To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum (The Anthropology of Christianity) (Volume 20) - Softcover

Roberts, Nathaniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520288823 ISBN 13: 9780520288829

Publisher: University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

To Be Cared For offers a unique view into the conceptual and moral world of slum-bound Dalits (“untouchables”) in the South Indian city of Chennai. Focusing on the decision by many women to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity, Nathaniel Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a “foreign” ideology that disrupts local communities. Far from being a divisive force, conversion integrates the slum community—Christians and Hindus alike—by addressing hidden moral fault lines that subtly pit residents against one another in a national context that renders Dalits outsiders in their own land."

Read an interview with the author on the Association for Asian Studies' #AsiaNow blog.

About this title

About the Author

Nathaniel Roberts is Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. 

From the Back Cover

"To be Cared For is a richly layered critique of elite discourses and anxieties about caste and conversion in India through a moving and insightful ethnography of religious practices and morality among the profoundly dispossessed. At once about caste, gender, hunger, injustice, and caring, this beautifully written book carries an analytical heft rarely seen in such grounded ethnographies."
—Raka Ray, Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley
 
"This is a remarkable book, supported by painstaking ethnographic research and written with clarity and sensitivity. To Be Cared For takes a hugely complex subject and gives us new points of departure. It shows how anthropological approaches to religion, identity, and conversion need to change. It helps the reader rethink the nature of religion, culture, and truth—matters urgent to people facing discrimination, extreme poverty, and acute uncertainty."
—David Mosse, Professor of Anthropology, School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London
 
"This remarkable ethnography tells a fascinating story with critical skill and compassion. Religion here is how people live, not what official doctrine says. Nathaniel Roberts gives us a complicated picture of moral contradictions and religious insights. This book is essential reading for anthropologists and others interested in the roles of religion in the modern world."
—Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, the Graduate Center, City University of New York

From the Inside Flap

"To be Cared For is a richly layered critique of elite discourses and anxieties about caste and conversion in India through a moving and insightful ethnography of religious practices and morality among the profoundly dispossessed. At once about caste, gender, hunger, injustice, and caring, this beautifully written book carries an analytical heft rarely seen in such grounded ethnographies."
—Raka Ray, Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley
 
"This is a remarkable book, supported by painstaking ethnographic research and written with clarity and sensitivity. To Be Cared For takes a hugely complex subject and gives us new points of departure. It shows how anthropological approaches to religion, identity, and conversion need to change. It helps the reader rethink the nature of religion, culture, and truth—matters urgent to people facing discrimination, extreme poverty, and acute uncertainty."
—David Mosse, Professor of Anthropology, School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London
 
"This remarkable ethnography tells a fascinating story with critical skill and compassion. Religion here is how people live, not what official doctrine says. Nathaniel Roberts gives us a complicated picture of moral contradictions and religious insights. This book is essential reading for anthropologists and others interested in the roles of religion in the modern world."
—Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

To be Cared for

The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum

By Nathaniel Roberts

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28882-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Terminological Notes, 
Introduction, 
1 • Outsiders, 
2 • Caste, Care, and the Human, 
3 • Sharing, Caring, and Supernatural Attack, 
4 • Religion, Conversion, and the National Frame, 
5 • The Logic of Slum Religion, 
6 • Pastoral Power and the Miracles of Christ, 
7 • Salvation, Knowledge, and Suffering, 
Conclusion, 
Appendix: Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Forcible Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2002, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Outsiders

RUMORS OF CERTAIN PASTORS RECEIVING "foreign money" surfaced soon after my arrival in Anbu Nagar. Previously my ideas about conversion in India had been drawn from newspaper reports and the like, and I took claims that foreign money was being used to lure converts at face value. It also seemed obvious to me that conversion must stir social conflict and, in areas where most converts were women, stir trouble between husbands and wives. Thus I assumed an important contribution of my research would be in ethnographically charting conflicts, and perhaps in showing how a local community struggled to keep its moral bearings under the assault of monetized proselytism, borne on a wave of global capital. I pursued "foreign money" rumors with the same energy that I sought out signs of religious conflict between Christians and Hindus, or within individual families, over matters of religion.

