University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Spring 2015
The church on Armenian Street: Capuchin friars,
the British East India Company, and the Second
Church of Colonial Madras
Patricia Raeann Johnston
University of Iowa
Copyright 2015 Patricia Raeann Johnston
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1650
Recommended Citation
Johnston, Patricia Raeann. "The church on Armenian Street: Capuchin friars, the British East India Company, and the Second Church
of Colonial Madras." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2015.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1650.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Religion Commons
THE CHURCH ON ARMENIAN STREET: CAPUCHIN FRIARS, THE BRITISH
EAST INDIA COMPANY, AND THE SECOND CHURCH OF COLONIAL MADRAS
by
Patricia Raeann Johnston
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Religious Studies in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2015
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Frederick M. Smith
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________
PH.D. THESIS
_________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Patricia Raeann Johnston
has been approved by the Examining Committee for
the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Religious Studies at the May 2015 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
____________________________________________
Frederick M. Smith, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________________
Morten Schlütter
____________________________________________
Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
____________________________________________
Ralph Keen
____________________________________________
Paul J. Griffiths
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human from divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity Dwell
There God is dwelling too.
William Blake
“The Divine Image”
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation would be incomplete without an expression of gratitude to the
many friends, mentors, and benefactors who made its completion possible.
I thank Drake University, the University of Iowa, the University of Northern
Iowa, the Stanley Foundation, and my patron Damien T. Guay for generous financial
assistance at various stages of my studies.
I am grateful to the Camaldolese Benedictines of Shanitvanam Ashram in Tamil
Nadu for their hospitality, solicitude, and guidance in my initial explorations of Indian
Catholicism. I am especially honored to have enjoyed the conversation of Fr. Augustine,
who offered spiritual counsel and acted the part of an Indian grandfather to me, as well as
the hospitality of the ever cheerful guestmaster, Br. George Abraham.
I must express my heartfelt appreciation for the many librarians who so
generously assisted me with my research. During the fieldwork phase, Anna Kielian of
Mundelein Seminary connected me with critical ecclesiastical contacts in India. Her
former student Fr. Joseph Lionel of St. Peter’s Pontifical Institute in Bangalore was an
excellent archival resource and introduced me to priests and religious in the Diocese of
Thanjavur, expediting the progress of my research. During the dissertation writing phase,
Rosemary Meany and her staff at the University of Northern Iowa’s Rod Library and Kris
Mogle of Cowles Library at Drake University made heroic efforts to obtain many obscure
and difficult-to-obtain volumes necessary for my research.
In India, many informants and collaborators aided the ultimate completion of this
dissertation. My translator Kumaressan of the French Institute in Pondicherry was
iii
essential, helping me to interview informants who might not have been equally
forthcoming when interviewed by a Western Christian. Fr. B. Arokiadoss and A.J.I.
Arumairaj in Velankanni referred me to informants, as well as opening doors for the
observation and recording of popular rituals. Josephine Dias and family from Vasai
West, Maharashtra shared their celebration of the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel
with me, as well as referring me to popular Catholic customs of the coastal fishing
communities. Brigitte Sébastia of the French Institute in Pondicherry directed my
attention to the St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral in Chennai, identifying it as
a site of popular devotion for which little scholarship has been published. At St. Mary’s
Co-Cathedral in Chennai, Fr. Xavier Packiam and Sr. Gloria of the Pious Disciples of the
Divine Master were essential sources of information about the history and official
archdiocesan policies toward the St. Antony Shrine, especially in the absence of written
sources. Outside India, the comparative theologian Francis X. Clooney and German
Indologist Matthias Frenz provided consultation and guidance at critical points in the
dissertation.
I am grateful to the organizers, respondents, and presenters at the various
conferences where I have developed my ideas. I am especially indebted to Philip
Deslippe and Mary Hancock at the University of California at Santa Barbara, George
Kunnath and Maria Caterina Mortillaro for their helpful comments at Wolfson College,
and to Glenn Willis, Kevin Johnson, and the entire comparative theology program at
Boston College. At the University of Iowa, I thank my colleagues Pranav Prakash,
Daniel Amodeo, and Jason Sprague for many opportunities to discuss research in
congenial company.
iv
Ed Heil’s artistic and technical savvy enriched this project, transforming a handdrawn map of St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral into an electronic version usable in the
dissertation. Although I have not directly cited his work in the dissertation, Corey Hart’s
statistical analysis of my informant questionnaires provides a degree of demographic
insight about Tamil Catholicism which is part of the background knowledge informing
the dissertation. Ed Heil and Mark Hoemmen offered invaluable assistance by reading
and commenting extensively on early drafts of various chapters. I have been the
beneficiary of the efforts of a small army of professional editors, with Megan King,
Bailey St. Clair, Erin Bunce, and Steven Deedon providing expert technical assistance in
transforming the dissertation into a finished product.
Above all, I owe a profound debt to all my teachers and mentors both past and
present. Dale and Mary Patrick and Allen Scult of Drake University have been
invaluable mentors since my undergraduate years, and I consider them true friends. Paul
J. Griffiths has been an indefatigable ally, offering advice and feedback on various
intellectual projects over a number of years. Fr. Arnold Klukas of Nashotah House
Theological Seminary is an especially valuable resource on liturgics and architecture,
being responsible for much of the knowledge of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Christianity
which is deployed in the conclusions of this dissertation. Last but not least, I thank
Frederick M. Smith, Ralph Keen, and my dissertation committee for their continual
exertions on my behalf.
v
ABSTRACT
This dissertation applies ethnographic research to answer a theoretical question in
the field of religious studies: to what degree does the prevailing world religions
paradigm illuminate or distort the interpretation of religious material that does not easily
fit into a single major religious tradition. Indian Catholicism generally and Tamil
Catholicism in particular have been deeply neglected both by scholars of India (who
generally assume that Christianity in India is a “foreign” religion more-or-less
indistinguishable from the Christianity of European missionaries), and by theologians and
historians of Christianity (who often treat non-Western expressions of Christianity as
somehow “compromised” by influence from alien religions such as Hinduism). By
interrogating the early modern origins of the world religions paradigm and questioning its
applicability to the particular case of Tamil Popular Catholicism, I intend to bring about a
shift within religious studies and allied theological fields that will allow popular
Catholicism to take a more central place within scholarship.
The major theoretical issue I pursue in this dissertation is the manner in which
European expectations about the nature of Christianity as a world religion impede the
understanding of non-conforming expressions of Christianity, such as Tamil Popular
Catholicism. My primary research agenda is a matter of ethnographically surveying a
representative Tamil Catholic site to determine the characteristics of Tamil Popular
Catholicism that most differentiate it from European expectations, and later to integrate
these findings with the theological self-definition of Catholic Christianity.
Methodologically, my approach combines ethnography with oral history, aiming at a
“thick description” of Tamil Popular Catholicism in its various manifestations that can be
vi
later used as a basis for theological reflection. Drawing on extensive field research at the
St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral in Chennai, I argue that popular, nonWestern expressions of Christianity in Tamil Nadu differ from elite interpretations
primarily with respect to the questions of exclusivity, openness to other communities, and
the place of “magical” or supernatural healing traditions.
There are concrete social and political consequences to the proliferation of
Western religious categories in India, namely, the unraveling of the previously integrated
Tamil religious culture into separate “Catholic” and “Hindu” identities and the social and
political marginalization of Tamil Catholics. At the St. Antony Shrine, the local
expression of Tamil Popular Catholicism cannot be described in terms of the prevailing
world religions paradigm, which differentiates absolutely between “Christianity” and
“Hinduism” and posits the existence of two hermetically-sealed religious communities
(“Catholic” and “Hindu”), whereas I argue there is but one (the popular religion of the
Tamil people, in which “Hindu” and “Catholic” differ primarily by virtue of caste rather
than religious classification or practice). The usual strategy within the world religious
paradigm for describing non-conforming Catholic sites is to appeal to the concept of
“syncretism,” which refers to the mixture of two or more of the world religions into an
incoherent third. This term carries heavy pejorative overtones and marginalizes the
religious phenomena so described, redirecting scholarly attention to religious phenomena
that can be described using existing categories. By demonstrating how Western religious
categories impede the understanding of a typical, non-eccentric Asian site, I show that the
prevailing categories used by Western scholars to analyze religions are Orientalist in
origin and logic and in need of drastic redefinition, which I provide in my conclusions by
vii
taking recourse to a premodern, Augustinian construction of “religion” which rejects the
pluralization of “religions” in favor of a singular definition, circumventing the theological
charge of “syncretism” and the legitimization of nationalist or communalist factions
formed on the basis of pluralized religious identities.
viii
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
This dissertation combines detailed ethnographic description of the beliefs and
practices of Hindu and Christian visitors of the popular St. Antony Shine at St. Mary’s
Co-Cathedral with theological argumentation that this material cannot be understood
using the standard world religions paradigm which essentializes Christianity as
monotheistic, exclusivistic, and unwilling to take recourse to so-called “magical”
practices. Drawing upon the visual and material culture of the shrine and the emerging
method of ethnographic theology, I argue that the beliefs and practices I document must
be allowed to inform both descriptive and constructive accounts of Catholic Christianity.
My overall thesis is that Tamil Popular Catholicism functions primarily as a caste
substitute rather than an ideological identity, which allows individuals to form a stable
Catholic identity which persists no matter which beliefs or practices they share in
common with Hindu or Muslim neighbors or their active participation in others’ worship.
The primary disciplinary intervention I seek in this dissertation is to caution comparative
theologians and methodological religionists against essentialist constructions of
Christianity and analogous traditions which treat these entities as mutually-exclusive
systems of belief and practice rather than complicated, interpenetrating cultural
complexes, and thereby re-prioritize the study of South Asian Christianity, which is often
marginalized for being “syncretistic.”
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
xxi
PART I: THE INVENTION OF CHRISTIANITY
INTRODUCTION
Chapter Outline
1
6
CHAPTER I. CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD RELIGIONS
The Invention of Religion
Partition: The Separation of Christianity and Indian Religion
Syncretism and Indian Religion
19
19
28
41
PART II: TAMIL POPULAR CATHOLICISM
CHAPTER II. THE CHURCH ON ARMENIAN STREET
Introduction
Catholic Madras
The Capuchin Mission
The Second Church
French Occupation
Race Religion
Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Second French Siege of Madras
The End of the British Padroado
The Irish Cathedral
An Excursus on Race and Colonialism
CHAPTER III. ANTONIYAR KŌVIL: A DESCRIPTIVE OVERVIEW OF
THE ST. ANTONY SHRINE
Introduction
Church and Shrine
The St. Antony Devotion
The Figure of St. Antony in Tamil Popular Catholicism
Devotions and Offerings
The Circumambulation Circuit
Moorat Chapel
The Koṭimaram
Devotions to Our Lady
Contestation, Conflict, and Compromise: Attitudes Toward Popular
Catholicism At The St. Antony Shrine
The St. Antony Shrine as “Second Church”
CHAPTER IV. HINDU-CHRISTIAN BORDER CROSSING AT THE
ST. ANTONY SHRINE
Method
x
49
49
50
53
57
60
61
68
71
76
80
83
83
85
87
90
100
106
114
120
126
129
138
142
143
Composite Results
149
Representative Informants
163
The Christian Vedantin: Antoniyar Rodrigues
164
My Orthodoxy Doth Protest Too Much: Rahul da Rocha
169
The Jesus Bhakta: Neil
172
An Equal Opportunity Bhakta: Nageshwara
173
Mariyadevi
175
The Convert: Pravesh
177
The Christian Sādhu and His Disciple: Arokiyadas and Agni Kumar 178
PART III: INTEGRATING POPULAR CATHOLICISM
CHAPTER V. THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
CONSTRUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY
Introduction
Theology Before Modernity
Truth Outside the Institutional Church
Premodern Recognition of Non-Christian Salvation
Modernity
The Second Vatican Council
Conclusions
REFERENCES
183
183
184
184
195
197
205
212
223
xi
LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE
1. Figure 1. Thomas Pitt, “A Prospect of Fort St. George,” 1710.
59
2. Figure 2. F.L. Conradi, “A Plan of Fort St. George,” 1755.
67
3. Figure 3. St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral, Armenian Street, Chennai.
83
4. Figure 4. “Bearded” St. Antony ex voto.
89
5. Figure 5. Devotees outside the shrine.
90
6. Figure 6. The St. Antony Shrine.
94
7. Figure 7. Rickshaw with Velankanni and Vinayagar decals, Pondicherry.
96
8. Figure 8. The gift of touch.
99
9. Figure 9. Candle offerings.
102
10. Figure 10. P.J. Johnston and Ed Heil, “A Plan of St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral,”
2014.
105
11. Figure 11. Devotees on the circumambulation circuit.
106
12. Figure 12. Our Lady of Good Health.
107
13. Figure 13. St. George.
109
14. Figure 14. Bishop Stephen Fennelly.
112
15. Figure 15. Votive locks.
113
16. Figure 16. Clandestine offerings at Moorat Chapel.
114
17. Figure 17. “No Candles” sign and burning candle, Moorat Chapel.
117
18. Figure 18. Religious articles absorbing shakti.
118
19. Figure 19. The Koṭimaram.
119
20. Figure 20. Krishna ex votos.
123
21. Figure 21. Tēr chariot for the Feast of Our Lady of the Angels.
124
xii
22. Figure 22. Our Lady of the Angels.
126
23. Figure 23. Bins to deposit vows/petitions and thanksgivings.
127
24. Figure 24. Kumaressan in the Immaculate Conception Chapel.
128
25. Figure 25. Decree establishing the St. Antony Shrine as an official shrine of the
Archdiocese of Madras-Mylapore.
129
xiii
INTRODUCTION
The emperor Akbar delighted the Jesuits who came to convert him, by assuring them that he had indeed
become a Christian – and then infuriated them by continuing to worship as a Muslim and, in many ways, a
Hindu. This was not what the Jesuits had in mind at all, and is yet another incident that reveals how
Europeans regarded the boundaries between religions as being impregnable, where Indians saw them as
rather porous.1
This dissertation represents the culmination of theological investigations first conceived
when I was fifteen years old and preparing for baptism into the Christian faith. I undertook
formal academic studies in philosophy and religion shortly thereafter, and although my scholarly
methods and geographical focus have shifted many times since I was an undergraduate, I
inevitably return to questions about the nature and boundaries of the Christian tradition and the
meaning of Catholic identity. In many respects, my investigation of Tamil Popular Catholicism
in this dissertation began as a set of longstanding theoretical concerns in search of a site where
they could be explored rather than a primary ethnographic interest.
By the early 1990s when I was an adolescent, the popular face of Christianity in America
had been reduced to a set of positions in the so-called “culture wars,” and there was a widelyheld understanding that certain kinds of people could never be authentically Christian by virtue
of their gender/sexuality, political positions, and countercultural as opposed to establishment
social comportment. Increasingly, young people with interests that placed them outside of the
Religious Right and its narrative about the nature of Christian identity disaffiliated from any
Christian denomination they might have been raised in, and if they retained spiritual motivations
at all, generally gravitated toward “alternative religions” such as the New Age, Wicca, Neo-
1
Wendy Doniger, “Foreword: The View from the Other Side: Postpostcolonialism, Religious Syncretism,
and Class Conflict,” in Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines, edited by Selva J. Raj and
Corinne G. Dempsey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, p. xviii).
1
Paganism, and Buddhism. Broadly speaking, “Christian” was taken to mean “conservative
evangelical” or possibly “right-wing Catholic,” and certain categories such as “gay Catholic” or
“progressive Christian” were considered oxymoronic and impossible to inhabit. I experienced
what many Christians of my age and background experienced, which was to be persistently
ideologically misread on the basis of personal identity markers that do not fit any neatlypackaged political program or set of presuppositions about the nature of religious boundaries. I
am approaching middle age, and if anything these demographic tendencies have accelerated
since my adolescence, with subsequent generations displaying an even greater degree of
ideological “sorting” into mutually-opposed camps. Formal academic theology offers little
respite, as the field organizes itself into “progressive” and “traditional” parties which align
themselves on the left/right division in the culture wars.
In such a situation, I might have become interested in any aspect of the constitution of
contemporary Christian identity, but as a traditionalist who is something of a social outsider, the
nexus of issues that has most concerned me is the construction and negotiation of religious
boundaries within “Catholic” (Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic) theological discourses and
communities. Who can claim Catholic identity, and on what terms? Which individuals and
groups should be considered outsiders, and how should they be treated? What should I think of
friends and acquaintances who have left Christianity, often under significant personal duress?
Did they need to go, or were they bullied or mistaken? Are there conditions under which it
would be necessary for me to go? Is there anything intrinsic to the grammar of the faith that
requires the contemporary degree of ideological sorting? How can Christian communities create
sufficient theological and cultural space to stop cannibalizing their young, and allow
marginalized groups to claim Christian identity without continual social pressure and
2
harassment? There are progressive Catholic answers to most of these questions, but they have
never been my answers, leaving me to experiment over time with a number of different
theoretical frameworks (Gadamerian hermeneutics, Neoplatonism, Madhyamaka, comparative
theological approaches aimed at borrowing “inclusive” elements from Asian religious traditions,
and so forth) aimed at maximizing the amount of communal interpenetrability and borrowing
between Catholic Christians and their social and theological “others.”
The intellectual provocation for this dissertation is dissatisfaction with mainstream
comparative theology as a means of addressing this particular nexus of theological concerns. To
a certain degree, comparative theology has always felt a little alien to traditionalists, as it tends to
attract progressive theologians and to reflect their distinctive methods and concerns. This is
primarily a matter of style, and sometimes of substance. More problematic, however, is the use
by many comparative theologians of the so-called “world religions paradigm” to categorize and
define religious groups in ways that undermine the desiderata one might hope to get from the
discipline. In addition to being a largely discredited taxonomy of religious difference, the world
religions paradigm contributes to “essentialist” constructions of religions which reify the
traditions in question as mutually-exclusive antagonists. Even if comparative theology
ultimately delineates religious boundaries in order to transcend them, for example by borrowing
material from other faiths, it seems reasonable to believe that this borrowing would be easier to
accomplish without reifying artificial religious boundaries in the first place. Moreover, when
comparative theologians such as Catherine Cornille write about the phenomenon of “multiple
religious belonging” (that is, individuals’ simultaneous participation in more than one
“religion”), the tone is often deeply hostile and pejorative, questioning the Christian identity and
religious authenticity of the individuals involved. This approach to comparative theology, if
3
universalized, would exclude Indian Catholics from consideration as authentically “Catholic”
and most practitioners of Asian religions from being considered “religious,” in addition to
problematizing Catholic outreach to North American and European practitioners of “alternative
religions,” who generally do not practice religion exclusively. This concern led me to seek an
ethnographic site with characteristics opposed by Cornille, and to offer a traditional theological
account of how the site might be understood as authentically “Catholic.” As Indian Catholic
shrines are famous for characteristics such as multiple religious belonging, borrowing from other
faiths, and magical practices, I organized fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, and was eventually directed
toward a suitable research site by Brigitte Sébastia of the French Institute in Pondicherry.
This dissertation, then, utilizes ethnography to explore the degree to which the prevailing
world religions paradigm illuminates or distorts the interpretation of religious material that does
not easily fit into a single major religious tradition. Indian Catholicism generally and Tamil
Catholicism in particular have been deeply neglected both by scholars of India (who generally
assume that Christianity in India is a “foreign” religion more-or-less indistinguishable from the
Christianity of European missionaries), and by theologians and historians of Christianity (who
often treat non-Western expressions of Christianity as somehow “compromised” by influence
from alien religions such as Hinduism). By interrogating the early modern origins of the world
religions paradigm and questioning its applicability to the particular case of Tamil Popular
Catholicism, I intend to bring about a shift within religious studies and allied theological fields
that will allow popular Catholicism to take a more central place within scholarship.
The major theoretical issue I pursue in this dissertation is the manner in which European
expectations about the nature of Christianity as a world religion impede the understanding of
non-conforming expressions of Christianity, such as Tamil Popular Catholicism. My primary
4
research agenda is a matter of ethnographically surveying a representative Tamil Catholic site to
determine the characteristics of Tamil Popular Catholicism that most differentiate it from
European expectations, and later to integrate these findings with the theological self-definition of
Catholic Christianity. Methodologically, my approach combines ethnography with oral history,
aiming at a “thick description” of Tamil Popular Catholicism in its various manifestations that
can be later used as a basis for theological reflection. Drawing on extensive field research at the
St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral in Chennai, I argue that popular, non-Western
expressions of Christianity in Tamil Nadu differ from elite interpretations primarily with respect
to the questions of exclusivity, openness to other communities, and the place of “magical” or
supernatural healing traditions.
There are concrete social and political consequences to the proliferation of Western
religious categories in India, namely, the unraveling of the previously integrated Tamil religious
culture into separate “Catholic” and “Hindu” identities and the social and political
marginalization of Tamil Catholics. At the St. Antony Shrine, the local expression of Tamil
Popular Catholicism cannot be described in terms of the prevailing world religions paradigm,
which differentiates absolutely between “Christianity” and “Hinduism” and posits the existence
of two hermetically-sealed religious communities (“Catholic” and “Hindu”), whereas I argue
there is but one (the popular religion of the Tamil people, in which “Hindu” and “Catholic” differ
primarily by virtue of caste rather than religious classification or practice). The usual strategy
within the world religious paradigm for describing non-conforming Catholic sites is to appeal to
the concept of “syncretism,” which refers to the mixture of two or more of the world religions
into an incoherent third. This term carries heavy pejorative overtones and marginalizes the
religious phenomena so described, redirecting scholarly attention to religious phenomena that
5
can be described using existing categories. By demonstrating how Western religious categories
impede the understanding of a typical, non-eccentric Asian site, I show that the prevailing
categories used by Western scholars to analyze religions are Orientalist in origin and logic and in
need of drastic redefinition, which I provide in my conclusions by taking recourse to a
premodern, Augustinian construction of “religion” which rejects the pluralization of “religions”
in favor of a singular definition, circumventing the theological charge of “syncretism” and the
legitimization of nationalist or communalist factions formed on the basis of pluralized religious
identities.
Chapter Outline
Chapter One (“Christianity and the World Religions”) argues that the world religions
paradigm adversely impacts research within religious studies by essentializing and reifying
arbitrary religious boundaries, dismissing Indian Christianity as mere “syncretism.” Special
attention is directed to understanding how the world religions paradigm is misleading in an
Indian context, where religious boundaries have tended to be permeable and non-exclusive, with
the sharpening of differences since colonization contributing both to the marginalization of
popular religion involving material from more than one “religion” and the growing problem of
communalism. Rather than accepting the world religions paradigm and its discrete traditions as
a necessary and inevitable given, the chapter traces the emergence of both the paradigm itself
and what are, for this study, its most salient traditions (“Christianity” and “Hinduism”) in order
to reveal the contingency and questionability of the received categories. These categories, I
argue, have generally served to render Tamil Catholicism invisible by making it appear to be a
local instance of “syncretism,” an incoherent combination of two or more world religions, rather
6
than a matter of interest in its own right.
In the first major section (“The Invention of Religion”), I draw upon the theoretical work
of J. Z. Smith, Tomoko Masuzawa, J. Samuel Preus, and others to situate the early modern
invention of the world religions paradigm in the European Wars of Religion and the colonial
enterprise. I argue that the traditional singular Augustinian construction of “religion,” which
organized its taxonomy of religious difference around degrees of participation in one “true”
religion, gave way to a plural conception of religion primarily under political and ideological
pressure from Protestant Christianity, which ruptured the political and religious unity of Europe.
The de facto pluralization of Christian religion and search for a political detente to the Wars of
Religion contributed to a new scholarly approach to cataloguing and theorizing religious
difference in terms of multiple competing “religions.” Although the older Augustinian model
continued to have predominantly Catholic adherents, increasingly the newer taxonomy
influenced the categorization of religion in the colonies and led to the definition of various
indigenous systems of belief and practice as “religions” in their own right, with an overall
sharpening of boundaries.
The next major section (“Partition: The Separation of Christianity and Indian Religion”)
documents the colonial categorization of “religions” and the consequent sharpening of religious
boundaries in Portuguese and British India. Drawing upon the work of Alexander Henn, Susan
Bayly, and David Mosse, I argue that the emerging world religions paradigm has been a force for
communalism and social disintegration since the Goa Inquisition introduced and policed a sharp
boundary between Catholic Christian and native Indian religious practices. The differentiation of
Christianity from Indian religion, and ultimately Hinduism and Islam from other traditions in
India, promoted competition between religiously-affiliated caste groups in the colonial period
7
and served as a necessary precondition for the emergence of religious nationalism in postIndependence India.
In “Syncretism and Indian Religion” I show that the partition of Hinduism, Christianity,
and Islam into separate religions has made the normal situation on the ground in India—mutual
participation in a common shrine culture across differences of religion and caste—into a
theoretical anomaly and contributes to scholarly neglect in favor of tradition-specific studies.
Drawing upon Robert Baird’s Category Formation and the History of Religions, I argue against
the cogency and usefulness of syncretism as an analytic category and appeal for the rehabilitation
of religious boundary crossing under the rubric of popular religion. On this understanding, Tamil
Popular Catholicism will be defined not by “syncretism” but by the participation of Catholics in
Tamil popular religion and the participation of non-Christian Tamils in Tamil Catholicism.
Chapter Two of the dissertation (“The Church on Armenian Street”) reconstructs the
fascinating and largely unknown story of today’s “Antoniyar Kōvil” on Armenian Street before
the site became associated with devotion to St. Antony in the mid-twentieth century. In terms of
name, administration, physical structure, clientele, political dominion, and ecclesiastical dignity
and jurisdiction, the site is a wild card, changing hands so frequently that only its location has
remained constant throughout its long history. The complicated narrative of the site offers much
to interest secular and ecclesiastical historians, but has never been told in its entirety—the most
comprehensive portrait (offered piecemeal in H. D. Love’s Vestiges of Old Madras) is secular,
dated, and ends before the establishment of St. Antony devotion at the site. Complementing
Love’s narrative with material from ecclesiastical historians (Celestine, Penny, and Thekkedath)
and more contemporary social and historical studies (Crosbie, Ballhatchet, and Nightingale)
allows me to piece together a richer, multidimensional portrait of the site. While none of these
8
sources is primarily concerned with the site nor aspires to offer a comprehensive narrative of its
history, each contributes enough to build upon Love and suggest that future historiographical
research about the site is needed.
My historical account provides a narrative institutional history of the Armenian Street site
from its foundation to the advent of the St. Antony devotion, focusing on church-state relations
in colonial Madras, British racial politics, and the site’s intersection with “celebrity” historical
figures and major historical events. In addition to contextualizing current devotion at the site, it
is hoped that this account will stimulate further scholarly investigation on this neglected topic.
For secular historians, the site’s role in the War of Austrian Succession and Seven Years War and
intersection with notables such as Elihu Yale and the Comte de Lally will likely prove engaging.
Ecclesiastical historians will be more interested in the site’s status as the second church in
colonial Madras and its role in a pattern of church-state patronage I term the “British Padroado,”
the racialization of religious identity in British India, and the classification of all Catholics as
“black” in the eyes of the British colonial authorities. As the original Catholic church in the
“Black Town,” the Armenian Street site offers a window into the global history of segregation,
with Madras often identified as the first racially-segregated city in the modern world and the
template for the subsequent colonial regimes of segregation. I conclude my historical narrative
with the ascendancy of the Salesians (the current custodians of the shrine) and the appointment
of John Mora, a transitional figure with a role in the establishment of the St. Antony devotion, as
parish priest.
Chapter Three (“Antoniyar Kōvil: A Descriptive Overview of the St. Antony Shrine”)
recounts the advent of St. Antony veneration at the Armenian Street site, describes and
contextualizes popular devotions prevalent at the shrine today, and contrasts the policies toward
9
these devotions of two representative Salesian priests serving the parish before and after the
Second Vatican Council.
Devotion to St. Antony at the Armenian Street cathedral began under the tenure of John
Mora, the first parish priest appointed by the Salesians to serve the congregation. Shortly after
his appointment as parish priest in 1929, Mora refused the votive gift of a bearded St. Antony
statue, which was offered by Goan sailors in thanksgiving for deliverance at sea, ultimately
agreeing to the statue’s placement inside the church after the image became disruptively popular
at another Madras location and was temporarily removed from public display by the archdiocese.
Though monitored and policed by Pietro Maggioni, a Salesian priest appointed by the
archdiocese to ensure orthodoxy and liturgical propriety at the shrine, devotion to St. Antony at
the cathedral grew dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s and has remained constant.
Recognizing its immense popularity, Archbishop Chinnappa named the site an official shrine of
the Archdiocese of Madras-Mylapore in 2005. Today the St. Antony Shrine is popular across
caste boundaries, and attracts a mixed clientele of Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and members of
other faiths both from adjoining neighborhoods and greater Chennai.
I contextualize devotion at the St. Antony Shrine by rehearsing and applying Brigitte
Sébastia’s research on St. Antony devotion at Puliyampatti and David Mosse’s typology of male
Catholic saints in Tamil popular religion, in which St. Antony functions as a member of a class of
ambivalent and dangerous minor deities known collectively as the pēy. Consistent with these
typologies, I describe St. Antony devotion as a popular religious movement partially
domesticated by the ecclesiastical authorities, associated with the liminal space of cemeteries and
wilderness, and primarily exorcistic in nature, in which the destructive influences of other pēy
are cast out by an equally ambivalent St. Antony.
10
After providing this context, I offer a systematic survey of the popular devotions
performed at the contemporary shrine. I inventory the physical layout and describe the visual
and material culture of the shrine, documenting a pattern of mutual cooperation between the
church and devotees in logistically facilitating particular devotions. The account is structured as
a description of the stations along a popular “reverse circumambulation” route through the
transepts and nave of the cathedral, beginning with the miraculous St. Antony statue and ending
either with an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help or a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the
opposite transept. I describe the manual gestures, substances, and objects of devotion, finding
them to be primarily Hindu in idiom and part of a broader Indian shrine culture shared across
caste and sectarian boundaries. I highlight a number of popular devotions at the shrine that
would be considered highly eccentric in a European Catholic context, including the veneration of
deceased bishops and missionaries, the transformation of a wealthy merchant’s funerary chapel
into a dargāḥ where clandestine magical rituals are performed, possible lay exorcisms performed
at the koṭimaram, and the offering of Krishna ex votos to St. Antony to bring fertility. I briefly
discuss devotions directed toward the Virgin Mary, another popular saint at the shrine, as well as
describing major feasts and processions that commence from the shrine. I conclude Chapter
Three by comparing and contrasting the policies toward these nonconforming devotions by two
parish priests, finding that mistrust and circumspection in the 1940s and 1950s evolved into
conditional acceptance of most popular devotions as inculturation, and toleration of most of the
rest.
Chapter Four, “Hindu-Christian Border Crossing at the St. Antony Shrine,” summarizes a
series of ethnographic interviews conducted by myself and an assistant in the courtyard outside
the St. Antony shrine during the summer of 2013. I briefly outline the interview method, which
11
combined prepared survey questions with open-ended interviewing, which was recorded for later
analysis. I then describe the composite results of the interview process, providing a list of
official survey questions, the range of typical answers, and topics about which information was
spontaneously volunteered. I did not subject the material to statistical analysis due to individual
idiosyncrasies among the informants which compromised the possibility of “control” variables;
however, the results were broadly consistent with my findings in previous statistical research,
and did not uncover significant differences between Hindu and Christian informants. Typical
patterns of response differed more within caste communities than between them, and suggested
common participation in a shared Tamil religious culture rather than the existence of rigid
sectarian boundaries.
The typical informant of any caste was middle-aged, from a neighborhood in Chennai
near the shrine, familiar with the shrine since childhood, likely of Paravar or Nadar caste
background, and relatively unconcerned with formal theological doctrines and practices oriented
toward otherworldly “salvation.” Rather, he or she was more interested in transacting an
exchange with the saint by offering a material gift of some kind and receiving a portion of the
saint’s shakti in order to overcome a practical life difficulty. Informants completely unfamiliar
with baptism and agnostic about the possibility of life after death would eagerly recount family
miracles, the special days and efficacious rituals celebrated at the shrine, and details of their
personal bhakti for the saint, who was generally conceptualized in terms of an Indian deity.
When theological speculations of a more abstract kind were offered, the range of opinion within
Hindu and Christian groups was comparable and overlapping, with occasional outliers within the
Christian community, where an informant would offer an “orthodox” opinion at variance with his
or her own behavior at the shrine and sometimes his or her stated theological opinions.
12
In the remainder of Chapter Four, I isolate eight informant interviews in order to give life
and personality to my composite results and to demonstrate the variability within the castes. The
two Hindu informants highlighted (Neil and Nageshwara) represent opposite extremes for Hindu
patrons of the site. Neil is a “Christ bhakta” or Hindu devotee of Jesus with religious beliefs and
practices that would put him within the Christian mainstream if he ever converted; Nageshwara
on the other hand is a wildly eclectic Hindu who treats devotional figures as somewhat
interchangeable and appeals to them primarily on the basis of pragmatic efficacy rather than
sectarian affiliation. The Catholic informants are equally diverse, including an orthodox figure
ideologically opposed to nearly all popular devotion at the site (Rahul da Rocha) and, at the
opposite extreme, a convert who still frequents Hindu temples and includes Hindu gods among
his personal deities (Pravesh). The remaining Catholic informants include an older woman
named Mariyadevi who prays for St. Antony to convert her Hindu son-in-law to Christianity
primarily over the difficulties raised by intercaste marriage, a businessman named Antoniyar
Rodrigues who has a Vedantin interpretation of Christianity and restricts the title “God” to the
impersonal absolute but calls upon personal deities such as St. Antony to meet practical needs,
and a Christian sādhu (Arokiyadas) and his disciple (Agni Kumar) who were visiting the shrine
hoping that St. Antony would empower a lay exorcism. Although each of these individuals is
striking, they are highlighted because they were the most generous about sharing their
personalities and stories—they represent the core of my ethnographic sample.
Chapter Five (“Theological Implications for the Construction of Christianity”) returns to
the theoretical considerations introduced in Chapter One to argue that innovations in the
categorization of religion in the early modern period served to theologically marginalize Indian
Catholic sites such as the St. Antony Shrine and that a renewed commitment to Catholic
13
traditionalism would move such sites from the margins to the mainstream of Christian
theological self-understanding. Far from being a necessary panacea to cure an insular and
intolerant tradition of negative attitudes toward non-Christian religions, I argue that the Vatican
II approach to religious diversity is ambivalent and problematic. While Vatican II doctrines undo
some of the worst damage of the modern world religions paradigm, this is accomplished
primarily through further investment in the same paradigm, limiting the extent of the repair.
After critiquing Vatican II documents and suggesting an overall theological approach of
ressourcement (return to premodern sources) rather than aggiornamento (accommodation to
modernity), I demonstrate that the St. Antony Shrine and similar sites would seem less alien and
more authentically Christian with the benefit of a more traditional theological lens.
In the first section of the chapter, I discuss the construction of religious boundaries by
Catholic Christians prior to modernity, finding that the major ecumenical “advances” of Vatican
II (inculturation, a toleration of pre-Christian ritual traditions, mechanisms for the salvation of
the non-Christian, and the recognition and borrowing of religious truths from outside the Church)
were mainstream elements of Catholic Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance
and declined as the world religions paradigm developed in early modernity. I briefly rehearse
paradigmatic antique, medieval, and early Renaissance instances of inculturation ranging from
theologia itself (a pagan middle Platonic philosophical discourse about the divine adopted by
Christians to formulate the nature of the Trinity) to the evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons in
Northern Europe and Jesuit accommodation to Chinese and Indian traditions in Asia. Drawing
on Augustine and Aquinas as primary sources and the secondary scholarship of Sullivan,
Pomplun, and Henn, I show that premodern Christian theology possessed resources to account
for the salvation of non-Christians and borrowing truth from non-Christian cultural sources,
14
allowing a diversity of possible Christian responses, ranging from rejection and hostility to
conditional acceptance and inclusion that was negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
In the next section, I argue that this fluid situation hardened and that firmer boundaries
and more oppositional approaches began to predominate with the advent of the printing press in
early modernity. The Spanish and Portuguese monarchies instituted Inquisitions in the Iberian
Peninsula, New World, and Goa to police Christianity from the threat posed by Jewish and
Indian conversos, converts to Christianity accused of retaining pre-Christian practices. The
publication of the Malleus Maleficarum spawned a witchcraft hysteria in Europe, leading to
unprecedented systematic efforts to eradicate witchcraft and superstition, with severe penalties
for the accused. Jesuit accommodation of the Chinese and Malabar Rites came under increasing
criticism and was ultimately suppressed. The charge of “idolatry” became a staple of Protestant
and Catholic polemic wars in Europe, leading to a retreat from ritual orthopraxy into increasingly
semantic and confessional constructions of Christian identity as well as Protestant iconoclasm in
Europe and Catholic iconoclasm in the colonies. “Syncretism” was coined as a theological
category by Erasmus of Rotterdam during this period, only to descend into a term of abuse to
denote the transgression of increasingly well-demarcated religious boundaries. The common
elements in these various movements are the emerging early modern concept of “religion” as a
genus/species classification system and increasing vigilance about the boundaries this new
classification system demarcated. Alexander Henn narrates the colonial encounter in India as a
linear progression from Vasco da Gama’s premodern conception of religio, which permitted him
to perceive Hindus as “Indian Catholics” on the basis of their similarities, to a program of
violence and erasure of Indian religion as the concept of non-Christian Indian “religions”
gradually emerged and took hold.
15
Returning to more contemporary theological approaches, I turn to Vatican II in order to
assess its impact on interfaith relations, finding primarily that the documents pertaining to the
subject of religious boundaries are ambiguous, combine opposing tendencies of mixed value, and
recapture much of the ground lost in early modernity primarily through reinscribing the same
modernist categories that problematized interfaith relations in the first place.
After analyzing the relevant Vatican II documents, I suggest that because the modern
world religions paradigm is damaging and counterproductive both for Christianity itself and the
non-Christian traditions it distorts and does not improve on premodern Christian approaches to
religious diversity in any obvious way, Catholic theologians should simply retire the world
religions paradigm and return to a premodern taxonomy of religious difference. Concretely, this
would entail reading the authoritative documents of Vatican II according to a hermeneutic of
continuity, prioritizing Vatican II documents such as Lumen Gentium that are more traditional in
their conceptuality, and reading more ambiguous documents such as Nostra Aetate in terms of
their more traditional elements so that they will harmonize with less problematic documents. I
argue that this approach would require the reconceptualization of several areas of contemporary
theological inquiry that presume the modern world religions paradigm (interreligious dialogue,
theology of religions, and comparative theology), suggesting that comparative theology might be
reconceived as ethnographic theology.
