased numbers of caste conversions.
Dornakal's non-Brahmin conversion movements attracted international interest, both during Azariah's lifetime and in later years, as examples of rural, agrarian movements which began among client agricultural laborers and moved upwards to patron tenants and landlords.I3I Pickett's 1937 study, which demonstrated that `Sudra' conversions always occurred in areas where there had previously been conversions among even lower classes,I32 provided powerful evidence for the theory, greatly favored by mass movement advocates, that India would be won for Christ through a process of `upward' filtration from the lowest to the highest ranks of society.
A more recent scholarly investigation has shed some doubt on Pickett's argument, contending that many jatis commonly classified by Christian observers as `Sudras' were actually either non-`Sudras,' in a state of limbo detached from Hindu society,' or the lowest of `Sudra' subcastes composed of highly unstable, often nomadic, elements.133 This important qualification applied particularly to Yerukalas and Waddars - the two largest so-called `Sudra' groups to convert to Christianity - which were, in fact, Adivasi (aboriginal) tribal groups.
Azariah was certainly aware of these complications. The Dornakal Diocesan Magazine noted in 1935 that caste movements were working their way up from the lower subsections of the `Sudra' ranks to the higher, and that conversions among higher groups such as the Kapus had occurred earlier and more frequently in northern Andhra where Kapus were poorly represented than in southern areas where they were strong, wealthy, and independent.I34 The bishop was familiar with differences between subcastes, describing Yerukalas, Yenadis, and Waddars as `border-line Sudras,' and Kammas, Kappus, and Telagas as `upper-class Sudras.' He knew there were many reasons for conversion.I35 But, in summarizing the results of extensive interviews, Azariah finally claimed that the primary reason for `Sudra' conversions was the `social, economical and educational transformation' that conversion to Christianity had caused among the depressed classes. He recounted the response of one landlord: "`Twenty years ago we called these depressed class people by their names and in a contemptuous manner; now we cannot address them except with terms of respect."'136 And in addition to conversions made by the positive impression of changed lives among depressed class converts, other `Sudra' conversions resulted from the `sub-group opportunism' and the desire to preserve both economic and social superiority over depressed class converts that have been well documented for some areas of nearby Guntur.137
Both Azariah and Pickett saw a causal link between depressed class and `Sudra' conversions wherever the introduction of Christianity had led to observable change in the lives of outcastes. Frequently, Christian converts of depressed class background were compared favorably to nonChristian untouchables by caste people. Pickett's study made no mention of the anti-meat campaign and spoke only generally about the importance of temperance and improving sanitary conditions in Christian villages as a means of demonstrating the `radical' change brought about by conver- sion.138 Like most missionary accounts of the mass movements, Pickett's tended to interpret the significant changes occurring during the process of Christianization in physical, western terms by focusing on scientific effects (sanitation reduces disease, etc.) and on moral issues familiar to western Christians (drunkenness, adultery, etc.). Such changes were easily interpreted as improvements. However, western observers tended to overlook changes associated with Indian notions of ritual pollution like eating beef or pork. Because there was nothing immoral or unhealthy in western Christian terms about consuming these meats and because the very concept of ritual defilement via ingestion seemed so foreign, changes here were largely overlooked in contemporary accounts of the mass movements destined for English-speaking audiences. As a result, the important sociological reality - that the Christian movement was part of a broader bid for jati mobility - was underemphasized and has remained underappreciated. The commonly held assumption by western missionaries that the mass movements represented a revolt against the caste system itself was to some degree a wish-projection made possible by the fact that westerners often interpreted the changes taking place in the villages in western rather than Indian terms.