When I discreetly queried pastors themselves about foreign money and who was receiving it, Pastor Senthil Kumar's and Pastor Vijay's names consistently came up. Other pastors regretted not being contacted by foreign donors willing to back their ministries, but consoled themselves with the idea that God chooses to bless each of His servants in different ways. "We cannot presume to know His plans" was a line I often heard in this context. I did not immediately question Pastors Senthil Kumar or Vijay about rumors that they had received foreign money. I assumed that direct questioning would put them on the defensive and that they would attempt to evade. So I gathered as much information as I could, indirectly at first, from lay Christians and Hindus. I planned my approach very carefully, over a period of weeks. I did not want anyone to know what I was after. I especially did not want to risk tipping off any of the other pastors to the centrality of foreign money to my evolving research plans. I knew pastors treated one another primarily as rivals, but I did not yet fully understand the relations among them, and it seemed prudent to assume that others, too, might be in on the game.

By the time I raised the issue directly with Pastor Senthil Kumar, I had already worked out the basic details of the case. He had received a one-time donation that financed a new church building. Compared to most slum churches, his was indeed impressive. Where other churches were simply larger versions of typical slum dwellings — often either palm thatch or corrugated asbestos sheeting tied to frames of wooden poles (figure 1) — Senthil Kumar's church had "pukka" (i.e., masonry) walls and was bigger than what could have been built on local donations. But I still wanted to question him directly. I needed to gauge his reaction. After weeks of cautious circling, during which time I attended the pastor's Sunday services and got to know the man himself a bit, informally, I arranged an interview. The interview was casual by design and wandered over a range of innocuous topics I had preselected to draw the pastor out and establish his trust. I saved my big question for the end.

I am glad I did my homework, but the cloak-and-dagger approach proved unnecessary. The pastor was happy to answer my questions and displayed not the slightest bit of embarrassment or defensiveness over having received money from abroad. His answers confirmed what I had already learned, to which he added several details. The foreign organization that had paid for his new church had later sent someone to take a photo of the completed building, which they published in a newsletter. He had had no contact with them since, but he helpfully dug out a copy of the newsletter carrying a photograph of his church. He was proud to have been featured in a foreign publication, which he interpreted as worldwide recognition of the good works he was doing for the people of Kashtappattinam. The newsletter's purpose, as he understood it, was to "tell the world" about his ministry and about the many miracles God was performing among the poor. The newsletter was in English, and reading it one could get the impression that Senthil Kumar's success could be credited to their own organization's support, and even that he himself was a creature of their global program. He was perplexed when I told him this. "But I built up this congregation myself, with only God's help! Those foreign evangelists had nothing to do with it. Apart from the new building, everything was paid for by the people in my flock who were with me from before, some from the very beginning of my ministry. The foreign donors heard of my good works. They came here and they saw that our church was crowded with believers. There was nowhere to sit, and the roof leaked when it rained. They wanted to help me by building this better church for us to worship in. That is all." In the name of thoroughness I double-checked his story with other pastors, especially known rivals. Everything he had told me was true.

The other pastor said to have received foreign money, Pastor Vijay, turned out to be just a particularly charismatic leader, whose superior church building was fully paid for by donations from his own congregation. Rumors of foreign money, though unfounded, comforted less popular pastors by ascribing Vijay's success in attracting followers to something other than superior abilities or greater effort. When questioned more closely, other pastors admitted that they had no positive knowledge that he had ever received foreign funds and that this was merely a matter of speculation.