Finally, I show how a return to a premodern taxonomy of religious difference would
benefit the interpretation of the St. Antony Shrine and similar sites in India. Under the world
religions paradigm and its theological derivatives, the Christian pedigree of the site must remain
suspect due to multiple non-conformities to prevailing constructions of Christian identity. Many
of the prevailing religious practices at the site would be dismissed as “syncretism,”
16
“superstition,” or “witchcraft,” and the Christian identity of the informants would be suspect.
Under the premodern Christian taxonomy of religious difference, none of these factors need be
problematic. A singular definition of “religion” creates no absolute boundaries between
Christians and other groups, encouraging taxonomies based on degree of participation rather than
difference in kind. The local Indian conception that Catholics and Hindus differ in caste even as
they make significant common cause in religion, while unintelligible from a modern Western
view, is entirely unremarkable on a more traditional theological account. Because Indian beliefs
and practices could not be read as “Hindu” or “Muslim” (and therefore “not Christian”) without
the existence of these labels within Christian theological discourse, they could be more easily
assimilated to Indian Catholicism as local cultural traditions baptized in the process of
evangelization. In cases where particular beliefs and practices remain unacceptable due to
internal Christian norms and are classified as “superstition” (the categorization for religious
material Christians traffic in which cannot be assimilated to orthodoxy), the relatively lenient and
unsystematic treatment of superstition in premodern Christian discourse leaves more latitude for
pastoral tolerance and creativity than a modern approach, which treats such material as
inappropriate participation in mutually-exclusive religions. The ritual pragmatism and
indifference to doctrine characteristic of many Catholic lay people (both European and Indian),
while eccentric today, was typical before the modern transformation of Christianity into a
confessional and semantic ideology, meaning that a more traditional conceptualization of
Christianity would render contemporary Indian informants more intelligible and less eccentric.
In the end, I argue, Tamil Christianity is marginalized not because it is insufficiently Christian
but because it is insufficiently modern and Western for contemporary Western theologians to
recognize. If one removes the usual modernist and Orientalist lenses, Asian Christianity can
17
assume its rightful place at the demographic and theological center of contemporary global
Christianity.
18
CHAPTER 1:
CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD RELIGIONS
The Invention of Religion
“Religion” is not a native category. It is not a first person term of self-characterization. It is a
category imposed from the outside on some aspect of native culture. It is the other, in these
instances colonialists, who are solely responsible for the content of the term … It is a term created
by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define. 2
Although a neologism everywhere else in the world, the term “religion” is native to the
medieval European Christian culture intellectually descended from the Greeks and Romans.
“Religion” was classically conceived as a particular and singular practice, which anybody could
do well or badly. For the Greeks and Romans, religion was the system of rites and practice that
gave one proper commerce with the gods. The Christian appropriation of the term in Augustine’s
De Vera Religione applied this definition to Christianity. Religion was a particular, singular
matter that anyone could do well or badly; one did it well if one conformed to the pattern of
belief and practice set by the Christian Church, and did it poorly if one resorted to some other
pattern of belief and practice.3 Conflicts between groups were not conceived as conflicts
2
J.Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark. C.
Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 269, 281).
3
Although it contains passages which can be misread as claiming that the Christian Church is the sole
possessor of religious truth, the overall thrust of Augustine’s De Vera Religione is inclusivistic, arguing that God
ordered creation in such a way that both individual human beings and the entire human race have never been without
access to religious truth. The treatise argues that the Christian religion is the fullness of the truth which can be
ascertained in creation and revelation, with Jewish prophets and Platonic philosophers having attained some measure
of the truth, without that truth necessarily sufficing for salvation. Within the Christian tradition, the text was read as
a locus classicus for the idea of prisca religio (a primordial revelation to Adam reflected in the ancient traditions of
all cultures), as for example in the case of the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino (see Chapter Three in Amos
Edelheit’s Ficino, Pico and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology, Leiden: Brill, 2006). Burleigh’s
Augustine: Earlier Writings (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953) provides a translation both for De Vera
Religione and Augustine’s later Retractiones, a commentary on his earlier work. The key passage in De Vera
Religione for the traditional, inclusivist reading of Augustine is provided below, with the the Retractio immediately
following. The passage argues that Christian religion has always been available to everyone, with the Retractio
19
between “religions,” but conflicts about the correct practice of the one true religion. Rather than
making an absolute distinction between one true religion and rival false ones, the singular
conception of religion operated in terms of degrees of participation, recognizing the presence of
elements of true religion outside the context of the institutional Church, without endorsing their
salvific efficacy for non-Christians.
The Christian Middle Ages complicated the taxonomy, but introduced no important
conceptual innovations. In Aquinas’ time, those deficient in “religion” were conceived of not as
belonging to separate “religions,” but categorized in terms of the particular mode of their
deviance from the norm. One could miss the mark for want of charity alone and be a
“schismatic”—a category for Christians whose improper relationship with others caused them to
separate themselves from communion with other Christians and refuse submission to the
established hierarchy of the church.4 One could repudiate one’s Christian faith entirely and
become an “apostate.”5 One could lack the supernatural virtue of faith and fall into one of other
clarifying that the name “Christian” arose at a later date and that truth does not need to be called “Christian” in order
to be true:
God in his ineffable mercy by a temporal dispensation has used the mutable creation, obedient
however to his eternal laws, to remind the soul of its original and perfect nature, and so has come to
the aid of individual men and indeed of the whole human race. That is the Christian religion in our
times, and to know and to follow it is the most secure and most certain way of salvation (p. 231).
In the same chapter [x], I said, ‘That is the Christian religion in our times, which to know and
follow is most sure and certain salvation.’ I was speaking of the name, here, and not the thing so
named. For what is now called the Christian religion existed of old and was never absent from the
beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh. Then true religion which already
existed began to be called Christian … When I said, ‘This is the Christian religion in our times,’ I
did not mean that it had not existed in former times, but that it received that name later
(Retractiones I, 13, n. 3 in Burleigh p. 218).
4
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 39.
5
Question 12.
20
forms of infidelity, such as “unbelief” or “heresy.”6 In addition to various Christian heresies,
Judaism and Islam were classified not as “religions” but “heresies,” differentiated from one
another in terms of whether or not the offending group had explicitly received the Christian
revelation before abandoning it.7 Finally, one could offend against religion through practices
known as “superstition,” a category covering both unauthorized devotional practices connected
to Christianity and magico-religious practices retained from one’s pre-Christian roots.8 Of the
various forms of deficient religion, “superstition” was classified as the least blameworthy,
normally punishable by law only in cases where superstitious actions also involved idolatry,
heretical beliefs, or were identified as the source of tangible harm to persons or property.9
6
Question 10-11.
7
Question 10, Article 6. See also Francis A. Sullivan’s Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History
of the Catholic Response (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1992, pp. 55-58) on the classification of Islam.
8
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Questions 92-96.
9
In its popular manifestation, superstitio consisted of magico-religious practices termed “witchcraft” in
contemporary English, but covered by a wider array of terms in Anglo-Saxon and ecclesiastical Latin. Due to
semantic shifts in early modernity related both to the radicalization of the clergy against superstitio and superstitio’s
emerging conceptual opposition to science and reason, all forms of magico-religious activity were gradually
reclassified as negative and categorized under the single modern English term “witchcraft,” creating terminological
confusion in the interpretation of premodern literature (see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic:
Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, pp.435-437 on the loss of semantic
distinction between beneficent magic and maleficium in England by the sixteenth century). Prior to this shift,
“superstitio” was the broadest and least negative technical term, referring to the entire range of magico-religious lore
surviving from antiquity. Superstitio in this general sense was condemned in sermons and clerical literature but
remained unpunished unless it was privately confessed (Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy,
and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, 29; Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, pp. 176-180). As
sacramental confession did not become mandatory until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, instances of voluntary
disclosure of superstitio presumably were limited. “Maleficium” (Anglo-Saxon drycraeft, “harmful magic”) and
“veneficium” (Anglo-Saxon unlibban, “poisoning”) were more specific and negative activities singled out in secular
law codes and penitentials from an early date, describing destructive practices such as poisoning through potions,
summoning storms to injure or kill persons and livestock, and any other form of magic that was considered directly
injurious to others (Bailey, p. 29; McNeill and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the
Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents, p. 246). In the Middle Ages, superstitio
normally was not punished unless it also qualified as maleficium, as magical acts were punished for the harm they
inflicted upon persons and property, not for their religious genre classification (Bailey, p. 29). Attempts to
prosecute allegations of destructive witchcraft were modest before early modernity. In 1258, Pope Alexander
21
Omitted conceptual possibilities are interesting, and suggest much about the boundaries
of the medieval intellectual world. Aquinas was not aware of the existence of Christian groups
that had never known or recognized the authority of the papacy, as in the case of Celtic
Christianity before the Synod of Whitby or the St. Thomas Christians of Kerala prior to
Portuguese colonization.10 No surprise then that Aquinas deemed all non-Catholic Christians
forbade the new inquisitorial courts from pursuing witchcraft allegations unless there was an aggravating charge
such as heresy (Kieckhefer, pp. 190-191). Gustavo Benavides in his chapter “Modernity” in Critical Terms for
Religious Studies describes early medieval Christianity in terms of wholesale “assimilation of pagan practices” and
“generalized, open use of magic,” noting increasing clerical opposition from the eleventh century. Bernadette
Filotas’ Pagan Survivals, Superstitions, and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature characterizes
superstitio as the European popular religion shared by lay people and clerics (pp. 25-28). In the twelfth century, an
influx of Greek Neoplatonic and hermetic magical texts entered Europe through Arabic translation and alarmed
clerics (Kieckhefer, pp. 17-18, 116-150), presumably because they represented a forgotten form of magic called
theurgy in which the magician explicitly invokes spirits and demons, suggesting demonic collaboration. In The
Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Christopher Mackay blames the early
modern Malleus Maleficarum for initiating a Kuhnian “paradigm shift” in which magic moved from being
considered a distasteful but inconsequential activity to a demonic anti-religion so intrinsically harmful that that it
must be hunted down and exterminated (pp. 34-35). Benavides, Duffy, Kieckhefer, and Thomas link increasing
clerical concerns about magic to early modernization efforts and reform movements in Protestantism and
Catholicism. Despite increasing clerical pressure and a major witchcraft hysteria beginning around the fifteenth
century, magico-religious practices remained a central aspect of European popular Christianity into the modern
period, as documented by Eamon Duffy’s chapter “Charms, Pardons, and Promises” in The Stripping of the Altars:
Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 and Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in
Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England.
10
The interpretation of petrine primacy (papal supremacy) was an evolving area of doctrine in the early
church, fueled primary by disputes over precedence between the metropolitan sees of Rome and Constantinople, the
capital cities of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire. As late as the early fifth century, some remote portions of
the Western church did not interpret petrine primacy as granting the pope sovereignty over internal affairs within
their own dioceses, interpreting the pope as merely the primus inter pares among a number of metropolitan bishops.
See Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder’s Documents of the Christian Church, pp. 88-90, which documents the
complaints of African bishops in a fifth century dispute with the papacy in which the former do not appear to have
accepted emerging notions of petrine primacy. The Eastern Churches never accepted the Roman interpretation of
petrine primacy, and strained relations between East and West finally broke down in 1054 with representatives of the
patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople ultimately excommunicating one another. Celtic Christians in Britain in the
seventh century and the St. Thomas Christians of Kerala during the period of Portuguese colonization appear never
to have been exposed to the expanded notion of petrine primacy before being confronted with Roman claims. The
Synod of Whitby (664) was called to resolve liturgical differences in Britain brought about by the fall of the Western
Roman Empire and the subsequent Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. Christianity survived in Celtic strongholds
such as Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, and Scotland, though it was cut off from Rome and assumed a monastery-based
rather than diocesan form of ecclesiastical organization and retained older liturgical customs that had become
outdated on the continent. Christianity was reintroduced to the rest of Britain through a Roman mission led by
22
guilty of intentional schism. Aquinas knew of no genuine pagans, because he assumes that all
pagans have been exposed to Christian preaching and the category he offered to account for
contemporary “pagan” beliefs and practices, “superstition,” describes Christians engaging in preChristian practices.11 Although Aquinas hypothetically considered what would happen if
someone implicitly desired to become a Christian but simply never heard about Christianity, he
accepted in principle that the entire world had been exposed to Christianity and anyone who did
not accept Christianity must have chosen to reject it.12 Although factually inaccurate, this picture
is not unreasonable if one imagines medieval geographical knowledge placing the effective
frontiers of the known world in the Baltic in the North and the Middle East in the South, with the
only known surviving religious minorities being Jews, Muslims, a handful of Scandinavian and
Baltic pagans who had already heard of Christianity, and various groups of heretical and
schismatic European Christians. Unless that geographical picture expanded or the unity of
European Christian culture was somehow fractured, there would be no conceptual pressure to
develop an alternative to the classical, singular definition of religion.
This classical conception held through the Renaissance but began to shift in early
Augustine of Canterbury. When Celtic and Roman missions finally converged in Northumbria, it resulted in chaos,
with King Oswiu celebrating Easter on a different day than his queen Eanfled of Bernicia. The Synod of Whitby
resolved issues in favor of Rome, appealing to the newer interpretation of the doctrine of petrine primacy, which
appears on Bede’s account to have been unknown to the Celtic delegates, having been developed on the continent
while the Celtic Church was effectively out of contact with Rome. There is no reason to believe that the St. Thomas
Christians of Kerala, most of whose metropolitan sees were outside the old territorial limits of the Roman Empire in
what are now Turkey and Iraq, had ever been exposed to the Western Church’s interpretation of Petrine primacy
before the arrival of the Portuguese. See Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the British People, pp. 152-159 on the
Synod of Whitby, and Susan Bayly’s Saints, Goddesses, and Kings, pp. 254-272 on the St. Thomas Christians.
11
Francis A. Sullivan, Salvation Outside the Church: Tracing the History of the Catholic Response
(Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1992, p. 56).
12
Sullivan, pp. 52-58.
23
modernity as a result of the Wars of Religion and European colonialism, which led to the
discovery of systems of belief and practice in some respects resembling Christianity but
importantly different from it. Under the pressure of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent
Wars of Religion between Protestants and Catholics, many scholars sought to replace the
traditional singular definition of religion with the generic abstract category “religion” admitting
of particular, mutually-exclusive instances called “religions.” With the discovery of new lands
and people there was a greater number of potential “religions” available for interpretation.
Gradually, “religion” became plural and admitted into its ranks whatever systems of belief and
practice European scholars felt resembled Christianity. Despite the effective pluralization of
“religion,” Christianity is the ultimate reference term from which the category derives, meaning
that Christian theological assumptions were hardwired into the very idea of religion, even where
efforts were made to pluralize and secularize the concept.
In Explaining Religion, J. Samuel Preus offers an account in which the development of
“religion” as a concept and “religious studies” as a discipline result from the early modern Wars
of Religion, representing a desire on the part of battle-weary and increasingly-skeptical European
intellectuals to conceive of “religions” as particular instances of something more universal and
generic, “religion,” which can then be studied with some conceptual distance from the recent
conflicts between confessional groups.13 Usually, an interest in genus/species conceptions of
religion would go hand-in-hand with an interest in “natural theology” or “natural religion,” a
stripped-down theological system it was presumed all people might have in common, consisting
of a few abstract points of doctrine such as the belief in a creator deity who institutes basic
13
J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1996, p. xiv).
24
human morality and a system of reward and punishment to undergird such moral teachings.14 If
“religions” could be rendered plural and “religion” abstract, the logic went, then conflicts could
be conceptualized as relatively less significant second-order disagreements between “religions”
sharing membership in the broader category of “religion,” rather than total war between
irreconcilable perspectives on the same true “religion.” This reconceptualization, it was thought,
would open the door to toleration and peaceful co-existence between faiths. The new approach
to defining religion became the basis for the territorial partition of Europe between Protestant
and Catholic confessional states at the Treaty of Westphalia, with Protestant and Catholic
“religions” functioning as mutually-exclusive identities and the integrity of the nation-state
predicated upon religious uniformity.15 From the earliest possible precursors of the field
(Herbert of Cherbury, Vico, Bodin), there was the desire to pluralize “religion,” define “religion”
in accordance with the needs of statecraft, distance “religion” from “confessional” theology, and
study “religion” on scientific terms.
Tomoko Masuzawa extends this basic historical narrative into the nineteenth and
14
Preus, pp. 38-39.
15
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the Wars of Religion by reorganizing Europe on lines suggested by
Jean Bodin. Each of the signatories would recognize one another’s territorial integrity and sovereignty over internal
affairs, marking the end of overlapping feudal claims to the same region and establishing a central political authority
as the exclusive and absolute ruler of a single domain. In addition to centralizing authority in the new institution
which became known as the “nation-state,” the Peace of Westphalia established religious uniformity within states
and a pact of religious non-interference between states, endorsing the earlier formula “cuius regio, eius religio”
(“whose realm, his religion”), the idea that the religion of the ruler dictates the religion of the ruled. This solution
amounted to the territorial partition of Europe on confessional lines, and officially pluralized religion by formalizing
a detente between Catholic and Protestant in which each is recognized as having a “religion.” Religious minorities
would be permitted to worship according to their consciences in private, and publicly to the extent the ruler allowed.
In these moves, all the political desiderata Bodin sought in reconceptualizing religion are realized: the political
nation-state becomes sovereign over religious matters, individual religion is privatized and allowed insofar as it does
not conflict with the public interests of the state, “religion” is pluralized and its significance relativized, and
religious disagreements are contained by territorial partition.
25
twentieth centuries, discussing the so-called “first comparative theology” of the mid-nineteenth
century that served as the precursor for the contemporary discipline of religious studies as being
from the beginning an exercise in secularization and othering that preserves implicit cryptotheological presuppositions and reflects a colonial political agenda.16 In complementary terms,
Russell McCutcheon (1997) and Timothy Fitzgerald (2000) re-examine foundational scholars in
religious studies in order to show that these scholars and their intellectual descendants harbor
crypto-theological assumptions that compromise the scientific character of their work.
McCutcheon’s primary antagonist is Mircea Eliade, whom he accuses of fostering belief in sui
generis religion—that is, religion as a natural, autonomous, transhistorical, irreducible category
of human experience—as a means of perpetuating the scholar class’s institutional power as the
privileged expert interpreter of religion.17 McCutcheon maintains that the category is the result
of mystification and tends toward the alienation of human interest from more natural categories
of interpretation that affect human life in the concrete, such as politics, economics, gender, and
class status.18 Religious studies should abandon the category of religion and reconceive itself as
critical theory, practicing a tactical, oppositional discourse to the powers-that-be by engaging in
critical analysis of the power interests invested in “religious” discourse.19 In a similar vein and
building on the insights of Preus, Timothy Fitzgerald speaks of the concept of religion as “liberal
ecumenical theology”—the crypto-theological belief in a transcendental ground of human
16
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved
in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 72-104).
17
Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of
Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 16-18, 24, 67-71).
18
McCutcheon, p. 19.
19
McCutcheon, p. 5.
26
experience, which would make “religion” coherent as a category of interpretation and “religious
studies” intelligible as a discipline.20 Fitzgerald argues that scholars would do better to abandon
“religion” as a productive analytical category and focus on explanations for human behavior in
terms of anthropology, politics, economics, or history. McCutcheon and Fitzgerald share the
assumption that to be a legitimate scholarly enterprise, “religious studies” must be nontheological in its presuppositions, methods, and approach.
Given the cultural history of the term, it is probably inevitable that even the most generic
and abstract attempts to formulate a concept of “religion” import Christian theological
assumptions such as belief in a supreme being or some functional equivalent, e.g. belief in an
universal transcendental, ground for human experience. Whether or not this is reckoned
problematic depends upon one’s position on the legitimacy of Christian theology as an
intellectual enterprise and upon the adequacy of the categories derived from the early modern
Christian discourse on “religion” for describing cultural material of significance to one’s work.
While I accept the legitimacy of theological discourse and will in my conclusions advance a
specifically theological taxonomy of religious difference, I will here argue that the early modern
articulation of the world religions paradigm is Orientalist in conception, distorts the
interpretation of Indian religion, contributes to communalism and religious nationalism in postIndependence India, and is theologically and descriptively less productive than the premodern
taxonomy of religious difference it replaces. I will explore these concerns over the next two
sections, focusing on the artificial separation of Christianity from Indian religion and the
conceptual difficulties introduced by interpreting Tamil Christianity as “syncretism,” before
Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 3-
20
10).
27
offering the same issues more sustained theological analysis in my conclusions.
Partition: The Separation of Christianity and Indian Religion
The taxonomy of religious difference offered in the world religions paradigm is ill-suited
to understanding Indian religion, especially in the precolonial South, contributing to a common
but mistaken picture of a primordially “Hindu” subcontinent into which Muslims and Christians
entered as invaders. On this common account, religious and cultural differences prevent any real
degree of social integration, requiring the disenfranchisement of Indian religious minorities as a
precondition of national unity. This basic Hindu nationalist narrative is unintelligible without the
world religion paradigm as its ideological presupposition, as it requires the notion of “religions”
as mutually-exclusive systems of belief and practice with essential characteristics that fix
religions as permanent antagonists.21 If “religions” were conceived as permeable, historicallycontingent, and adaptive, then religious agents could be conceived as potential coalition partners
who can coexist within a given polity, rather than absolute and unassimilable aliens whose
influence must be neutralized. The implication of modernist constructions of religious identity in
21
Chad M. Bauman’s “Hindu-Christian Conflict in India: Globalization, Conversion, and the Coterminal
Castes and Tribes” (Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 72, No. 3 (2013): pp. 633-653) traces the rise of Hindu
nationalism to the categorization and differentiation of religious identities through the decennial British census,
which generated Indian anxieties that “Hindus” were a “dying race” who needed to counter “foreign” influences on
their culture, such as Christianity and Islam, in order to survive. Arya Samaj launched a massive reconversion
movement to align the lower castes with Hinduism, and U.N. Mukerji published A Dying Race in 1909 to argue that
the growth of Christianity represented a serious threat to local culture. The political ferment led to the establishment
of anti-Christian and anti-Muslim Hindu identity groups called Sabhas, which argued that Christianity and Islam
were “foreign” religions promoting alien political loyalties (Bauman, p. 639). V.D. Savarkar’s 1923 tract Hindutva:
Who Is a Hindu? crystallized these tendencies in an essentialist construction of Indian identity in which Hinduism
was identified as the basis of authentic Indianness. Savarkar ultimately became president of the Hindu Mahasabha,
further radicalizing the Sabha movement (p. 639). The R.S.S., B.J.P, and V.H.P. trace their ideological origin to
Savarkar’s Hindutva ideology, promoting the narrative that Christianity and Islam are incompatible with Indian
identity, “denationalize” their adherents, and must be stopped by making conversion to these religions illegal (pp.
640-641).
28
religious nationalist politics in nearly every theater of the post-colonial world, from Wahhabiinspired terrorism in the Middle East to Hindu nationalism in India and Buddhist-inspired
nationalism in South and Southeast Asia, should give pause to any scholar who believes that
categorizing “religions” is a politically-neutral act without consequences.22 In the case of the
separation of Christianity from Indian religion, the politics at work in making the partition were
colonial rather than indigenous in origin, reflecting early modern statebuilding techniques of the
major European powers. Indigenous Indian taxonomies operated from an alternative
administrative logic, and did not organize the world in the same terms. It is not necessary to
enter the acrimonious debate about whether the British or some other colonial power “invented”
Hinduism to document many of the transformations in existing strategies for categorizing and
negotiating religious difference that resulted from the colonial encounter.23
Alexander Henn, Susan Bayly, and David Mosse offer fundamentally complementary
accounts of the taxonomy and negotiation of religious difference before the advent of the
Portuguese in Goa. First, each of these writers questions the historical inevitability of the
modern category “Hinduism” to describe the variety of religious currents ultimately organized
22
Willfried Spohn argues in “Multiple Modernity, Nationalism, and Religion: A Global Perspective”
(Current Sociology, Vol. 51 No. 3/4 (2010): pp. 265-286) for a “multiple modernities” model in which
fundamentalist or religious nationalist reinventions of local religions are the ideological basis for statebuilding
efforts in their respective regions, and account for the simultaneous rise of religious violence across multiple postcolonial theaters. Spohn argues that the European nation-state is an exemplar rather than an exception to this
phenomenon, arising from a protracted period of violence that resulted in the partition of Europe on confessional
lines.
23
Consult David Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” (Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol.
41, No. 4 (1999): pp. 630-659) and Brian K. Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the
Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) for more information about this
debate, which shall not be pursued in this dissertation.
29
under that term.24 This does not mean that groups that are now recognized as “Hindu” did not
exist or that many of them did not conceive of themselves as somehow “different” from other
groups on grounds scholars would term religious, only that the use of the term and its
deployment as a means of negotiating religious difference is secondary and historically late, with
more local terminologies and strategies being salient before the colonial encounter. The most
powerful organizing force for what became “Hinduism” was Brahmanism and its elite Sanskritic
textual tradition, but this had little purchase in many parts of India, particularly the South, and
has yet to become the dominant ideology of various “tribal” Hindu groups throughout India.25
Bayly recognizes the Indian Christians of the St. Thomas tradition, Indian Muslims, and other
non-Brahmanic minority groups as indigenous Indian traditions.26 The strongest case for Indian
Islam and Christianity being perceived as culturally-alien latecomers rather than local traditions
is made by David Lorenzen, not coincidentally by focusing his attention on vernacular literature
from the Indo-Gangetic plain in the North, the area in India with the longest continuous tradition
of Brahmanic influence.27 Finally, each author cautions the reader against assuming that
religious differences, even in cases where indigenously perceived and categorized as such,
24
Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 170-171); Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims
and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 454); David
Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012, pp. 221-222).
25
Bayly, pp. 20-22, 453-454, 463.
26
Bayly, p. 454.
27
See Kent’s summary of the Lorenzen debate in Eliza Kent and Tazim R. Kassam’s Lines in Water:
Religious Boundaries in South Asia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013, pp. 4-7).
30
normally became a salient category for dividing rather than integrating Indian polities.28 If the
modern European nation-state treated religious boundaries as mutually-exclusive and so
impermeable that only the territorial partition of Europe on confessional lines could provide a
blueprint for peace, premodern Indian polities used the patronage of diverse religious institutions
as an instrument of statecraft, actively fostering relationships of mutual reciprocity between the
major groups.
Susan Bayly’s Saints, Goddesses, and Kings describes a deeply heterogeneous and
mutable South India in the centuries immediately preceding European colonization. In contrast
to the North (where Brahmanic influence was widespread), in the South, Brahmanic religious
culture initially existed almost exclusively in the wetland agricultural kingdoms of the alluvial
river valleys of Tamil Nadu, where religiously sanctioned social stratification was needed in
order to exploit labor for cultivation.29 Most South Indian religion was local, tribal, unconcerned
with characteristic Brahmanic emphases such as ritual purity and social stratification, and
focused on the worship of ferocious goddesses or ammans and “power cults” of morally
ambiguous deities with reputations for ritual efficacy.30 From the fourteenth through sixteenth
centuries, local rulers attempted to consolidate and legitimize political authority by linking
themselves to larger subcontinental traditions, though this process did not fully extend into the
hinterland until the eighteenth century.31 Conversion to a given tradition tended to be
28
Henn, pp. 121-125; Bayly, pp. 55-63, 69-70; David Mosse, “The Politics of Religious Synthesis: Roman
Catholic and Hindu Village Society in Tamil Nadu, India” in Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious
Synthesis (New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 85-107), edited by Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw.
29
Bayly, pp. 21-34, 453-455.
30
Bayly, pp. 48-52, 55-63.
31
Bayly, pp. 453-455.
31
circumstantial, political, negotiable, and above all non-exclusive—a matter of contracting
favorable alliances in trade and political patronage and utilizing the respective religious systems
for prestige, legitimacy, and efficacious cult practices. The conversion of entire castes proceeded
en masse, for the most part independently of organized missionary movements, along currents of
perceived political and religious efficacy, while being subject to renegotiation as fortunes
shifted.32 The major beneficiaries of these conversions were Brahmanism and Sanskritized
interpretations of Dravidian religion, Indian Islam (spread primarily along maritime networks by
merchants hoping to contract favorable trade relationships), and Catholic Christianity (which
benefited both from the prospect of political alliance with the Portuguese and the reputation of
unauthorized saint cults, which provided access to a new source of supernatural power).33
Hindu, Muslim, and Christian traditions all benefited from the appeal of “power cults” of
typically unauthorized local deities, saints, or pīrs, and even where patronage of these cults did
not result in conversions, their ritual sites became part of an integrated shrine culture patronized
across boundaries of religion and caste.
This situation of intense religious plurality led to organized sectarian conflict primarily in
European-controlled colonies such as Portuguese Goa. In contrast, religion was used by Indians
for purposes of social integration accomplished through a ritual “honors” system in which
political and caste patrons competed to support particular religious institutions in return for
prestigious ritual roles in that institution’s annual festival which would reinscribe and legitimize
Mosse, Saint in the Banyan Tree, pp. 53-55, 65-67; Bayly, pp. 312-319, 392-396, 397-404, 446-447, 451-
32
452.
33
See Bayly, pp. 77-96 on conversion to Islam in South India, pp. 65-70 on increasing Brahmanization, and
pp. 327-331, 367-369 on conversion to Christianity.
32
their relative status in the emerging South Indian caste hierarchy.34 Religious affiliation was no
barrier to participation, as specific ritual honors were extended and even reserved for particular
groups in order to create networks of mutual reciprocity between castes.35 South Indian society
was feudal and organized in a segmentary manner – a mosaic of highly-localized religious,
ethnic, linguistic, and caste identities requiring negotiated integration into a political network,
not a rationalized polity such as the nation-state that could operate unilaterally and vertically.36
This ensured that the ritual honor system would remain a privileged site of political coalitionbuilding, and that religion would be deployed primarily in an integrative role.
The nature and social role of “religion” in South India was so incongruent with the
modern world religions paradigm that Bayly speaks of the Christianity of the most important
South Indian Christian caste, the Paravars, not as a “religion” with implications of exclusivity but
as the “caste lifestyle” for a group of people completely integrated into the South Indian ritual
honors system.37 David Mosse’s The Saint in the Banyan Tree follows Bayly, arguing that the
“Hindu” forms of devotion traditionally assimilated into the worship of Catholic saints in Tamil
Popular Catholicism are not instances of “syncretism” so much as a reflection of the effective
integration of Catholics as a caste group in the South Indian religious patronage structure. Mosse
34
On the political role of the ritual “honors” system, see Mosse, pp. 40-44, Henn, pp. 121-125, and Bayly
pp. 34-40, 48-52, 453-455.
35
On the role of the ritual honors system in social placement and the integration of smaller communal
groups into larger political communities, see Margaret Meibohm, “Past Selves and Present Others: The Ritual
Construction of Identity at a Catholic Festival in India” in Raj and Dempsey’s Popular Christianity in India, pp. 7076 and Bayly, pp. 347-351.
36
On the segmentary character of Indian polity and the role of ritual honors as an aspect of statebuilding, see
Bayly, pp. 21, 49-50, 453.
37
On the Parava “caste lifestyle,” see pp. Bayly, pp. 331-336.
33
explains the gradual historical disintegration of Hindu-Catholic cooperation at his primary
research site, Alapuram, in terms of British colonialism in the nineteenth century, increased
Catholic criticism of the caste system with the advent of Dalit liberation theology in the
twentieth century, and the reification of separate “Hindu” and “Catholic” identities in the
discourse of Hindu nationalism.38
Alexander Henn’s Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa follows Bayly and Mosse in
making what he terms a “striking analogy between Goa and South India,” noting “a relationship
between religious communities ... based above all on an ancient village organization that
connects political authority, economic redistribution, and ritual honors.”39 However, Henn notes
important differences in Goa when compared to the rest of South India. First, while Tamil
Catholicism functions as a local caste or perhaps group of castes within an integrated religious
structure, Goan Catholics form a separate and exclusive social group with its own caste structure,
replicating the Hindu caste system; correspondingly, any ritual parallelism in Goa is between
separate religious communities, who at times cross boundaries to forge coalitions with one
another, rather than being evidence of an integrated ritual community inclusive of both Hindus
and Catholics.40 Religious interactions in Goa are characterized by occasional “syncretism,” the
crossing of boundaries between two distinct religions to forge alliances, rather than the
“synthesis” Mosse describes in Tamil Nadu.41 The primary difference between Mosse’s and
38
103.
On the disintegration of the village caste order, see Mosse, “The Politics of Religious Synthesis,” pp. 100-
39
Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, p. 121).
40
Henn, pp. 122-123.
41
Mosse, “The Politics of Religious Synthesis,” pp. 85-107 and Henn, pp. 122-125.
34
Bayly’s South India and Henn’s Goa is Goa’s legacy of colonialism under the Portuguese, who
instituted the Goa Inquisition (1560-1812) to delineate and police the boundaries between what
the Portuguese came to perceive as two separate and irreconcilable “religions.”42
Although the Portuguese government forbade the practice of any religion but Catholic
Christianity in its territories and demolished temples and mosques, the Inquisition in Goa was
tasked with policing the behavior of convert Christians, including Christians of Jewish
background from Portugal and Indian Christian communities from the Malabar Coast, such as
the Paravas and the St. Thomas Christians. Though no official Portuguese records survive,
second-hand accounts document action against converts for retaining religious practices of
Hindu and Muslim origin and against St. Thomas Christians for allegedly subscribing to the
Nestorian heresy and maintaining their own ecclesiastical hierarchy.43 Many Indian Catholics
fled Goa to escape the Inquisition and established Christian communities elsewhere in South
India. The status of the St. Thomas community was deeply damaged by Portuguese restrictions,
as they had functioned for over a millennium as a high, ritually pure caste with patronage
connections integrating them into the local religious community which the Portuguese forced
them to discontinue, wedging them apart from other castes and associating them with the
ritually-polluting Portuguese.44 The local suppression of religious practices lacking a European
42
Henn, p. 47.
43
The Inquisition banned making religious images from any material and prohibited the use of local plants
and flowers, rice, coconut, turmeric, betel leaves, and areca nuts in worship. Additionally, the Inquisition banned
customary social practices such as keeping Indian names, wearing Indian dresses, singing Konkani verses, cooking
rice without salt, removing footwear in one’s home, and male urination in a squatting position. Eventually, even the
use of Konkani was banned (Henn, pp. 51-52).
44
The St. Thomas Christians trace their historical origins to communities of spice traders who settled in the
coastal parts of Kerala in the early centuries of the Common Era. They claim descent from Nambudiri Brahmans
evangelized by St. Thomas during his stay in Malabar in the first century, but probably descend from Syrian traders
of Jewish and Christian background. They are described in the sixth century travel account of Cosmas
35
Catholic pedigree in Goa and the persecution of individuals and groups who appeared to blur
religious boundaries sharpened distinctions between the communities and prevented their ritual
integration, differentiating Catholicism in Goa from the rest of South India. 45
For Henn, the Portuguese war against “idolatry” in Goa and forced demarcation of
separate religious identities is the historical origin of the world religions paradigm, with the
Indicopleustes, establishing a terminus ante quem for the foundation of the community. But scholars generally
accept dates from the third century or even earlier. The St. Thomas Christians were treated as high caste and ritually
pure, holding reciprocal donor roles with the Nayars and other elite Hindu groups in the local temple honors system
(Bayly, p. 253). Before colonization, the St. Thomas Christians recognized West Asian patriarchs and used the
Syrian liturgy, presumably never having known or recognized the authority of the Bishop of Rome (pp. 254-257).
The Portuguese fractured the unity of the St. Thomas Christians, deploying the Inquisition to force subscription to
the anti-Nestorian Council of Ephesus and bring the community into submission to the Roman Catholic
ecclesiastical hierarchy (Bauman, pp. 636-637). The Portuguese even assassinated visiting West Asian bishops
(Bayly, p. 268). “The Portuguese … initiated a process whereby the cult of Syrian Christianity was progressively
Europeanized and disentangled from those of other South Indian religions. These trends accelerated after 1795,
when the Hindu states of Malabar (Travancore and Cochin) became tributary states of the British East India
Company,” who altered the economic and political landscape in ways that made the St. Thomas Christians less
necessary and degraded their status in the ritual honors system (Bauman, p. 637). Most devastating of all, British
evangelicals waged a campaign to reform Syrian Christianity of “syncretistic” elements, banned the St. Thomas
Christians from participating in Hindu temple ceremonies, and required that low caste converts to Christianity be
treated with the “same” respect as the elite St. Thomas Christians. This meant that by the mid-nineteenth century,
the St. Thomas Christians were reclassified as a ritually-polluting caste which was routinely excluded from ritual
honors in Hindu festivals, effectively rendering them pariahs.
45
It would be interesting (although beyond the scope of the present dissertation) to investigate contrasting
patterns of Hindu-Christian synthesis in former colonies such as Mylapore and Pondicherry where Catholic
missionaries were backed militarily by a Catholic colonial power. Most of the early inculturation efforts by the
Jesuits in India that achieved a high degree of political and religious integration were promoted by missions such as
Roberto de Nobili’s inland Madurai Mission, which operated in Mosse’s Ramnad and the “dry South” communities
studied by Bayly. It is possible that there would be marked differences in the nature of local Hindu-Catholic
interaction, with Catholic missionaries more prone to iconoclasm and religious boundary maintenance where they
were backed by state power. However, missionary politics in French-controlled Pondicherry were complicated and
did not amount to a clear-cut effort at suppression as in the case of Portuguese Goa, with the Jesuits employing
techniques of accommodation even as they occasionally encouraged the destruction of temples, and French
Capuchins appealing to Rome against the Jesuits over their accommodation policies, a conflict which became
known as the Malabar Rites Controversy. For more on the complicated ecclesiastical politics of French Pondicherry,
see Danna Agmon’s An Uneasay Alliance: Traders, Missionaries, and Tamil Intermediaries in Eighteenth-Century
French India (Doctoral thesis, University of Michigan, 2011) and Paulo Aranha’s “«Glocal» Conflicts: Missionary
Controversies on the Coromandel Coast between the XVII and the XVIII Centuries” in Michela Catto, Guido
Mongini, and Silvia Mostaccio’s Evangelizzazione e Globalizzazione: Le Missioni Gesuitiche Nell’età Moderna tra
Storia e Storiografia (Rome: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 2010).