In the context of such cultural misperceptions, Azariah's own observations regarding the anti-beef campaign seem particularly enlightened. In 1929, he visited a village in which outcaste Christians had given up beefeating, they claimed, in order to remove an alleged obstacle to caste conversions to Christianity. This had apparently helped to take away some of the stigma associated with the local Christian congregation, as Azariah recounted: `A Komati [village banker or merchant] recently remarked of Christians of a certain village that he had no objection to their coming to his shop or his touching them since now they had altogether given up beef.' The bishop added:
Far from condemning the anti-beef resolutions as symptomatic of the continuing hold of caste prejudice or of heathen cow veneration among Christians, the bishop welcomed these movements as goodhumored expressions of a new, gospel-motivated desire to reconcile communal differences. The fact that converts had spontaneously opted to give up eating beef without a mandate, or even encouragement, from the church was not viewed as insubordination but rather as an encouraging sign that outcaste Christians desired to improve their reputation among higher-caste groups, which Azariah believed would ultimately help the Christian (not to mention the outcaste) cause. The issue of eating beef had been discussed already at the 1910 Edinburgh Conference, where it was concluded that to refrain from eating beef would remove a serious obstacle to the acceptance of the Christian faith by Hindus.'I40 But abstaining from beef had not become a policy in Dornakal, nor even a practice followed by Azariah and most other Indian church leaders. Consistent with Azariah's generally optimistic attitude about the gospel's power to transform negative aspects of Indian culture, he viewed the campaign as an expression of Christian power to heal communal differences rather than as the self-serving attempt by one jati to improve its ritual status by adopting a higher-caste practice.
That the latter motivation may often have been the more compelling is suggested by the fact that the anti-beef campaign was not confined to Christian groups, although Christians often took the lead in initiating broad resolutions on the subject. In the mainly non-Christian Madiga hamlet cited above whose 800 inhabitants had agreed to stop drinking and eating beef, the minority Christians held all but one of the positions on the village panchayat responsible for the initiatives. Since Indian national independence, a sizable part of the non-Christian Madiga community has also attempted to stop eating carrion and dealing with dead cat- tle.141 The rise in economic position and political power which Madigas have experienced in urban areas to which they have been migrating has been accompanied by an attempt to claim better status in the eyes of higher-caste groups. But the abstention from beef-eating and from handling cattle has been the Madigas' only concession to values derived from the Sanskritic tradition. Madiga elites attempting to raise their jati's status have not engaged, except sporadically, in the process of Sanskritization, have avoided incorporating Brahmin priests into their socioreligious life, and have worshipped local territorial and caste deities rather than `the all-India gods of classical Hinduism.1142 Their models for emulation have been derived only occasionally and partially from the Sanskritic tradition and more often from a variety of cultural heritages which include local, regional, modern-western, and secular national traditions. For example, modern Madiga interfamily relationships have been modeled increasingly on patterns established by upper-caste Andhra agriculturalists rather than by Brahmins.143 Refraining from beef-eating appears to have been the only Brahminical practice widely adopted.
Christianization in the Dornakal Diocese with its variety of socioeconomic and cultural repercussions is, thus, perhaps best understood as one of many facets of change which occurred in the wider context of jati upward mobilization. Unlike some western missionaries, Azariah accepted his converts' accommodation to certain values defined by India's broad ritual criteria whereby different meats were accorded different degrees of ritual pollution. This was a realistic recognition that, although his formerly outcaste converts resented their ostracism from Hindu society, they were still inclined to assimilate some of that culture's values in order to gain greater respect. Insofar as those indigenous values did not offend his Christian values, Azariah chose to focus instead on their potential for improving the lives of both his converts and of Indian society as a whole.
The church hoped to bring about dramatic changes in the values and practices of the depressed classes while also adapting and invigorating certain positive elements of their culture. By requesting baptism, the mass movement converts apparently welcomed many of these changes. There is little doubt that conversion to Christianity in Dornakal and in other mass movement areas entailed, in addition to spiritual experiences, the quest for a better life both economically and socially and for greater individual and group dignity.I44 The question of which motivations took priority was one of the more vexing issues Azariah had to face during his episcopal career.