What is significant here is the lack, among pastors, of any sense that foreign money was morally compromised. This is interesting because in India more generally the possibility of "foreign money" supporting churches is invoked in ominous tones, suggesting malign antinational interests. Such talk draws on an old trope in Indian politics, the interfering "foreign hand," an unspecified threat famously cited by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency to justify repressive measures and explain away policy failures. Prime Minister Gandhi's frequent resort to the "foreign hand" bugaboo has since become a matter of general ridicule in Indian public life and a way to poke fun at the flimsy grounds on which succeeding generations of national leaders have invoked the specter of foreign influence to shore up political support or attack rivals (e.g., B. Ali 1986; Arora 2012; "Deadly 'Foreign Hand'" 1990; "'Foreign Hand' Again" 1999; Kaur 2002; Singh 2004; Romesh Thapar 1983). But what such ridicule targets is the outlandishness and implausibility of leaders' claims, not the underlying assumption that foreign influence is malign and to be avoided. This assumption is shared by actors across the spectrum of elite politics in India, though how the label "foreign" is applied varies according to political ideology. Thus, for India's communist parties, American influence was foreign but not the dictates emanating from Moscow (Sherlock 1998). For Hindu nationalists, remittances by overseas Indian Christians and Muslims count as foreign influence, but not the substantial flow of money into Hindu nationalist organizations from North America's powerful Indian business communities.

The rejection of "foreign influence" is a feature of all modern nationalisms, which follows from a core precept of national ideology, that of national self-determination or autonomy. Self-determination is especially dear to postcolonial states, born as they were of a struggle against foreign rule. But the intellectual trajectory of the Indian independence movement has endowed autonomy with a religio-spiritual dimension that goes beyond the usual nationalist ones and continues to play a profound role in elite common sense. From its origins in nineteenth-century Bengal, the push for self-rule rested on unique arguments (Chatterjee 1986). To most contemporary observers — natives no less than outsiders — India was not a nation at all but a geographic region home to a multiplicity of culturally and linguistically diverse peoples, whose historical allegiances had been to mutually antagonistic political traditions that actively resisted subsumption under a single state. The closest the subcontinent had come to political unity was under British rule, and being forcibly brought together by a foreign power was no argument for national identity. Early nationalists in Bengal devised an ingenious response. India's internal divisions — like its subordination to foreign power — were very real but pertained only to the vulgar, material domain of economic and public life. Against this they posited an "inner" spiritual (and implicitly Hindu) domain, associated with the domestic sphere, in which the nation was not only already unified but the "undominated, sovereign master of its own fate" (Chatterjee 1999, 6, 121; Sartori 2008). Arguments for national autonomy in British India were thus not merely political. They were premised on claims to autonomy in a uniquely Indian religio-spiritual realm.

This line of thought was further developed by the "Father of the Nation," M.K. Gandhi (1997), whose novel theory of swaraj (self-rule) sought to link the autonomy of the nation to that of the individual. Not only must the nation reject foreign influence in the geopolitical realm, but, more fundamentally, every individual must cultivate an ethos of self-reliance and personal self-control (Terchek 2011). National autonomy depends, in the Gandhian worldview, on personal autonomy and not the other way around (Parel 1997, lv). Accepting aid — monetary or otherwise — from others is anathematized in Gandhian ideology because it violates the principle of self-reliance and opens the self to the corrupting effects of outside influence. Aid that comes from Christian sources is particularly threatening to the nation Gandhi fathered, not just because it is "foreign," but, worse still, according to him, because it illegitimately mixes worldly and spiritual concerns and undermines personal autonomy in the most important realm of all, the religious.

As we will see, the people of Anbu Nagar did not enshrine autonomy as a sacred moral principle. Their own most deeply held moral intuitions centered on a very different ideal, one that is in some sense its opposite. To be human, for them, was not to be autonomous but to be profoundly and irreducibly connected with others. These connections were at once moral and material, and involved positive obligations to others in relation to which the contrivances of modern nation-states and the regimes of border control on which they depended were of no relevance. Slum pastors' failure to stigmatize "foreign money" was rooted in this alternative moral understanding and not in partiality toward their own coreligionists abroad. The pastors of Kashtappattinam were confident that money flowing into India from rich countries in the Middle East, through Muslim organizations, was also motivated by the basic human impulse to care for those in need. All over the world, they were quite sure, were people who just wanted to help. The urge to help those in need — poor people such as themselves — was not a specifically Christian impulse, according to these pastors, but a basic human one.