36
religion of the Indian “idolaters” being the first non-Christian tradition classified as a “religion”
in the emerging taxonomy. 46 Henn divides his account of the Portuguese colonial encounter in
Goa into three distinct stages. In the earliest period, Portuguese explorers and administrators
held a traditional Augustinian taxonomy of religious difference, making it impossible for them to
interpret Indian customs in terms of an alien “religion.” As Christianity was on this account the
only “religion,” indigenous religious practices were read in terms of “Indian Christianity” where
interpreted favorably, or interpreted less favorably as a demonic counterfeit of the Gospel
intended to keep natives from accepting Christianity.47 In the second period, the Portuguese
adopted an unambiguously negative interpretation of Indian customs, launched the Goa
Inquisition to extirpate Indian practices retained by local converts, and forcibly suppressed the
practice of “idolatry” in Goa.48 In the third and final period, the Jesuit practice of
“accommodation,” an early form of inculturation, produced translations of Christianity into
native terms which Henn argues merely served to facilitate the erasure of Indian “idolatry” as
Christian purāṇas replaced suppressed Indian purāṇas.49 The unfolding process of cultural
negotiation over these three periods catalyzed the transition from a premodern to a modern
taxonomy of religious difference, separating “Hindus” and “Christians” into discrete “religions”
for the first time and setting stage for the expansion of the world religions paradigm. 50
To demonstrate Portuguese attitudes prior to the partition of Hinduism and Christianity,
46
Henn, p. 172.
47
Henn, p. 39, 175.
48
Henn, pp. 40-41.
49
Henn, pp. 78-82.
50
Henn, pp. 169-184.
37
Henn recounts a striking episode he calls “Vasco da Gama’s error,” illuminating the premodern
Christian taxonomy of religious difference as it was applied to India.51 Gama and his men
entered a Hindu temple in Calicut, which he referred to as a church and venerated a Hindu
goddess whom he took for the Virgin Mary, and for some five months he wrote of Hindus he
encountered as “Indian Christians.” He was predisposed to find evidence of Christianity from
reading medieval merchant and missionary reports that purportedly document the existence of
Indian Christianity, as well as by his familiarity with the legend of Prester John, a mythical Asian
king believed by many to have offered to aid European Christians in a crusade against
Muslims.52 Henn goes so far as to say that given the taxonomy of religious difference in Gama’s
time, he committed no error. The Augustinian taxonomy of difference acknowledged the
existence of exactly one religion, Catholic Christianity, which admitted degrees of participation,
and thus permitted early modern explorers and missionaries to read similarities of religious
practices between European Christians and Indians in terms of the latter’s Christianity.53 Gama’s
application of the Augustinian taxonomy of religious difference was similar to the South Indian
taxonomy in that it could integrate different communal groups—in this case, Indians and
Portuguese—into a shared ritual system, while interpreting differences in terms of ethnicity
rather than religion.
Eliza Kent argues that the British administration of India, although ostensibly more
laissez-faire on matters of religion than the Portuguese, had a similarly transformative effect on
51
Henn, pp. 19-27. See also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 128-139).
52
Henn, pp. 22-27.
53
Henn, pp. 39, 175.
38
both the Western taxonomy of religious difference and the way in which Indians inhabited their
traditions. The 1872 institution of an Indian census required respondents to categorize
themselves in terms of language, religion, caste, occupation, and so forth, not allowing for
multiple affiliations and forcing informants to fit themselves into Western rather than indigenous
Indian categories.54 At the same time, the British established parallel systems of personal law for
54
Kent, p. 9. Religious census efforts in South Asia have been problematic since their introduction,
primarily because the options supplied by census-takers do not map reality on the ground, or do so only after
influencing local populations to adopt the religious categories of the census-takers. Not only do the census options
not allow for participation in multiple “religions,” even the primary categories themselves are often disputed. In the
1891 Punjabi Census, members of Arya Samaj refused to be identified as “Hindu,” insisting that the term was nonnative, pejorative, and invented by Muslims. Arya Samaj urged members to cross out “Hindu” and write in “Arya”
on census forms, and mounted a poilitical pressure campaign to get census officials to accept their religious selfidentification (Kenneth W. Jones, “Religious Identity and the Indian Census” in Gerald N. Barrier’s The Census in
British India, p. 87). Dundas’ analysis of the 1921 Indian Census found a general “unwillingness of Jains and Sikhs
to be classified separately from Hindus” (Paul Dundas, The Jains, p. 4). Carrithers’ review of 1940s social survey
records in Kolhapur found that prominent local Jain families listed their caste as “Hindu” and either listed “Jain” as
their subcaste or else bypassed Jain self-identification altogether (Michael Carrithers, “On Polytropy: Or the Natural
Condition of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in India: The Digambar Jain Case,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4,
(2000), p. 834). When it comes to the classification of Christians, J. Chartres Molony, Provincial Superindentent of
Census for the Madras Presidency, wrote that “mistakes” were made by informants and census-takers in the
classification of Indian Catholics: “Clever as the Madras clerks were, they could at times make quaint mistakes …
Roman Catholic Missions have always interfered less with caste than have the Protestant, and many Indian Roman
Catholics mixed up difference of Christian sect with difference of Hindu caste,” claiming Catholicism as a caste
rather than a religious identity (J. Chartres Molony, A Book of South India, p. 103). Writing in the records of the
1891 Travancorean census, V. Nagam Aiya noted the limitations of the official religious categories to account for
“Roman Catholic Hindus.” He quoted a decision of the Madras High Court which referred to Roman Catholics in
South India as “Roman Catholic Hindus,” insisting that “the habits of the Roman Catholic Hindus had not changed
since their conversion. In their dress, habits, and all circumstances of social life, they were in every respect the same
as their non-Christian brethren … In matters of inheritance, adoption, acquisition, enjoyment, and devolution of
property, the customs of the several families are rigidly followed … In fact as regards these matters, the caste
Christians are entirely governed by Hindu law” (Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South
India, p. 93). Hausner and Gellner describe Western religious categories as intrinsically problematic in a South
Asian context: “Notably in Nepali history, but in other populations as well (in South Asia and elsewhere), religious
categories are much more fluid and negotiable than ethnicity. While religious practice is for Nepalis second nature
… religious categories are not given and obvious; for the majority, they must be learned. During the first Nepali
census, carried out between 1952 and 1954, the alternatives “Hindu,” “Buddhist,” and “Muslim” had to be taught
both to the people being surveyed and to the census enumerators. Gradually, over the decades, religious
identifications have been internalized and enacted, have bedded down, and have in turn become politically
contentious” (Sondra L. Hausner and David N. Gellner, “Category and Practice as Two Aspects of Religion: The
Case of Nepalis in Britain,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 80, No. 4 (2012), pp. 971–997).
39
Hindus, Christians, and Muslims to govern marriage and inheritance:
Though the overt purpose of the census was to provide an accurate representation of Indian society
and that of religious personal law was to adjudicate conflict effectively, these policies had the effect
of forcing Indians to choose and inhabit ascribed identities ... As religious identities became shaped
more by written scripture than by community customary law ... practices specific to a region or a
particular subcommunity came to be seen as deviant and in need of reform in order to conform to
scripturally defined orthodoxy … The overall effect was a significant fracturing of Indian society
along many lines. Reformers critiqued traditions of sharing sacred texts, motifs, practices, and sites
as suspect and sought to make their religious tradition, broadly conceived, more standardized and
homogenous (Kent, 9-10).55
At the same time, the British government both actively and passively interfered with the
ritual honors system that integrated Hindu, Muslim, and Christian castes into an overall religious
system. Insisting upon the separation of politics and religion, the British colonial authorities
forbade Christian priests from offering “first honors” to the Hindu political patrons of annual
feasts in Tamil Nadu, eliminating the primary motive for their cooperation and patronage and
obstructing religious integration.56 Perhaps more significantly, the centralization of Indian
political authority under the British Raj replaced a segmentary, feudal political structure of
nested networks of influence with a centralized modern nation-state, transforming the nature of
political coalition-building.57 It became possible to rule without mustering the support of a broad
base of religious constituencies through common participation in the ritual honors system, setting
the stage for the domination of Indian politics by any religious group that could command
overwhelming electoral majorities on its own behalf. The partition of the British Raj into Hindumajority and Muslim-majority states at Independence was a logical consequence of this reality.
In post-Independence India, Hindu nationalist parties associated minority religions with
55
Kent, pp. 9-10.
56
Henn, p. 121.
57
Bauman, p. 638; Bayly, p. 459.
40
compromised political loyalties, emphasizing the “foreign” character of these traditions and
questioning the citizenship of individuals who subscribed to them.58 Although arguably wellintentioned, the British recognition and syndication of diverse religious constituencies as
mutually-exclusive “religions” requiring distinct cultural and legal accommodation served only
to introduce and reify religious boundaries and force adherents of these traditions into direct
competition for political influence and economic resources in the newly independent Indian
nation-state.59
Syncretism and Indian Religion
If a religion is said to be ‘syncretistic,’ it is held to be ipso facto inferior.60
I argued in the first section of this chapter that the world religions paradigm is cryptotheological, betraying signs of Protestant Christian origins in the European Wars of Religion. In
the second section, I showed that world religions paradigm introduced distortions in the
interpretation of South Indian society, breaking apart the components of an integrated ritual
system into distinct and mutually-exclusive “religions” while pushing social reality on the
ground in the direction of the new interpretation, promoting communalism and nationalism on
the basis of politicized religious identities. I concluded that the development and application of
the world religions paradigm in India is Orientalist in logic, being both product and tool of the
58
Bauman, p. 640.
59
Bauman, pp. 642, 644-646. Bauman argues that economic competition is a major factor in contemporary
communal violence against Christians, who are associated with globalization and perceived to be its main
beneficiaries.
60
William Montgomery Watt, Truth in the Religions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963, p. 61).
41
Portuguese and British administration of their Indian empires.61 In this concluding section, I
explore a special aspect of this conceptual division, the problematic label “syncretism” that is
applied to Indian religious practices that participate to some degree in the earlier paradigm of
ritual interaction.
“Syncretism” is typically defined as the combination of elements of belief and practice
from two or more “religions,” resulting in a new system that shares elements from the “religions”
in question but really belongs to none of them. Common instances offered for the phenomenon
of “syncretism” include Afro-Caribbean versions of folk Catholicism, Chinese popular religion,
Japanese new religious movements, the New Age movement, and of course the common ritual
practices encountered within Indian shrines which are shared by multiple religious
constituencies.
Though sometimes anthropologists valorize “syncretism” as a creative act of resistance
on the part of subaltern communities to a hegemonic culture, within religious studies it is more
often the case that phenomena described as “syncretism” lose credibility in the eyes of scholars,
being perceived as somehow thoughtless and inauthentic.62 That is, “syncretism” is usually
61
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979, pp. 2-3). All three aspects of Said’s
definition of Orientalism come into play when considering the religious partition of colonial India. The
missionaries, scholars, census-takers, and colonial bureaucrats who contributed to the partition were Orientalists in
the primary sense of being authorities on “Oriental” religions (p. 2). In its second sense, “Orientalism is a style of
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the
Occident’ (p. 2). That is, Orientalism is based upon “othering.” Finally, Orientalism is a “corporate institution for
dealing with the Orient … a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p.
3).
62
Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw’s Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis
(New York: Routledge, 1994) characterizes the use of the term “syncretism” as generally positive within
anthropology, a field they claim was influenced by American melting-pot ideology, and deeply negative within the
field of religious studies, a field they claim is still prejudiced toward the implicit acceptance of clerical perspectives
(p. 5).
42
perceived as being random rather than thoughtful, with elements borrowed haphazardly and
incoherently rather than in light of the teleology of some particular individual or group’s system
of belief and practice.63 “Syncretism” carries implicit associations of superficiality and
inauthenticity, as if practitioners were splitting their time trying to observe two or more religions
badly rather than genuinely focusing on any particular religion.64 Moreover, the charge of
“syncretism” is sometimes used polemically in cultural and intrareligious debate to brand and
63
In Raj and Dempsey’s 2002 Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines, Wendy Doniger
writes that the aforementioned volume is an important moment in religious studies, representing the first time a
serious academic study of popular Christianity in India had reached the page (p. xi). She argues that previous
neglect resulted from scholarly collusion with generations of theologians and church leaders, who focused on nonChristian traditions in India out of missiological impulses and adopted the perspective of power, refusing to see
Christianity as influenced by a non-Christian environment, regarding such influence as a “problem” to be “solved”
(p. xi). Moreover, the pervasive Protestant bias implicit in the field of religious studies has prejudiced scholars to
prefer classical and textual sources, making issues of contemporary practice by subaltern Indian communities of
little interest until the advent of postcolonial studies. Raj and Dempsey’s introduction to the volume contends that
the “messy” issues of religious boundaries in Indian Popular Christianity have tended to “relegate popular Christian
traditions to the realm of an aberration or sideshow,” with most scholars preferring historical, colonial,
missiological, and theological studies of elite forms of Christianity (pp. 1-2). They argue that the study of popular
Christianity has been the victim of pervasive bias which will not resolve until the elite, textual “center” of religious
studies loses its hegemony (pp. 5-6). Because of this bias, Raj and Dempsey conclude, “the study of popular
Christianity has been largely the domain of anthropology” (p. 6). Even efforts to rehabilitate the category of
“syncretism,” such as Henn’s “Syncretism Reconsidered” in Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa, argue that for this
to be done it is necessary “to free syncretism from the pejorative meanings it had acquired in nineteenth-century
theological discourse in which it was often used to indicated a ‘contamination’ of supposedly ‘pure’ forms of belief”
(p. 168). Henn valorizes syncretism, claiming its “peculiarity is … that it relies on forms of knowledge and modes
of signification that, to some extent, resist the epistemological revolutions and semiotic upheavals that characterize
the transformation from the pre-modern to the modern era … What Goan syncretism reveals … is that the modern
Western philosophical concept of religion tolerates the cultural plurality of religions around the world only at the
cost of a ubiquitous epistemological and semiotic universalism that – like the mythical Procrustean bed – curtails or
stretches everything that does not fit its own shape” (p. 184). While I am fundamentally in sympathy with Henn’s
antimodernism and antipathy toward the world religions paradigm’s distortion of non-Christian traditions, I will
argue that Henn would be better served not by rehabilitating the modern analytical concept of syncretism, but by
abandoning the world religions paradigm altogether to adopt premodern indigenous categories. The use of one’s
own categories (e.g. “religion”) to describe someone else’s culture will always distort interpretation to a certain
degree, but this is both inevitable and something scholars are already doing when they take recourse to Christianderived terms such as “religion,” “syncretism,” etc., giving non-confessional scholarship no advantage over
confessional scholarship in descriptive accuracy.
64
Robert D. Baird, Category Formation and the History of Religions (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991,
pp. 146-148).
43
discredit non-mainstream spiritualities and innovative versions of recognized traditions.65 The
label “syncretism” usually discourages scholarly investigation of materials so described, with
Indian Christianity being neglected for this reason within both confessional and non-confessional
research. For these reasons, I maintain that the term “syncretism” is prejudicial to the
understanding of religious phenomena so labeled, and ought to be retired.
Apart from the issue of prejudice, there are good theoretical reasons why the concept of
syncretism is analytically counter-productive. Most basically, the concept depends upon
essentialist constructions of particular religions, which have been for the most part abandoned
within the field of religious studies. To be able to distinguish between the legitimate historical
adaptation of a particular religion and inauthentic acts of borrowing, which result in
“syncretism,” one would need to know what characteristics uniquely and essentially constitute a
religion such that all authentic instances of a religion will share those defining characteristics
65
For an example of characteristic theological invective against syncretism, see Catherine Cornille’s
introduction to Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Eugene: Wipf and Stock,
2002, pp. 2-4), which states: “Whereas the phenomenon of multiple religious belonging may thus seem rather
innocuous from historical perspective and unproblematic on a modern existential level, it presents a number of
serious philosophical, theological, and, of course, doctrinal questions and challenges … In order to avert the
assumption that Christianity would be the only religion having trouble accepting divided loyalties in its members, I
wish to point out briefly that a total commitment and unitary belonging are ideals for most religions in the world …
In the end, most religious traditions expect a total and unique commitment, if not from their followers at large, at
least from their specialists or spiritual elite. Whereas the Chinese might have experienced a sense of simultaneous
belonging to Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, scholars or monks of each of these traditions were expected to
demonstrate unswerving and single-minded commitment to their own tradition. This may be seen to flow from the
very nature of religion, which might be understood – ideally – as the total commitment of will, feelings, and intellect
to the ultimate reality … There are various ways of understanding the phenomenon of multiple religious belonging.
It may be associated with the form of religiosity generally called New Age, in which the individual chooses beliefs
and practices from various religious traditions based on his or her own taste and judgment. While this may be
understood as multiple religious belonging in the broad sense of the term, it would be more appropriate to speak
here of a complete absence of religious belonging … Religious belonging implies more than a subjective sense of
sympathy and endorsement of a selective number of beliefs and practices. It involves the recognition of one’s
religious identity by the tradition itself and the disposition to submit to the conditions of membership as delineated
by that tradition … Religious belonging implies a full commitment to at least one religion.”
44
with no false positives.66 Because of the historical and geographical variation within recognized
religious traditions, to produce a list of essential characteristics one will need to resort to a
normative rather than historical definition of the religion, and this will exclude some particular
group of practitioners who would self-identify as belonging to the tradition in question.67 If one
rules out the normative approach as most non-confessional scholars do, one is left with a number
of historical exemplars of given religious traditions in a loose family resemblance with one
another, sharing no uniquely-identifying set of core characteristics—Buddhisms rather than
Buddhism, Christianities rather than Christianity, Hinduisms rather than Hinduism, and so
forth—rather than an inflexible set of criteria for belonging. But upon making the conceptual
move of allowing definition through non-essential family resemblance, “syncretism” is no longer
viable as an analytic category, because by its purported nature anything described as
“syncretism” will bear a resemblance to one or more of the traditions in question and be
legitimately describable as a form of the religion it most resembles rather than an incoherent
tertium quid. Therefore, non-confessional scholars would do better to apply a family
resemblance model for determining religious membership, rather than describing marginal cases
as “syncretism.”
Moreover, it is questionable whether the concept “syncretism” in fact isolates anything at
all. As Robert Baird suggests in his Category Formation and the History of Religions, it appears
that all “religions” engage in continual acts of appropriation and differentiation from the other
religions with which they are contact—and if that is true, “syncretism” is redundant and
66
Baird, p. 136.
67
Baird, pp. 141-142.
45
meaningless because it is the same thing as “religion.”68 For instance, forms of Christianity that
are universally accepted as orthodox could be described as instances of “syncretism,” if one were
so inclined. Conciliar Christianity could be conceptualized as a late antique pagan appropriation
of the beliefs and practices of a messianic Jewish sect of the first century in terms of Middle
Platonic philosophical categories such as ousia and logos, and medieval Christianity could be
conceptualized as the Germanization of the original Graeco-Roman syncretism under the
influence of the pagan Franks.69 On the other hand, “syncretic” forms of Christianity could be
legitimized as instances of Christian adaptation if one were so inclined, meaning that AfroCaribbean traditions such as Santería could be conceptualized as the inculturation of Iberian
Christianity in a Yoruba cultural context.70 The difference between “religious” categorization
and “syncretism” does not isolate a genuine conceptual distinction, being rather an assertion of
political power to define one phenomenon as mainstream and authentic rather than inauthentic
and marginal. In short, the term “syncretism” is incorrigibly political and analytically useless
and ought to be dropped.
The foregoing arguments are non-theological in nature, primarily aimed at nonconfessional scholars in the field of religious studies. In the conclusion of this dissertation, I will
argue against the pluralization of “religion” on theological grounds—a move that makes
specifically theological argumentation against “syncretism” unnecessary, as one cannot combine
multiple “religions” if there is but one “religion. If the concept of “syncretism” is abandoned,
theologians can cease excluding cultural material from Christianity for purportedly belonging to
68
Baird, p. 146.
69
Baird, p. 145-146.
70
Baird, pp. 147-148.
46
an alien “religion” and, more productively, distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate
instantiations of a single “religion” in terms of degree.71
Whatever one’s reasons for discarding the term, if one abandons the concept of
“syncretism,” the conceptual territory covered by the label can be reassigned to categories that
are more productive and less prejudicial. The category of “popular religion” (the typical
complex of belief and practice most people draw upon within a given culture) can be helpful in
contexts such as South India where there are multiple so-called “religions” in circulation but
most people draw upon elements from several of them on a circumstantial basis.72 Scholars
could speak of participants as practitioners of one coherent system of “popular religion” rather
than as engaged in a haphazard process of “syncretism” between traditions. I propose the label
“Tamil Popular Catholicism” to cover both the participation of Catholics in Tamil popular
religion as well as the participation of non-Christian Tamils in popular Catholicism.73 The next
three chapters of this dissertation will describe Tamil Popular Catholicism at St. Mary’s Co-
71
Up to this point, I have argued why non-confessional scholars in the field of religious studies should be
uncomfortable with the language of syncretism, and have therefore framed my argument in those terms, even though
this is not my preferred mode of argumentation. In my conclusions, I will argue on explicitly theological grounds
that dropping the term syncretism would be even more beneficial to normative theological discourse within the
Christian tradition than it is for non-confessional religious studies. Within that argument, my primary criticism will
not be that “syncretism” is a “distortion” of alien religious material or fails the test of scholarly neutrality, even
though that is true and should concern non-confessional scholars who make neutrality their goal. I will be arguing
that the concept “syncretism” is a late addition to Christian theological discourse and is parasitical on the equally
late and problematic world religions paradigm, and that the tradition would be able to accomplish more of its
intellectual goals if syncretism and the world religions paradigm were dropped. This will be a normative argument
with no aspiration to neutrality, which is unattainable anyway, be one a theologian or a practitioner of nonconfessional Religionswissenschaft.
72
Baird, p. 142.
73
While I recognize that the labels “Indian popular religion” and “Tamil popular Hinduism” are equally
appropriate within alternative frames of reference (e.g., non-confessional scholarship in the case of “Indian popular
religion” and Hindu theology in the case of “Tamil Popular Hinduism”), this is a Christian theological project,
meaning that “Tamil Popular Catholicism” is normally preferred, although not to the exclusion of other frames of
reference.
47
Cathedral in Chennai, a shrine which appeals to patrons across religious boundaries.
48
CHAPTER 2:
THE CHURCH ON ARMENIAN STREET
Introduction
Like Tamil Popular Catholicism itself, the St. Antony Shrine on Armenian Street is a palimpsest
upon which it is possible to read shifting allegiances in church-state relations, caste identity,
colonial and racial politics, and popular devotion, making a confusing chronicle if viewed
without historical perspective because all the different layers are visible at the surface and
nothing has entirely receded into the past. The only thing that remains immutable about the site
is its location on what is now Armenian Street in Chennai, although even here there are
complications in that the site, its street address, the street itself, the neighborhood, and the city
have all changed names, and most if not all of the alternative designations are still used. For
example, the mailing address of the shrine is 63/110 Armenian Street, as a municipal street
renumbering changed the address to 110 Armenian Street and the older address was retained out
of respect for the past. Apart from location the site is a wildcard, changing popular name,
physical structure, clientele, political dominion, ecclesiastical dignity, and episcopal jurisdiction
so many times that even researches have at times become confused and thought they were
writing about two or more separate sites.74
74
Though they are alternate names for the same site, Peter Celestine writes in his Early Capuchin Missions
in India: Pondicherry Surat, Madras, 1642-1834 (Sahibabad: Capuchin Publications, 1982) of a “Church in the
cemetery which for three years, was used by the Government s a hospital” (p. 127) separately from “the Church of
St. Mary of the Angels” on Armenian Street built on the same location at a significantly later date (pp. 128-129), and
therefore is at a loss to explain why in 1836 people living in the neighborhood of the church wished to preserve an
old gate with an inscription bearing the founding order’s coat of arms and the date 1642 in a renovation. This is
despite the fact that the order involved is Celestine’s own order, the Capuchins, and presumably he would wish to
emphasize the Capuchin connection and the antiquity of the site.
49
Because of these difficulties, my historical account of the Church on Armenian Street
will necessarily be selective, consisting of a main narrative about the colonial and racial politics
of the site punctuated by highlight events which would interest scholars outside the field. I
organize my account primarily around the changing status of race and caste in British Madras
(modern Chennai), describing the origins of the church as a mortuary chapel in the so-called
“Black Town,” the colonial reclassification of Catholics as legally “black” and their expulsion
from the “White Town,” and the shifting fortunes of the site under a sequence of political and
ecclesiastical patrons. I conclude that the multiple reinventions of the site were driven primarily
by changing conceptions of race and caste and that the postcolonial “rebranding” of the site as
“Antoniyar Kōvil” represented an ongoing effort on the part of missionaries and the archdiocese
to decolonize and inculturate the site. This analysis will set the stage for Chapters Three and
Four, an ethnography of the contemporary St. Antony Shrine describing its visual and material
culture and popular devotions (Chapter Three) and a series of informant interviews (Chapter
Four). I will assess the success of this inculturation strategy in my conclusions, arguing that an
earlier taxonomy of religious difference organized in terms of participation in one true religion
would do greater justice and Tamil Catholic sites like it than the current Vatican II inculturation
approach pursued by the archdiocese, which is organized according to the world religions
paradigm and ambivalent about “syncretism.”
Catholic Madras
The British settlement of Madras was founded by Francis Day and Andrew Cogan in
1640, after receiving a grant from the Vijayanagara vassal Damarla Venkatadri Nayaka in return
50
for an annual payment (Love, I, 16-18).75 Although the majority of these British East India
Company employees were Protestant Christians belonging to the Church of England, they
brought no chaplain and initially established no church (73-74). The British were few in number
and represented a small fraction of the personnel necessary for the settlement to function. From
its very beginning, Company Agents induced Portuguese and Luso-Asiatic laborers and their
families to move into Madras from the more established neighboring settlement at São Tomé de
Meliapor (modern Mylapore), offering many privileges including housing provided by the
Company free of lease or rent (388). These policies brought in Portuguese mercenaries and
factory workers, Armenian and eventually Sephardic Jewish merchants and laborers who tended
to specialize in the diamond trade with Golkonda, “topasses” of mixed Indian and Portuguese
ancestry, and native “dubashes” familiar with local customs and languages who could function
as cultural middlemen in trade and diplomatic negotiations.76 These other constituencies greatly
outnumbered the British presence. European Christians were invited to live in what was first
75
H. D. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras 1640-1800 (London: John Murray, 1913, Volume I, pp. 16-18). Love
was a Lieutenant Colonel of the Royal Engineers stationed in Madras who was commissioned by the British
Government of India to collate geographical references to the existing topography of Madras in old British East
India Company records. The survival of few original maps from the early history of the settlement had created
administrative and archival confusion, as researchers could not always place the current locations of Madras sites
referenced in records. With the Government’s approval, he expanded his scope to offer a general history of the
settlement from 1640-1800. In addition to drawing upon East India Company records in Fort St. George and the
India Office in London, many private individuals made supplementary material available to Love, including
Archbishop Colgan of the Archdiocese of Madras, who furnished the records of the Capuchin Mission formerly
based at St. Mary’s Cathedral Armenian Street. Love’s four-volume history is the primary and almost ideal source
of information about the church on Armenian Street, being organized and indexed in terms of Madras places and
institutions, while also drawing upon ecclesiastical documents that the failure of the Capuchin Mission and the midtwentieth century merger of the Madras Archdiocese and the Diocese of Mylapore are likely to have displaced and
rendered inaccessible to researchers.
76
John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York: Penguin Books, 2012,
pp. 54-59). For the role of native dubashes, see also Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided
Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 62-63).
51
called the “Christian” and later the “White” Town; native dubashes and artisans were
encouraged to set up their dwellings on the periphery of this settlement in what was already by
the 1670s known as the “Black Town” (Nightingale, 62-63). In terms of the population numbers,
the nominally “Protestant” Christian Town within Fort St. George was principally Catholic and
remained so, despite recurring complaints from concerned Anglican chaplains, until 1752, when
the entire Catholic population was forcibly expelled from the White Town and their property
confiscated (Wheeler, 57; Nightingale, 70-71).77 The story of Christianity in British Madras for
its first 110 years of existence is first and foremost a Catholic story.78
77
John Talboys Wheeler, Madras in the Olden Time Volume I: 1639-1702 (Madras: J. Higginbotham Press,
1861); Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012).
78
Madras was in fact so overwhelmingly Roman Catholic in terms of population and demography that the
local government needed to take special measures to artificially preserve the Protestant religious identity of the
British minority in Madras. Despite continual complaints from Anglican chaplains that intermarriage between
British men and Portuguese and Indian women frequently resulted in the husband and children becoming Roman
Catholic, it was necessary to permit intermarriage because the British men could not afford to recruit and support
British wives. Chaplains William Isaacson (1660) and Patrick Warner (1676) both petitioned the East India
Company Court of Directors in London on the matter, Isaacson requesting that the Capuchin priests should be
expelled for baptizing children of mixed marriages and attempting to proselytize British men (Love, I, pp. 181-182),
only to be strongly rebuked because the French Capuchins were necessary to retain the presence of the Portuguese
mercenaries (Love, I, pp. 182-184). Warner more modestly requested that the Directors inhibit marriages between
British men and Portuguese or native women lest “the children turn either infidels or popish” (James Talboys
Wheeler, Madras in the Olden Time Volume I: 1639-1702, p. 69). The Capuchins were briefly expelled by Governor
Edward Winter for allegedly proselytizing Protestants (Love, I, p. 221), but were invited back into Madras when
Winter was dismissed by the Company. When a Portuguese priest from Meliapor conducted a Catholic marriage for
a British man marrying a Portuguese widow in 1680 and fled to avoid punishment, the Madras government finally
deliberated on an official policy to keep Indian-born British subjects Protestant, and determined that intermarriage
would remain legal provided that both parties made a solemn oath before the Anglican chaplain that any children
would be raised Protestant (Wheeler, pp. 75-76). The Company briefly experimented with encouraging
intermarriage with Indian women and providing cash incentives for baptizing the children as Protestant, but
intermarriage with the Portuguese remained more common. The Company at last determined that the only solution
to their problem was to proselytize the Portuguese, and so provided a Portuguese catechism, translation of the Book
of Common Prayer, and a special chaplain to lead Protestant services in Portuguese (Stephen Neill, History of
Christianity in Asia. India: The Beginnings to A.D. 1707, pp. 371-372). These efforts bore little fruit. Without
these special measures to ensure that the children of intermarriages would be raised Protestant, it is likely that
Christian Madras would have become effectively Roman Catholic within a few generations, if it was not already,
52
The Capuchin Mission
Although Protestant Christians would wait until 1646 for the first in their often broken
series of official chaplains appointed by the East India Company, William Isaacson, and until
1678 for the construction of the first Anglican church in Madras, Catholics received both church
and chaplain by the official decree of Company Agent Andrew Cogan in 1642 (Love, I, 49).
After befriending Abdullah Qutb Shahi of Golkonda, a French Capuchin missionary named
Ephrem de Nevers stopped at Madras on his way to a new appointment at Pegu in Burma and
received such an enthusiastic reception by the Portuguese living in the settlement, that they
immediately wrote a letter to the Madras Government requesting that Fr. Ephrem be detained in
Madras to serve their spiritual needs (48). When Fr. Ephrem declined due to his obligation to
proceed to Pegu, Cogan and his assistants, Thomas Winter and Henry Greenhill, signed an order
formally compelling him to remain and assigned land inside the Fort for the first Catholic
church, presumably named St. Andrew’s after the Agent (48-49). The church was built shortly
thereafter with Fr. Ephrem as its first priest and remained there (twice rebuilt and enlarged) until
it was razed by order of the Company in 1752.
The retention of Fr. Ephrem as the first Christian priest in colonial Madras at the
employment of the Company was due, in part, to the rivalry between Padroado and Propaganda
Fide and the disinclination of the British to see their Portuguese workers associating too closely
with Padroado priests from the Diocese of São Tomé de Meliapor.79 Padroado and Propaganda
Fide were rival missionary structures within the Roman Catholic Church, whose politicking and
given the small percentage of British in comparison to the settlement’s Portuguese mercenaries and Indian
merchants and laborers.
79 On the Padroado/Propaganda Fide conflict, see Peter Celestine, pp. 109-110.
53
intrigue against each other was a significant factor in the development of Catholic Christianity in
Asia during the European colonial period. Padroado priests were appointed at the discretion of
the King of Portugal and subject to the metropolitan jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa,
remaining largely answerable to the secular monarch and his local regents, while Propaganda
priests answered to their respective orders and ultimately to Rome, rather than any particular
European political power. The British recognized the potential security risks associated with
allowing Padroado priests from Meliapor to minister to their personnel within the Fort in the
event of possible conflict between the two nations. According to Company Agent Thomas
Chamber writing in 1661, “There hath been bitter enmity betwixt that [Portuguese] Church and
this of the French Padres, and one of the reasons of their continuance many years agoe was the
great controversyes betweene our and their nation and the Churches” (Love, I, 182-184). An
early critic of the French Capuchins in 1646 who wondered at the favored status of Catholicism
in the settlement and the official stipend granted to the priests was proffered seven official
reasons for the arrangement:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
That if the French Padres went away, the Portugalls would leave the towne.
These Padres were invited to reside in the towne for the gaining Portugalls to inhabit.
The dispeopling of the towne of Christians was accompted a weakening to the Fort.
The residence of the Portugalls was reckoned a cause of encrease of trade and the Companies customes.
The terrour and awe that many white men strikes to our neighbourss.
The honour and reputation that redounds to the Company among the Princes of India in the multitude of
their people.
7. It was sayd that the glory of a King was the multitude of his subjects (183).
Even though Fr. Ephrem claimed the sanction of Pope Urban VIII for his ministry in British
Madras and operated under the auspices of Propaganda Fide (Celestine, 48), the Padroado
priests of São Tomé de Meliapor under the leadership of the governor, Jeronimo de Sá, claimed
they possessed the exclusive right to minister to the Portuguese within the territorial diocese
54
which included British Madras. Sá initiated heresy accusations against Fr. Ephrem, but could
not act while Fr. Ephrem remained within the British settlement (104-105). Eventually Fr.
Ephrem was lured into São Tomé under the pretext of settling a dispute between the English and
Portuguese in December 1649, whence he was arrested by the Inquisition and sent to Goa, where
he was imprisoned for 22 months (105-107). Even though the Portuguese Ambassador in Paris
and ecclesiastical authorities in Rome ordered Fr. Ephrem’s release, the Goa Inquisition would
not relent until Abdullah Qutb Shahi of Golkonda, then on a military expedition near São Tomé,
directed a general to blow up the Portuguese factory in São Tomé if his old friend Fr. Ephrem
was not released (106-107).80 The British of Madras believed in 1662 that if the French
Capuchins were ever expelled from Madras, Fr. Ephrem would be burned by the Inquisition,
either on the basis of the original charges against him or for attending Protestant christenings,
burials, and weddings within Madras – an officially-proscribed practice known as communicatio
in sacris (Love, I, 183).81
80
Paolo Aranha casts doubt on the veracity of this story in “«Glocal» Conflicts: Missionary Controversies
on the Coromandel Coast between the XVII and the XVIII Centuries” in Evangelizzazione e Globalizzazione: Le
Missioni Gesuitiche Nell’età Moderna tra Storia e Storiografia (Michela Catto, Guido Mongini, Silvia Mostaccio,
editors). The story is related in the biographies of Tavernier and Goujet but not in an early biography by Manucci,
raising the possibility that it is a later hagiographical addition.
81
Accounts of the nature of Ephrem’s alleged heresy differ, and as the records of the Goa Inquisition have
not survived, there is some difference of opinion on the matter. All accounts seem to agree that Ephrem’s contiguity
with English Protestants in Madras was the ultimate basis behind the specific allegations against him. According to
Paolo Aranha’s evaluation of the sources, Ephrem was accused of: 1. iconoclasm, by arguing that the Holy Trinity
should not be depicted and opposing the presence of statues in his churches, 2. accepting the sacramental validity of
Anglican orders, 3. denying that the crucifix should receive religious worship (latreia) rather than respect and
veneration (doulia). According to Aranha, Ephrem was found guilty and ordered to make a public profession of
orthodoxy on these issues and released, rather than being freed through diplomatic pressure from Golkonda. Peter
Celestine (p. 105) describes the charge of iconoclasm as resulting from Ephrem’s denunciation of the ancient
Portuguese practice of lowering an image of St. Antony upside down into a well daily until prayers for rain are
answered – an ironic charge if true, given Ephrem’s role as the founder of the Armenian Street church which would
later become famous for popular devotions to St. Antony. If justified, the charges against Ephrem reveal him to have
been a person of ecumenical sensitivity, not terribly distant theologically-speaking from the British Anglicans he
sometimes served.
55
The British backed the Capuchins to make themselves masters of Catholic Madras, and
just as quickly abandoned them when the French rather than the Portuguese appeared a greater
menace to their security. In no respect was the Catholic community free to govern its own
affairs. The original missionary, Fr. Ephrem de Nevers, had been compelled to remain in
Madras though he was en route to Burma. Grants of land to the mission required the Company’s
permission, and even if funded by the missionaries, the buildings erected upon them could be
restored only with permission and subject to regulations concerning the height and building
materials (Love, II, 46). The British governors disallowed ecclesiastical orders from Europe to
be delivered to the missionaries or read in the churches without official approval, and controlled
the appointments of the priests, often vetoing the nominees of the order’s superiors in Europe
and appointing their own (Penny, 481-482).82 When Cardinal Tournon arrived in India to
deliberate on the Malabar Rites Controversy, several Madras Capuchins fell under Tournon’s
ecclesiastical censure and were placed under interdict when the British government forbade their
departure to Pondichéry, as ordered by Tournon; to prevent further priests from incurring
suspensio a divinis, the government simply forbade the promulgation of any further ecclesiastical
edicts in Madras so that priests would not learn of their suspension (Love, II, 48) The priests’
salaries were paid for by the Company (47). In essence, the Capuchin priests under the British
East India Company operated under the same strictures as Portuguese Padroado priests, only
with the Honourable Company rather than the Portuguese serving as the secular patron. When
the French proved suspect, the British patron had no qualms about securing another order as their
client to replace them, first calling for Italian and Portuguese Capuchins, and later putting the
82
Frank Penny, The Church in Madras: Being the History of the Ecclesiastical and Missionary Action of the
East India Company in the Presidency of Madras (London: John Murray Press, 1912).
56
order under heavy strictures and bringing in a series of other orders to take their place (Love, III,
393). The British authorities would maintain nominal support of the French Capuchin priests of
Propaganda Fide over Padroado priests from São Tomé until the political balance in Europe
shifted in the mid-eighteenth century, and France rather than Portugal became their major
geopolitical rival (391). In 1792, the Capuchin priests of Madras were put under the licensure of
the Padroado Bishop of São Tomé and their funds were put under the administration of lay
Syndics answerable to the secular government (391-393).