The debate over the significance of Indian mass movements during and since Azariah's lifetime focused on the question of motives for conversion. Some claimed the movements were spiritual awakenings (move ments of the Holy Spirit bringing about a revival of New Testament Chris- tianity').145 Others described them as nothing more than `superficial' actions prompted by economic, social, or other material motives (conversions for convenience). 146 Many Christians joined non-Christian critics in suspecting untouchables of converting in order to find relief from their poverty, to attain higher social position, or to obey family orjati leaders, rather than as the result of any religious experience. Azariah and Whitehead observed that the motives that lead people to become Christians in mass movements are strangely mixed.1147 Because of such suspicions, many missionaries were reluctant to baptize mass movement converts, especially after depressed class conversions became the focus of the serious moral and political dispute between Christians and Hindus in the 1930s - as we shall see in the following chapter.
Concerns about the legitimacy of group conversions from depressed classes prompted the NCC (under Bishop Azariah's presidency) to commission Pickett to conduct a nationwide sociological study of the mass movements. This was published in 1933.148 On the basis of 3,947 interviews with Christians from representative mass movement areas, Pickett and his research team concluded in 1933 that 8.1 percent had converted for secular reasons (education, better social standing, agricultural and medical aid, marriage prospects, relief of oppression by landowners), 34.8 percent for spiritual reasons, and 22.4 percent for social reasons (i.e., because family and friends had converted). The remaining 34.7 percent said they were Christians for natal reasons (i.e., because they were raised in Christian families). Despite the limitations of such classifications, the results demonstrated the complexity of motives behind conversions and were `effective in destroying tendencies to label simplistically and derogatorily the converts in mass movement areas.'149
Pickett's study concluded that the motives that lead Indian people to Christ in mass movements are the motives that lead people anywhere to him.' Although other Christians might describe their motives differently, Pickett believed that the experiences behind them would be very much the same,' even when following the decision of group leaders.110 The study's other major conclusion was that the mass movements `constitute for many Indian people the most natural way of approach to Christ' because the more individualistic way preferred in Western countries is not favored by people trained from early childhood to group action.'151 Pickett's study was the most detailed and comprehensive analysis of mass movements during this period and provided the NCC with sufficient evidence of conversion's positive effects to justify launching a nationwide evangelistic crusade in the 1930s, to be examined below.
The controversy over the motives for conversion hinged upon a distinction between the two categories of the `spiritual' and the `material' which Azariah did not believe were particularly relevant to either the Bible or the South Indian village. Mass movement critics, including many educated Indian Christians from urban areas, claimed that the only worthy motives for conversion were spiritual ones. In contrast, Azariah emphasized that worldly aspirations had not disqualified the disciples of Christ nor the prodigal son from spiritual fellowship.152 Furthermore, mass conversions and baptisms had occurred throughout Christian history, beginning at pentecost.153 By analogy, Azariah contended that `mixed motives' on the part of the oppressed untouchables were legitimate and not necessarily devious or a mask for self-advancement. Just as the Christian God (in the incarnate person of Jesus) had not ignored the material needs of his followers, so also should Christian missionaries seriously consider the material aspirations of the depressed classes. Azariah believed that post-baptism religious instruction and long-term exposure to Christian love and fellowship would eventually enable converts to appreciate the deeper, more specifically `spiritual' dimensions of their baptism. Even if new Christians expressed their reasons for conversion in material terms (the desire for education or suitable marriage partners), the bishop discerned that spiritual forces were at work `beneath the surface' providing `dynamite' for the mass movements so that, after several years of active membership in the church, converts manifested `higher motives, nobler thoughts and fresh achievements in character.'154
Of course, village Christians, immersed as they were in the diverse practices of India's `little' traditional belief systems, were often also aware of the more reflective `great' tradition of classical Hinduism.'57 But the villagers' dominant everyday worldview was populated mainly by spiritual beings, magical forces, and astrological and other signs; and their social life was so permeated by and patterned around religiously significant ceremonies as to make the distinction between the two transcendent ideals of `spiritual' and material' almost meaningless. Such concepts were more indigenous to what Max Weber would have called a rationalized' society in which, as Clifford Geertz has described it:
Mass movement critics imported the basically alien analytical dichotomy of `spiritual' versus `material' to explain and condemn actions of village converts for whom such categories had little meaning. Azariah, the bearer of a supposedly alien religion, seems to have understood more clearly than his critics the central role of religious beliefs and practices in ordering and explaining the everyday material life of the Indian village. The sometimes desperate need for a good monsoon and harvest, for protection from an epidemic, and for blessings in work and family life - these were spiritual as much as material issues in the less secularized rural context. As Azariah wrote to his diocese in 1935:
It was perhaps somewhat condescending of mass movement critics to assume that outcaste converts were either too unspiritual and ignorant to have religious motivations for baptism or too devious to admit that their true motivations were material. Untouchable converts in Dornakal fully expected that their gods would be involved in `worldly' matters such as healing illnesses and in guaranteeing success in marriages, house-building, crop cultivation, and the like. `Spiritual' revivals might be sparked by rainfall after a special day of fasting and prayer for rain.160 Their relatively undifferentiated understanding of the spiritual and material realms made it reasonable to expect religion to entail some degree of practical benefit. Telugu village culture had been as yet only indirectly affected by those forces of secularization which had led nineteenth-century Europe to distance God from the details of human existence.161 Rather, it was a culture in which material reality was permeated with sacred significance and in which clear divisions were not delineated between the spiritual and material realms. Not for the first time in the history of cultural contact and religious change have largely inappropriate questions led to unsatisfactory answers which tell us more about the motives of the debaters than the motives of those converted.
More recently, the debate over motives for depressed class conversions has refocused upon the somewhat different question of whether Indian Christian converts regarded their baptism as a means of protest against and escape from the hierarchical values of the Indian caste system (as the missionaries, many Indian Christians, and some scholars have claimed), or whether they were merely trying to improve their positions within the traditional Indian social order. Recent studies of Indian Christian communities suggest that converts often continued to adhere to Hindu standards of social rank and precedence and that conversion move ments in India cannot be properly understood in isolation from these val- ues.162 This was certainly true in Dornakal, where conversion served, among other functions, as a means by which depressed groups tried to improve their social and economic status, to gain new self-respect, and to win the respect of higher castes.163 Optimistic western missionaries of this period tended to regard mass movements as means by which outcastes and low castes were rejecting not only their particular position in the caste hierarchy but also the entire hierarchical value system upon which it was based. Missionaries tended to assume that, by converting to Christianity, former untouchables and `Sudras' were adopting not only the Christian faith but also the more egalitarian values of modern western `democratic' cultures.164 In fact, conversion to Christianity seems to have provided in many cases an effective instrument for improving the status of depressed class groups within the caste hierarchy. The missionaries' surprise, frustration, and bewilderment at not being able to eradicate the `remnants' of caste and other social practices from the church are at least partly accounted for by this misperception. Evidence in the Dornakal Diocese suggests that, while the mass movements were sometimes a means of protest against the prevailing caste system, they were more often a means by which subordinate groups tried to elevate their rank within the social hierarchy by accommodation to the values of dominant groups.
Most of the changes in living habits advocated by the Dornakal church (and at least partly achieved in the villages) were universally considered improvements' according to both Indian/Hindu and western/ Judeo-Christian values. Converts to Christianity were expected to give up a range of habits which were regarded by everyone (although often for different reasons) as contributing to their state of `degradation.' Christianity did change outcaste culture to some degree - but not so much in the radical way that Azariah and western missionaries originally envisioned as in a manner consistent with the elevation of caste status in Andhra society. Azariah's unique contribution was to allow his church the short-term freedom to order its affairs according to principles important to local culture rather than principles important to the external cultures of the missionaries, in the expectation that the gospel would work deeper transformations on local culture over the long term.
As a rising influence in India, particularly among hitherto neglected outcastes, Azariah necessarily came into conflict with the new political movement that was convulsing India and threatening to override preexisting local traditions: Indian nationalism. Azariah supported many of the most sacred goals of nationalism; but his growing successes seemed to threaten this emerging secular movement. By the 1930s, he was drawn unwittingly into a serious conflict with the unchallenged giant of modern Indian nationalism, Mohandas K. Gandhi.