The salient distinction for the people of Anbu Nagar was not between conationals and foreigners, but between those who embraced the impulse to care for others and those who, out of selfishness, refused it. Thus, apart from not perceiving the world beyond India's borders as opposed to their interests, they emphatically rejected the idea that conationals were necessarily allies. "It is only politicians who talk badly of 'foreign influence,'" one pastor exclaimed in response to my repeated attempts to elicit nationalist distrust. "But that is only because they want us to stay poor!" He continued, "People from other countries try to send money to help the poor, but the politicians block it. They are afraid. They are afraid that we will become educated, and rise up. But slowly, slowly, because of Jesus, we are rising up anyway. The rich keep trying to stop it but they cannot." His name was Matthew, and like all pastors he perceived Jesus as the poor's ultimate ally. Yet he equally praised the efforts of Muslims in the Emirates, who he believed were sending money to fund schools and charities in India. Indeed, none of the pastors I knew saw charity coming from non-Christian sources as inferior, let alone threatening, though all maintained that only Jesus could guarantee ultimate salvation. In some ways, even Muslim and Hindu charitable organizations were seen as doing Jesus's work, insofar as the poor benefited. "Who is afraid of 'foreign money'?" another pastor asked rhetorically when I asked him why money from the Middle East should be a source of worry for other Indians. "Only the rich! Why? Because they want the poor to remain their slaves."

It was not just pastors who saw things this way. Ordinary Hindus and Christians in Anbu Nagar, I discovered, also failed to perceive foreign money as threatening or tainted. Nor did they share another view Gandhi popularized, that there was something irreligious about the desire for money, or for the worldly goods that money could buy, and that religion should be directed solely to spiritual ends. Money itself was not seen by them as morally suspect, and they betrayed no sense that money and religion ought to be kept separate. Money was not a bad thing. It was very useful. It was exactly what slum dwellers lacked and desperately needed. Immorality was a characteristic not of money but of people, and the paradigmatic form of immorality in their eyes was the refusal of the haves to share with the have-nots. Like slum-born pastors, ordinary Hindus and Christians in Anbu Nagar envisioned the world outside India's national borders in curiously positive terms. Whatever money foreigners had sent, they assumed, was sent with love and had been earmarked for benevolent purposes.

Among the benevolent purposes ordinary slum dwellers attributed to foreign money was proselytization. Unlike nationalist elites, they saw efforts by religious people of all faiths — Pentecostal pastors, the Ramakrishna Mission (a Hindu organization), local Muslim preachers, and so on — to propagate their teachings as a good thing. They were prepared to take at face value the claim by missionaries of all faiths to be motivated by love and concern for others. Like most Indians they had heard rumors that elsewhere in India Christian pastors were offering cash or gifts in kind to potential converts, and they did not doubt that these rumors were true. But when I asked whether they'd ever heard of local pastors giving such gifts they scoffed. "They say Christians are doing that [i.e., offering gifts to those who convert] in other places," one Hindu man laughed in response to my queries about the practice, "but around here all the pastors do is take!" He did not see such gift giving as morally suspect, and he added that if local pastors were as generous as their counterparts elsewhere he would hold them in higher regard. Other slum dwellers interpreted the absence of such "programs" in Kashtappattinam — programs they believed were being made available to potential converts in other parts of India — as yet another symptom of the area's neglect. "Ha! Do you think anyone cares that much about us?" one woman commented. "Do the politicians care? Do the pastors?" The fact that none of the local, slum-born pastors made such offers was cited as an example of how stingy they were. Where national public sphere discussions saw the alleged mixing of material and religious goods as a self-evidently illicit practice, and as a sign that Christian conversion efforts were not sincerely religious but driven by "ulterior motives," many in Anbu Nagar took local pastors' failure to offer gifts as evidence of their insincerity. If they really cared about saving people, surely they would put their money where their mouths were!

(Continues...)

Excerpted from To be Cared for by Nathaniel Roberts. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520288823
• ISBN 13: 9780520288829
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 306