The Second Church
The church on Armenian Street, which serves as the subject of this dissertation, began its
existence as the mortuary chapel of the settlement’s Portuguese burial ground in Muthialpetta,
part of the city’s “Black Town.” The first church of colonial Madras was the Capuchin church in
Fort St. George, St. Andrew’s, which was built on behalf of Portuguese laborers in 1642 and
sometimes referred to as “the Portuguese Church in the White Town” or simply “the Portuguese
Church.” By 1676, a certain Major Puckle referred by letter to “two churches nigh unto the
Fort” used by the Portuguese (Love, II, 44). Unless in addition to St. Andrew’s there were
multiple Catholic churches in Madras of which we retain no record – a rather unlikely conjecture
as there were but two elderly Capuchin priests in Madras in 1676 – the second Catholic church,
noted by Major Puckle, must have been the “open pandall Chappel” built with the permission of
Company Agent Henry Greenhill, referred to in a letter of Madras President Elihu Yale in 1692:
President Yale to the reverend Padres Ephraim de Nevers and Michael de Anjou.
57
In answer to your request for liberty to repaire your open pandall Chappel, it being much decayed
and in danger of falling, which to prevent and the danger it may do, I do hereby permit the same
upon the following conditions: –
First that you do not encroach upon the Companys ground, nor anyways to enlarge that formerly
given you by Agent Greenhill, nor must you rebuild higher or stronger than formerly, nor than the
neighbouring houses, it being so near the Fort as may be prejudicial to our Guns (46).
The letter refers back to an initial grant under Mr. Henry Greenhill, Agent in Madras
from January 1655 until his death in 1659. It envisages a location near enough to the Fort that it
would be within range of the cannons and likely to take friendly fire in the case of military
conflict if it were rebuilt to a higher physical profile than the buildings nearby. The 1710 map of
Thomas Pitt depicts the location of a “Portuguez Burying Place” in Muthialpetta within 1,200
yards of the Fort, easily within cannon range just outside the walls of the original Black Town
settlement. The walled and gated cemetery includes two low, rectangular, shedlike buildings
scaled at roughly the same size as the buildings nearby; one appears to have a slight angular
uprising on the left side, which might be the steeple of a church. There are three small turreted
buildings on the grounds, interpretable either as tombs or in the case of the largest possibly a
mortuary chapel.
58
Figure 1. Thomas Pitt, "A Prospect of St. George, 1710.
It seems straightforward that one of these buildings corresponds to the “open pandall Chappel,”
both from parsimony of explanation (just how much real estate can we imagine two elderly
mendicant friars building and administering “nigh unto the Fort” in range of the cannons for
benefit of the Catholic residents of a modestly-populated settlement already possessing a much
larger church within the Fort?) and from the existence of a written order that Fort officials
inspect the improvements made to a local church immediately subsequent to Governor Yale’s
1692 letter that appears to situate the chapel in the Portuguese Burial Ground:
Fort St. George Consultation
Ordered that Mr. Symon Holcombe and Mr. Thomas Wright take a full and satisfactory view of the
Portuguese Church and the Buildings thereto belonging about it both within the Church and
without in the Yard; and truly examine what enlargement hath been latterly made, either in Length,
Breadth, or Height; And what Lights more than formely was, and make report thereof to us (46).
59
Madras historian Henry Davison Love concludes that these references must refer to the same site
and that the second Catholic church referred to by Major Puckle in 1676 must have been the
original “open pandall Chappel” built under Greenhill and restored in 1692 (45). Although St.
Andrew’s possessed a cemetery of its own, which received the Portuguese dead, the Portuguese
population of Madras expanded dramatically in the 1650s due to the residents of Meliapor
fleeing worsening military conflict with Golkonda, which would provide ample rationale for the
establishment of a second burial ground and chapel under Greenhill to meet their posthumous
spiritual needs.83
French Occupation
War between England and France broke out on the continent in March 1744, a conflict
known as the War of Austrian Succession. When news reached India in September, the British
colony of Madras and the French colony of Pondichéry on the Coromandel Coast also
commenced hostilities. The French moved first, besieging and occupying Madras, which
surrendered after heavy artillery bombardment in 1746. The siege appears to have been a total
rout on the part of the French. Indian sepoys, workers, and servants were reported to have fled
the city under the stealth of night during the bombardment, fleeing after a descent from the city
walls (357-358). The Portuguese and mestiço mercenaries also fled, and English soldiers were
reported as near mutiny. The French under Mahé de la Bourdonnais offered terms, promising
not to destroy the White Town or alienate English property so long as a sufficient ransom was
83
Golkonda was a regional successor to the Bahmani Sultanate centered it what is now Hyderabad,
governed by the Qutb Shahi dynasty. At its most expansionistic, Golkonda conquered the last capital of the
Vijayanagara Empire, Vellore, in 1652 and Portuguese Meliapor in 1662, ultimately falling to the Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb.
60
paid (360). When the English accepted terms, the victorious Mahé de la Bourdonnais entered the
White Town, rang the church bells in St. Andrew’s, and had a Te Deum sung, which must have
aroused the anger of the English as French Capuchins would fall under suspicion of disloyalty
when Madras was returned to the English after the conclusion of the war (365). Though the
French were supposed to leave Madras within four months of the siege, the French governor
Dupleix repudiated the peace treaty within a week of signing it, ordering his men to seize
English possessions and directing the inhabitants to swear loyalty to the French king under pain
of expulsion. Much of the Black Town was deliberately razed by the French to create a cordon
sanitaire for cannon fire (376-377), likely including the church in the Portuguese burial ground,
as it needed to be rebuilt in 1750 (465). Of the French Capuchins who lived in Madras during
the occupation, the majority fled to Pulicat to avoid swearing the oath to the French monarch,
while a certain Fr. Renatus fell under suspicion of disloyalty for remaining in the city and
reportedly engaging in treasonable correspondence with the French military (Penny, 326-328).
Race Religion
The French occupation of Madras was a watershed moment in the history of the colony,
radically reconfiguring the construction and enforcement of racial boundaries, the official role of
Catholicism in Madras, and the relationship between the Capuchin Mission and its secular
patrons. Carl Nightingale considers the aftermath of the French occupation a signal event in the
global history of segregation, setting a precedent for race relationships that would be followed in
other British colonies.
The British who returned to Madras from Fort St. David (whence they had escaped to
avoid swearing allegiance to the French crown) were inclined to view the remaining civilian
61
population with suspicion. The hostilities profoundly damaged the standing of the Portuguese
and mestiço mercenaries, who moved from being perceived as white Christian Europeans to
being perceived as black. The failure of the Portuguese to fight against the French enemy
excited suspicion of their racial credentials.
The Garrison Stores were very much out of Order, and the Gunner’s People being composed of
Mustees or Portuguese, they like the Black Soldiers, all deserted upon the first Day of Bombarding
of the Town. For it must be owned, though these Portuguese Men and half Cast may fight and do
very well against the Moors and other Enemies Natives of the Country, yet they will not face or
stand the Fire of an European Enemy (Love, II, 358).
By 1802, the East Indian Chronologist wrote of the Portuguese:
The topasses, of which the major part of the garrison consisted, every one that knows Madras
knows to be a black, degenerate, wretched race of the ancient Portuguese, as proud and bigotted as
their ancestors, lazy, idle and vicious withal, and for the most part as weak and feeble in body as
base in mind. Not one in ten possessed of any of the necessary requisites of a soldier (352).
Nightingale considers the episode in explaining the advent of the name “White Town” to
describe the Fort, replacing the earlier designation “Christian Town”:
By the early eighteenth century, the Company had grown impatient with its Christian allies. British
officials had long been wary of the Portuguese. Their Inquisition-minded priests lurked in the
nearby settlement of São Thomé, and Portuguese soldiers would often desert in moments of danger,
or even spy for rivals. The Armenians fell behind on their taxes; traded with the French, Dutch,
and Danes; ignored the authority of the Madras courts; and were often suspected of treachery
during wartime. Though both groups were clearly Christian, the Company seemed unsure about
what color they were. Sometimes it pigeonholed them as white, sometimes it called them by the
Portuguese casta term musteez (mestiço), and sometimes it put them in a long list of Indian castes.
In this context, the name “White Town” seems to have fit a general strategy among British
authorities to cool the welcome of the Portuguese and Armenians and keep disloyal members of
both communities on notice. In 1749, when the East India Company regained Madras after the
French occupation, local Company officials fulfilled the veiled threat contained in the words
“White Town.” Some Armenians and Portuguese had sided with the French and enriched
themselves through the occupation. In response, the British passed new ordinances that for the first
time explicitly forbade Armenians and Portuguese from settling in the White Town without
62
exception. Houses were confiscated, a pitiful sum was paid in compensation, and both groups were
sent to live in the new Black Town four hundred yards distant from the fort (Nightingale, 70-71).
The once all-important Portuguese mercenaries are erased from respectability by the conflict –
when the British Commissaries consider the position of Catholicism in the post-rendition
settlement in 1749, the importance of retaining a priest is explained in terms of placating native
laborers (Love, II, 394: “most of Our Boat people are of that Communion”) rather than the
resident Portuguese.
The French Capuchins fell under suspicion with the Portuguese and the Armenians, their
core European constituencies, and were expelled from the Fort and sent to live in the Black
Town. At a stroke, Catholicism ceased to be the favored religion of the settlement and the
relationship of patronage between the British government and the Capuchin mission was forever
transformed. Also at a stroke, Catholics became “black” as opposed to legally “white,”
racializing religious identities. Only European Protestant Christians could live within the “White
Town,” and otherwise “white” Europeans such as the French-born Capuchins were segregated to
the Black Town based on their religious affiliation.
The French were suspected of treason both on the basis of their nationality and because
Mahé de la Bourdonnais and Dupleix performed actions favorable to Catholics while in control
of Madras. Bourdonnais Te Deum in the Capuchin church in the Fort could have done nothing to
ingratiate the British. Moreover, the French governor Dupleix acted against the British
“Padroado” by attempting to put Catholic priests operating in Madras under the territorial
control of the Portuguese Diocese of Meliapor.
The Purport of the Letter from [Admiral] Boscawen is as follows … That he is for the sending to
Europe all those who have been Traitors to the Company’s Interests, particularly the four Priests
63
of the Great Church in the White Town...That, as to the Priests, no Man doubts their Affection and
Good will to the French, and their having had Liberty to build two large Churches in the Bounds is
a proof of the good Understanding between them … That he has certain proof of Mr. Dupleix has
wrote to Goa desiring the Portugueze Vice Roy to send the padre Antonio a Commission as
Governour of St. Thome and its Dependancies, and a Supply of Men and Money (394-395).
There was debate about what should be done with respect to the priests and the Catholic cause
more generally. Company functionaries at Fort St. George and Fort St. David were favorable to
expelling the French priests but considered this an international diplomatic matter beyond their
competence that must be referred to the Company itself (394-395). Perhaps Catholicism should
be entirely banned, but as that would be prejudicial to the retention of native boatmen, perhaps
instead the Catholics may have a Portuguese rather than French priest in some remote chapel of
the Black Town (394). In any event, except for a handful of proven benefactors to the Company,
anyone who swore loyalty to the French crown should be expelled from the White Town and
their properties confiscated, as likewise for the Portuguese and Armenians and any other foreign
national (395-396). The British authorities eventually determined it politically inexpedient to
expel the Capuchins from Madras altogether, but their ecclesiastical property was seized and, as
Catholics, they could no longer live within the White Town. In reality, their treatment was more
lenient than that called for officially by the Company in 1748:
Having suffered greatly by the Number of Priests and Popish Inhabitants at Madrass, who have
acted a very Treacherous Part to Us continually in that place, especially when it was attacked,
therefore We strictly forbid your suffering any Romish Church within Our Bounds, Or any of their
Priests to dwell among you, or that Religion to be openly professed. And in case any Papists have
crept into places of Trust in Our Service, they must be immediately dismissed. You are not to deem
this Order to affect the Armenians of the Greek Persuasion (396).
The government at Madras was unable to contemplate the total exclusion of Catholics by the
virtue of labor demographics and, deeming it inexpedient to bring in Portuguese Padroado
priests from São Tomé, was left with no practical alternative but to retain the French Capuchins.
64
It was eventually officially determined that the Capuchins, with the exception of Fr. Renatus, had
been loyal to the British cause all along and should retain the use of a small church in Chepauk
to minister to the native boatmen (404). St. Andrew’s in the White Town would be demolished
and the other surviving churches delivered over to the Danish Protestant missionaries working
under the auspices of the S.P.C.K. Company communications with the S.P.C.K. missionaries
concerning the disposition of confiscated church property further corroborate the notion that the
“open pandall Chappel” in the Portuguese Burial Ground had been destroyed during the French
occupation, as they itemize Roman Catholic real estate in the Black Town. In addition to “some
lesser Idol-houses” there was a northerly church in the Parchery district of the Peddanaikpetta
(probably today’s “Portuguese Church” on Portuguese Church Street), a southerly church at Mile
End in Chepauk to be given to the Capuchins, and a new church in Vepery in the west of
Madras, the Armenian merchant Petrus Uscan’s personal chapel (397-398). Boscawen states that
two of these churches were erected during the French occupation, and there is no extent prior
record of either the Chepauk or Parchery churches before the S.P.C.K. missionaries’ letter.84
Boscawen leaves the Luz Church in Meliapor to Portuguese Padroado priests, as it had no part
in hostilities, São Tomé and Meliapor only being annexed to Madras at the end of the French
occupation in 1749. This leaves only the Portuguese Burial Ground site as the possible location
of the “open pandall Chappel” that was the second Catholic church of colonial Madras.
The French Capuchins, unsurprisingly, were none too sanguine concerning the
confiscation and disposition of their property, and appealed to the government for a delay in the
84
The S.P.C.K. (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) is an Anglican missionary organization
founded in 1698 to publish and distribute theological books for the use of Christians in Britain’s overseas colonies.
In early eighteenth century Tamil Nadu, it worked in close collaboration with Lutheran missionaries from the
Danish-Halle mission in Tranquebar to publish a Tamil translation of the Bible and to establish the first Protestant
church in the Black Town in Madras.
65
implementation of these policies. It would be difficult to remove their possessions from St.
Andrew’s in the Fort within a short time frame and “in the distress’d situation they now are,
without Church or Habitation” they hoped to find another site for their ministry (403). Upon
vacating St. Andrew’s, Fathers Severini and Bernard petitioned for the use of their Portuguese
Burial Ground site in December 1749, asking “to Stay Near Your White Town at Such Place as
that where Our Church Yard Situates, or any other that you Should think fit to grant us, with the
free exercize of Our Religion towards those of our Communion as we have hitherto been
Allowed” (404). Because of the threat of defection by native workers, the government allowed
them use of the Chepauk church instead. Rather than remaining in the Chapauk church, the
Capuchins were permitted to return to the Portuguese Burial Ground and erect temporary church
buildings on site in 1750 (465-466), though they did not receive a permanent grant of the site.
When St. Andrew’s was finally demolished in 1752, the cadavers buried in the Portuguese and
Armenian cemeteries in the White Town were ordered removed to “the Portuguese and
Armenian Churches in the Black Town” and the site surveyed, indicating that churches had been
built at their present Armenian Street sites (465).
Fort St. George Consultation
Petition of Padre Severini and the Inhabitants of Madrass of the Roman Religion read..., setting
forth that, when the Romish Church in this Town was taken from them, they were permitted to retire
to a place in the Black Town which had served as a Church Yard, where they erected a Building for
the Exercize of their Religion; but the same being done in a very slight manner, is liable to receive
Damage by every strong Wind; and being desirous of building a Church there, they pray that the
said Spot of ground may be granted them, with the Addition of another spot contiguous thereto
belonging to the Company.
Recourse being had to the Company’s Orders relating to Romish priests, it appears ... that We are
absolutely forbid suffering any Romish Church within the Bounds, or even to suffer the publick
profession of the Romish Religion, or their priests to dwell amongst us.
66
It is therefore Agreed that the said Petition be not complied with; but that, in Consideration of the
good Character of the Padre Severini, and his having always shewn himself a friend to the English,
he is still permitted to reside there until Our Honble Masters further pleasure be known (466-467).
Despite the denial, the temporary chapel on the Portuguese Burial Ground had been built and
was ultimately returned to the hands of the Capuchins and served as the headquarters of their
mission. The site appears prominently on F. L. Conradi’s 1755 “Plan of Fort St. George and the
Bounds of Madraspatnam” at its location on present Armenian Street.
Figure 2. F.L. Conradi, "A Plan of Fort St. George," 1755.
Love writes:
67
In Muthialpetta the new Roman Catholic and Armenian Churches, marked 15 and 16, are shown in
the positions formerly occupied by the Portuguese and Armenian cemeteries. These sites in the
thoroughfare now called Armenian Street are retained at the present day. It will be noticed that the
Church enclosures project beyond the southern boundary line of Muthialpetta. The projection is
due to the old cemeteries having been spared when the demolition took place, at the time of the
threatened Maratha incursion, which gave Old Black Town its esplanade (472).
Despite this massive evidentiary history, most ecclesiastical histories of Madras first date a
Catholic church on Armenian Street at some point between 1765-1790, with the date depending
on their estimate for the erection of the present St. Mary of the Angels on the site. As the
presence of a place of worship on present Armenian Street is clearly indicated on two prominent
British East India Company maps and there is ample attestation for the site in Madras records,
this must result from failure to associate the “open pandall Chappel” attested by Elihu Yale with
the Portuguese Burial Ground and/or taking the British authorities’ apparent refusal to allow a
church to be (re)built on the site at face value due to being unacquainted with Conradi’s map.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Second French Siege of Madras
The renewal of hostilities between the French and English during the Seven Years’ War
brought the Capuchin church at Armenian Street back into the historical record in a dramatic
way. The French crossed the Triplicane River and entered the Black Town on December 14,
1759, led by the Irish Jacobite Thomas Arthur, the Comte de Lally. The French settled in to
besiege Fort St. George, setting fire to land and property. The French hoisted their flag at the
Armenian Church in the Black Town, adjacent to the Capuchin Church, and repelled a British
sally under George Pigot. The Regiment de Lally, situated at the site, initially repelled the
English escape, resulting in protracted and bloody street fighting (540-541). The British forces
eventually escaped to the Fort and the French entrenched for a prolonged siege in the Black
68
Town. On December 22, a Company Peon reporting on the French position reported that the
Battalion of India (Muslim sepoys employed by the French) were encamped in the area between
the “Portuguese Church” (the Capuchin church) and “Cachelly Pagoda” (the Kachchaleswarar
Temple) on Armenian Street (541). The French commander, the Comte de Lally, wrote a letter
to the British commander in protest that his field headquarters had been fired upon. On
December 31, Lord Pigot wrote him as follows, indicating that the Capuchin church on
Armenian Street was used as the French headquarters during the siege.
To Mr. Lally … In War mutual Civilities and mutual Severities may be expected. If the first has
been wanting, it has not been on my part. Upon your entrance into the Black Town, I gave Orders
to the Commandant of the Artillery that no fires should be directed at the Church of the Capucine
Friars, where I heard you intended to reside, altho it is nearly Point Blank Shot of the Fort, a
distance very unusual for a General’s Head Quarters. These Orders were not revoked until I
received Information that you had removed from them, and that your Guards often paraded there.
If you will do me the Honour to inform me at what Pagoda you fix your head Quarters, all due
respect shall be paid them. GEORGE PIGOT. (545-546).
Unlike the 1746 occupation, the French Siege of Madras ended in failure on February 17, 1759
after 67 days when Fort St. George was relieved by ships deployed from Fort St. David. The
French forces retreated by ship to Pondichéry, raising the siege. Upon re-occupying the Black
Town, the British found it almost entirely destroyed and established temporary hospital sheds
made of straw (Love, III, 35) for the sick and wounded on the site of the Armenian and Capuchin
churches, depriving the priests of their residence (Love, II, 576). The sites would not be restored
to their rightful owners until 1772, after which the present Armenian Orthodox and Roman
Catholic buildings were erected at their respective sites on Armenian Street (465).
The Capuchin Superior Father Severini of Savoy protested this heavy-handed treatment
in September 1762, demanding “a Redelivery of the Buryal Place, which Serv’d him both for
Church and Lodging.” The Government concluded that the site was unsanitary, and a proper
69
hospital should eventually be built, but that it would remain in charge of the temporary hospital
sheds in the meantime, paying an annual rent of 15 Pagodas (approximately £6) to the Capuchin
and Armenian priests for the use of the land (776).85 Severini would die in 1763, never again
dwelling in his old home on Armenian Street.
In 1769, Severini’s successor as superior of the Capuchins, Victor of Niort, appealed to
the Madras Government for compensation for their confiscated properties, receiving no
satisfactory response (Celestine, 127). Growing impatient, the Capuchins appealed directly to
the Court of Directors of the British East India Company in London, sending Jean Baptiste de
Colmart of Pondichéry to plead their case (Celestine, 127; Love, III, 37-38). Colmart was to
appeal for compensation for confiscated and demolished churches, the restoration of the church
on Armenian Street or the payment of compensation to build another church elsewhere,
restoration of the bells of old St. Andrew’s, the Capuchin’s privilege of nominating their own
superior, and the ability to add missionaries to the order without formal approval by the Madras
Government. All requests were granted by the Company without consulting Madras (Celestine,
127-128). The Capuchin appeal complained that they would “be necessitated to erect a proper
Church [at Armenian Street], the temporary one they had there before, not being even completed,
is now ruined and gone to decay” (Love, III, 37). The Company voted that the Capuchins should
receive Pagodas 15,000 or approximately £6,000 in compensation, paying Pagodas 3,000
themselves and leaving the rest to be paid by the Madras Government (38). The church at
Armenian Street likewise would be restored to the Capuchins:
85
The Pagoda was a coin minted by the British government in Madras, worth 36 fanams in the local
currency or approximately 8 British shillings.
70
Fort St. George Consultation
As the new Hospital is entirely finish’d, and We have no further Occasion for the Church House and
Garden which was taken from the Capuchins for that purpose, it is Agreed to restore them, and that
they be permitted to build their new Church on that same Spot unless, upon enquiry and report from
the Engineer, it should appear to be inconvenient by being too near the Esplanade, in which case,
by the Companys Orders, they are to be paid 1,000 Pagodas, and to be permitted to carry away the
materials of the Old Church (38).
Colmart’s successful advocacy with the Company appears to have marked the end of any
amicable collaboration between the Capuchin Mission and the Madras Government, if it is not
the case that it had already ended with the original French occupation of Madras. Increasingly,
the Company’s representatives in Madras sought to limit and control the mission, eventually
curtailing its independence to such a degree that Propaganda Fide was obliged to install a Vicar
Apostolic in Madras to resume normal ecclesiastical operations. Though the last Capuchin
priests would remain in Madras until their deaths in 1843 and 1845 (Celestine, 148), their
mission and its churches had long since passed out of their control.
The End of the British Padroado
The affirmative ruling by the British East India Company’s Court of Directors in London
both financially inconvenienced the Madras Government (leaving it with a balance of Pagodas
12,000 to repay the Capuchins) and shifted the local balance of power further away from the
Protestant Church of England toward the Roman Catholic mission. (Except for the Anglican
church of St. Mary’s in the Fort, the only Anglican establishment in Madras “founded” before
1800 was St. Matthias Church in Vepery, a private Catholic chapel that had been appropriated
from Petrus Uscan after the French occupation of Madras). The Madras Government stalled and
temporized implementing the Company’s directives, explaining in 1773:
71
Fort St. George to the Company
The Capuchin Friars residing at this place applied to Us some time ago for the Sum of money
directed by your Letter of the 23rd March 1770 to be paid to them as a compensation for the Losses
which they have sustained in their Possessions here. As your Honors were pleased at the same time
also to inform Us that you enforced the Orders of the year 1716 in favor of this Society, We have
searched our Records for the purport of these Orders; but the Book of Letters Received from Europe
that year proved to be One of those which could not be found after the Capture of this Settlement by
Mr. Le Bourdonnais (38).
Whatever privileges the Company had accorded the Capuchins, the Madras Government
explained to the Directors, we cannot grant until such time as we are informed of the contents of
our “missing” book. Moreover:
In the mean time, to avoid the Inconveniences which might ensue from the Capuchins being
possessed of too large a Sum at one time, We propose advancing the money which you have
directed us to pay them in such small Sums from time to time, as may be necessary for Building
their Church, and for other purposes to be appointed of by Us. (38-39).
Fathers Victor, Medard, and Mariel then petitioned the Company for the right to manage their
own funds (39), presumably with some success, as their funds would later be alienated and put
under the control of lay managers known as Syndics.
In the meantime, the Madras Government was obliged to release funds to the Capuchins
so they might rebuild their church at Armenian Street. After gaining permission to rebuild the
church, they erected St. Mary of the Angels at the site in 1775 (37-38). The church was built on
a relatively modest scale, leading the new superior of the Capuchins, Father Ferdinand, to appeal
in 1781 to totally rebuild the 1775 church on a much grander scale. The Chief Engineer of the
Fort objected to the erection of a 24-foot church building so near the Fort, as it would interfere
with the cannons. Rather than abandon his plans, Father Ferdinand simply scaled them back:
72
“There seems to be so many difficulties for the building of a new Church upon the Emplacement
of the old one that I think (in order to displease no body) to repare only that which is extent,
which I hope you have no objection to,” (294).
By 1787, Madras Governor Archibald Campbell had investigated the Roman Catholic
community of Madras and claimed to have made “Discoveries” about the community that would
rationalize an end to the British patronage of the Capuchin mission. The geopolitical balance of
Europe had shifted by the late eighteenth century, and in terms of home politics, the British now
identified their interests as allied with the Portuguese and their financiers against their new archenemies the French—a reversal of the political situation when Madras was founded (Ballhatchet,
79).86 Moreover, the wealth and relative success of the Capuchin mission—better organized and
funded than the Church of England, with considerably more real estate on the ground—must
have been a continuing embarrassment to the Protestant government of Madras.
Campbell entered a lengthy “minute” concerning his inquiries into Catholic activities into
the Company’s Records for 30 October 1787 (reprinted in full in Love, III, 391-393, and
selectively quoted here). He explains that Roman Catholics number approximately 100,000
persons along the Coromandel Coast, with 17,000 resident within Madras proper. “It must
therefore be of great Consequence to this Government to attach Such a considerable Body of
people to our Interest by every Tie by which Society is held together.” Campbell then recounts
the history of the Capuchin mission at Madras as having been from the beginning a story of
intrigue and perfidy. Many Portuguese workers emigrated to Madras from São Tomé as
Portuguese power in the area declined and “as no pains were taken by us to furnish them with
86
Kenneth Ballhatchet, Caste, Class and Catholicism in India 1789-1914 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998).
73
priests, the French, availing themselves of our Negligence, sent some Capuchin Friars to
officiate” who have been successful enough to build a “House and Church” - the Armenian
Street site - and amass a fund of 50,000 Pagodas. “It is now become a regular convent under the
Management of a Superior who pretends to receive his Appointment from the Superior of their
Order in the province of Touraine in France, and in fact is generally appointed by the Superior of
the Capuchins at Pondicherry.” This is done for nefarious political purpose – the French
“secretly acquiring an Ascendancy over the Minds of the Roman Catholics who immediately
reside at this place ... aspired at extending this Influence from Cape Comorin to Ganjam.” The
French have “lately sent out an Ecclesiastic from France with Title of Bishop in Partibus” who
“immediately on his Arrival, entered into a very strict Correspondence with those [former
Jesuits] who were wandering about India, and offered them even pecuniary Assistance as well as
every other Support in his power, provided they attached themselves to him and obeyed his
Orders.” Appealing to a stereotypical caricature of the Jesuit order, Campbell concludes “This,
in my Opinion, developed the whole Mystery. The French never distribute their money in this
Manner unnecessarily, nor would they think” of such action toward the former Jesuits without
promise of “some temporal Advantages from the Exertions of these intriguing people.” To
counteract the machinations of disloyal French Capuchins and their scheming Jesuit allies,
Campbell would institute formal measures to end the old “British Padroado” system, which
favored the French Capuchins, and replace it with the Padroado of Britian’s political clients, the
Portuguese. “The Bishop of St. Thome has been, time immemorial, the Roman Catholic
Metropolitan on this Coast.” Because “he resides amongst us, and his Nation is firmly in
Alliance with ours” Campbell put the Padroado Bishop of São Tomé in charge of all churches in
the territory belonging to the East India Company or its ally the Nawab of Arcot. “No Roman
74
Catholic Priest shall be allowed to officiate in any such Places without first obtaining a License
from him [the Bishop of St. Thome]. By this Single Regulation the power of the [French]
Bishop in Partibus is entirely annulled, and the Bishop of St. Thome is made the first Link of a
great Chain on which depends 100,000 useful and valuable people.” In order to “eradicate the
power of the French,” Campbell took further measures to alienate the funds of the Capuchin
mission and put them under effective Company control. He selected “Persons in that [Roman]
Communion in whom Government might repose implicit Confidence, and the Catholic consider
as persons who would carefully watch over their Rights and Privileges” as Syndics. The Syndics
would lodge all the Capuchins’ money in the Company Treasury, “call upon the Capuchins for
an explicit and particular account of their Finances, and likewise...manage and controul the
Affairs of that House in the Future,” putting the priests under the effective control of the Madras
Government. Campbell handpicked the Portuguese financier John Defries, the merchants
Antonio De Souza and Miguel Johannes, and the Armenian merchant Edward Raphael for
Syndics to ally the British government with local capital - “under their Management, no Doubt
can be entertained of their being conducted with the greatest Regularity, and in a manner the
most consistent with the Honour and Interest of the Company.” Rather than compelling the
hamstrung Capuchins to leave, Campbell would permit them to stay, but prioritize Portuguese
and Italian Capuchin immigration in order to “preclude many Applications from France or
Pondicherry.” At a stroke, the “British Padroado” shifted from the French Capuchins to the
Portuguese Archdiocese of Goa. By 1832, Propaganda Fide had conducted several apostolic
visitations and concluded that the situation of the Capuchins had become so untenable that they
raised the Apostolic Prefecture of Madras into an Apostolic Vicariate and ultimately sent Daniel
O’Connor, an Irish Augustinian, as the first Vicar Apostolic (Celestine, 146-147). The church on
75
Armenian Street would nominally remain under the control of the Capuchins until the death of
the last resident Capuchin priest in 1845, but it would be supervised by an Irish Augustinian with
episcopal powers.
The Irish Cathedral
Under the Capuchins, the church on Armenian Street had been known as the “Capuchin”
or “Portuguese Church” in the Burial Ground, being named for its ecclesiastical patrons and core
European constituency. With the establishment of the Apostolic Vicariate in 1832 and its
eventual elevation to the Archdiocese of Madras in 1886, the church became known as “the Irish
Cathedral.” The Vicars Apostolic and archbishops of Madras who made the church on
Armenian Street their episcopal see between 1835 and 1911 were all of Irish extraction. With
Catholic emancipation in 1829, Irish Catholics became eligible to serve as soldiers in the
overseas colonies of Great Britain; by the early nineteenth century, they constituted half of the
British East India Company’s European army and replaced the Portuguese as the major European
Catholic constituency of Madras (Crosbie, 141).87 While this strategy of naming neglects that
Indian Catholics of the Paravar and Mukkuvar castes and Telugu-speaking boatmen were
probably never less than 85 percent of the Catholic population of Madras (Guite, 108-109),88 it
does reflect the administrative priorities of both the European priests who ran the churches and
the interests of the British East India Company in tolerating a Catholic presence in Madras. 89
87
Barry Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in NineteenthCentury India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
88
Guite, Jangkhomang. Catholics in a Protestant Enclave: The Catholic Community and the English
Company in Madras, 1640-1750 A.D. New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2008.
89
For a more detailed discussion of the role of religion in British East India Company settlements, see Stern,
“The Most Sure and Profitable Sort of Merchandise: Protestantism and Piety” in The Company State: Corporate
76
The British authorities never totally succeeded in subjecting the priests of Madras to the
ecclesiastical control of the Portuguese Padroado in Meliapor. Martin’s 1839 Statistics of the
Colonies of the British Empire lists seven churches under nominal Capuchin control and
seventeen under the See of St. Thome within the greater Madras area. This does not represent
much change from the status quo ante Campbellum as most of the Padroado parishes listed were
simply old Portuguese churches that became part of Madras when the British annexed Santhome
and Meliapor in 1749 (Martin, 300-301).90 The Padroado Bishop of Meliapor possessed legal
prerogatives backed by the British secular authorities but not recognized under Roman canon
law, under which Propaganda churches were subject to their own orders and to Rome and not to
the local territorial archdiocese. When Propaganda Fide ultimately replaced the French
Capuchin Prefecture with an Apostolic Vicariate administered by Irish (that is, native-born
British) priests, the Madras law courts eventually decided most disputed ecclesiastical
jurisdictions in favor of the Vicariate, even before the Vatican formally suspended the Padroado
Diocese of Meliapor in 1838 (Crosbie, 150-151). In the meantime, disaffected native Christians
(usually Indian Catholics of the Paravar caste) took advantage of the competing jurisdictions to
disaffiliate their parishes with jurisdictions that troubled them or else voted with their feet,
moving to a more congenial parish in a rival jurisdiction. In this manner, St. Peter’s Royapuram
would switch affiliation from Propaganda Fide to the Diocese of Meliapor, and a new parish
named St. John’s would be formed in 1815, under Padroado jurisdiction, to protest Capuchin
abuses (Ballhatchet, 94; Martin, 300).
Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011). Stern describes a tension between toleration and authority in official British dealings with Roman Catholics,
who were allowed to operate in Madras only to expedite Company goals (pp. 104-106).
90
Robert Montgomery Martin, Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire (London: William H. Allen
and Company, 1839).
77
When the church at Armenian Street became the “Irish Cathedral” to minister to the
spiritual needs of the regiments, many Indian Catholics were impatient with the changes
introduced by the missionaries, which were often scandalous by prevailing local standards. The
first Vicar Apostolic, Daniel O’Connor, and his delegation of Irish assistant priests could speak
and officiate only in English and Latin, as opposed to the French Capuchins who were fluent in
Portuguese (Crosbie, 151). Indian Catholics demanded priests who could speak either Tamil or
at least Portuguese, which was spoken by 75 percent of the congregation. Many Irish soldiers
spoke only Gaelic and could not confess their sins intelligibly to English-speaking priests (142143). A group calling itself the “poor Indians” alleged liturgical improprieties, noting that the
Irish priests only said High Mass on Sundays, neglected processions, and did not provide a cross
for the pulpit (142-143). Because the Irish priests also did not wear the soutane or the full
ecclesiastical vestments favored by the French and Portuguese clerics, they were accused of
crypto-Protestant tendencies and were mistrusted. High caste Paravas were especially displeased
and focused their criticism on the transformation of the church into an “Irish cathedral”:
They [the Paravas] complained that the Irish missionaries in Madras spoke no Tamil and devoted
much of their time to the Irish Roman Catholic soldiers in the military cantonments. The Irish, they
protested, were trying to treat Indian Catholics as if they were Irish and not Indian at all. They did
not adhere to Indian customs such as the separation of the sexes during Mass, nor did they take
their shoes off before entering the church … O’Connor made matters worse and continued to
incense high-caste sensibilities by separating his ‘Cathedral’ church in Madras into two distinct
sections. In the first section O’Connor assigned seats for Europeans and Indians in European
dress, while in the second those wearing Indian dress were put together. As a result, many highcaste Tamils, who resented being mixed together with low-caste Pariahs, began collecting money
with a view to building a separate church of their own (152).
Ultimately, eighty high-caste Paravar families withdrew from St. Mary’s Armenian Street to a
separate Padroado parish (Ballhatchet, 104).
78
O’Connor’s successors were no more positively received by Indian Catholics. Despite
John Fennelly’s directive that his priests should adopt the soutane and “tolerate and respect all
their [Indian] usages, even when they appear barbarous in our eyes,” Fennelly adamantly
opposed the training of Indians for the priesthood due to their sensitivity to caste and would not
modify his predecessors’ seating arrangements. He and his priests were characterized as “mainly
concerned … with the welfare of the European and Eurasian population” and “fail[ing] to
observe the distinctions appropriate to high castes” (Crosbie, 156-157). The high caste Tamil P.
D. Sarouvanitomarayan caustically characterized the mission as consisting of disreputable Irish
priests who “ate beef and thought it perfectly fine to drive women in their carriages” (157).
Eventually Indian Catholics warmed to the catechetical teachings of the Irish missionaries
(s162), but never surrendered their mistrust of the Irish social customs that prevailed within the
mission.
The Irish Augustinians and Mill Hill Fathers who served as the Vicars Apostolic and
Archbishops of Madras in their turn favored the Irish use in the cathedral, prioritized the soldiers
for whom they were provided an official government stipend as military chaplains, and remained
suspicious of Indian Catholics as a racial group, even as they worked for their gradual
empowerment.91 When the Irish Mill Hill missionaries were departing and the first Salesian
91
According to Lawrence Nemer’s Anglican and Roman Catholic Attitudes on Missions: An Historical
Study of Two English Missionary Societies in the Late Nineteenth Century (St. Augustin: Steyler Verlag, 1981, pp.
129-134, 135-140), the ultimate goal of the Mill Hill Fathers included a gradual “civilizing mission” to the culturally
disadvantaged and the ultimate establishment of native churches, but this was perceived as a long-term goal rather
than something immediately feasible for most of the missions. The order endorsed such a gradual approach to racial
uplift that when the Mill Hill Fathers’ chief missionary to African Americans in the U.S. Peter Benoit, was criticized
for seeming to endorse racial equality and desegregation, he quickly backtracked and clarified his remarks as
warnings against missionaries working to end social inequality between the races (p. 135). It is not difficult to
imagine the context of the Mill Hill Fathers’ detraction of Archbishop Mederlet for appointing a native secretary if
in their caution they perceived the action as being intemperate due to native Indian clergy being “unready” to
assume such responsibilities. With the official adoption of the Montagu-Chelmsford measures pursuant to the
79
Archbishop of Madras Eugene Mederlet appointed an Indian priest as his personal secretary in
1929, the departing order detracted him for doing so.
Though he might be as clever and holy as any in Europe can be, nevertheless it appears to all, not to
be a good policy and not one Bishop has ever done it. This is a course for irrespectful talkings
among the other Churches and place the Catholics in a very low position before them. The very
first to say it and to speak of it are the Mill Hill Fathers, creating an atmosphere very little
favourable to His Grace (Thekkedath, 432).92
With the appointment of the Italian Salesian John Mora as parish priest at the cathedral, the days
of the Irish Cathedral had officially ended, and St. Mary’s Armenian Street embarked upon the
continuing experiment with inculturation that eventually transformed it into “Antoniyar Kōvil,”
as the site is generally known today.
An Excursus on Race and Colonialism
Broadly speaking, the history of the Armenian Street site can be periodized in terms of the
particular intersection of race and colonialism that prevailed in a given historical period. Until
the early part of the twentieth century, Tamil Catholics were largely invisible to that history,
appearing only in the role of occasional critics of the customs and liturgical practices of different
groups of European priests and religious, despite the fact that they must have always been the
majority of the patrons of the site.
ultimate emancipation of British India, British apologetics for empire in the early twentieth century had shifted to a
rhetoric of a negotiated withdrawal from Britain’s overseas colonies when they became “ready” for independence,
meaning that the Mill Hill Fathers’ policies were consistent with the racial and colonial politics of the era. See
Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, pp. 457-460, pp. 519-520.