Gandhi's lifetime almost exactly coincided with that of Azariah, and there were many striking parallels in their development. But there were also deep differences between the two Indian leaders, which came into focus in a dramatic and still controversial meeting just a decade before the final liberation of India.
he remarkable story of Azariah has been almost entirely excluded from the historical literature on modern India partly because his entire life was lived in the shadow of the far more famous figure of Gandhi. Gandhi has been seen not only as the tactician and embodiment of successful Indian nationalism but also as the modern exemplar of India's mysterious and ancient spiritual values.
The public image of Gandhi, and much of the scholarship about him, has tended to be idealized and hagiographic rather than critical.' Otherwise some mainstream attention would surely have been devoted to Gandhi's hostile relationship with Azariah, whom the Editor of The Collected Works ofMahatma Gandhi has described as Gandhi's `Enemy Number One.'2 Those who think of Gandhi as a saintly figure working to improve the lot of the Indian masses seem not to have either questioned or explored why Gandhi should have been so hostile to someone who was do ing precisely that at the local level within his own country. And it seems odd that the well-subsidized editors of Gandhi's massive collected works seem never to have found - or at least included - any serious documentation of Gandhi's interaction with his `Enemy Number One.'
One can place Azariah in the broad historical context of modern India by comparing and contrasting his life with the remarkably parallel yet strikingly divergent life of Gandhi. Gandhi was born five years before Azariah, and was killed by an assassin's gun three years after Azariah was killed by a fever contracted in a remote diocesan village. At the time of his death, Gandhi dressed as an Indian peasant while living in a businessman's Delhi mansion; Azariah dressed as an Anglican bishop - complete with resplendent robes - while living in his rural village. Both men were preoccupied with the problems of poverty and untouchability; and both men had devised entirely different strategies for alleviating its hardships.
Gandhi was born into a Hindu home in the princely state of Porbandar, where his family belonged to a subcaste of shopkeepers and moneylenders known as Banyas, and his father was raised as a Vaishnavi - a member of the Hindu sect that worships Vishnu or his incarnation, Krishna. Although Gandhi came from a higher caste than Azariah, both Gandhi and Azariah began their educations in schools where they learned to read and write by drawing letters in the dirt with sticks. Both boys were shy, and few predicted their eventual importance. Gandhi began his career inauspiciously as a tongue-tied lawyer; Azariah began by failing to complete his college degree in mathematics.
Gandhi, the apostle of Indian nationalism, was actually educated in London, while Azariah, the supposed adjunct of western imperialism, was educated in India. Gandhi spent the first twenty-one years of his adult career in South Africa during the time that Azariah was traveling the length and breadth of India as a missionary advocate. When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, he felt in many ways a foreigner in his own land. By the time the Mahatma began his famous train tour of India designed to reacquaint him with the ways of his own people, the younger Azariah had already spent almost twenty years riding trains, bullock carts, and bicycles throughout the subcontinent meeting with ordinary people and promoting his evangelistic message.
Gandhi began his extended years outside South Asia as a careful imitator of western dress and manners, and he ended them by rejecting western civilization and calling for Indian home rule. While hammering out legal and political challenges to racist politics in South Africa, he was inspired by western writers such as Tolstoy and Ruskin to reject western civilization as godless in his 1909 publication Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). Living abroad for an extended period of time probably intensified Gandhi's need to construct a newly viable Indian identity, both personally and politically.
Azariah avoided these extremes of imitative westernization and xenophobic nationalism, at least in part because he stayed in India. He agreed in some ways with Gandhi's Hind Swaraj when it criticized westernized Indian professional doctors and lawyers for betraying India's innate spiritual values: Azariah, too, enjoined professional classes in India to pursue a more spiritual mission. But because Azariah believed that Christianity contained the answers to India's deepest needs and that the Christian missionary to India was therefore the truest kind of Indian patriot, he sought ways to express and validate his Indian Christianity by combining the best of both western and Indian civilizations. Azariah shared much of Gandhi's frustration and resentment toward patronizing westerners and their institutions, but he never either fully adopted or decisively rejected western cultural norms or political legitimacy.