92
Joseph Thekkedath, A History of the Salesians of Don Bosco in India: From the Beginning Up to 1951-52
(Bangalore: Kristu Jyoti Publications, 2005).
80
The raison d’etre of Catholicism in British Madras was to serve the interests of the East
India Company and later the British Raj, rendering it in effect a “British Padroado.” There
would have been no Portuguese Church in Fort St. George or Burying-Ground on Armenian
Street without the British need to religiously accommodate Portuguese laborers who would
otherwise fall under the influence of colonial rivals in nearby São Tomé de Meliapor. The
Archdiocese of Madras would not have been established as an independent ecclesiastical
jurisdiction apart from British desire to preserve ecclesiastical autonomy from the Archbishop of
Goa, nor would the Capuchin Church of St. Mary’s have been elevated to the status of a
cathedral to rival Santhome. With the expulsion of Catholics from the “White Town” after the
French occupation of Madras and the demolition of the original Portuguese Church within the
Fort, the Armenian Street site became the premier “church in the Black Town,” with Catholics
culturally and legally black. Catholicism became a race religion, part of a largely
undifferentiated colonial subaltern in which Catholics and natives were reckoned idolaters by the
white Protestant establishment. Native Catholics became doubly subaltern, speaking only from
the margins as occasional critics of liturgical practice and only late in the period.
The end of the British rule in India stripped the site of much of its original purpose and
required significant rebranding. This process got off the ground under the Salesians of Don
Bosco, parish priests of the cathedral since 1928, who accelerated a program of racial
empowerment initiated more cautiously by the Mill Hill Fathers. The Salesian bishop Louis
Mathias presided over the merger of the Archdiocese of Madras with the Diocese of Mylapore in
1952, which demoted the site to Co-Cathedral. With the end of British colonial interests in
Madras, there was simply no rationale for the old archdiocese. Mathias and his successors made
racial empowerment their new rationale, rededicating the attached school as “St. Mary’s Anglo-
81
Indian School” and focusing its attention on the education of mixed race Indians who would
have been considered “black” by the colonial powers. The school in turn became a major anchor
for its neighboring church.93 During Mathias’s tenure as archbishop, a devotional icon of Martin
of Porres, patron of non-white Christians, was installed along with other saints’ icons, dealing
with the cause of the poor and the downtrodden, indicating that racial uplift of poor Indians had
become a preoccupation for the Salesians. With what is by now an almost exclusively Indian
priesthood and congregation, the decolonization of the archdiocese has ended, leading to some
uncertainty about the future shape of the Church on Armenian Street. According to the current
parish priest, Fr. Xavier Packiam, “there are no Anglo-Indians anymore,” and the average
student of the school is a comparatively affluent Muslim sent by his parents to what is considered
an elite school with very high teacher pay; the Salesians are thinking of dropping the school’s
official “Anglo-Indian” classification in order to match reality on the ground and gain some
regulatory advantages from a new classification. The official promotion of the St. Antony Shrine
to an official shrine of the archdiocese in 2005 appears to be an effort to provide a new raison
d’etre for what is now a postcolonial site with a more generically Indian demographic.
93
Saradha Mohan Kumar, “School with European Roots Celebrates 175 Years of Greatness,” Times of India,
January 22, 2014.
82
CHAPTER 3:
ANTONIYAR KŌVIL: A DESCRIPTIVE OVERVIEW OF THE ST. ANTONY SHRINE
Figure 3. St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral, Armenian Street, Chennai.
Introduction
At the conclusion of Chapter Two, I argued that the Church on Armenian Street had been
reinvented on multiple occasions and that the negotiation of race and caste under British colonial
governance was the major factor driving these transformations. The Church was marketed at
different times to a constellation of subaltern constituencies, each of which was officially
classified “black” subsequent to the 1752 expulsion of Catholics from the White Town which
83
partitioned the colony on lines of race and religious identity. European Catholic, Indian
Catholic, and Hindu were largely undifferentiated communities in the eyes of the British colonial
authorities who segregated these communities in the Black Town. Eighteenth century Protestant
missionary literature made a rhetorical trope out of the equivalency and interchangeability of
Roman Catholicism and Indian religions as expressions of heathenism, although Catholic
emancipation in Britain eventually improved the social status of Catholicism.94 Within this
colonial system, Indian Catholics were doubly subaltern, excluded from the White Town on the
basis of race and religious identity, yet clearly subordinated and sidelined within the Black Town
parishes for which they were the majority constituency, as designations such as “Portuguese
Church,” “Irish Cathedral,” etc. for the Armenian Street church clearly attest. I concluded that
the contemporary rebranding of St. Mary’s Cathedral as Antoniyar Kōvil was made necessary by
the end of British rule, as Indians assumed independent governance. The origin of St. Antony
devotion in the transitional period between the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and Indian
Independence makes the site ideal for appreciating the renegotiation of Catholic identity at
Independence, as it possible to trace contrasting policies toward the devotion in different periods
of ecclesiastical leadership with different priorities and attitudes toward race. The Europeanborn priests John Mora and Pietro Maggioni, who administered the site through the 1940s, were
94
“Increased Protestant experience of non-Christian practice at their missionary stations soon linked
Catholics to the strange heathen abroad in their alleged mutual affront to the principles of purely spiritual worship.
The collusion of Roman and Indian idolatry was a persistent theme in relations between Protestant and Catholic
missionaries in South India. Roman idolatry was seen as an ally of Hindu belief and worship, banding with it to bar
pure gospel Christianity from taking root among the Indian people. James Hough charged that Jesuits made Hindu
converts only ‘to exchange the idols of their own superstition for the images of Rome … [and to] substitute the
crucifix for the lingum.’ To European Protestants, processions by Indian Catholics were indistinguishable from
those conducted by their Hindu counterparts, displaying all the pomp, chaos, and superstition of the most offensive
Hindu parades. By conferring the name ‘Christian’ on those who continued to practice such manifest idolatry,
Roman Catholics, especially the Jesuits, it was said, were preventing any real spiritual awakening in India and
frustrating Protestant efforts at a real religious transformation” (Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? pp. 68-69).
84
significantly more cautious and circumspect about popular religion than later Indian-born priests
such as the contemporary Xavier Packiam, who frames his toleration of many controversial
devotions at the site in terms of Indian secularism and avoiding communal tensions.
In the present chapter, I contextualize and describe the devotions that transformed the
Anglo-Indian cathedral church of St. Mary of the Angels into Antoniyar Kōvil. After offering a
brief institutional overview of the parish church and the shrine as distinct entities serving
different constituencies and needs, I turn to the shrine proper, offering a detailed ethnographic
description of the site in terms of its visual and material culture and popular devotions. Drawing
upon the scholarship of David Mosse, Brigitte Sébastia, and Ramsay MacMullen, I interpret the
material as an expression of South Indian shrine culture and popular Christianity. Finally, I
contrast the pastoral policies of Salesian priests Pietro Maggioni and Xavier Packiam toward
devotion in the shrine, attributing differences to Vatican II teachings about non-Christian
religions and the reality of Indian Independence.
Church and Shrine
The contemporary St. Antony Shrine is part of St. Mary of the Angels, a British colonial
church sharing the position of cathedral with Santhome since the 1952 merger of the
ecclesiastical government of Madras and Mylapore created the new Archdiocese of MadrasMylapore. Despite occupying the same location, the church and shrine are semi-distinct entities,
both institutionally and at the level of popular opinion, and their constituencies do not entirely
overlap. Only the archdiocese refers to the site as “St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral,” and it does so
inconsistently. The official declaration making the site an archdiocesan shrine only
parenthetically refers to the location as “St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral,” making its shrine status
85
primary. In the court of popular opinion, the site is known almost exclusively as Antoniyar Kōvil
or sometimes the “St. Antony’s Church” in English, as I learned through frustrating efforts to
locate the site on Google Maps and negotiations with rickshaw drivers.
Located in Parry’s Corner in Georgetown, St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral has a congregation of
235 members belonging to 43 families who attend mass and take part in the official sacramental
life of the Catholic Church.95 The St. Antony Shrine draws from between 5,000-10,000 people
on an average Tuesday and 20,000 or more on First Tuesdays, virtually none of whom are
members of the parish.96 The parish attracts a number of Catholics from outside the parish to
Sunday mass, drawing an average 1,500 people despite its low official membership. The number
of parishioners has declined significantly from an 1857 high of 8,000 and 1900 count of 800,
largely due to the transformation of the neighborhood from a residential to a commercial district
the official website refers to as having an “only floating population.” Even as a commercial
distinct, the neighborhood is in decline from a mid-twentieth century apogee as the main
shopping district of the city, which the commerce hub gradually drifting into more southerly
neighborhoods around Gemini Circle. While pilgrims come to the St. Antony Shrine primarily
for its renown, most of the Catholics from outside the neighborhood who attend Sunday services
attend because they have been out shopping, according to the parish priest. The church offers
two Sunday masses in English and one in Tamil, suggesting an effort to draw any Catholic in
Chennai who is in the neighborhood and willing to attend. The church is easily accessible from
the rest of Chennai, with major bus and railway terminals located nearby in Parry’s Corner. The
95
St. Antony’s Shrine. “Our History.” stantonyshrine.org. http://www.stantonyshrine.org/history.php
(accessed March 6, 2015).
96
Estimates provided by the parish priest, Fr. Xavier Packiam, were somewhat higher. He estimates weekly
attendance at 12,000-15,000 and First Tuesday attendance at 25,000.
86
church is anchored by the nearby Madras High Court and the on-site St. Mary’s Anglo-Indian
School, with a few of my informants present at the church because of business at these other
institutions.
Sociologically, the church and shrine patrons are quite distinct. Most of the shrine
pilgrims are middle class and come from diverse caste backgrounds, but according to the parish
priest, most of the parishioners are destitute and live on the streets near the church. My only
contact with parishioners was through their begging activities, and none would consent to be
interviewed. Even in the context of Sunday mass, they were greatly outnumbered by Catholics
from other neighborhoods. My account therefore focuses almost exclusively on popular
devotion at Antoniyar Kōvil, rather than the sacramental life of the parish.
The St. Antony Devotion
St. Antony devotion at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral originated with a spontaneous votive
offering. In 1929, a number of Goan sailors in danger on the high seas made a vow to St. Antony
that if they were saved from a storm, they would present a statue of the saint to the church
nearest their point of landing, which was St. Mary’s.97 They duly commissioned a statue from
Goa, which unusually depicted St. Antony as bearded, and presented it at the church.98 The
parish priest at St. Mary’s, John Mora, claimed that there was no room for the statue in the
cathedral and presented it to the catechist of Park Town Parish, who put the statue on a side altar
before moving the image to the mortuary chapel in St. Patrick’s Cemetery (189). While the
97
Maggioni, Pietro. “History of St. Anthony’s Devotion at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral” (limited-circulation
archdiocesan publication, unknown press, unknown date, p. 188).
98
According to Joseph Thekkedath in A History of the Salesians of Don Bosco in India: from the Beginning
up to 1951-1952 (Bangalore: Kristu Jyoti Publications, 2005, pp. 569-770) the image was originally rejected from
the cathedral for being too “ugly” and possibly depicting St. Cajetan rather than St. Antony.
87
image was installed at St. Patrick’s Cemetery, it became a popular devotional object with rumors
of miracles spreading its fame. In fact, devotion was so popular and income from votive
offerings was so lucrative that the cemetery watchman and the catechist of Park Town fought
over the offerings and attracted the notice of Archbishop Mathias. He temporarily put a stop to
the devotion by directing the statue be moved to the parish house at St. Mary’s, where it would
be out of view of the public (189). Only when disappointed devotees came looking for the statue
and pleaded with Fr. Mora—who was newly promoted to Vicar General—was the statue finally
installed on a side altar in the cathedral (189). The devotion grew to the point where the church
was kept open all day on Tuesdays, the saint’s day, and an annual high mass and procession were
kept on June 13, the Feast of St. Antony (189). By 1945, 3,000-5,000 people were coming to the
site on Tuesdays and “abuses” and “superstitious practices”—unapproved popular devotions—
were observed (189-190), leading Archbishop Mathias to direct the new parish priest of the site,
Fr. Maggioni, to take close watch and suppress any unwanted developments (191). By 1951 the
number of people coming to the site were between 20,000-28,000 on the first and second
Tuesdays of the month and between 15,000 and 20,000 on the other two Tuesdays, with 70
percent of the devotees being non-Catholic and mostly Hindu (190). Today, the shrine priests
estimate the number is probably 5,000-10,000 on any Tuesday of the month, with a similar
percentage of Hindus.99 St. Antony devotion is so popular that for most people who are familiar
with the site, it is known as the St. Antony Shrine rather than St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral
(Jørgensen, 358-359).
99
St. Antony’s Shrine. “Our History.” stantonyshrine.org. http://www.stantonyshrine.org/history.php
(accessed March 6, 2015).
88
Figure 4. “Bearded” St. Antony ex voto.
Over the course of roughly three weeks in Chennai, I had the opportunity to make a
rough physical inventory of the site, collect photography, observe the devotions characteristic of
each part of the shrine campus, speak with the priests and religious who administer the shrine,
and interview numerous devotees. This chapter will describe the role of St. Antony in Tamil
Popular Catholicism, drawing upon the research of Brigitte Sébastia and David Mosse to
contextualize my findings. Next I will describe in detail the devotional circuit followed by many
visitors to the shrine, a reverse circumambulation of the church, which begins with the
miraculous St. Antony image and typically ends with veneration of Our Lady of Perpetual
Succor. I will describe Moorat Chapel, a mortuary chapel in the cathedral that boasts a number
of idiosyncratic practices and the Immaculate Conception Chapel that mirrors it on the other side
of the church. I will describe the church’s koṭimaram and associated devotions, ending with a
89
summary of the practices on the shrine campus that are most deeply contested. In the following
chapter, I will describe the interviews conducted on site and their findings. Together, this will
constitute what I believe is the first ethnographic description of this important site.
Figure 5. Devotees outside the shrine.
The Figure of St. Antony in Tamil Popular Catholicism
Devotion at the St. Antony Shrine is paradoxical. While the figure of St. Antony is
conceptualized in terms consistent with his role in Tamil Popular Catholicism, functioning
primarily to combat sorcery or drive out the evil influence of the pēy, I observed no one directly
engaged in the expected exorcistic practices and interviewed no one who admitted to calling
upon the saint for such purposes. Nevertheless, if one asked either priest or lay person of any
caste what purposes St. Antony is good for and why people come to the site, informants would
90
answer in terms of the standard conception.
David Mosse’s 1994 “Catholic Saints and the Hindu Village Pantheon in Rural Tamil
Nadu, India” does not address St. Antony directly, but differentiates between the function of
major cult figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary and lesser male Catholic saints in the
religious system of a local village.100 The former figures essentialize divine attributes and
possess absolute rather than relational authority. They accept only vegetarian offerings and are
abstracted beyond violence or confrontation, being conceived as pacific, life-bestowing, and
“cool.”101 Male Catholic saints such as St. Antony occupy a markedly more ambivalent place in
the village pantheon. They are “relational” beings who may in certain ritual contexts (for
instance, if celebrated as the kula deivam or village deity) be the highest legitimate authority on
the scene, in which case their usual violent, ambivalent, or “hot” status is delegated to a more
inferior saint or deity, allowing them to be honored with vegetarian offerings as benevolent or
“cool” (Mosse, 313-314). More often, male Catholic saints are relationally inferior—most often
to God or the Virgin Mary—and marginal, associated with liminal contexts such as the forest,
wilderness, or graveyard and qualities such as violence and renunciation, which are opposed to
civilized village life (308). They are “hot” deities capable of great help or hindrance whose
awesome powers must be propitiated with blood (311-312). The male Catholic saints can be
demoniacal or cast out demons, ambivalent beings who partake both of the civilized world of
saints and legitimate authority and the demoniacal world of powers outside the village that
threaten its order. The saints will sometimes turn their power against their own devotees to
100
David Mosse, “Catholic Saints and the Hindu Village Pantheon in Rural Tamil Nadu, India.” Man 29: 2
(June 1994), pp. 301-332. See also Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, pp. 74-88).
101
For the distinction between “hot” and “cool” deities, see Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 193-196).
91
avenge wrong-doing and uphold dharma (Mosse, 310-311). They are able to overcome violence
and cast our sorcery, witchcraft and the pēy because they themselves possess such dangerous
supernatural power to a superlative degree.
In her article “Like an Indian God: Hinduisation of the Cult of Saint Anthony of Padua in
Tamil Nadu,” Brigitte Sébastia applies David Mosse’s observations about male Catholic saints in
Tamil Nadu to explain the cult of St. Antony in Puliyampatti, a village near Tirunelveli.102
Noting that devotions to St. Antony in the West rarely involve an exorcistic element, Sébastia
argues that St. Antony in Tamil Nadu has assumed the characteristics of a minor Hindu god who
is capable of boons a major goddess, such as the Virgin, cannot fulfill (2, 9). Appearing in India
through the missionary efforts of the Padroado, St. Antony devotion took hold on the Fishery
and Coromandel coasts among the Paravar and Nadar castes, who adopted St. Antony as their
kula deivam and appealed to the saint for protection at sea (5-6). However, competition between
the Padroado and Propaganda Fide made an effective control of Christian converts impossible.
Susan Bayly documents frequent opportunistic mass conversions among these castes when
denied prerogatives, with lay communities essentially playing one missionary group against
another to pursue advantage and maintain independence.103 So it was commonly the case that
Christian cults “ran wild,” free of ecclesiastical planning or control and only subsequently could
be brought into the orbit of any organized mission. Sébastia’s Puliyampatti shrine was founded
by a lay devotee and only many years later administratively annexed by the Jesuit order, who had
102
Brigitte Sébastia. “Like an Indian God.” http://hal.archivesouvertes.fr/docs/00/59/71/60/PDF/Like_an_Indian_god.pdf (accessed March 6, 2015). The online article is an
English summary of fieldwork originally published in French as part of Sébastia’s doctoral dissertation, Les Rondes
de Saint Antoine. Culte, Affliction et Possession à Puliyampatti (Montreuil: Aux Lieux d’Être, 2007).
103
Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses, and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 423-437).
92
expanded their operations into the area (11-14). In the absence of any meaningful ecclesiastical
control, the St. Antony cult was free to take on characteristics of the Tamil popular religion, and
St. Antony assumed the familiar characteristics of a minor Indian deity.
Sébastia’s ethnography of St. Antony devotion at Puliyampatti closely follows the
characteristics of a generic male saint in David Mosse’s account of Tamil Popular Catholicism in
Ramnad, while also mirroring the history of the St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s in Chennai. The
origins of the Puliyampatti shrine and the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai both lie with lay people
from coastal castes evangelized by the Portuguese (5-6); both cults also spent their early,
formative years outside of an established church and were only later brought into the orbit of
ecclesiastical authority (2-3). Both cult images of St. Antony were taken from cemeteries to their
present locations, strongly associating them with the kind of ambivalent and demoniacal force
David Mosse attributes to minor deities and saints (11-12). As Mosse’s typology of these cults
would predict, St. Antony of Puliyampatti is primarily an exorcist who heals by casting out
sorcery, witchcraft, and the pēy through a battle of wills with the demons, which is somatized in
the body of the patient.104 Animal sacrifices are made to Puliyampatti St. Antony as to a “hot”
deity, which would be impossible for the Virgin Mary. (8). Devotees report Puliyampatti St.
Antony as an ambivalent character who will sometimes punish his worshipers for lapses and
transgressions (10-11). St. Antony is both forest deity (11) and kula deivam (5-6) and is the
focus of bhakti (6-7). The shrine koṭimaram, which concentrates the shakti of the saint, is for
both Mosse and Sébastia a site of danger and healing (4-5).
104
Sébastia’s ethnographic video “Dance of St. Anthony: Devotion, Affliction, and Possession in
Puliyampatti” more thoroughly describes the somatic gestures of the possessed at the shrine. These often involve
violent gesticulations and bodily self-harm, as well as “crises of possession” which occur when patients are exposed
to the darśana of St. Antony or the sight of the consecrated sacrament.
93
Devotees at the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai report an understanding of St. Antony that
conforms to Mosse’s typology of the male Catholic saint as forest deity and Sébastia’s
ethnography of the Puliyampatti in nearly all salient respects, but without visible evidence of
exorcistic practices. According to devotees, St. Antony takes care of black magic, mental illness,
and possession by the pēy, but they are usually more concerned with jobs, family problems,
personal health, and having enough money to meet their families’ needs.
Figure 6. The St. Antony Shrine.
In addition to these more definite characteristics listed above, ethnographic interviews at
the site suggest that St. Antony might specifically be conceived as if he were a “hot” equivalent
of Vinayagar or Ganesha, the Hindu remover of obstacles. In a generic sense, the problems and
afflictions St. Antony addresses for devotees are all obstacles and St. Antony deals with them
94
without discrimination, making him a remover of obstacles. Although St. Antony specializes in
pēy problems, any range of secondary afflictions can be attributed to the pēy,105 and informants
often claimed St. Antony helps all castes deal with any problem. A connection with the Hindu
remover of obstacles, Vinayagar, repeatedly surfaced in informant interviews, where an
informant claimed Antony or Velankanni Madha as their ishta or kula deivam, only for Vinayagar
to surface in the parallel role. In addition to informant interviews in Chennai, I observed the
same pairings in devotional stickers in rickshaws in Pondicherry, suggesting the association is
not unique to the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai. Perhaps as a “hot” and dangerous form of
Vinayagar, St. Antony is called upon in extreme circumstances, where a more benign form of
Vinayagar will not do, although this is speculation. The fact of a connection between the two
figures for Tamils on the Coromandel Coast seems clear, although its meaning requires further
investigation.106
105
Isabelle Nabokov, Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 45.
106
Carl Gustav Diehl also notes that St. Antony and Ganesha shrines are often paired as equivalents in his
Church and Shrine: Intermingling Patterns of Culture in the Life of Some Christian Groups in South India
(Uppsala: Uppsala University Publishers, 1965, p. 176).
95
Figure 7. Rickshaw with Velankanni and
Vinayagar decals, Pondicherry.
Finally, no discussion of St. Antony or his shrine would be complete without some words
about St. Antony’s status as a universally-accessible supernatural healer. Many of the miraculous
interventions devotees reported in their lives through supernatural agency were medical in
nature, with St. Antony effecting cures where Western biomedicine had been tried and failed or
in some cases left untried.
India’s medical delivery system can be characterized as pluralist, pragmatic, and
complementary.107 Western medical services are available to the elite at high prices in major
Indian cities, putting them out of reach of most Indians except in the case of a major medical
emergency; psychiatric resources are acutely inadequate, with only a few thousand therapists
107
Helen Lambert, “Popular Therapeutics and Medical Preferences in Rural North India.” The Lancet 348
(December 1996), pp. 1706-1709. See also “Conversion, Illness, and Possession” in Divine Remedies: Medicine
and Religion in South Asia (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2008, p. 265).
96
serving all of India.108 Traditional Indian medical paradigms such as āyurveda and unani
complement the allopathic medical delivery system, along with homeopathy and local traditions
of supernatural healing (1706). Few Indians of any level of affluence are exclusive patrons of
any of these medical systems, with the others serving as “medicines of last resort” if the system
of first resort fails to get the desired results or deems a condition incurable (1708-1709). Few
Indians accept the entire epistemological paradigm of Western medicine, engaging it in an ad hoc
and circumstantial manner to meet practical medical needs, as a complement to existing
technologies, whose cultural premises are more widely shared. However, just as few Christians,
Hindus, or Muslims would exclude themselves from recourse to a shrine of another tradition
offering the promise of supernatural assistance for a major problem or crisis in their lives, and
few Indians would eschew any of the locally-available traditions of medicine.109
In the case of “pēy problems” specifically attributed to mental illness in the Western
psychiatric tradition, there is a distinct cultural aversion to the diagnosis and treatment on a
Western biomedical model. Individuals suffering from pēy problems are significantly less
socially-stigmatized on the basis of a pēy diagnosis than individuals suffering from mental
illness, which is regarded as contagious, incurable, and the result of gross personal or familial
immorality in this or a previous lifetime.110 As pēy possession is ambivalent rather than wholly
negative (the pēy can offer boons such as divination or healing abilities as well as afflicting their
108
Janani Sampath, “Shortage of Psychiatrists Hits Treatment.”
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Shortage-of-psychiatrists-hits-treatment/articleshow/29085662.cms
(accessed March 6. 2015).
109
Selva Raj and William P. Harman, Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2006), p. 7.
110
Brigitte Sébastia, “Dance of St. Anthony: Devotion, Affliction, and Possession in Puliyampatti.”
97
victims), the experience itself is categorized as a far less significant medical emergency carrying
a reduced burden of stigma.111 Family and caregivers who might abandon a patient in the case of
a diagnosis with a mental illness will generally nourish and care for one who is afflicted with
possession by the pēy. Treatment efforts aim at restoring and reintegrating the individual into the
social structure through rituals in which the entire family collectively participates, leading to
significantly better therapeutic outcomes.112 St. Antony’s Shrine in Puliyampatti, surveyed by
Brigitte Sébastia, ministered to a surprising number of patients whose families rejected their
diagnosis as mentally ill by a psychiatric doctor and transferred them to St. Antony in search of a
possession diagnosis and more effective treatment. Recourse to a supernatural healing agent
such as St. Antony aims at the restoration of health, integrity, and harmony to an entire family
unit (Smith, 47). The St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral on Armenian Street
accommodates this by providing spiritual counseling free to devotees and their families.
In addition to being a supernatural healer in his own right, St. Antony serves as an
empowerer of supernatural healers, such as a Christian sādhu interviewed in Chapter 4 who
comes to the site with a representative member of his client’s family before undertaking an
exorcism in the family home later in the day.
111
On beneficial aspects of pēy possession, see Frederick M. Smith, The Self-Possessed: Deity and Spirit
Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp. 130-131).
112
On the abandonment of the mentally ill, see Janani Sampath’s Times of India article, cited above.
98
Figure 8. The gift of touch.
St. Antony’s healing activities in the shrine are not limited to exorcism, medical cures, or
even restoring the broader health and wholeness possessed by an individual free of medical,
financial, and familial problems. Arguably the most important aspect of St. Antony’s role as a
healer is his social emphasis. St. Antony is a liminal figure who reaches out and heals the
socially marginalized and the excluded. As documented in Chapter 4, informants strongly
emphasize that St. Antony heals all castes without distinction. Persons of low caste status are not
prevented from physically entering the temple, receiving darśana, or even touching the saints’
images. In this manner, St. Antony acts as a healer of untouchability, granting the gift of touch
and human contact to his devotees. By presiding over a shrine open to people of all caste
99
backgrounds, St. Antony acts as a healer of communalism, creating a space where Catholic and
Hindu can worship together without respect to communal labels. In a contemporary India
increasingly dominated by communalism and religious nationalism, this non-sectarian vision of a
community accessible to all without respect to race, religio-cultural background, or social status
can serve as a healer and reconciler of damaging social divides.
Devotions and Offerings
Most of the offerings at the St. Antony Shrine appear to be connected with individual
vows (nerccai) on the part of devotees. Nerccai are normally voluntary undertakings, less
formally structured than North Indian vratas. Most typically, devotees agree to undertake some
specific activity on behalf of a deity or saint if a particular boon is granted, depositing a written
promissory note in an offering bin at a shrine dedicated to the saint or deity concerned,
frequently along with some preliminary offering as a kind of “down payment” with a promise for
more if a petition is granted.113 It is relatively common for devotees to cross religious
boundaries in the offering of vows, searching for a deity or saint reputed to have more efficacy in
dealing with a particular kind of problem (45, 61-62). Petitions are highly individualized, but
frequent concerns include agricultural success, marital stability, economic prosperity, family
harmony, and the health and fertility of family members, land, and livestock (44). Most vows at
the St. Antony Shrine at the time of my fieldwork appeared to focus on physical health,
economic issues, and fertility. Although North Indian vratas typically involve fasts and the
association is so strong that the word vrata is sometimes used simply to mean “fast,” no
113
Selva Raj, “Shared Vows, Shared Space, and Shared Deities” in Raj and Harman, Dealing with Deities:
the Ritual Vow in South Asia, p. 44.
100
informant related undertaking a fast in connection with their devotions at the shrine.114
Offerings to St. Antony are varied. A plurality of pilgrims offer garlands of flowers,
which are clipped by an attendant who then returns the flower to the devotee as a kind of prasād.
The floor of the shrine area is littered with the remains of foliage because after pilgrims deposit
their garlands on the statue, others quickly come and remove a flower or two from the alreadyoffered garland. Sometimes these flowers ultimately are used to make further offerings within
the church, but an informant told me these are usually taken home to be given to images of the
saint kept within one’s domicile. According to my translator, Kumaressan, this practice derived
from Hinduism is known as “using the flower.”
There are two metal bins within the sanctuary to allow devotees who wish to offer coins
to deposit them directly in front of the image. Though I did not observe this offering, I was told
that sometimes devotees who have been granted an especially noteworthy boon will return with a
garland made from Indian banknotes to offer the saint as a kind of thanksgiving.
114
Anne Mackenzie Pearson, “Because It Gives Me Peace of Mind”: Ritual Fasts in the Religious Lives of
Hindu Women (Albany: State University of New York, 1996, p. 2).
101
Figure 9. Candle offerings.
Within the shrine enclosure, there is a multi-tiered metal candelabrum where devotees
can offer taper candles, which they have touched to the image for blessing. Most of the time, this
candelabrum is full of candles. On some occasions, it is necessary for an attendant to quickly
remove unburned candles to make room for new in order to maintain the flow of offering.
Among more unconventional offerings are malar or pratima, thin metallic sheets of
hammered silver stamped with various shapes representing the nature of the problem the devotee
wishes to overcome. Most of these are in the shape of body parts or sometimes houses or
motorcycles—the former seeking healing of various physical ailments, the latter representing
tangible goods the devotees would like to acquire or protect.115
When the shrine is not as well supervised, devotees leave durable offerings, which they
intend to return for later, presumably to absorb some of the shakti of the saint in the meantime,
ritually empowering the object for use in the home. While inspecting the site, I noted several
115
Vasudha Narayana, “Religious Vows at the Shrine of Shahul Hamid” in Raj and Harman’s Dealing with
Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 73).
102
large painted icons that had been left at the shrine in burlap sacks, presumably to be taken again
later by those who had left them.
The manual gestures of devotees at the shrine derive largely from a Hindu devotional
idiom. While a certain number of worshipers kneel on their knees, large numbers do full
prostrations or rock in front of the image or throw their arms outstretched in supplication. When
they reach the shrine, devotees within the queue touch the feet of the saint through an aperture in
the wooden cabinet and then touch themselves—sometimes in the forehead and eyes, sometimes
on the chest, and sometimes in a manner reminiscent of an Iberian Catholic genuflection. Some
touch the image and when they bring their hand back, they kiss the hand which made contact
with the statue. Though devotees are expected to expedite the flow of the queue, many rest their
hand against the glass or the image and linger for as long as will be tolerated by those around
them. Though there are commonalities in approach, no devotional gestures seem to be
prescribed, and consequently the shrine appears almost chaotic in its diversity of devotional
styles.
Devotees at the St. Antony Shrine are usually trying to overcome some major problem or
crisis in their lives. Frequently devotees are in search of employment. An informant told me that
the youngest contingent of pilgrims use the shrine almost exclusively for this purpose. Opinions
varied about the number of weeks it is necessary to invoke the saint—seven weeks, nine weeks,
eleven weeks, thirteen weeks—but there seemed to be a general consensus that a pilgrim looking
for a job should come to the shrine for a specified number of Tuesdays upon which they would
offer a candle to the saint and possibly deposit a coin in one of the offering bins.116
116
An informant referred to this practice as the marat prarthani, an unfamiliar phrase which may be related
to the Tamil prarthanai, or prayer. In “Religious Vows at the Shrine of Shahul Hamid,” Vasudha Narayanan writes
that prarthanai in the context of South Indian shrine culture refers to prayer in the sense of promising to do a
particular thing in order to fulfill a ritual vow to deity (Raj and Harman, p. 76). In context of St. Antony devotion, it
103
Conspicuously missing from these accounts is any kind of formally-prescribed ritualized
prayer—no informant mentioned any prayer devotees are expected to make, and there are signs
the shrine custodians consider this as an absence. The church has affixed a prominent billboard
offering a simple St. Antony novena prayer for devotees to use while standing in the queue and
they duplicated this billboard within the shrine itself. Nevertheless, no one seems to be utilizing
this prayer. A written account of the shrine in the 1930s and 1940s states that the shrine
custodians, dissatisfied with various popular devotions they considered immature and/or
superstitious, printed their own booklets with a simple novena prayer to distribute among
pilgrims hoping to mainstream St. Antony devotion (190).117 This would seem to hint that for the
majority of these Indian pilgrims, what matters is not a fixed formula of verbal petitioning as in
much European popular devotion, but the completion of some concrete ritual action.
appears to mean something like “the order of prayers for beseeching St. Antony,” or “St. Antony novena.” The
shrine publishes St. Antony prayer books in English and Tamil versions which advocate the practice of making a
novena over a sequence of weeks. The English version suggests that individuals can make a novena or tredecima
version of the devotion by visiting a Franciscan church or else praying before a picture or statue of St. Antony at
home if that is impossible. The devotion may be made either on nine or thirteen consecutive Tuesdays or on nine or
thirteen consecutive days, but devotees will only qualify for a plenary indulgence if the Tuesdays are consecutive,
the devotees confess and communicate each Tuesday, and also pray, meditate, or undertake a pious or charitable
work such as the giving of alms. The booklet goes on to provide scripted novena and tredecima prayers which
devotees may recite on their visits. It appears likely that this is an attempt to conditionally accept but redirect
popular devotion, in that it encourages practices no one seems to engage in (the recitation of church-approved
prayers, confession, and receiving the eucharist) for motives that would probably mystify the average devotee
(receiving a plenary indulgence). The prayer book describes the novena as being very effective, with St. Antony
promising in an apparition that what devotees seek in their prayers will be granted if they visit a Franciscan church,
pray, and receive the sacraments on nine consecutive Tuesdays. The prayer book also advocates offering “St.
Antony’s Bread,” a form of food donations for the poor and needy, and contains miscellaneous litanies, prayers, and
petitions along with a hagiographical life of St. Antony. None of the prayer book’s contents are outside mainstream
European Catholic popular devotion. The existing English prayer book bears a 1967 imprimatur from A. Pereira de
Andrade, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Madras-Mylapore, but may reprint earlier materials first circulated by
Pietro Maggioni and referred to in his account of the shrine. The prayer book circulates widely in Catholic shrines
in South India, and my own copy was purchased over 300 kilometers away in Velankanni.
117
The booklet in question is probably an early version of the St. Antony prayer book described in the
previous note, which seems to have been cheaply mass-produced for distribution on site. The booklet features a
print of St. Antony on the cover and advertises itself as distributed by the “Good Pastor International Book Centre”
at 63 Armenian Street, the older street address of the shrine.
104
Figure 10. P.J. Johnston and Ed Heil, “A Plan of St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral,” 2014.
105
Figure 11. Devotees on the circumambulation circuit.
The Circumambulation Circuit
The physical layout of St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral facilitates the movement of devotees
engaging in private devotion independent of the main sanctuary enclosure. Pilgrims may follow
a pre-arranged circuit by entering the left transept, venerating the main St. Antony statue,
reverse-circumambulating the interior of the church venerating statues and icons along the way,
and finally ending up in the opposite transept without ever entering the sanctuary or intruding
upon worship services underway.
106
If a devotee proceeded along the circumambulation circuit, the first statue he or she
would encounter after the main St. Antony icon would be Our Lady of Good Health, clearly the
most popular devotional figure apart from St. Antony himself. The image is bedecked in a
magnificent cloth-of-gold sari and garlanded with flower offerings from devotees; the latter are
sufficiently numerous to leave a clutter of discarded petals beneath the icon’s feet, which are
periodically swept and removed. The area around this image is typically congested with
devotees making offerings, and equipped with a nearby candelabrum to prevent devotees from
burning candles on the floor directly beneath the image.
Figure 12. Our Lady of Good Health.
The next saint upon the route is St. Thomas, depicted holding the mahārāja’s spear
traditionally credited with martyring him. Next is St. Dominic Savio, a young boy standing with
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lily flowers to represent his purity, a crucifix, and a motto reading “death before sin,” who is
advertised as a holy model for boys. Unlike St. Thomas, famed throughout the world because of
his alleged role in bringing Christianity to India, St. Dominic Savio is an obscure saint especially
associated with the Salesian order as he was a pupil of Don Bosco. The next image in sequence
is St. Mary Mother of Humankind—an image of Mary holding the Infant Jesus. Next is St. Jude,
a popular saint in European Catholicism associated with the poor, the desperate, the destitute,
and those in need of urgent assistance. According to Fr. Xavier Packiam, the saint statues in the
church were made by Hindu craftsmen in Krishnagar, Calcutta, an artist’s colony famed for the
construction of Hindu gods.
There are a number of framed saints’ icons opposite the statues on the left side of the
nave, and devotees frequently add a mini-circuit to their circumambulation to include these in
their veneration or else tack back and forth between the statues and the icons, while continuing
along the main route. These portraits include Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. Alphonsa,
St. Rita, Our Lady of the Rosary, and finally, the British patron saint George slaying a dragon
(representing the church’s location in Georgetown, a relic of the British colonial origins of the
cathedral).118
118
It is also possible that the image is multivalent and appeals to the popularity of St. George in South India.
An indigenous saint of the St. Thomas tradition, the St. George cult was later promoted by the Portuguese and
British, for whom St. George was the national patron saint. In Kerala, St. George is a popular figure across religious
boundaries, often paired with Hindu deities such as Kali or Vishnu in a “sibling” relationship where devotees of
either “sibling” honor the other’s place of worship during the annual procession for the saint or deity on his or her
feast. On the role of St. George in popular religion in Kerala, see Corinne G. Dempsey’s Kerala Christian
Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 3451). In Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting: Sinhala Catholics in Contemporary Sri Lanka (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 102), R.L. Stirrat discusses similar pairings of Hindu or Buddhist
deities with particular saints in Sinhala Catholicism, with St. Antony often identified as an aspect or sibling of
Kataragama. Alexander Henn’s Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 54-64) argues that Catholic saints and shrines in Goa often
preserve and reinscribe the attributes of Hindu deities and shrines suppressed by the Portuguese, and that in modern
times, with Hindus free to practice their religion, this has contributed to a phenomenon of twin Hindu and Christian
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Figure 13. St. George.
As one crosses over to the right side of the nave, one encounters a massive 1940s Jesuit
mission crucifix mounted to the back wall of the narthex, illuminated with L.E.D. lights and
surmounted by a special wooden canopy. The crucifix is highly expressive, accentuating the
wounds of Jesus. This station is a site of considerable attention on the part of devotees who
linger to touch the crucifix with one hand, which is consequently deeply worn at the base.
Coming up the right side of the nave, the first statue encountered is St. Francis Xavier
shrines sharing the same location which can be sites either for Hindu-Christian cooperation or competition. As the
Portuguese employed a policy of religious coercion in their colonies, one might conclude that a common element
connecting saint/deity pairings in Dempsey’s Kerala, Stirrat’s Sri Lanka, and Henn’s Goa was the desire for South
Indian and Sinhala Catholics to be able to covertly venerate particular gods or goddesses without incurring the wrath
of the Goa Inquisition and proposing a particular saint as a substitute.
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wearing a priestly stole and holding a crucifix in his hand. He is described in a caption as the
Apostle of Asia and sometimes vested in a cloth-of-gold shawl, which deceptively resembles as a
sari. The next image is of St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus, like all the statues in the co-cathedral
well-worn from continual touch. The most visibly worn of the images is a second St. Antony
statue. This image is a more conventional representation of St. Antony than the shrine’s more
famous image, depicting the saint clean-shaven, holding lilies and the child Jesus. There is deep
flaking on the lower part of St. Antony’s legs, indicating serious wear. Although nearly all the
statues and icons have offering boxes directly underneath their canopies, the offering box for St.
Antony is the most conspicuously used, illustrating its popularity. The next statue depicts a
standing Infant Jesus holding up the globe. Installed in the wall, where one might visually
expect a final statue, is a framed wooden portrait of Our Lady of Health, the last image on the
right wall of the nave.
Opposite the sequence of statues on the right are framed icons of St. John Bosco, St.
Sebastian, St. Martin of Porres, and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, which devotees
either circumambulate separately or else include on the main route.
In the right transept of the co-cathedral, there are statues of St. John Bosco and the Sacred
Heart of Jesus to balance the main St. Antony statue in the left transept. The Sacred Heart statue
deliberately imitates the style of the St. Antony statue, with an equally elaborate wooden canopy,
a glass casing, and an aperture for touching the statue base; it is, however, sometimes overlooked
by devotees as it is effectively in the back corner of the church. As the miraculous St. Antony
statue begins the circumambulation, the Sacred Heart image appears intended to conclude it,
although it is actually dwarfed in popularity by a nearby framed portrait of Our Lady of
Perpetual Help, which appears to be the usual terminus of the devotees’ circumambulation. This
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icon is surrounded by conspicuous rotating L.E.D. lights, a candelabrum, and separate offering
boxes for petitions and thanksgivings, and sits on the border between the sanctuary and the nave.
Although they are somewhat off the circumambulation circuit and the church hierarchy
never intended devotees to worship them, there are also a small number of sculpted busts of early
archbishops and Capuchin missionaries associated with the cathedral toward the front of the nave,
which receive a surprising amount of veneration. While it is not unheard of in the St. Thomas
Christian traditions of India for graves of bishops to receive flower offerings and other signs of
devotion,119 this is extraordinary in the Latin rite, and the parish priest attributed this to a
theological misunderstanding, wherein devotees somehow reckon these figures divine. At various
points in my visit, I found busts of Apostolic Vicar Bishop Stephen Fennelly, Archbishop Colgan,
Archbishop Mederlet, Archbishop Aelen, and Apostolic Vicar Bishop John Fennelly—early
bishops of the Madras archdiocese for whom St. Mary’s served as their archepiscopal see—each
garlanded with flowers or else holding a single flower blossom in an outstretched hand. It would
not be the slightest exaggeration to say that every framed icon, every sculpted bit of marble, and
every statue in the church is on some occasion the object of somebody’s devotion.
119
Paul M. Collins notes in Christian Inculturation in India (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2007, p. 145)
that in the Syrian Christian tradition of India, the term for a bishop (thirumeni) means “holy body” and their bodies
are accorded special sanctity in burial. In “Conversion, Illness, and Possession” in Divine Remedies: Medicine and
Religion in South Asia (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2008, p. 283), Ines
Županov adds that crosses and the tombs of bishops and monks were the primary sites venerated by the St. Thomas
Christians before the colonial period. Susan Bayly writes in Saints, Goddesses, and Kings (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989, pp. 270-272) that veneration at the tombs of bishop-saints within the Syrian Christian
tradition is functionally equivalent to pīr devotion at dargāḥs in Kerala, with the sacred power or energy of the
deceased bishop remaining accessible in the tomb.
111
Figure 14. Bishop Stephen Fennelly.
Situated in high-traffic areas of the church are a number of free-standing metal fences
upon which devotees are free to attach padlocks and other objects of devotion. The most
common offerings are padlocks, yellow cords, and pieces of cloth tied to resemble a baby’s cloth
diaper. The assemblage usually contains a deposit box, where devotees are invited to leave the
keys to the padlocks so the church can remove them if they become too numerous; however, I
was informed by the parish priest that most commonly the devotee will keep the key and then
remove the lock themselves when a wish is granted. Yellow cords and diapers are typically
offered to obtain a marriage partner or a child, while padlocks are more open-ended in their
intention.
112
Figure 15. Votive locks.
The original architectural plan for the church included possibilities for European-style
popular devotions. There is not one but two complete sets of the Way of the Cross on the inside
walls of the nave. One set is smaller, older, directly inlaid in the walls, and written in English.
There is an obviously newer set of framed stations, significantly larger, inscribed in Tamil, set up
a little higher to be more easily seen. The effort to encourage this European popular devotion
appears never to have caught on, as on no occasion was I able to observe someone following the
Stations of the Cross. The fact that these two sets of the Stations of the Cross were erected on
distinct occasions indicates either a radical transition in the composition of the church from
English to Tamil patronage or else was a conscious effort to redirect the devotion of Tamil
worshipers from popular forms that were disapproved by the church.
113
Figure 16. Clandestine offerings at Moorat Chapel.
Moorat Chapel
Perhaps the most unconventional offerings at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral are made within
Moorat Chapel, a small side chapel memorializing Samuel Mucartish Moorat, his wife Anna
Raphael, and their son Edward Samuel Moorat. The Moorats were a family of wealthy
Armenian merchants in British colonial Madras, with Samuel Mucartish Moorat being best
known for acts of philanthropy and the establishment of a number of educational institutions in
Europe.120 Edward Samuel Moorat is remembered as a profligate and a playboy who wasted the
120
Born in Tokat, Armenia in 1760. Moorat was educated by the Mekhitarists, an order of Catholic monks
founded to advance Armenian literature. H. D. Love’s Vestiges of Old Madras Vol. 3, p. 491 notes that Moorat
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family inheritance, selling off several of Madras’ most significant historical estates to pay down
his debts. Unusually for Armenians of their time, the Moorats were Roman Catholics attending
St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral rather than attending the Armenian Orthodox church on the same street.
Their generosity is said to have enhanced St. Mary’s financially, and consequently the family has
its own funerary chapel on the grounds.121
The most noteworthy features of Moorat Chapel are the imported marble memorial
plaques for the three family members and corresponding sculptures for Samuel Mucartish
Moorat and his wife Anna Raphael. None of these have been well-maintained by the church.
Anna Raphael’s relief sculpture bears deep fresh marks where it was impacted by a roughlypushed freestanding confessional; it is also mostly obscured from view. Samuel Mucartish
Moorat’s plaque has been shattered and re-set into the wall. This plaque is accompanied by an
elaborate funerary sculpture of a disconsolate female mourner being comforted by an angel
bearing the motto “resurgam” (Latin: “I shall rise”). The base of the sculpture is inscribed
“Turnerelli,” indicating that it was sculpted by Peter Turnerelli, a prominent nineteenth century
sculptor who produced a series of busts for the royal family of Great Britain and many of the
royal families in Europe. The European art press of Turnerelli’s time described it as bound for
served as one of eight Syndics who managed the funds of the Capuchin Mission. Moorat’s will provided for the
establishment of two schools in Europe associated with the Armenian Mekhitarist Congregation - the Samuel
Moorat College in Sèvres and the Moorat-Raphael College in Venice. Moorat’s sons fought the bequest in a series
of lawsuits but ultimately failed. For information about the Mekhitarists and Moorat’s benefaction, see Henry
Boynton Smith and James Manning Sherwood, The American Presbyterian Review, Volume 3, p. 182 and the
Armenian Mekhitarist Congregation website at http://mechitar.com/aboutus/index.php?iM=79. For information
about Samuel Moorat, his family, and his grave at St. Mary’s, see Jacob Seth Mesrovb’s Armenians in India - From
the Earliest Times to the Present (Calcutta: Asian Educational Services, 1937, pp. 592-594). The lawsuits
surrounding the bequest were chronicled extensively in contemporary legal journals, including the East India
Company’s Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany, Volumes 28-29 (1821), pp. 477-479.
121
S. Muthiah, “All in the Name of Improvement”
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2003/04/28/stories/2003042800160300.htm (accessed March 6, 2015).
115
the East Indies and a work of considerable merit;122 until this present research, the work had been
considered lost.123 This sculpture is the object of considerable devotion, contributing to its
serious cosmetic damage. Devotees spread flower petals, blossoms, and occasionally whole
garlands on the base of the sculpture, or adorn the human or angelic figures with garlands. The
figures and base are covered with a thick layer of coarse white salt, a devotional gesture
replicated at the base of the koṭimaram. The base and feet of the figures are deeply discolored by
the perpetual offering of candles, which are burned directly upon the marble; the motto
“resurgam” is especially blackened. The backdrop and even the angelic figures are covered by a
palimpsest of English and Tamil graffiti, written directly upon the marble with the end of a wax
candle. Some of this is secular graffiti (mobile phone numbers, personal names, declarations of
love), but most of it consists of petition prayers wherein a person states their human need in
anticipation that the inscription will result in its fulfillment. Some of these invoke deity, but
many are more impersonal and objective in tone, as if the very fact of writing one’s desire
automatically results in its fulfillment. This palimpsest spilled over to the confessionals stored in
the room, which are covered with similar graffiti.124
122
“[Turnerelli’s] monument for Samuel Moorat, Esq. which has been lately sent to the East Indies, is another
of his most pleasing productions. The figure of Grief, strewing the tomb of the deceased with Cypress, is most
feelingly depicted, while an angel, holding the book of life, endeavours to call her attention from the tomb, to the
glory that awaits the just.” Philological Society of Great Britain, The European Magazine and London Review,
Volume 79 (1821), p. 391.
123
The work is listed “untraced” in Roscoe, Sullivan, and Hardy’s Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in
Britain, 1660-1851 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
124
In The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001, p. 12), Carla Bellamy mentions a similar practice of tying photocopied petitions for the
saint to the latticework of Feroz Shah dargāḥ in Delhi. In dargāḥs I have personally observed, Nizamuddin in Delhi
and Nagore dargāḥ in Tamil Nadu, it is commonplace to fix handwritten petitions to the latticework or some other
convenient place. It would be reasonable to suppose that the practice of writing petitions in wax in Moorat Chapel,
often duplicated verbatim the Immaculate Conception Chapel opposite Moorat Chapel, is an approximation of these
practices.
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While I was on site, I observed many devotees entering the chapel to venerate a large,
ornate, empty wooden frame occupying almost the entirely of one of the chapel’s walls. I was
later informed that this frame normally contains a nineteenth century painting of Our Lady of the
Angels, the patron saint of the church. Devotees would touch the frame and then themselves, or
else light candles beneath the frame; on one occasion, I saw a candle burning directly on the
frame itself, which is common enough that the chapel has a posted “no candles” sign. I was told
that the painting was away for cleaning due to discoloration from a candle that was burned
directly against the mural itself. The absence of the painting seems to have stopped no one from
venerating it as if were still present.
Figure 17. “No Candles” sign and burning candle, Moorat
Chapel.
There is a small window alcove in the chapel with sufficient space for devotees to leave
offerings as prasād, hoping they will absorb shakti and intending to retrieve them later. I
observed Christian rosaries, a Hindu mālā, a small St. Antony statue, a small Sacred Heart statue,
bottles of Velankanni and Lourdes water, a Tamil Christian yantra used for magical protection, a
number of saints’ icons, and a pair of sculpted crucifixes. Seemingly any object that can receive
supernatural power and subsequently protect the home of the bearer was left in order to be
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blessed. Alongside the wall I saw a much larger icon left in a cloth bag for ease of retrieval.
Figure 18. Religious articles absorbing shakti.
According to Indologist George Kunnath, religious activities such as candle-lighting and
petition-writing within Moorat Chapel clearly correspond with those undertaken by devotees in a
South Indian dargāḥ, or saints’ tomb. Tombs are somewhat rare in India, and monumental tombs
tend to possess religious significance, making it unclear whether this devotion is a spontaneous
cultural reflex to the presence of a prominent monumental tomb on the part of Hindu devotees
accustomed to visiting dargāḥs or perhaps a practice introduced by Muslims at the site. Given
the significant presence of Muslim students at St. Mary’s Anglo-Indian School, my occasional
sightings of Muslim devotees on the shrine campus and informants’ estimate that Muslims might
constitute up to six percent of the total number of devotees at the site, either scenario is plausible.
I asked the parish priest about devotions in Moorat Chapel, and he dismissed them as
symptomatic of “illiteracy”—an odd charge, given that much of the unauthorized religiosity in
the chapel consisted precisely of written prayer petitions, which covered sculptures,
confessionals, and even the chapel’s glass doors with a thick palimpsest of wax graffiti. My
translator and I made several attempts to interview people in Moorat Chapel about their activities
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but for the most part they appeared defensive and hastily departed. The church is planning to
transform the space into a climate-controlled confession room, a plan which if implemented,
would greatly curtail unauthorized devotions.
The church is currently using the chapel as a disorganized, impromptu storage space for
objects for which there is no room for elsewhere in the church. I observed offering boxes,
freestanding rails for padlocks and other ex voto offerings, stray tables, a pile of plastic chairs
that reached to the ceiling, a large rolled carpet, two stray confessionals, and other ecclesiastical
miscellanea—all left in an unceremonious, indecorous, disorganized manner with little regard
that the chapel is an active place of worship.
Figure 19. The koṭimaram.
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The Koṭimaram
The koṭimaram is a common feature of Tamil Popular Catholicism, which is virtually
unknown in the West. A koṭimaram or flag-tree is a flagpole upon which representations of a
saint or deity are hoisted, concentrating the spiritual power of that entity.125 Most Catholic
churches in Tamil Nadu including St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral are equipped with a koṭimaram, and
they are commonly one of the main centers of devotion and offerings at the churches and shrines
they adorn.
While many a koṭimaram consists of a simple iron pole surmounted by a Latin cross,
possibly with poured concrete to reinforce the base, the koṭimaram at Santhome, St. Mary’s CoCathedral, and the Annai Velankanni Church in Chennai are all of a similar and more elaborate
style. Each of these is an imposing pillar of rounded, burnished copper upon a polished stone
base, and they are similar enough in appearance to suggest that they may have all been produced
as part of the same archdiocesan inculturation initiative or contributed by the same donor. The
koṭimaram at St. Mary’s incorporates two sets of four copper plates into the design of its base,
forming the sides of a cube. These plates are stamped with the images of deity and saints—the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a clean-shaven St. Antony with the child
Jesus, and the bearded St. Antony of the shrine making up a quaternity.
The koṭimaram and its associated practices in Tamil Popular Catholicism are according to
Mosse directly analogous to vernacular Hindu practices in the area.126 During an annual multiday festival to a particular Hindu deity or Christian saint, the domesticated, dharmic power of the
125
David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012, p. 86).
126
David Mosse, “Catholic Saints and the Hindu Village Pantheon in Rural Tamil Nadu, India.” Man Vol.
29, No. 2 (1994): pp. 318-320).
120
being, whose image is enclosed within a shrine, is brought into the village itself, exposing its
inhabitants to its power and danger (319). When the shrine image is brought out in procession
and a banner is hoisted on the koṭimaram to announce the festival, the saint has moved officially
“outside” the shrine and takes on the ambivalent, demoniacal powers of a forest deity (318). The
koṭimaram or “flag-tree” is the ritual equivalent of the forest and is considered along with the
itinerant processional image the most intense concentration of the deity or saint’s shakti (318.).
Paradoxically, this movement temporarily expands the outer boundary of the shrine, bringing the
entire village under the spiritual sovereignty of the shrine deity (318). Direct contact with the
processional chariot and the koṭimaram is both dangerous and highly-sought, due to the intense
power situated there. Brigitte Sébastia’s ethnographic video “Dance of St. Anthony” documents
intense crises of possession at the St. Antony Shrine in Puliyampatti, including lewd gestures,
setting one’s hair on fire, and beating oneself violently against the pole, and other somatizations
of possession as attempts to use the overpowering shakti of the saint to drive out the lesser being
possessing one. Margaret Meibohm documents possession and attempts at exorcism with the
koṭimaram at the shrine basilica in Velankanni, which would be unusual in that the Virgin Mary
(a figure normally too exalted and pure to engage in exorcism) rather than a lesser male saint
would be the spiritual entity effecting the exorcism.127
It was impossible during my short period of time at the St. Antony Shrine to document
any practices concerning possession at the site, but there were tantalizing hints that a persistent
researcher might be rewarded in this endeavor. The shrine’s koṭimaram is surrounded by a large
127
Margaret Meibohm, “Cultural Complexity in South India: Hindu ad Catholic in Marian Pilgrimage”
(Doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2004, pp. 181-182). In Māriyammam-Mariyamman: Catholic
Practices and Image of Vigin in Velankanni (Pondicherry: French Institute Pondicherry, 2002, pp. 54-56), Brigitte
Sébastia documents unauthorized exorcisms by mantiravātis in the Velankanni shrine complex at the Chapel of
Viyākūla Mātā, or Our Lady of Sorrows.
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fence that can be closed with a padlock at times of diminished ecclesiastical supervision,
suggesting an awareness of ecclesiastically-disapproved exorcistic practices at the koṭimaram of
other saints in Tamil Nadu and the desire to control them. Devotees make prolonged (and at
times forceful) physical contact with the koṭimaram, while circumambulating it, and reach states
of emotional intensity rivaled only by veneration of the main St. Antony image within the shrine.
Though informants are unwilling to mention being at the shrine in pursuit of the exorcism
themselves, most would describe the importance of the shrine to other devotees in terms of
neutralizing sorcery and casting out invasive spiritual beings known as the pēy. I also met a
Christian sādhu who performs exorcisms and a disciple at the site, and though they both claimed
to be there for different motives, they were planning an exorcism for a member of the disciple’s
family in the near future. It seems certain to me that there is an undercurrent of possession and
exorcism at the shrine analogous to other St. Antony shrines in Tamil Nadu, but that I was simply
not able to document it in such a short period of observation at the site.
The offerings I observed at the koṭimaram were numerous and more varied than offerings
at the koṭimaram at Velankanni; seemingly, they were also more numerous than anticipated by
the shrine authorities who originally built the koṭimaram, as they have added several freestanding
railings to accommodate offerings that will not fit on the main fence around the koṭimaram. The
koṭimaram itself receives candles and rose petals, large quantities of coarse salt, and occasional
peppercorns as offerings. Devotees tie red and saffron cords to the fence and railings, most
commonly beseeching the saint for help finding a marriage partner or the birth of a child. This
form of offering appears pan-Indian, as I have observed it in dargāḥs in Delhi and Nagore, Hindu
temples throughout India, and Catholic shrines in Tamil Nadu. As at other sites, devotees offer
cloth babies’ diapers in hope of the birth of a child. Additionally, there is a superabundance of
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metal padlocks attached to the fence and railings, along with a deposit box for the keys to
facilitate easy removal on the part of the shrine when the locks have become too numerous. I am
told, however, that devotees tend to keep the keys and remove the locks themselves when prayers
are answered. The locks are versatile, offered for any number of issues.
Figure 20. Krishna ex votos.
From the point of view of a Western scholar, the most striking offering at the koṭimaram
was a large number of Krishna cradles tied to the main fence.128 These consisted of painted
wooden cribs with an upraised nail in the center to hold a small, blue, painted clay image of the
baby Krishna. It is unclear whether these are being offered exclusively by Hindus, or whether
some Christians are involved in what seems to be perceived as an efficacious practice. I
observed similar Krishna-cradle ex votos at the Annai Velankanni Church in Chennai, and it is
possible to conjecture that these are perceived as particularly desirable offerings to saints such as
St. Antony and the Virgin who are conventionally depicted with the divine child Jesus in their
128
Although an ex voto offering of a Hindu image at a Catholic shrine is striking, it is not unique to the St.
Antony Shrine. In his “Salus Infirmorum: The ‘Culture of Healing’ at a Marian Pilgrimage Centre in Tamil Nadu,”
Matthias Frenz notes the presence of infant Krishna ex votos among the offerings at the Basilica of Our Lady of
Health in Velankanni. See Frenz’s essay in Ines G. Županov and Caterina Guenzi’s Divine Remedies: Medicine
and Religion in South Asia (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2008, pp. 350-351).
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arms. This particular practice has the power to generate controversy, and on one occasion, I
found the cradles systematically overturned and their images smashed on the ground.
Figure 21. Tēr chariot for the Feast of Our Lady of the Angels.
The organized liturgical use of the koṭimaram is consistent with the use of the koṭimaram
at other shrines, both Catholic and Hindu. Though it was once suppressed by the priests, there is
an annual feast to St. Antony culminating on June 13 (the saint’s feast day in the liturgical
calendar) in which an image of St. Antony is carried in procession, and a flag bearing the image
of the saint is hoisted to the koṭimaram.129 The church also holds a nine-day feast culminating on
129
Tēr processions borrowed from Hindu temple ritual in which a chariot or palanquin bearing an image of a
saint is conveyed through the neighborhoods surrounding a church have become mainstream aspects of inculturation
in Tamil Catholicism, typically honoring the saint of a church on his or her annual feast. Once banned by the 1744
papal bull Omnium Sollicitudinum and a major source of contention between Jesuits and Capuchins during the Rites
Controversy, tēr processions have been licit since a series of Propaganda decrees reversed the official Catholic
position on the Rites Controversy. The Japanese Rites were authorized with the decree Pluries Instanterque in 1936,
the Chinese Rites with Plane Compertum Est in 1939, and finally the Malabar Rites with the decree Super Dubium
in 1940. According to Joanne Punzo Waghorne’s “Chariots of the God/s: Riding the Line Between Hindu and
Christian” in Raj and Dempsey’s Popular Christianity in India: Riting Between the Lines (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2002, pp. 17-18), tēr processions were celebrated throughout the period of the papal prohibition,
presumably because the withdrawal of the disbanded Jesuit order from India contributed to a local shortage of
ecclesiastical manpower and made bans on popular devotion more difficult to enforce. Vatican II decrees on
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Our Lady Queen of the Angels, the patron saint of the shrine. This is celebrated with great
fanfare to ensure that the devotion to Our Lady remains greater than any mere saint. For either
feast, there is a procession from the altar of the church to the koṭimaram carrying a series of
flags, with the flag hoisted to the accompaniment of pealing church bells, fireworks, and
devotees attempting to touch the flag to absorb its shakti, while others bombard it with coins and
flower petals.130
evangelization and the liturgy left matters of inculturation largely to the discretion of local bishops, and Indian
bishops have sometimes banned and sometimes permitted the practice. At the St. Antony Shrine, Fr. Pietro
Maggioni banned the chariot procession and annual feast of St. Antony during his tenure as parish priest. Selva
Raj’s “Transgressing Boundaries, Transcending Turner: The Pilgrimage Tradition at the Shrine of St. John Britto” in
Popular Christianity in India, p. 105 provides an instance of a 1974 local prohibition of a tēr procession in which
the same Indian bishop who officially banned the practice a few days before subsequently blessed the chariot when
the people brought it to him, explaining that it is necessary to respect the sentiments of the people. See Joanne
Punzo Waghorne’s “Chariots of the God/s: Riding the Line Between Hindu and Christian” for a more thorough
discussion of chariot processions and their contemporary role in Hindu-Christian boundary-crossing.
130
Compare Margaret Meibohm’s account of the annual Feast of Our Lady of Velankanni in “Past Selves and
Present Others: The Ritual Construction of Identity at a Catholic Festival in India” in Raj and Dempsey’s Popular
Christianity in India. Because the distribution of ritual honors is a major function of Catholic saint festivals and the
Hindu festivals on which they are modeled, annual feasts have frequently become a basis for conflict, as well as
vehicles of control as the priests who organize festivals exercise discretion over the groups allowed to serve as
patrons and dignitaries of rites. The handbill for the 2013 Feast of Our Lady Queen of the Angels at the St. Antony
Shrine corresponds to this expectation, listing the “celebrators” or ritual patrons being honored each day of the
festival. Generally these are groups within the parish, called “anbiams,” but other Catholic institutions within
Chennai are represented. See David Mosse’s The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, pp. 143-167) for a discussion of church honors and the politics
surrounding their distribution.
125
Figure 22. Our Lady of the Angels.
Devotions to Our Lady
The priests at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral actively encourage Marian devotion, and while
this is not as successful as the devotion to St. Antony, it does seem to attract a genuine following.
In addition to the church’s annual patronal feast for Our Lady Queen of the Angels, the church
has recently become a departure point for the Velankanni pādayātrā, a walking pilgrimage from
Chennai to Velankanni 329 kilometers away, in preparation for the saint’s annual nine-day feast
in September. Our Lady of Velankanni has an outdoor statue that can be venerated by pilgrims
before they enter the queue to the St. Antony Shrine. This is reasonably popular, with the glass
case that surrounds the image covered with a thick palimpsest of graffiti and petitionary prayers.
Another statue of Velankanni is on the main circumambulation route within the church, and is
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one of the most popular of these images. There is a statue of Mary directly beside the St. Antony
image, which is even more popular, with the area directly beneath her feet bestrewn with rose
petals returned as prasād from garlands originally offered to St. Antony. This image’s popularity
is rivaled only by the Our Lady of Perpetual Help icon at the end of most devotees’
circumambulation of the church, which is venerated in organized services on Wednesdays and
Saturdays, which are sponsored by the church.
Figure 23. Bins to deposit vows/petitions and thanksgivings.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help is considered an especially auspicious figure for granting favors and
petitions. This is evident in the bins for petitions and thanksgivings the church has placed next to
the image.
127
Figure 24. Kumaressan in the Immaculate Conception
Chapel.
There is a side chapel at St. Mary’s reserved especially for veneration of Our Lady of the
Immaculate Conception. This chapel is opposite Moorat Chapel, but it seems less frequented.
This chapel has its own altar where mass could be celebrated, but the altar is more frequently
used as a platform for candle offerings to the image of Our Lady of Lourdes that stands above
the altar in a faux landscape depicting the Virgin Mary’s apparition to St. Bernadette in the grotto
at Lourdes. The glass doors that protect the entryway to this chapel are also covered with candle
wax graffiti and petitionary prayers, as at Moorat Chapel across the church; in fact, some of the
specific petitions from Moorat Chapel were duplicated verbatim. By and large, devotion within
this chapel appears less idiosyncratic than in Moorat Chapel, consisting primarily of prayers and
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candle offerings on a modest scale.
Figure 25. Decree establishing the St. Antony Shrine as an official shrine of the
Archdiocese of Madras-Mylapore.
Contestation, Conflict, and Compromise: Attitudes Toward Popular Catholicism at the St.
Antony Shrine
The St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral is not an autonomous entity and
answers to diverse constituencies, both domestic and international. Locally, it answers to parents
of many faiths whose children attend the attached secondary school, Hindu and Catholic
devotees from the immediate neighborhood and the rest of Chennai, parishioners of St. Mary’s,
the priests and religious who administer the site and their orders, and the local archdiocese
(Archbishop Chinnappa having declared the site an official shrine of the archdiocese in 2005).
Given the shrine’s close proximity to the Madras High Court and the presence of a government
official with a military security detail while I was visiting the site, the possibility of influence
from the secular government of Tamil Nadu cannot be ruled out. Internationally, the site is
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ultimately answerable to the Salesian order (whose priests staff the site) and the Vatican, though
as a relatively low-profile site compared to more widely-known institutions such as Shantivanam
and Velankanni, it probably does not attract much attention. I have only encountered passing
references to the site in international scholarship—a short, one paragraph description from a
Jesuit journal article on inculturation and popular devotion in India,131 along with a brief,
tangential reference in a Danish doctoral dissertation on so-called “Christ bhaktas,” Hindu
devotees of Jesus.132 I will focus on competing attitudes toward the shrine and its practices at the
local level, as it appears off the radar screen of international constituencies which could influence
it.
Official attitudes toward popular devotion at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral are circumstantial
and varied, depending on the nature of the practice in question. Direct confrontation is usually
avoided, with shrine authorities attempting to passively redirect devotions of which they
disapprove by making them logistically more difficult to perform or by promoting a more
acceptable alternative. The only evidence I could find of attempts to directly, coercively put an
end to disapproved devotions originated with Catholic laity.
The shrine’s historical relationship with popular devotion is one of contestation, conflict,
and compromise, with the latter the most characteristic in the present day. This evidently was
not always the case, as the chronicles of a former parish priest, Pietro Maggioni, attest. Fr.
Maggioni’s account of his career in the archdiocese in the 1930s and 1940s indicates that the
local Catholic hierarchy was once deeply concerned with the nature of devotion at the shrine and
131
John Packiaraj, “Devotion and Popular Religion: Examples from India,” The Way Supplement 100
(2001), p. 118.
132
Jonas Petter Adelin Jørgensen, “Jesus Imandars and Christ Bhaktas: A Qualitative and Theological Study
of Syncretism and Identity in Global Christianity” (Doctoral thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2006).
130
that formal measures were taken in an effort to control it. “His Grace the late Archbishop
Mathias was also very keen that I should watch the devotion and not allow anything to creep in
against the liturgy or faith and morals” (Maggioni, 191). In compliance with this directive,
Maggioni “made it a point to be present all day [on Tuesdays, the saint’s day] to see that abuses
did not creep in and to regulate the crowd and the queue” (190). The shrine image of St. Antony
had already been moved from the mortuary chapel at St. Patrick’s Cemetery and briefly removed
from public view when the archdiocese deemed its popularity too disruptive and continued to
monitor popular devotion when the image was reinstalled at St. Mary’s (189). By the beginning
of Maggioni’s tenure as parish priest in 1945, “a number of abuses and a few superstitious
practices were going on,” which Maggioni was directed to end (189). Among these, “garlands
were re-sold for money [after being offered in the shrine and received back as prasād], special
chits were distributed” and “oil, holy water, dresses, etc.” were collected by devotees (190).
Maggioni’s “chits” were formal Tamil nerccais (written promises that if the saint will grant a
particular boon, the petitioner will make a certain offering in return)—a distinctive Tamil
devotional practice evident in Muslim dargāḥs, Hindu temples, and other Catholic shrines.133
The oil and holy water were probably the mainstream European Catholic pious practice of
collecting holy water and oil blessed by a priest at a shrine for use in healing and spiritual
protection in the home. The “dresses” probably were saris and shawls offered by devotees to
adorn saints’ images, which are commonly distributed as a benefaction or prasād to poor
devotees after being used in this fashion. Each of these practices is mainstream in either
See especially Selva Raj’s “Shared Vows, Shared Space, and Shared Deities” in Raj and Harman’s
Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. 4364), which addresses the boundary-crossing aspects of Tamil nerccai and the characteristics of South Indian shrine
culture.
133
131
European or Tamil Popular Catholicism today, so Fr. Maggioni’s policing of the site appears
especially exacting. In addition to ending these practices after more than a year’s effort,
Maggioni also suppressed St. Antony’s June 13 mass and procession, and replaced a third class
relic of St. Antony venerated in the shrine with an “authentic” relic he acquired in Padua (190).
Maggioni made concerted efforts to catechize devotees of the shrine into more mainstream
practices, mass-producing a novena booklet with St. Antony’s picture and prayers to the saint
(190).134 He considered a missionary apostolate to convert Hindu visitors to the site until
deeming it politically inexpedient, instead installing a “book-barrow,” where pamphlets and
booklets could be distributed and devotees interested in conversion could leave their addresses in
order to be contacted later by their local parish priests (190). This ministry is now part of the
archdiocesan Commission on Evangelization and is staffed by a nun from the Pious Disciples of
the Divine Master, Sr. Gloria. Maggioni’s approach to both Tamil and European Popular
Catholicism appears unrelentingly negative and confrontational—a matter of suppressing
popular devotion, wherever possible, while attempting to redirect it in the direction of official
European Catholicism. Maggioni’s tenure as parish priest predates Vatican II and the move
toward inculturation in the Indian church; many of the practices characterized “superstitions,”
“misunderstandings,” and “abuses” are entirely unremarkable today.
In comparison with Fr. Maggioni’s approach to popular religion, the prevailing approach
at the shrine today appears largely tolerant, inclusivistic, and laissez-faire in nature. Direct
confrontation between priests and devotees in avoided, with efforts to redirect devotion typically
being passive and indirect. This approach is consonant with the pastoral philosophy of Fr.
Xavier Packiam, the Salesian priest in charge of St. Mary’s.
134
This is probably the original publication of a novena book distributed at the shrine today.
132
Where devotional practices are encouraged or tolerated, church authorities have often
made efforts to expedite them. The church has placed receptacles for offerings near many of the
most popular sites on the shrine campus. The St. Antony Shrine in the left transept of the
cathedral is the most conspicuous example of official encouragement of devotion, as it has
required the most architecturally substantial accommodation. Originally a simple side altar with
a statue of St. Teresa, the transept has gradually been entirely reworked. The side altar and
image of St. Teresa were removed so that the main statue of St. Antony could be centrally placed
in the left transept for veneration, and guard rails were placed within the area to allow one group
of devotees to circumambulate the image and bring offerings while others congregate in front of
the image for individual prayers and prostrations (189). The church installed an elaborate system
of railing just outside the entrance to the transept to provide some order to the chaotic long
queues of devotees outside, and eventually built a corrugated metal roof to protect people in the
queue from the elements. A number of stalls have been built to accommodate a first aid station,
booths to purchase taper candles or make donations, and a desk for commissioning mass
offerings on behalf of the deceased. Additionally, the archdiocesan Commission on
Evangelization staffs an office near the queue, where Christian catechetical literature and prayers
and spiritual counseling are available, capitalizing on the flow of human traffic. Large images of
Our Lady of Velankanni and the Sacred Heart have been installed in the queue area for pilgrims
not yet inside the St. Antony Shrine. On Tuesdays, the church keeps a table near the St. Antony
image staffed with a volunteer to expedite flower and other offerings to the saint and give back a
certain amount as prasād; otherwise, the area would quickly become congested with offerings
and impede the flow of human traffic. The church has also installed permanent metal donation
boxes and multi-tiered candelabra for the devotees not circumambulating the image.
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Loudspeakers are just outside the church to blare bhajanas to St. Antony for the edification of
devotees in the queue. The church obviously intends to facilitate St. Antony devotion, as it has
invested significant organizational resources in doing so, including major, permanent alterations
to the church itself. The overall setup makes candle, flower, money, and pratima offerings
popular, along with facilitating the deposit of ritual vows and thanksgivings. Similar bins and
candelabra are situated at strategic points around the shrine campus, some explicitly earmarked
for the deposit of vows (the so-called “chits” Fr. Maggioni so vociferously opposed). Other
offering boxes request the deposit of keys, which open the padlocks devotees attach to special
church-installed railings when seeking a boon from the saint. Interestingly, both the “vow” box
and most of the railing key boxes are installed away from the main St. Antony statue and near
Marian images such as a statue of Our Lady of Velankanni and the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual
Help, possibly indicating a desire to redirect much of the boon-seeking to the Virgin Mary to
establish her precedence over the saint. The Sacred Heart statue at the end of the
circumambulation route and prominent Tamil Stations of the Cross have also been installed to
encourage more mainstream popular devotions.
Official attitudes toward devotional practices around the shrine campus are more
complicated and ambivalent, though it is still the case that direct prohibitions and confrontations
are rare in comparison with solutions that attempt to encourage alternatives or passively redirect
devotees away from a particularly disapproved practice.
The shrine koṭimaram appears relatively new, and to have been constructed with
awareness of lay exorcisms at the koṭimaram of other prominent Catholic sites in Tamil Nadu. It
is surrounded by a permanent rail fence, which both facilitates offerings and impedes lay
exorcisms, as it can be locked to deny access to the koṭimaram at night or at other times it cannot
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be supervised. As St. Antony’s reputation in Tamil Catholicism is largely that of an exorcist,
such a measure was probably necessary, and I would not rule out attempts to perform impromptu
exorcisms during the day at the shrine. In addition to the rail fence, the church has installed a
number of temporary railings around the koṭimaram to handle the overflow of offerings that
cannot be left on the main fence; a box to deposit the keys to padlocks is attached. Rather than
attempting to eliminate “superstitious” or “excessive” devotion to St. Antony at the koṭimaram,
the church has simply attempted to “re-brand” it by adding representations of the Virgin Mary
and the Sacred Heart to the koṭimaram base along with those of St. Antony. Even flag-raising
and tēr procession on the saint’s annual feast, which Fr. Maggioni suppressed to prevent
“misunderstandings,” have been restored, although a similar rite is offered for Our Lady Queen
of the Angels in August for the church’s patronal feast.
Though not unique to the site, the most striking example of the contestation of
theological categories at the St. Antony Shrine was the practice of tying yellow wooden cradles
containing painted clay images of the baby Krishna around the fence of the koṭimaram. This is
an especially popular practice—the rate of offering on the weekly saint’s day is sufficient to fill
the koṭimaram fences even when Krishna images are removed or fall victim to acts of vandalism;
no effort on the part of the shrine to remove the images could possibly command the human
resources necessary to stay ahead of the offerings.
Though this practice is clearly more popular with women than with men, I was unable to
ascertain the sectarian affiliations of those who were making the offering, as devotees generally
avoided being interviewed on the subject. I do think it would be overly impetuous to assume that
everyone making such offerings was Hindu. In a sense, this seems like a natural devotional
gesture toward either St. Antony or the Virgin, as both saints are usually depicted with the divine
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child in their arms and could be understood as being especially partial to babies. Though direct
cultural transmission of the practice seems unlikely, offering a small sculpted image of the child
Jesus to St. Antony is a common ex voto in New World popular Catholicism, as the devout
remove the infant from statues of St. Antony in order to coerce him to fulfill their petitions, only
to return the baby when the prayer has been granted. At the St. Antony Shrine, it seems more
likely that the image is offered first as one of the many kinds of offerings that Tamils of any caste
make at holy places in hope of gaining a child.