The Whiteheads and Azariah met Gandhi for the first time in February 1916 when the Whiteheads hosted him for a week's visit in their Madras home.4 Gandhi arrived on February 13 by slow train, 3rd class, and immediately struck Whitehead as `a delightful person, very simple in his life and very warm-hearted and affectionate and most responsive to the appeals of poverty and suffering.'5
On February 15, the Whiteheads hosted a garden party at their house to introduce Mr. Gandhi to a large number of Indians (including Azariah) and a few Europeans. That the Whiteheads should have been the conduit between Gandhi and new Indian constituencies in Madras suggests once again the importance of liberal westerners in promoting Indian nationalism on the subcontinent. We have no record of Azariah's conversation with Gandhi. In the evening after dinner, Bishop Whitehead and Gandhi had a long talk about swadeshi, and Whitehead expressed for the first time serious concerns about Gandhi's message:
Whitehead and Gandhi then turned to the more difficult question of evangelism, undoubtedly with the example of Azariah's Dornakal in mind:
Mr. Gandhi's ideal was that the Hindus should retain their own religion but reform its abuses. What he did not realize was that the main reform needed is in the fundamental conceptions of God and man and the relation between them.
This was, of course, the crux of the difficulty between Gandhi and Azariah: that Azariah favored conversion from, rather than reform of, Hinduism. Whitehead admired Gandhi as a great hero because of this wonderful self-sacrifice and endurance in championing the cause of his fellow countrymen during their struggle for justice' in South Africa, but he now began to question Gandhi's broader views on religion and Indian politics.
Azariah and Gandhi did not clash directly over these issues until the 1930s. But the fundamental religious and philosophical disagreements that lay at the heart of their debates emerged much earlier. Gandhi's position that all religions were equally valid was directly opposite to Azariah's position that Christianity was the only true religion. Gandhi had long believed that all religions were merely `different roads converging to the same point,'10 and that conversion from the religion of one's birth to another was an offense against the dharmic order." Azariah's evangelism, despite its obvious benefit to untouchables, offended Gandhi by its focus on conversion and baptism. Gandhi disapproved of Christian missions that went beyond social work - education, medicine, and the like - into the realm of religious confession and commitment. Azariah's emphasis on the importance of membership in the visible church set him on a collision course with the Mahatma from their earliest years.
Azariah and the Christians in his diocese were also increasingly isolated by the growing Indian nationalist consensus that Indian Christians, especially those who opposed aspects of the Independence movement, were not really patriotic. In a 1929 letter to Gandhi, the Indian Christian Community of Nandyal in Andhra - probably with Azariah's help - defended themselves from accusations of being `unpatriotic and antinational in outlook.' They objected that these charges were `utterly unfounded,' defended western missionaries, and described their own church as an object lesson on self-government.' 12 They advocated the more moderate political goal of Dominion status for India within the empire, and cautioned `against extreme and militant nationalism which seeks to destroy the most fundamental of all truths, viz., the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God.'13
Later, after the great rift between Gandhi and Azariah, the bishop expressed the heart of his grievance against Hindu nationalists who criticized the attitudes of Indian Christians toward their countrymen:
He has forgotten - the critic - the great service to India that Christians are rendering, through bringing Christ and His faith to bear upon the social problems of India. My love to my countrymen and my nationalism - they think - ought to be measured by my attitude to Congress or to political problems. No, I say my love to my country may be exercised through my ex-political work. If I labour to remove illiteracy, dirt, social enslavement and superstition of the neglected and the unprivileged or underprivileged - am I to be reckoned a foreigner with foreign sympathies with no love for my country? Should I be denounced as unpatriotic, simply because I am not dressed in a particular way or do not eat in a particular style or am not a member of a political party?
Azariah concluded by calling for a `nationalism that will not be narrow, and will not lead to nationalistic egoism.'14 But even in the 1920s, before his conflict with Gandhi, Azariah realized that a confrontation might be inevitable between Indian Christians - whose affiliations with the religion of empire were drawing intensified criticism - and India's nationalists.