The practice of offering Krishna images at the shrine is of course a contested one within
the local Christian community. While I was researching the site, I found one day that the
Krishna images around the koṭimaram had been systematically vandalized, presumably by
overturning the cradles and then smashing the images that fell to the ground. A few had been
virtually ground into powder, which is well beyond the damage that a simple fall would do. I
counted fragments of at least a dozen Krishna images on the ground in the general vicinity of the
koṭimaram, indicating quite a bit of effort was taken to eliminate all the images. Even in the
short period of time between the vandalism and my observation of what had happened, however,
the fence had received several new Krishnas and showed every sign that it would be full again
within hours.
The range of attitudes toward the Krishna ex votos among the local Christian community
was surprisingly diverse. I believe it is safe to assume that some of the images were offered by
Christians, as I found other significant instances of Christian boundary-crossing while
interviewing at the site. If this is the case in fact, then there are Christians at the site for whom
this is a cherished manifestation of popular Catholicism. It is obviously also the case that some
Christians at the shrine deeply detest the practice and react against it with iconoclastic fervor; I
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discovered by speaking with the parish priest that this was far from the only time such vandalism
had occurred, and his considered response to my query indicated that he had often needed to
articulate the church’s stance on the subject to a variety of constituencies with the opinions of
local Hindus and ecclesiastical authorities both entering into the equation. According to Fr.
Packiam, any vandalism at the site comes at the hands of vigilante lay people whom the church
would prefer to restrain. He mentions having stopped a woman who objected to the practice and
who was bent on chasing offenders from the site, explaining to her that the images are offered in
faith and that all expressions of faith should be respected. On the other hand, the shrine does not
protect the Krishna images actively, Fr. Packiam explains, so no Hindu should be surprised or
offended if some are destroyed as they must know about the vandalism and choose to make the
offering anyway. Fr. Packiam says that this stance in important in dealing with the archdiocese,
which would otherwise be concerned the site was becoming a Krishna temple if the site was seen
as protecting or promoting the devotion. The official stance of the church is that it should
tolerate but not promote non-Christian forms of devotion at the site, and that communal friction
between Christians and other religious groups should in all cases be avoided.
Fr. Packiam’s pastoral approach to the issue seems as much the product of Vatican II
teachings on religious diversity and inculturation as Fr. Maggioni’s was of the exclusivist
interpretation of Tridentine Catholicism. Maggioni vigilantly policed liturgy and popular
devotion not only for “Hindu” elements that might creep in, but also tried to suppress European
popular devotions he considered “superstitious” or to depart from official doctrine. This
approach implicitly assumes that true religion lies exclusively in officially-sanctioned forms of
the Catholic faith and that it is necessary to preserve boundaries against secular or pagan
influence, which would inevitably be corrupting. Though Fr. Packiam criticizes the do ut des
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transactional quality of much devotion (both Christian and Hindu) at the shrine and attempts to
redirect devotion through spiritual counseling and catechesis, he affirms a baseline value in all
expressions of faith as an implicit response to the grace of God, which should be developed and
matured rather than forbidden or suppressed. This permits him to be open to the potential
goodness and spiritual value of practices from the outside, and to movements of popular
devotion. As Nostra Aetate affirmed “rays of truth” in other “religions” and claimed that the
Church “opposes nothing that is good and true” in these other faiths, Fr. Packiam’s approach is in
line with current church teaching.135 The Krishna ex votos at the koṭimaram offer a particularly
illuminating vantage point for understanding the differences between Indian Catholics on the
construction and negotiation of religious boundaries at the level of popular devotion.
The St. Antony Shrine as “Second Church”
Despite over a millennium of history and thousands of miles of distance between the site
and the churches surveyed in Ramsay MacMullen’s The Second Church: Popular Christianity
A.D. 200-400, the St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral site conforms to MacMullen’s
distinction between a “first church” populated by elites professing official magisterial
Christianity and the “second church” of popular religion, which centers upon ancestral grave,
sites and securing tangible favors through the veneration of saints.136 According to MacMullen,
elite magisterial Christianity is unlikely to have ever been the dominant vehicle of evangelization
or the belief and practice of the majority of Christian adherents. Using archeology and historical
135
Austin Flannery, editor, Vatican II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (Northport: Costello Publishing, 1996,
pp. 570-571).
136
MacMullen, Ramsay. The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400 (Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2009, p. 104-111).
138
records to determine the seating capacity of ancient churches and estimating the maximum
number of persons who could congregate outside within earshot of a preacher. MacMullen
concludes that some 95 percent of the Christian population of the Roman Empire between 200400 C.E. could never have enjoyed regular access to the sacraments, preaching, and moral
exhortations of official “elite” Christianity (111-114). Nevertheless, the Eastern Roman Empire
in particular was overwhelmingly Christian, and Christian ideas permeated the culture.
MacMullen’s task in The Second Church is to determine how this could be and to accomplish
this he turns to the traces of popular Christianity preserved in the archaeological record and the
writings of literate elites who often regarded these beliefs and practices as a catechetical
obstacle.
In MacMullen’s typology, the “first church” of a given region is the bishop’s cathedral or
the monumental church of elites, where the official doctrine and sacraments are taught and
dispensed (15). The “second church” of popular Christianity, on the other hand, is the one built
outside the walls of the city upon the graves of ancestors to whom the local Christian faithful
take recourse in hopes of receiving supernatural assistance for concrete life problems (9-10) The
“second church” begins in cemeteries containing the remains of ancestors and martyrs who are
venerated in largely the same idiom as they would have been under paganism, with families
making the visit into a picnic complete with libations and a communal meal (29-30, 109).
Despite occasional condemnations as “superstition” or “idolatry” in the writings of elites, these
practices fuel the development of the cult of the saints, and are described by MacMullen as the
only Christianity most Christians of the period ever would have known. Unlike the cathedral,
the “second church” occupies the liminal space of the cemetery and invokes equally liminal
saints associated with death and violence, the martyrs who stand outside as intermediaries to
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distribute practical favors to their kinfolk and clients (106-107).
Over the course of the previous chapter, a picture emerged of the St. Antony Shrine for
which MacMullen’s “second church” provides an ideal typology. Literally the second church in
the Archdiocese of Madras, built within the old Portuguese burial ground, today’s St. Antony
Shrine is popular with Catholics and Hindus who shun official sacraments and devotions in favor
of practices borrowed from a common Indian shrine culture. The saint invoked at the shrine and
koṭimaram is treated like a violent and unpredictable Indian god who is capable of driving out
the malevolent influence of demonic pēy by possessing their qualities to a superlative degree,
associating him with liminality, death, and violence. St. Antony distributes favors as the kula
deivam (clan deity) of longstanding families in the neighborhood and others who appeal to him
in a patron-client relationship. Conceivably, some of the ancestors of St. Antony’s current clients
are buried in the courtyard of the church, which lies over the old Portuguese graveyard. Ritual
meals called āsanam are distributed and shared in the courtyard, and the current parish priest Fr.
Xavier Packiam remarks that the courtyard serves as “spiritual picnic place,” where families
bring wedding cards to the church to be blessed and share a meal.137 Although the shrine
engages in catechesis and promotes official Catholic sacraments, the idiom of popular
Christianity is the only one “spoken” by the vast majority of visitors, who appear unaware of any
other approach. Today, the shrine has figuratively become the “second church” once more,
demoted to “co-cathedral” and eclipsed in ecclesiastical prominence by the new archdiocesan
137
The ritual of āsanam appears to be a local adaptation of the European pious practice of vowing to donate
“St. Antony’s Bread” to the poor if one’s petition is granted by the saint. The novena booklet uses the standard
terminology of “St. Antony’s Bread.” According to Selva Raj’s “Shared Vows, Shared Space, and Shared Deities” in
Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, pp. 57-59, āsanam at another St. Antony shrine in Uvari, Tamil
Nadu involves a vow to feed thirteen people across lines of gender, caste, and religion after a special ritual bath in
thanksgiving for a petition being granted. I was unable to determine the level of ritual formality of āsanam at the St.
Antony Shrine, but it was clear that devotees occasionally distributed meals for significant numbers of persons.
140
cathedral at Santhome.
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CHAPTER 4:
HINDU-CHRISTIAN BORDER CROSSING AT THE ST. ANTONY SHRINE
Introduction
In the previous chapter, I offered the first part of an ethnographic survey of the Antoniyar Kōvil,
describing the visual and material culture of the shrine as well as its characteristic popular
devotions. In the present chapter I continue by summarizing the results of a series of
ethnographic interviews conducted in the shrine courtyard with the help of an assistant. While
my questions were wide-ranging and informants were permitted to go “off-script,” the
underlying theme behind most of the questioning was individual perceptions of the nature and
boundaries of religious traditions and the extent to which devotees crossed (or even recognized)
such boundaries in their personal beliefs and practices. I found little evidence for the
construction of Hindu and Christian identities in terms of the world religions paradigm, the
groups being conceived and treated more in terms of caste than as mutually-exclusive sectarian
affiliations. St. Antony devotion, while not entirely free of communal tension, appeared
primarily to integrate Hindu and Catholic inhabitants of Chennai’s older core neighborhoods;
possibly, the St. Antony functions as the neighborhood kula deivam for members of formerly
seagoing castes living in Mylapore and the old Madras Black Town. Although the parish priest,
Fr. Xavier Packiam, justifies arrangements at the shrine in terms of post-Independence themes
such as secularism and communal harmony and connects these with Vatican II teachings on
inculturation and interfaith dialogue, such elite concerns do not motivate the majority of
devotees, who attend the shrine primarily to solve practical problems. In my conclusions, I will
suggest that the elite theological discourse of inculturation and interreligious dialogue at Vatican
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II allows the Indian Church to recapture some of the theological and missiological ground lost by
the emergence of the world religions paradigm with its strict partition of Hindu and Catholic
identities, but that that the Church would be better served by abandoning the world religions
paradigm and returning to a singular definition of religion, and accepting the longstanding South
Indian shrine culture in which churches, temples, and mosques integrate castes into a shared
religious system. This move would allow priests and religious to fully embrace, rather than
tactically rationalize and tolerate, the kind of border-crossing admitted and exemplified by the
informants interviewed in this chapter.
Method
My method for interviewing informants proved largely adaptive and trial-by-error,
subject to revision in light of any obvious shortcomings that emerged in the field. Although
nearly all my informants spoke English among their other languages, I determined early on that I
would benefit from the services of a bilingual Tamil-English translator, a contractor from the
French Institute in Pondicherry named Kumaressan. This sometimes mystified informants (who
would often carry on side conversations with me in English) and even Kumaressan himself, who
had assumed that I hired him in part because I needed a personal assistant to negotiate business
in India, only to discover that this was unnecessary. At times this approached the ludicrous—for
example, we found that informants would not take Kumaressan seriously unless I was present
and willing to chat informally after the interview, which effectively eliminated the possibility of
either of us working independently. As I had assumed that I would be taken less seriously
without a local mediator fluent in Tamil, I was bemused by this turn of events, although it is
obviously consistent with the privilege accorded English-speakers and Westerners in Indian
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society.138 In the end, however, the project benefited enormously from Kumaressan’s
contribution and prior experience in similar projects. Because he had conducted interviews at
the St. Antony Shrine in Puliyampatti with Brigitte Sébastia, Kumaressan had the framework and
training to effectively prosecute a line of questioning with minimal input from me to slow the
natural rate of conversation with informants. Perhaps even more valuable than this, he allowed
me to observe the interview process without being directly socially implicated in it, meaning that
I could reflect on the way in which the social mechanics of interviewing itself influences the
results. Kumaressan chose a visually “Hindu” self-representation, wearing a red thread on his
wrist which indicated he had been blessed inside the church. Because I was presumed “R.C.”
(Roman Catholic) and confirmed this if asked, we usually could ultimately gain the trust of most
informants, even if at times many seemed initially suspicious of so many questions about
potentially “communal” subjects coming from a Hindu. Finally, I was able to observe the
cultural translation process at work without necessarily skewing it myself by imposing my own
conceptuality, which I believe would have occurred inevitably if I had interviewed in English
due to the influence of Westerners’ high social status. For instance, it was possible for me to
observe that for questions Western scholars would term matters of “religion,” Kumaressan asked
about “caste” (sometimes using the English word) and that this was the natural conversational
way to ask the question, as it inevitably supplied what Westerners would understand as the
informant’s “religion.” Christians and Muslims at the shrine answered “R.C.” or “Christian” or
“Muslim” as their caste, with Hindus specifying a particular jāti. I will return to this point later,
as I believe it is crucial for understanding Tamil Christianity.
138
Kumaressan was even on a single occasion confronted by a security guard who was concerned about the
fact that he was interviewing an unaccompanied woman and appeared ready to eject him from the shrine campus
until he noticed my presence, at which point he directed the two of us to carry on with our interview.
144
Issues of caste, gender, religion, power, and social location—though much ameliorated by
this working partnership between an “R.C.” Western scholar and a “secular” Indian Hindu—still
influenced the interview upon occasion and cost us a number of possible informants. Others
were to varying degrees uncomfortable with caste-related questions, but ultimately willing to
continue the interview. The only clear case of an informant refusing to be interviewed on the
basis of caste was an elderly woman named Lakshmi who had just attended the Ashtalakhsmi
Temple on Elliot’s Beach with her family and self-identified as a Christian before her family
intervened to stop the interview. Far less confrontationally, I believe some of the Hindus who
professed to being too busy for an interview at the St. Antony Shrine may have been embarrassed
to be interviewed at a Christian site, though it did not appear as existentially-threatening for them
as for Lakshmi.139 One proudly “orthodox” Christian informant tried to redirect my research
interest to a less non-conforming Christian site in Chennai, while another more conservative
Christian left his mother to finish the interview on his behalf after becoming annoyed at the line
of questioning and leaving the site. Each of these cases is as remarkable as it is exceptional, as
139
Through a survey of the literature and my own experience as a fieldworker, I know that Christians engage
in “shrine-shopping” and other acts of ritual cross-over to meet practical needs as readily as other caste groups in
India, but due to social pressure from elite Christians, this is not readily admitted to priests, religious, and Western
researchers. I have typically only been able to get Christian informants I have known for some time to freely
volunteer their patronage of non-Christian sites, such as a rickshaw driver friend in Chennai who visited Nagore
dargāḥ and the Velankanni shrine (both in Nagapattinam District) on a single trip to deal with a serious family issue.
For a fuller discussion of lay Christian “temple-crossing” and “deity-hunting” and the role of priests and religious in
inducing a sense of discomfort in Christians who cross religious boundaries, see Selva Raj’s Interactive Religious
Systems in Indian Popular Catholicism: The Case of Tamil and Santal Catholics, pp. 251-261. Despite this
hesitation, there is a considerable accumulation of ethnographic evidence of Catholic Christian boundary-crossing in
South Asia. In my judgment, the most interesting in-depth discussion of the phenomenon is contained in the chapter
“On the Borders” in R. L. Stirrat’s Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting: Sinhala Catholics in
Contemporary Sri Lanka, which discusses the popular Catholicism of Gabriel, Basil, and Conci, who in individual
ways as distinct as those of my informants weave a personal synthesis of the dominant religion in their environment
with official missionary Christianity to produce variations on a local popular Catholicism. The results are frequently
striking from a Western point of view, as in the case of the exorcist Conci, a Catholic lay exorcist who keeps statues
of Christian saints and Buddhist deities in her personal shrine and calls primarily upon Kataragama in her rituals.
145
the vast majority of informants were cooperative or even eager to participate in the research.
Toward the end of fieldwork, we determined that religious self-identification questions were best
situated at the end of the interview along with other demographic questions and not frontloaded
at the beginning where they could make people nervous, which streamlined the interview process
considerably.
Gender concerns never cost us an interview, though male chaperones did sometimes
intervene to check on the welfare of female informants or answer in loco parentis for the family
unit; we deemed this acceptable, given the more familial as opposed to individual character of
Indian religion and cultural concerns about female safety and reputation.
Physical location was far more determinative than social location in selecting and
interviewing informants. Kumaressan and I ultimately scuttled plans to interview extensively at
the Annai Velankanni Church and the Ashtalakshmi Temple, a Christian and a Hindu site
adjoined by a short alleyway on Elliot’s Beach in Chennai often visited by the same devotees on
a single outing. In addition to the difficulty of interviewing Christian informants at the
Ashtalakshmi Temple, neither site had any feasible place for large numbers of people to gather
together and sit, apart from the sanctuaries themselves. Selecting informants amounted to
singling out an individual or family who needed to stand for the entire interview and who may
have felt uncomfortable in the first place with being unexpectedly approached. Either or both
sites would have made valuable contributions to the dissertation—Annai Velankanni Church was
inundated with “Hindu”-style offerings such as Krishna cradles and broken money pots, while
merchants next to the the Ashtalakshmi Temple told me they sold images of Jesus in a seashell
alongside the obligatory Vaishnava images because so many Christians visit the Ashtalakshmi
146
Temple.140 Despite the value these interviews would have added to the dissertation, it was
simply not feasible to interview extensively.
Kumaressan and I found rather unsurprisingly that ethnographers have the best odds for
effective, large-scale interviewing wherever there is enough open space for large numbers of
people to congregate and enough place for them to sit down for long periods of time without
being bothered; a potential informant will either be seated relaxing and thus not too preoccupied
for an interview, or at least able to sit down for the interview if encountered while on the move.
Because the St. Antony Shrine adjoins St. Mary’s Anglo-Indian School, there is a courtyard and
parking lot behind the church, which doubles as a basketball court for the school children.
Altogether, this is an ideal site for interviewing; in addition to parents waiting to take their
children home, devotees from the church resting after worship inside and homeless parishioners
who importune passersby for food and money, the courtyard is one of the only open spaces in
Parry’s near the Madras High Court, attracting lawyers and government bureaucrats eating their
tiffin. Nearly all of these populations visit the shrine occasionally, making more-or-less
everyone on site potential informants. Informants were eager to share their stories, and when
given the option to remain anonymous preferred to be credited using their real names. Although
I was prepared to offer small (Rs. 50) financial incentives to facilitate interviews, the only
informant who wanted or for that matter would accept compensation was an elderly widow who
otherwise would have needed to beg bus fare to return home from the shrine.
When it came to deciding who would be interviewed, we resolved to interview as many
lay people as possible randomly and indiscriminately during the time we both could be present at
140
Joanne Punzo Waghorne recalls vendors selling images of Our Lady of Velankanni and Mahalakshmi at
the Ashtalakshmi Temple in her “Chariots of the God/s: Riding the Line Between Hindu and Christian,” published
in Raj and Dempsey’s Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines, p. 13.
147
the site. This would likely represent a true random sample, as the courtyard was a place of
gathering and rest for all constituencies visiting the site. I determined in advance that any priests
or religious resident at the site would be interviewed last—the reverse of my policy at all other
Indian Catholic sites I had visited in the past. In virtually all cases in my own research, the
proprietary interest of the professionally religious at the site in projecting orthodoxy to local and
international superiors and avoid controversy has conflicted directly with my scholarly interest in
issues such as inculturation and religious boundary-crossing, frustrating all parties involved.
This is a recurrent motif in ethnographic literature on Indian Catholicism (see especially Kristin
Bloomer’s controversial research on Marian possession, which brought her into serious conflict
with Archbishop Chinnappa of the Madras-Mylapore archdiocese, as well as likely contributing
to visa problems with the local government, for which Indian Christianity can be a politicallysensitive subject).141 Because lay informants will usually include someone who can provide a
broad overview of the site that will emerge from open-ended questioning, it is almost never
necessary to appeal to a site’s custodians for one’s initial picture, and is potentially
counterproductive to do so. A program of participant observation and interviewing in which one
has nearly concluded one’s research before approaching priests and religious seems a prudent
rule for ethnographic research on Indian Catholicism, given the very real possibility of official
interference.142 Though Sr. Gloria and Fr. Xavier Packiam at the St. Antony Shrine proved most
141
Kristen Bloomer, Making Mary: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Spirit Possession in Tamil Nadu,
South India, pp. 50, 455-463.
142
Kerry San Chirico’s Between Christian and Hindu: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, Hindus, and the
Negotiation of Devotion in the Banaras Region (Doctoral Thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2012,
pp. 18-21) offers another cautionary account of the dangers of letting research on Hindu-Christian border crossing
proceed with too much methodological input from the religious elite at too early a stage in one’s research. San
Chirico gained access to village informants through sponsorship by the religious leadership of an āśrama of Christ
bhaktas, rather than pursuing the relationships individually, and as a consequences suffered a series of procedural
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hospitable and facilitated research greatly, the possibility that less helpful priests and religious
could seriously hinder research if approached at the outset recommends this circumspect manner
of proceeding.
Kumaressan and I approached informants with a prepared list of questions and a voice
recorder in case informants broke away from the standard interview format, which turned out to
be the rule rather than the exception. I refrain from statistical analysis of results in this chapter
because answer patterns were highly idiosyncratic and few informants completed the entire prearranged survey; rather, I will describe the range of answers for each question and highlight a
sample of instructive individual interviews for my conclusion.
Composite Results
For the pre-arranged survey, Kumaressan and I asked the following sequence of
standardized questions: where informants came from, their names and castes, a sequence of
questions about personal religion, shrines visited, why they were present at the shrine, the first
time they came to the shrine, what problems had been solved for them at the shrine in the past,
what problems they are hoping to solve in the present, what is special about the shrine, what is
special about St. Antony, what they are planning to do at the shrine, the special days at the shrine
setbacks which eventually forced him to discontinue his planned agenda for research and reconceive the project. It
is difficult for a Westerner to interview on religious topic without being perceived to be foreign priest or missionary,
as San Chirico duly notes, but this problem was accentuated by his close association with local religious leadership.
Informants referred to San Chirico as “Father,” expected him to assume an insider Christian role and pray with them,
and probably avoided reporting beliefs and practices they thought Christian priests and religious would disapprove.
His relationship with potential Hindu informants was compromised, as many were wary of his motives. Ultimately
his sponsor required him to stop interviewing in the villages for fear there would be communal backlash against the
“Western missionary,” which would also affect the reputation of the āśrama. Some of these issues would have
remained if he were to have paired himself with a Hindu collaborator and contacted informants on his own initiative,
interviewing the religious leadership last, but he probably would not have lost access to his site or evoked the same
level of hostility and suspicion.
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and what people do to commemorate them, and a final question about the afterlife, which was
added in response to the observation that many of the Christian informants we were interviewing
mentioned a belief in rebirth over many lifetimes.
Nearly all our informants came from middle class or more upscale neighborhoods in
Chennai. No one had come from outside Chennai, except one old woman from Tirunelveli who
had been living in Chennai for almost 50 years. Informants came from the Chennai
neighborhoods of Kōvilambakkam, Nungambakkam, Kavangarai, Royapuram, Thiruvottiyur,
Velachery, and Tondiarpet, though several did not specify their neighborhoods beyond claiming
to live in Chennai. A few of the neighborhoods are at some distance from the shrine, suggesting
a clientele drawn from greater Chennai, not exclusively the immediate and adjoining
neighborhoods.
One informant chose to remain anonymous, but the rest offered a mixture of “Christian”
personal names, Portuguese or Anglo-Indian names associated with convert castes, and
Sanskritic personal names. Despite being perfectly aware of the phenomenon of conversion,
Kumaressan took personal names to be indicative of religious identity, no matter what an
informant might claim for himself or herself. He repeatedly expressed doubt to me about the
veracity of informants’ religious self-identification—no one could “really” be Christian if she
was named “Pushpa” or his parents had names like “Vimala” and “Raj.” For Kumaressan as for
the vast majority of our informants, the most straightforward way to ask about religious identity
was to ask a person their caste (jāti), sometimes following up the Tamil with the English word.
Christians invariably claimed their caste was “R.C.” or perhaps “Christian,” while Hindus would
give the name of a particular Hindu caste. If Kumaressan was aware a person had converted
religion, he referred to them as having “converted caste,” something he grudgingly accepted as
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socially real while believing it metaphysically impossible; this sometimes resulted in extremely
confusing ethnographic notation where Kumaressan is inconsistent about whether an informant
is a Christian or a Hindu. Kumaressan deemed Muslims to be unlikely to visit the shrine and
expressed surprise when he learned from several informants that they do, “but they take caste so
seriously!” he protested. For Kumaressan, what we in the West call “religion” and deem a
personal and individual matter is an objective matter of family and ethnicity and cannot be
changed, despite individuals’ claims to do so—Christians and Muslims and Hindus may have an
ethos, which either facilitates or forbids the occasional patronage of one another’s shrines or the
circumstantial borrowing of others’ ritual behaviors, but the individuals doing this remain
members of their respective castes in any event, because caste is unchangeable. Even informants
who claimed a religious identity other than that of their birth understood religion in terms of
caste; they simply believed that caste was changeable. Census efforts in Tamil Nadu sometimes
yield response patterns where individuals claim their “religion” is “Indian” and their “caste”
“R.C.” or “Christian.” Hindus tend to supply the name of a recognizable jāti rather than
answering “Hindu.” Scholars miss the reality of Tamil religious self-identification if they think
in terms or two or three “world religions,” each with their own adherents.143 It seems much more
143
Baumann and Salentin’s research of Sri Lankan Tamils in Germany allowed informants to affirm multiple
religious identities by checking the box for more than one religion, rather than assuming mutually-exclusive
religious identities. Even after Baumann and Salentin controlled for informants casually checking all religious
boxes even for traditions for which they have no real commitment by only counting religions for which the
informants reported “strong” or “very strong” feelings of belonging, the amount of boundary-crossing was
staggering. Two-thirds of the self-identified Catholics also identified as Hindu, and one in nine of the self-identified
Hindus identified as Catholic. Though the contexts are quite different, mainland census efforts in which “Catholic”
is reported as a caste identity rather than a religion and diasporic research such as Baumann and Salentin’s in which
Catholics and Hindus report multiple religious affiliation seem to exhibit a common strategy on the part of many
South Asian Catholics to claim the maximum amount of religious inclusivity permitted by a study’s methodology, if
possible treating Christian identity as a more “communal” affiliation. See Martin Baumann and Kurt Salentin,
“Migrant Religiousness and Social Incorporation: Tamil Hindus from Sri Lanka in Germany,” in Journal of
Contemporary Religion, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2006), pp. 297-323.
151
accurate to social reality to think of an organic Indian society organized in terms of varṇajāti in
which “Christian” and “Muslim” are two of the local castes, though Hindu nationalism and
Christian Dalit liberation movements may be transforming the norm.144
In addition to asking informants their caste, we inquired about a number of their religious
activities and their conception of the afterlife; frequently, informants would take these questions
as a starting point for much longer and unexpected narratives concerning personal religious
experiences, theological beliefs about God, Jesus, and the saints, and caste relations. Christian
and Hindu informants were for the most part remarkably consistent in their practices and
conceptions, with the most characteristic difference being that Christians were less likely to
explicitly acknowledge their patronage of Hindu temples. As there is substantial ethnographic
evidence of Christian boundary-crossing in India, it is unclear to me to what extent my
informants may simply have wished to conceal their transgressive behavior from a Western
Catholic as they would from a priest or a member of a religious order. Apart from explicit
religious self-identification and leading religious lives that are at least putatively separate, it
would have been difficult to distinguish the two groups on the basis of their external
characteristics.
Most Christian informants were familiar with the categories of ishta deivam (personal
deity) and kula deivam (family deity), and readily identified Christian saints in terms of these
devotional Hindu categories. Typically, ishta deivam and kula deivam were the same, with any
individual preferences assimilated to family tradition; departures here probably indicate deep
bhakti for a given ishta deivam. The most common figures were apparitions of the Virgin Mary
144
See especially David Mosse’s “A Return Visit to Alapuram” in The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity
and Case Society in India, pp. 233-265 on the complicated unraveling of a previously better integrated R.C./Hindu
village that was the site for his previous research.
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(Velankanni and Lurthu [Lourdes] Madha), Antoniyar (St. Antony), and Jesus; where ishta
deivam and kula deivam departed, Antoniyar was generally preferred. Religious boundarycrossing was in evidence for both Hindus and Christians. One converted Christian recognized
Velankanni Madha and Vinayagar (Ganesh) as ishta deivam and identified Vinayagar and
Antoniyar as kula deivam, while a Hindu identified Perumal (Vishnu), Vinayagar, and
Velankanni in these roles. Another elderly Hindu identified Jesus in both roles. One particularly
conservative Christian with an unusual degree of global awareness explicitly rejected the concept
of the ishta and kula deivam, claiming it was not allowable for Christians.
Though Kumaressan suspected several Christian informants of being converts on the
basis of their personal names, only one admitted to being a convert from Hinduism; as
conversion may entail the loss of caste reservation and other benefits, it was possible that some
informants were less than entirely forthcoming on this question. Conversion to Christianity by
Hindus did not correspond to a change in religious attitudes or practices or an increase in
Christian “orthodoxy.” The single convert still attended both church and temple and venerated
both Christian and Hindu deities and was distinguishable from the Hindu informants sharing a
nearly-identical response pattern principally by caste membership. Another Christian informant
admitted to attending both church and temple. There was an elderly Hindu at the site whose
ishta deivam is Jesus, reads the Bible daily, favors the idea of heaven or hell after death, and had
no intention whatsoever of converting to Christianity, so one can say that the “orthodoxy” of
self-professed Hindus is often greater than that of converts, and that Christians are frequently
less “orthodox” than Hindus.
Although I was specifically interested in the question of the pilgrimage networks to
which the St. Antony Shrine might belong, I could at best glean hints in the short period of time
153
available at my site. Many sacred sites in India are part of informal pilgrimage networks linking
them with other sites through shared devotees and devotions; this tendency goes a long way to
explain the traditionally inclusive and integrative nature of Indian religion, as shrines from
different “religions” often become sites of complementarity and exchange. Ideally, shrines
should be understood not as discrete entities in isolation, but as component parts of their
religious network.
The main difficulty in this line of questioning was what I perceived to be a general
reticence on the part of Christians to speak about their patronage of non-Christian sites. One
potential Christian informant outside the Ashtalakshmi Temple on Elliot’s Beach in Chennai was
quickly silenced by her family when interviewed about her religious activities. I suspect it is
only because of a previous acquaintance with a rickshaw driver informant named Anand on
several trips to Chennai that he told me about visiting both Nagore Dargah and Nagapattinam
Velankanni as part of the same pilgrimage. If there are non-Christian sites associated with the St.
Antony Shrine, I would be unlikely to uncover it without extended social relationships with
informants, and this did not surface in brief interviews in which Christian informants were asked
about the other kōvils they visited. The frequent worship of St. Antony or Velankanni Madha
with Vinayagar as ishta or kula deivam by both Christian and Hindu informants does suggest a
connection between the figures which could speak to a Vinayagar or Shaiva temple as a possible
member of the pilgrimage network.145 There is in fact a British colonial kōvil, the
145
Though striking to Westerners, the devotional pairing of Hindu and Christian figures appears
unremarkable amount the coastal fisherman castes of South India. Cecilia Busby’s “Renewable Icons: Concepts of
Religious Power in a Fishing Village in South India” in The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006, pp. 94-95) characterizes Christianity among the Mukkuvar in Marianad, Kerala as
“polytheistic and pluralist,” an “Indian religious system” as opposed to an exclusivistic Western one. “Christianity,
here, is not ‘right,’ where other religion or gods are ‘wrong’ or misguided. Rather it is one choice of deity among
many; it is localized, bound tightly to a notion of identity...This view of Christ allows apace in the fishing
community’s cosmology for other, non-Christian deities, and particularly, as we have seen, for the worship of the sea
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Kachchaleswarar Temple, built in 1725 by the Hindu dubash Kalvai Chetty to honor Shiva and
Vinayagar a few blocks from the shrine on Armenian Street—a fact I did not discover while I
was present at the site. The proximity of age and location might speak to the same clientele
making both part of a single pilgrimage.146
It is, however, easier to speak of the St. Antony Shrine along with other Christian sites as
part of nested pilgrimage networks. Many informants reported visiting the Annai Velankanni
Church on Elliot’s Beach, a claim which is reinforced by the presence of Krishna cradles at both
sites. Because the Annai Velankanni Church and the Ashtalakshmi Temple on Elliot’s Beach are
clearly often visited together by the same devotees, possibly the Ashtalakshmi Temple is part of
this network as well. In addition to the Christian patron of the Ashtalakshmi Temple who was
silenced by her family, I interviewed a Hindu patron of the temple who reported going to Annai
Velankanni Church. Nagapattinam Velankanni and the St. Antony Shrine are clearly linked, both
from the direct attestation of informants who reported visiting both, but also by the Velankanni
pādayātrā that commences annually from the shrine.
When asked about other sites of pilgrimage they have attended, Christian informants
goddess Kadalamma.” These characteristics seem to apply to other coastal fishing castes evangelized by the
Portuguese, both in South India and Sri Lanka. Ines Županov’s study of the Confessionairo, a sixteenth century
Portuguese Jesuit penitential for Paravar converts, identifies a long list of sins Paravars are imagined prone to
committing, such as celebrating demons and goddesses, selling palm leaf books, believing in and using magic,
consulting astrologers and wizards, using love potions, finding thefts by magic, believing in animal omens,
observing auspicious times, herbal remedies, keeping iron objects and bracelets to ward off demons, and employing
a Hindu shark charmer for protection (Županov, “I Am a Great Sinner: Jesuit Missionary Dialogues in Southern
India,” p. 433). Most of these activities recur in later, eighteenth through twentieth century, studies of Parava
Christianity, such as Susan Bayly’s chapter “The Christian Paravas of Southern Tamilnad” in Saints, Goddesses, and
Kings and Selva Raj’s dissertation Interactive Religious Systems in Indian Popular Catholicism, and would
ordinarily require the cooperation of Hindu ritual specialists. Bayly concludes (p. 332) that for the Paravas,
Christianity functioned as a “caste lifestyle” - a code of behavior for a particular caste otherwise integrated into the
loal religious system – rather than a mutually-exclusive “religion.”
146
For further information on the Kachchaleswarar Temple, see “A Revered Relic in the Commercial Hub,”
The Hindu, August 28, 2011.
155
produced entirely Christian lists. Again, given the presence of Christians and most major Hindu
and Muslim sites in India, this seems rather unlikely to be the case, but it does speak to the desire
to be perceived as exclusively patronizing Christian sites. While some of these sites would be
familiar to any student of Indian Catholicism, others which seemed no less reputable to devotees
are virtually unknown and have not been studied. The Annai Velankanni Church in Besant
Nagar and Nagapattinam Velankanni are familiar and recurred frequently on pilgrimage lists.
Thiru Iruthaya Andavar, Adaikala Annai Church, Shivagangai Mavattam Church, Mazai Mali
Madha at Acharapakkam, St. Thomas Mount, St. Antony Alanthur, St. Teresa’s Nungambakkam,
the Infant Jesus of Gendu, and the Lurthu Madha Church at Vellur all appear to be popular South
Indian pilgrimage destinations in need of greater scholarly attention.
Initially, the prepared survey questions included a special demographic question for
Christian informants I had used in previous research to identify charismatic Catholics. I asked
informants if they considered themselves “born-again.” Four Christian informants responded
affirmatively at the St. Antony Shrine before it became obvious that the question was taken to
inquire whether or not an informant believed in rebirth over many lifetimes, and that most did.
At that point I modified the survey to ask all informants what happens after death. One Hindu
and one Catholic responded that souls go to sorgam or naragam on the basis of merit, with the
remaining informants stating that no one knows, they have no idea, they are not sure, etc.147
Amidst an atmosphere of generalized uncertainty, all of the popular religious answers supplied
by Hinduism or Christianity have their partisans within both religious groups.
147
Isabelle Clark-Decès writes of a pervasive agnosticism about the afterlife among her Tamil informants:
“Although they refused to link the end of physical being with physical decay, my consultants hesitated to speculate
on forms of the afterlife – often countering my investigation with the pragmatic question “who knows what really
happens after death?” See Clark-Decès, No One Cries for the Dead: Tamil Dirges, Rowdy Songs, and Graveyard
Petitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, p. 129).
156
When asked why they had come to the shrine, informants either duplicated a later
question concerning the problem they would like solved at the shrine, or made a more generic
statement that they had come to pray or make a money or candle offering. Some informants
commented on the frequency of their attendance—either daily or every Tuesday, most
commonly. Occasional informants looked upon the shrine as a place of relaxation and
recreation; one explained that it is the only open place to sit outside and take one’s tiffin near the
Madras High Court. Even recreation seekers tended to stop inside the church to pray, at least
upon occasion. One informant said that she had come to pick up her daughter from school and
not for any special religious purpose, but still brought a problem she hoped to have remedied at
the shrine.
Despite being told by an informant that the shrine had become significantly more popular
in recent years after being officially enrolled as a shrine of the archdiocese, most of the people
we interviewed had been coming for decades, and the shrine’s own estimated attendance figures
are lower than the figures Fr. Maggioni gives for the 1950s. The only relative newcomer had
been coming weekly for two weeks with his mother—presumably as part of a multi-week novena
to solve a particular problem. Three others had been frequenting the shrine for less than a decade
(three, five, or seven years), but everyone else had been coming much longer (17, 25, 25, 25, 28,
40, 45, 47, or 59 years). Judging by the apparent ages of informants, this would normally mean
they had been coming to the shrine nearly their entire lives; the only interesting exception was an
elderly Hindu man educated in a Christian school in the 1950s who had “only” been coming to
the shrine since 1996. As most interviewing was conducted on Tuesdays or Saturdays and few
people were present on other occasions, this is probably a consistent finding so it seems that the
core clientele of the shrine was established well before official action on the part of the
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archdiocese.
Informants were keenly enthusiastic to report past miraculous interventions of St. Antony
on their behalf; oftentimes, this threatened to derail the interview, as informants would only
reluctantly move on. Despite the reputation of the shrine for dealing with black magic or
possession or the pēy (“pēy problems”), nearly all of these stories concerned other issues such as
health, finances, marriage, or fertility. This does not necessarily exclude exorcism from the ill
effects of sorcery as many of these problems are culturally attributed to sorcery, but informants
only rarely were willing to directly state that their problems had been caused by sorcery rather
than having a purely mundane origin, which may indicate reluctance to speak of beliefs and
practices sometimes derided as “superstitious” to a Westerner and an educated Indian.148 Perhaps
not terribly surprising for a shrine with a long-term clientele, most informants related several
miraculous dealings on their behalf. One man had a grandson with inoperable gastrointestinal
problems cured, a daughter succeeded in engineering studies and made a good wedding match, a
son received a successful interview at Kodak Mohendra and gained the family much-needed
financial security, and he himself secured rapid improvement of his own economic circumstances
when, as a young man, he had often been hungry. A woman reported successful prayer for a
daughter’s marriage and fertility, the cure of her own skin problems, and two instances where
family members whom doctors could not cure regained the ability to walk. One man who had
black magic troubles survived a fall from a third story window and being hit by a lorry, both
without serious injury. Two others claimed to be cured from an undisclosed health problem,
another escaped a serious accident, and yet another found a job. One Hindu man simply stated
that St. Antony solves every problem for all castes, a feeling that was widely shared.