The events that precipitated confrontation in the 1930s were set in motion by the British themselves as they gradually introduced parliamentary institutions and elective government to India. The British and Indian governments used communally based categories as the basis for organizing political reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some limited and indirect elections and representation for different groups had been introduced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; but the British introduced their first major constitutional innovation in 1909 when, under the Morley-Minto reforms, they instituted elections for an expanded number of seats on the Provincial and Central Legislative Councils. At this stage, separate electorates were introduced to protect the interests of various classes and interests, especially the Muslims who insisted on separate seats for Muslim constituencies and the right to vote in general constituencies (in all provinces except Bengal, where they were in the majority). Muslims and their British allies claimed that communal electorates - which guaranteed each definable community a predetermined level of political representation - were necessary to safeguard oppressed or underprivileged groups. Indian nationalists argued, in response, that the Raj was using communal electorates to bolster its own political position in India through a policy of `divide and rule.'
Separate electorates were given to Indian Christians in 1919 as part of the next major phase of constitutional reform: the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Separate electorates were also granted (or re-granted) to Muslims, Sikhs, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, Mahrattas in Bombay, and NonBrahmins and Depressed Classes in Madras. However, limitations on the franchise kept the bulk of Azariah's converts from voting until greater rights were extended through the Government of India Act of 1935. Before this, on 4 August 1932, as a result of the deliberations in London of the Second Round Table Conference, the Government issued a Communal Award which granted separate electorates to almost every possible group, including Christians and Depressed Classes. The expanded numbers of Indians on the electoral rolls were now also increasingly divided according to their religious, caste, and economic status.15
These complex communally based political categories for electoral and employment procedures threatened to open up many barely submerged religious and caste fissures in national politics. Both Gandhi and Azariah opposed the separate electorates, but for different reasons: Gandhi did not want the depressed classes to be separated from his conceptualization of modern Hinduism; Azariah did not want Indian Christians to be separated from Indian society more generally. Ultimately, both men were forced to accept a compromise through the intervention of yet another untouchable leader, B. R Ambedkar, who sought to defend and maximize separate representation for the depressed classes against Gandhi's efforts to keep them in the Hindu fold.
In this new political landscape, Indian Christians were distinguished from all other groups, including non-Christian depressed classes. Conversion instantly became a highly charged political as well as spiritual act. The mass movements now threatened to take substantial numbers, not just out of a new and increasingly organized modern Hinduism, but also off the Hindu electoral registers. Furthermore, depressed class converts to Christianity would lose all special privileges inherent to their former depressed class status; and caste converts would be grouped with former outcaste converts. Problems quickly emerged after the Congress Party gained control of the Legislature in the elections of 1937, problems that became more commonplace, complex, and troublesome after Independence. By 1939, Azariah described the emergence in his diocese of widespread communal discrimination in the matter of school fees and admissions which is rightly resented by all':
The effects of political reforms - some intended, others unexpected - changed the role of Christian missions in India and forced leaders such as Azariah into several contentious public policy debates. Previously, most Indian nationalists had cared little about Christian mission to the untouchables; it was, if anything, merely honorable charity work. Now that Indian Christians were placed in a separate electoral category, conversion from Hinduism (or other faiths) to Christianity (or other faiths) posed a more pressing political threat to the national movement, to Gandhi's leadership of the `Harijans,' and therefore also to Gandhi's broad moral and political agenda.
Azariah and Gandhi united in battle against the British government's communally based political reforms of the 1930's, but before long Gandhi attacked Azariah with criticisms and innuendo, and even tually he undermined the effectiveness of Azariah's missionary work in his diocese. An ill-conceived reconciliation effort by yet another group of unrealistic westerners exacerbated Azariah's problems and caused him publicly to defend Gandhi against his Christian missionary colleagues. This retreat marked a significant defeat for Azariah and for the Christian missionary enterprise, since it prevented them from engaging Gandhi in a clear public debate over issues of religious freedom that still plague India today.