148
For an extended discussion of the pēy and their role in destructive sorcery that can impact specific areas of
human well-being, see Isabelle Nabokov’s Religion Against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals, pp. 44-54.
158
The problems informants hoped to solve in the present fell largely into the same
categories, though they skewed away from health complaints and were much more likely to be
financial in nature. One family complained they had no business, no income, and no money for
rent; another man complained that he could earn money, but it always goes too fast, so he needs
to rent a vehicle in order to improve his business income. One informant was searching for a
job, and another blamed his joblessness on black magic. Another man was trying to set aside
enough money to start an independent household. Yet another was undertaking a new business,
and prayed for the harmony, health, and success of his business team on the rationale that
praying for others is both meritorious and more likely to meet with success than praying directly
for oneself. One confided an unspecified “family problem,” while others sought marriage for a
son or a baby for their daughter. One man had absolutely no idea what problem he had come for,
as he was accompanying his wife. Another man had no problem at all but simply wanted to pray
for his son and family. The most unique concern came from an older Christian lady whose
daughter had married a Hindu, whom she hoped St. Antony would convert to Christianity
because he was preventing her daughter from going to church.
When asked what makes the St. Antony Shrine special, answers were surprisingly varied,
commenting on everything from the site having good power or shakti, being open to all castes,
everyone getting good results, St. Antony or Jesus being powerful intercessors or gods, to more
mundane observations that it is the most important church in Parry’s and boasts a famous school.
Some informants remarked that it is a good place for worship and prayer. Shading into the next
question, informants observed that the site is good for black magic, mental problems, conceiving
children, healing illnesses, and getting jobs. One informant mentioned that whatever one’s
problem might be, one could write it down in a book along with a vow (nerccai) and the saint
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would accept the bargain and grant one’s petition.149 One informant claimed that the site is
important for a multi-week money pūjā, and he was here to make up an interrupted week
because the ritual will not work at full strength without the requisite number of weeks. One
conservative Christian informant rejected the idea that the shrine or St. Antony were special in
any way, as any church and any saint could grant one’s requests equally; however, the fact that
this was not his usual parish and in fact some distance away from it and that he had come with a
job petition in mind on the saint’s day allows one to reasonably conclude that practice and theory
parted ways in this particular instance.
Questions about St. Antony himself were answered in almost uniform ways—the saint
deals with black magic, mental problems, the pēy, and possession (“pēy problems”). Moreover,
he was described as powerful, with informants oscillating between calling him “like” god or
perhaps a “mediator” or “intercessor” with God and referring to him as an actual deity, doing so
irrespective of the informant’s caste, and often within the same interview. St. Antony is open to
all castes and all problems. In addition to the main focus on black magic and possession, a few
informants mentioned that St. Antony is good for jobs. An elderly informant remarked that it is
usually the youth who come seeking jobs, for which there is a special pūjā. One man said that
St. Antony is special because he can turn bad people good. Everyone planning on seeking a
boon from the saint stated that they would “pray” to do so, which presumably was a term meant
to encompass all conceivable religious activities at the site, as only a small proportion of ritual
behavior observed at the site would best be described as involving the vocal invocation of deity
in petitionary prayer. A few specifically mentioned they would be making prayers with no
149
Selva Raj describes the role of “promissory notes” offered to saints as part of a formal vow in “Shared
Vows, Shared Space, and Shared Deities: Vow Rituals among Tamil Catholics in South India,” published in Raj and
Harman’s Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, p. 44.
160
accompanying offerings, while one man emphasized that he always deposited coins with his
prayers, and another claimed that one could fulfill a vow by making an offering to a superior
saint in place of an offering due to one of that being’s subordinates. Informants were especially
generous in detailing the religious behaviors of others, though they had not been asked to do so.
There appear to be seven, nine, eleven, and thirteen week versions of the “marat prarthani,” a
pūjā in which one offers a candle for a special number of Tuesdays in exchange for an
anticipated boon; Fr. Xavier Packiam thought that sometimes this rite took the form of thirteen
“First Tuesdays,” one for each month following an initial Tuesday candle-offering.150 The
number matters strictly, and if a week is missed, it must be made up at a later time. Some
grateful devotees return with garlands made out of Indian banknotes when a boon has been
granted. Devotees offer saffron threads, locks, flowers, cloth, and saris, particularly on
Saturdays. This, along with the fact that these devotional gestures are common at Marian shrines
in South India, suggests that at least some of this devotion is directed toward Our Lady of
Perpetual Help for whom the church holds organized devotions on Wednesdays and Saturdays
rather than St. Antony. Salt or sometimes salt and peppercorns are offered to cure disease and
solve black magic problems. Holy water is both offered to saints and enthusiastically received as
prasād by devotees of all castes; Fr. Xavier Packiam relates that Hindus let him know
immediately if the holy water basins become empty. Very occasionally, a devotee will bring
meals to feed others at the shrine, either to make a petition or to thank St. Antony for his favor.
150
Although the St. Antony prayer book circulated at the shrine recommends nine week (novena) and
thirteen week (tredecima) Tuesday devotions to St. Antony and the Tamil popular tradition of venerating St. Antony
on Tuesdays and Mary on Saturdays corresponds to Western custom, it is likely that much of the cultural resonance
for this practice is Indian in origin. Tuesdays and Saturdays are particularly inauspicious astrologically, being the
days of Mangala (Mars) and Shani (Saturn), so Hindu temples are often flooded with devotees on these days, with
Hanuman temples being especially favored. See Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine
Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 186).
161
While a major aspect of St. Antony devotion at Uvari, where the practice is called āsanam,151 it
appears to be a minor practice at the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai with the exception of the
annual festival in June.
Most informants agreed that New Year, Christmas, and Easter were major festivals at the
shrine, and listed them together. The June 13 Feast of St. Antony and the novena leading up to it
are also frequently mentioned as important days; allegedly, it brings in some half a million
people and requires a major security detail. “Mary’s Birthday” (September 8) and “Velankanni
Flag Day” (August 29)—the beginning and end points of a Marian novena celebrated at the
site—both make honorable mentions. “Kallarai Thiruvela” (November 2, Tamil All Saints’) is
celebrated with fervor, with offerings to the dead made by the burning of candles at their graves,
which are scattered throughout the church. The parish priest, Fr. Xavier Packiam, says the
church observes all the “major secular holidays” of Tamil Nadu, including Hindu ones such as
Diwali—an activity specifically authorized by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.152 On
a weekly basis, Tuesday (St. Antony) and Saturday (Our Lady of Perpetual Help) are the major
days, with the first Tuesday of each month being by far the most popular.
Given a strong demographic tendency for shrine devotees to have been patronizing the
site for decades and sometimes their entire lives and their general concentration within
neighborhoods contiguous with Georgetown, it is possible that St. Antony functions as a kula
deivam for families with longstanding ties to the neighborhood, possibly going back as far as
151
Selva Raj, Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, pp. 57-60. Brigitte Sébastia records
evidence of the practice at Puliyampatti in Les Rondes de Saint Antoine: Culte, Affliction et Possession en Inde du
Sud, p. 68. This bears a certain resemblance to the Western devotion known as “St. Antony’s Bread,” in which
devotees in search of a boon vow gifts of the food for the poor to St. Antony, but the Uvari āsanam is ritualized as a
full pūjā with requirements for a precise number of ritual bathings, specifications of the gender and caste of people
to be fed to ensure an inclusive ritual, and other restrictions.
152
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, Guidelines for Interreligious Dialogue, pp. 72-73.
162
initial Portuguese evangelization efforts in South India. St. Antony was clearly important for the
Portuguese in Mylapore, as one of the charges brought against the French Capuchin missionary
Ephrem of Nevers when he was captured by the Goa Inquisition was that he preached against the
efficacy of the popular practice of suspending an image of St. Antony upside-down in a well to
bring rain.153 St Antony is the national saint of the Portuguese, and was also adopted as kula
deivam by Christians of the Paravar and Nadar castes.154 A heavy concentration of Paravar and
Nadar Christians having a family tradition of patronage of the shrine as the local seat of their
kula deivam would explain general demographic tendencies and the surprising amount of oral
history possessed by some informants at the site.
153
Celestine, p. 105.
154
The Paravars and Nadars are South Indian maritime castes historically situated on either side of the
coastline near Cape Comorin. The Paravars were the first caste to convert to Christianity en masse during the
colonial period, accepting Christianity so that the Portuguese would aid them in a maritime trade war with the more
powerful Lebbai Muslims. Already a relatively powerful caste before conversion, their alliance with the Portuguese
helped the Paravars advance socially and economically, as Portuguese demand for pearls from Paravar fisheries
brought in a considerable income and the distribution of church “honors” brought prestige and a sense of cohesion to
the caste, which had not ranked so highly in the Hindu temple honor system. The Paravars developed a Christian
ceremonial in many ways parallel to that of local Hindus, with flag-hoistings, chariot processions, and Christian
saints such as St. Antony, St. Francis Xavier, and Our Lady of Snows serving as clan deities for the caste. The
Paravars and their missionaries were often in disagreement, which both sides played to their advantage, Jesuit
missionaries creating parallel honor systems to promote or damage Paravar political groups, and Paravars often
switching affiliation between Propaganda Fide and Padroado priests in order to gain concessions. The Paravars
intermarried with the Portuguese, often taking Portuguese names. By the nineteenth century, many Paravars had
ceased to work in fishing and pearl diving and moved into work as dockmen and boat hands and traders in colonial
trading ports throughout South India. The Nadars, formerly known as the Shanars, were cultivators and tree tappers
involved in the distillation of arrack, and served as lower-status clients of the Paravars, living in nearby villages.
Many eventually embraced Christianity, but were excluded from the church honor system maintained by the
Paravars even when Muslims and Hindus were eventually integrated. For more about the Paravars and Nadars, see
“The Christian Paravas of Southern Tamilnad” in Susan Bayly’s Saints, Goddesses, and Kings, Robert L.
Hardgrave’s The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969), Edgar Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1909),
and S.B. Kaufmann’s “A Christian Caste in Hindu Society: Religious Leadership and Social Conflict among the
Paravas of Southern Tamilnadu” in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1981), pp. 203-234.
163
Representative Informants
The majority of our interviews generated primarily demographic information of the kind
summarized above. A few informants went well beyond the established script and supplied more
detailed portraits of the personality of the informants and the character of their religious concepts
and observances. I will describe these now at further length.
The Christian Vedantin: Antoniyar Rodrigues
Antoniyar Rodrigues is a middle-aged to elderly retiree old enough to have children
completing studies and establishing careers of their own, while his grandson remains no more
than a toddler. He first came to the shrine 59 years ago, which given his likely age probably
means that he was taken there by family during his childhood. The name Antoniyar suggests
either that the family is dedicated to St. Antony as their kula deivam, that Antoniyar is of Paravar
descent, or possibly both; conceivably, his first visit to the shrine was to dedicate him to the
saint.155 (Paravars historically are endogamous and Christian, and tended to intermarry with
Europeans during the colonial period). As his name suggests, Antoniyar claims the “R.C.” caste
and is not a convert. Antoniyar Rodrigues makes his home in Tondiarpet, a respectable but
somewhat down-at-the-heels fishing, manufacturing, and mercantile village north of Georgetown
in Chennai. Although I would not consider it so by looking at a map, he considers the St. Antony
155
One of my translator’s professional collaborators is a Tamil Christian named Anthony who told me that it
was common for people with that name to be tonsured and formally dedicated before an image of St. Antony on a
Tuesday. Brigitte Sébastia writes that the Nadar and Paravar castes accept St. Antony as kula deivam, and describe
his ritual role in the life of a given family as follows: “In Hindu devotion, the kulateyvam assures protection of the
family/caste, and in compensation, it receives an annual cult organized by family and / or caste. Because of their
function, they hold a privileged place within the domestic sphere for protection against difficulties of the daily life,
and for performance of biographical ceremonies (naming ceremony, ear-piercing ceremony, marriage, ceremony of
the 7th month of pregnancy) which integrate new members into the family; the child becomes a full member of the
paternal line, and the bride by joining her new family has to adopt its kulateyvam. These ceremonies are held
preferentially in the temple of the kulateyvam” (Sébastia, Like an Indian God, p. 6).
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Shrine near his home and frequents it often. Though he confessed often going hungry in his
childhood, presumably Antoniyar Rodrigues now possesses reasonable economic means, as he
sent his children to college, engages the Western allopathic medical system rather than
indigenous ones as his first resort in the case of medical emergencies, and petitions St. Antony
concerning business dealings. He claims modest professional success, saying that he has enough
money to meet his needs but is by no means rich. Antoniyar Rodrigues enjoys both the money
and leisure time necessary to have undertaken many pilgrimages at some distance from
Chennai—Nagapattinam Velankanni, Thiru Iruthaya Andavar near Dindigul, Adaikala Annai in
Viriyur, and an unidentified shrine (possibly the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Idaikatthur) in
Shivagangai Mavattam.
Antoniyar Rodrigues appeared knowledgeable about the shrine and eager to share its
renown. He did not know when the shrine was built and referred us to “Father or Sister” for
information about festival days, but he had clearly been to the site often enough to form
impressions of his own. He believed that on the first and second Tuesdays of the month, at least
50,000 people attend, and that on the third and fourth Tuesdays of the month, 30,000 and 20,000
people come, respectively. He estimated the caste background of devotees as 60 percent Hindu,
6 percent Muslim, and the remainder Christian. The shrine is special for dealing with black
magic, mental problems, and possession, though there is a special pūjā for job seekers that is
mostly popular with the young. On Saturdays, people will come to offer yellow threads, locks,
flowers, and saris (presumably to Mary). Other than Tuesdays and to a lesser extent Saturdays,
he says the shrine is deserted. The shrine is open to all castes, and the R.C. caste in particular
accepts all other castes. Easter, Christmas, and the Feast of St. Antony are the main festivals.
For the St. Antony Feast, there is always a big tēr procession around the church, which attracts
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such a crowd that police security and traffic control are necessary. There are special flower
shops outside, and Hindus will make a sweet pongal for the occasion, as for a Hindu deity.156
Like nearly all informants, it was difficult to situate Antoniyar Rodrigues in the official
sacramental life of the Church, despite his hereditary R.C. caste. No informant ever spoke of
practices such as confession or receiving communion as motivating their visit to the shrine or
being personally important to them. When it came to baptism, no one really seemed to know
what the practice was—Kumaressan lacked a Tamil word for the practice, but paraphrastic
explanations of baptism in Tamil and failing that extended English discussion of baptism did not
help anyone understand what we were talking about. Antoniyar Rodrigues finally claimed that
he takes holy water in the church, which was his best approximation of the concept. This
suggests that what matters to non-elite Tamil Catholic informants falls largely in the realm of
popular devotion. As I did not demand that any formal criteria be satisfied before accepting an
informant as “Catholic” or “Christian” other than their self-identification as such, it might be
fruitful to conduct further research to determine what caste membership means to the people
making such identifications. Probably in many cases it means that the person was baptized and
fully sacramentally incorporated into the Catholic Church, the most traditional and only official
criterion for formal institutional membership. It is far from clear that this was universally the
case; in fact, one could suspect on the basis of informants’ general unfamiliarity with the baptism
that some were not baptized, and nevertheless still identified as Catholic. Patterns of social, nonsacramental affiliation with Christianity are a reality in India, where baptized converts of the
scheduled classes lose caste reservation eligibility upon baptism. However, I cannot determine
156
Selva Raj notes that the Tamil festival of Pongal has been Christianized and is observed as “Antoniar
Pongal” in the area around Madurai, and my R.C. informants in Pondicherry were familiar with the existence of
Antoniyar Pongal in their own area. See Selva Raj, Interactive Religious Systems in Indian Popular Catholicism:
The Case of Tamil and Santal Catholics, p. 220.
166
whether this is generally the reason for lack of baptism among R.C. informants on available
evidence.
Conversation progressed the most easily and with least misunderstanding using Hindu
lexical terminology such as pūjā, kōvil, kula deivam, pēy, etc. and the most paraphrastically and
awkwardly in the rare instances where a specifically Western concept such as intercession or
mediation was deployed, regardless of which party introduced the concept into discussion. Most
informants seemed to use the categories of ishta deivam (personal deity) and kula deivam
(village or clan deity) somewhat interchangeably, in ways that suggest that both are a matter of
present rather than historical preference on the part of the individual or group in question.
Antoniyar Rodrigues identified his kula deivam as Velankanni Madha, which would be strange
given his personal name and childhood introduction to the saint if it were not construed as the
expression of an individual rather than inherited family preference for the Virgin Mary; some
ethnographic research on Indian Catholicism does suggest that individuals and families change
their kula deivam in return for boons granted in the present.157 Antoniyar Rodrigues’s pilgrimage
to Velankanni in the past probably reflects a personal primary devotional interest in that saint.
Nevertheless, he has called upon Antoniyar Thiruvela (St. Antony) for specialist help at many
points in his life, and can offer a detailed history of the saint’s intervention in the life of his
family. Most notably, his grandson needed an operation for a serious gastrointestinal issue
within a month of his birth and was given a 30 percent chance to live. The family prayed to St.
Antony during the operation and the doctors found a much less serious problem than the
probably inoperable problem that had been indicated on x-ray, which they then easily corrected.
The doctors told them that their grandson’s survival was miraculous and not the result of medical
157
Selva Raj, Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, p. 48, pp. 59-60.
167
skill; only God could have fixed the problem, they said. The grandson is now four years old and
healthy. Antoniyar Rodrigues also credits St. Antony with the success of his daughter’s
engineering studies, her successful wedding match and pregnancy, and her good home. He
credits prayers to St. Antony on behalf of his son with the latter landing three interviews and
being hired in human resources by Kodak Mahendra after significant difficulty on the job
market. Antoniyar Rodrigues was happy to share this material to promote the fame of the saint.
Currently, Antoniyar Rodrigues is praying for his team in a new business venture to succeed and
enjoy harmony and good health; he believes that because it is more meritorious for members of
the R.C. caste to pray for others before themselves, this indirect prayer for his own concerns will
ultimately be more efficacious.
When asked to describe the power of the shrine and the nature of its saint, Antoniyar
Rodrigues provided two not necessarily exclusive sets of concerns: 1. St. Antony and the shrine
are good for dealing with black magic, possession by the pēy, mental problems, and the negative
effects of sorcery, and 2. people come to the shrine to solve specific problems such as family
illness, the conception of a child, and getting a job. Some of the latter set of concerns may be
explained by the presence of Marian devotion at the site, but also by the idea that deficiencies in
these areas of one’s life are the result of black magic or the pēy. The St. Antony statue inside is
miraculous, a storehouse of vast supernatural power, and sorcerers and their black magic are
completely under his feet. St. Antony helps all castes, and serves as a mediator who can channel
the power of God to help people; the shrine is a “mediating place” where St. Antony asks God to
solve problems for people. St. Antony is not divine but human, with God but not himself a god.
Interestingly, Jesus is referred to in the same terms—he is a human who asks God to mediate
problems. Jesus is a powerful man who specializes in helping outcast persons, but is not God.
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When queried about the specific theological conceptions underlying his statements about
Jesus and St. Antony, Antoniyar Rodrigues offered a detailed theology which seemed adapted
and appropriated from Advaita Vedanta. He said he did not believe in specific, personal deities
such as the gods of Hindus or Christians. He believes in one utterly transcendent power which is
beyond personality, name, form, and the division between castes. It is a power behind all things,
like a tree giving off oxygen for all to breathe; everything that exists and has name and form does
so because this power is present to it. This god does not intend to do anything; it is simply a kind
of natural force that can be shaped and directed by more personal intercessors such as Jesus and
St. Antony and the Hindu gods. Antoniyar Rodrigues wishes to strictly reserve the term “God”
to the impersonal ultimate power and call other, lesser divinities including Jesus “persons” or
“saints.” Antoniyar Rodrigues was eager to share this theological excursus, which he had
apparently given some thought. When asked about whether he considered himself born again, he
affirmed belief in rebirth over many lifetimes. This theological framework seemed to maximize
Antoniyar’s conceptual common ground with his Hindu neighbors, while allowing him to deny
that Hindu divinities, properly-speaking, are gods. Nothing in Antoniyar’s language or
demeanor conveyed that he thought Jesus was somehow being demoted in this reckoning from a
more exalted status he otherwise would occupy; he appeared to believe that his was the
mainstream Christian account of the nature and role of Jesus. Except for the implicit demotion
of personal deities Christian and Hindu alike to non-divine status, one could fairly categorize this
theology as broadly Vedantin in inspiration.
My Orthodoxy Doth Protest Too Much: Rahul da Rocha
Rahul da Rocha is a smartly-dressed young man in his late twenties who arrived and left
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the St. Antony Shrine on the back of a shiny new motorcycle. Like several informants, he spoke
considerably better and had a less-accented English than my translator. In fact, he questioned the
procedure of being interviewed in Tamil, and ended up having an extensive friendly conversation
with me in English after the conclusion of the regular interview, many of the questions of which
he seemingly deliberately evaded. The impression of affluence and internationalism he formed
was subsequently verified via internet, where I discovered through his extensive web presence
that he is a senior e-marketing executive for a major internet firm in Chennai with a recent
M.B.A. degree from a regional university; he gives his annual income at Rs. 3-4 lakhs per month
on another, matrimonial website.
The surname “Rocha” is common among Paravars of mixed European ancestry, one of
the earliest Christian castes with a major presence in Chennai; presumably then he is not a
convert.158 Religion is important enough to him that he has listed himself as a prospective groom
on a Catholic Christian matrimonial website, where he notes that he is baptized, reads the Bible
daily, and is interested in evangelization. Familiarity with baptism as a major rite of passage
makes him unique among my informants. He wishes his prospective wife to be Christian by
religion and Catholic by caste.
Rahul evaded or refused the vast majority of questions he was asked, typically objecting
in terms of perceived doctrinal orthodoxy. This is not meant to imply that he was unpleasant or
uncooperative by nature, as he was otherwise congenial and disposed to help; clearly, he simply
possessed a strong sense of doctrinal propriety which some of the questions seemed to threaten
to a greater or lesser degree. Rahul ultimately suggested that I should not be interested in this
158
According to Susan Bayly’s Saints, Goddesses, and Kings, p. 334, “Roche” (a variant on “Rocha”) is one
of many common Parava surnames of Portuguese origin.
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rather unwholesome site but should relocate to a church closer to European norms of orthodoxy,
such as his own. His home parish is St. Teresa of Avila in Nungambakkam, a hundred-year old
church that developed from a chapel attached to the bishop’s house to a parish with a major
catechetical school, which ultimately came under the control of Jesuit missionaries under the
Padroado, later to be handed over to the archdiocese.159 The church was recently renovated in
high European architectural style and given a bright new koṭimaram,160 and appears to enjoy a
formidable reputation for orthodoxy. Rahul avidly follows political developments in the
worldwide church, praising the archconservative American prelate Cardinal Dolan.
Rahul happily informed us that the St. Antony Shrine is not special in any way and is a
place for all problems just as every other church is a place for all problems. He has no special
saint or kula deivam because “having a kula deivam is not allowed.” We should ask in the
church if we want to know about the shrine’s special days, because he doesn’t know and all days
are equally special. This is not his usual church, and he knows relatively little about it. Why
don’t we relocate to some place that will give a more orthodox image of what Indian Catholicism
is all about, rather than perversely fixating on this site?
Yet Rahul’s actions implicitly denied much of his explicit theology. He goes to church at
least twice a week—specifically, Tuesdays and Saturdays. He had been to the site three years
ago to seek a boon, and he is present now in order to pray for a job. While professing on the one
hand that all churches and days are the same and none special, Rahul has made a special trip
from Nungambakkam to this very specific shrine to seek a boon for which it is famous, and he
159
St. Teresa of Avila Parish. “History.” http://stteresaschurch.in/history.html (accessed April 22, 2015).
160
Lalithasai. “St. Teresa’s Church Spruced Up.” The Hindu.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/chen-downtown/st-teresas-church-spruced-up/article4200756.ece
(accessed April 22, 2015).
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schedules his churchgoing for the weekly saints’ days of the two saints arguably possessing the
strongest reputation for efficacy within Tamil Catholicism. Rahul’s case is one of conflicted
orthodoxy—formal, public adherence to perceived international norms, reverting surreptitiously
to local religious patterns under the stress of personal crisis.
The Jesus Bhakta: Neil
Neil is a 76 year old retiree from Tondiarpet—apparently of reasonable means, as his son
acquired an M.B.A. and after working in the United States started his own company in
Hyderabad. Neil spent seven years in a Christian school beginning in 1952, which he pointed
out was of personal significance to him. Though his own caste background is that of a Hindu of
the Nadar caste and he has no intention of ever converting to Christianity, he identifies Jesus as
his kula deivam and the St. Antony Shrine as his favorite temple. Neil makes a daily routine of
coming to the shrine, depositing money in the offering box and praying for his son, sitting
outside much of the day in the courtyard we found him, and ultimately returning home. He first
discovered the shrine in 1996, and had nothing to say of his religious life before that point.
Given his British personal name and childhood attendance of a Christian school, it is possible
that he is a Nadar of Anglo-Indian ancestry and attended St. Mary’s Anglo-Indian School.
Neil probably qualifies as what missiologists and ethnographers of Indian Catholicism
call a “Jesus bhakta” or “Christ bhakta,” a range of Hindus for whom Jesus is devotionally
central which includes Christians in all but name who do not convert at one extreme to
individuals who are more recognizably Hindu but happen to prefer Jesus or one of the saints as
their devotional deity at the other.161 Neil seems closer to the former type, making no mention of
161
See Herbert Hoefer, Churcless Christianity and Jonas Jørgensen, Jesus Imandars and Christ Bhaktas: A
Qualitative and Theological Study of Syncretism and Identity in Global Christianity. pp. 259-395.
172
his religious activities outside of this single Christian site and generally preferring religious
activities and a conceptual vocabulary closer to Christianity than mainstream Hinduism. Rather
than offering a candle or making special pūjās for St. Antony like many other informants, he
prefers to pray, generally does not seek a personal boon other than abstract benefit to his family,
and, while uncertain about the afterlife, prefers the idea that people go to sorgam or naragam to
any other idea of the afterlife. It seems reasonable to infer that his piety was shaped in his
childhood at the Christian school he attended, but that Neil never converted due to the serious
social and cultural break that conversions in India require.
Neil’s remarks were not especially illuminating with reference to the religious practices
of others, remarking only that Tuesdays and Saturdays were the most popular days and that most
devotees brought material offerings such as candles in hope that God would hear their request.
He seemed aware of the rituals conducted in Moorat Chapel and cognizant of their significance,
but would not expound upon their nature, saying that we would need to ask the predominantly
Hindu individuals involved.
An Equal Opportunity Bhakta: Nageshwara
If Neil represents the most conventionally “Christian” template for Hindu Christ bhaktas,
Nageshwara represents the opposite extreme. Nageshwara is a Hindu devotee of Velankanni
Madha (the Virgin Mary) and Vinayagar (Ganesh) from Tiruvottiyur, with a family tradition of
worshiping Perumal (Vishnu) that is carried on in his home. His approach to divinity is fluid –
he has come to a shrine of St. Antony to solve his problem on the rationale that Jesus, rather than
St. Antony, is a powerful god who can help him, and if his request is granted he intends to give
an offering to Velankanni Madha rather than St. Antony. Whatever this might appear to suggest,
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there was nothing confused about his grasp of the divine personages or random about his choice
of the St. Antony Shrine. Nageshwara had been coming to the shrine for seven years and was
familiar with oral history concerning the shrine’s construction of which the shrine priest and
other informants appeared to be completely unaware. He described an old legend in which a
priest named “Sevenier” (a mistaken rendering of “Severini,” one of the first missionaries
associated with the church) struggled against misfortunes plaguing the building effort, and only
after nine years was able to complete the temple. Though I cannot attest to the chronology
Nageshwara established because Padre Severini was likely dead by the time of the major
renovation to which the story seems to refer, it would probably be unreasonable to expect
folklore and archival history to agree completely. The story is interesting for replicating a
pattern for origin stories common in many churches and temples in Tamil Nadu in which the
local spirits or divinities fight against the temple being built only to be pacified or subjugated by
the superior deity enthroned within.162
Nageshwara’s motivations for appearing at the shrine on that particular day could best be
described in terms of ritual efficacy for meeting a concrete human need. He rents bulldozers for
a living, but finds that his money always goes too fast, and needs to increase his income. So he
had been coming to the shrine to meet the required number of seven Tuesdays. He missed a
week due to a death that required him to be out of town, so he was present at the shrine to make
up the seventh Tuesday. Nageshwara thought the ritual would have far less power if the precise
number of weeks was not observed. Though Nageshwara’s pūjā seemed different from those of
other informants in terms of the required number of weeks, the idea that the crucial element for
162
Among common mythic motifs for the foundation of a church or temple, Susan Bayly p. 368 identifies
bloody conquest over an existing god or goddesses of the place, giving Velankanni as an example.
174
ritual efficacy involves returning to the site for a fixed number of Tuesdays was definitely the
norm among boon-seekers dealing with financial hardship.
Nageshwara was enthusiastic about the ecumenism of the site, pointing out that not only
large numbers of Hindus but also Muslims come; given his own religious boundary crossing, this
appeared to be a natural sentiment for him.
When asked more abstract theological questions, Nageshwara was at real pains to take
any interest. He professed agnosticism about the Hindu doctrine of rebirth claiming that no one
has ever found out what happens after people die. Nageshwara was most happy when
conceiving of religious observance as bhakti or as a practical means of dealing with concrete
problems.
Mariyadevi
Mariyadevi is a middle-aged to elderly grandmother from Kōvilambakkam, a village in
the southern part Chennai near Nanmangalam. She lives the furthest from the St. Antony Shrine
of the informants, making her monthly visits to the site a significant commitment of time and
perhaps of money. She is happy to make the trek, however, claiming that every time she returns
from the shrine there is good news waiting for her.
Mariyadevi first came to the shrine 28 years ago when she was married to an electrician
currently working in Uttar Pradesh. At the time she had a serious skin problem, which she says
she remains grateful to St. Antony for curing. She said that the cure for this problem involved
offering salt to the saint, which can also be used to deal with black magic and disease.
Mariyadevi credits the saint with helping her daughter find a husband and conceive a child after
difficulties, healing a daughter’s leg problem, and also with helping her grandson learn to walk
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after conventional medical treatment failed to remedy his condition. At the time of the interview,
Mariyadevi was hoping that St. Antony would convert her Hindu son-in-law to Christianity so
that he daughter could go to church again, a practice the man was preventing.
Mariyadevi is a devotee of Mary rather than the Hindu goddess of a similar name,
specifically identifying Lurthu Madha (the Mother of Lourdes) as her kula deivam. However,
given Mariyadevi’s predominantly Indian conceptual vocabulary in matters of religion, it is
possible that her name is multivalent and not exclusively Christian in reference.163 She has been
on a few long-distance pilgrimages in Tamil Nadu, visiting the Lurthu Madha Church in Vellur
and the Mazai Mali Madha Church near Acharachpakam; both are popular Marian pilgrimage
sites that appear to have escaped scholarly interest. For Mariyadevi, St. Antony appears to be a
specialist problem-solver, with Mary the main focus of her devotion. She identifies June 13 (the
Feast of St. Antony), Christmas, and Kallarai Theruvela (Tamil All Saints’) as the major feasts at
the shrine. Whichever saint intercedes for her, she attributes the credit ultimately to God.
While one might possibly expect a lifelong member of the R.C. caste with intense
devotional ties to Mary and St. Antony who is praying to convert a Hindu to Christianity to be
163
The goddess Māriyamman and Mother Mary (Mariyamman) are often assimilated with one another in
Christian Marian shrines with a significant Hindu clientele. In her Māriyamman-Mariyamman: Catholic Practices
and Images of Virgin in Velankanni (Pondicherry: French Institute, 2002, pp. 50-51), Brigitte Sébastia records a
poem found in the Chapel of the Apparition in Velankanni:
Māriyamman, Mariyamman,
When the Portuguese arrived, Māriyamman, they made a mistake writing your name.
They wrote Mariyamman, and that changed your history.
Māriyamman, Mariyamman, these are two different words,
But you are, in fact, the same.
Because the Brahmans forbade us access to the temples.
Before we always remained outside, never able to approach you.
Then, knowing how much we pray to you and respect you
You decide to flee the temples and came here to take refuge.
To Velankanni you came
And now we can come and address our prayers to you,
Māriyamman, Mariyamman.
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conventionally orthodox in outlook, Mariyadevi was remarkable more for her easiness with
Indian religious vocabulary (kōvil, kula deivam, caste, etc.) and Indian conceptuality than
anything else. In fact, she seemed embarrassed that she was praying for a conversion, and
readily explained it in terms of her daughter’s loss of religious liberty. For her, the St. Antony
Shrine is a place to deal with possession, black magic, the pēy, and the problems these cause in
people’s lives with the help of special consecrated substances such as salt empowered with the
saint’s shakti. She conceptualized religion as primarily a matter of caste, and was concerned that
at least one of her interviewers should share her caste background before she would be
interviewed. This “Indian” conceptuality extended even to her beliefs about the afterlife—in
preference to the standard Christian binary of heaven and hell, Mariyadevi believes in rebirth
over many lifetimes. In the end, she seemed to be negotiating a caste conflict within the family
between an R.C. daughter who had married out of caste and a Hindu son-in-law who expected
his wife’s public ritual role to be consistent with his Hindu caste identity in the only way which
seemed both logical and feasible to her, which was to get the husband to change caste. If this
was the marriage St. Antony had found for her daughter, after all, then surely it fell upon him to
fix any resulting disharmony!
The Convert: Pravesh
Pravesh was the only one of my informants who admitted converting caste to the R.C..
Rather than resembling Hindu “Christ bhaktas” such as Neil, whose religious behavior seemed
Christian in everything but name, Pravesh most clearly resembles the more eclectic Nageshwara,
who remains Hindu. Clearly, one’s caste identification as R.C. or Christian and one’s religious
behavior float freely enough of one another that one’s closest religious equivalents may belong to
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another caste. Pravesh would not decide on a single ishta deivam, claiming both Vinayagar and
Velankanni. Likewise, he identified both St. Antony and Vinayagar as his kula deivam. Pravesh
prefers going to a church most of the time, but happily admitted that he goes to Hindu temples
too and has no intention of ever changing that fact. I suspect he is not unusual in this regard
except for his easy honesty in admitting this to a researcher.
Pravesh’s concerns at the shrine were eminently practical; he had been having trouble
saving money, so he wanted St. Antony to improve his business performance so that he could
rent a vehicle and make more money than he was at the time. He was primarily interested in
commissioning St. Antony for the job because St. Antony has intense shakti or divine power, and
so would be best able to help him. He first came to the shrine 25 years ago, which judging by his
youth, suggests that his family may have brought him there in infancy or youth because St.
Antony is their kula deivam. Pravesh was totally indifferent to theological as opposed to
practical aspects of the Christian faith, focused very much on deities and saints who have shakti
and are gracious enough to share it with their bhaktas. He thought that trying to figure out what
happens after death was “crazy”—akin to trying to figure out where you were before you were
born, when nobody has ever discovered the answer to either question. True to his pragmatic
focus, Pravesh seemed rather busy and could not stay much longer into the interview, but he was
happy he was able to help and seemed especially pleased that his role as the only convert we had
interviewed was an important one.
The Christian Sādhu and His Disciple: Arokiyadas and Agni Kumar
Arokiyadas is a bearded, middle-aged Catholic who dresses in khādī and wears his rosary
of colored glass beads openly like a sādhu. Agni Kumar is a significantly younger man who
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accompanied Arokiyadas at the time of our meeting. Together, the two resemble a sādhu and his
disciple, and they confirmed the role in the course of the interview, with Agni excitedly
mentioning that his companion has siddhis or yogic powers and can solve any problem, like a
saint.164 Agni acted as Arokiyadas’ unofficial publicist, inviting Kumaressan and myself to an
exorcism of one of Agni’s family members planned for later in the day. Arokiyadas was
considerably more cautious and circumspect—even somewhat suspicious of our motives in
asking these questions about the people who come to the shrine—but he ultimately opened up
when I satisfied him that I am R.C. and trustworthy by engaging him in conversation about his
ishta deivam and showing him my personal rosary and its attached Velankanni medal.
Arokiyadas has been going on Velankanni pādayātrā (a foot pilgrimage from Chennai to the
Velankanni shrine in Nagapattinam District) for the last 29 years, and credits this demanding
164
The chapter “On the Borders” in R.L. Stirrat’s Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting describes
popular Catholicism in Sri Lanka, which shares certain basic characteristics with South Indian popular Catholicism
due to similar demographics (the Catholics in both cases being coastal peoples belonging to a common maritime
trade network) and a common Christian pedigree of sixteenth century evangelization by the Portuguese. The chapter
is interesting for highlighting three Sinhala Catholic informants who parallel informants at the St. Antony Shrine.
There is an upper class philosophical gentleman, Gabriel, who has no novel devotional practices but synthesizes
Catholic and Buddhist doctrine by accepting the doctrines of karma and rebirth (pp. 182-184). He most closely
approximates S.Sthe Christian Vedantin. A second informant, Basil, has agnostic views about the afterlife but
patronizes Catholic and Buddhist bhakti cults such as the cult of St. Antony and Kataragama because they have
power to solve practical problems. Basil defines Catholicism not as a religion, but a matter of birth “like caste or
race,” and takes recourse to all religions (pp. 187-188). Basil closely approximates my informant Pravesh and,
although Christian rather than Hindu, also resembles the border-crossing, equal-opportunity bhakta Nageshwara.
Finally, Stirrat interviews a young woman named Conci, who resolved a possession crisis for herself by becoming
an oracle and healer of the god Kataragama, keeping a private shrine for Catholic saints and Buddhist deities and
attracting a clientele from all castes (pp. 189-193). Conci is comparable to the Christian sādhu Arokiyadas in her
social role as exorcist, oracle, and healer, although dissimilar in approaching religious figures from outside the
Christian tradition. Cecilia Busby’s chapter in Cannell’s Anthropology of Christianity highlights a Christian
mantravādi named Paulos who recites Christian mantras with Hindu ritual forms for exorcism and healing (pp. 9293). Although Selva Raj was of the opinion that Catholics in Tamil Nadu farm off their magico-religious needs to
Hindu ritual specialists and maintain none of their own, it appears more likely that Christian mantravādis such as
Arokiyadas and his parallels in the literature are a recognized cultural type and that Raj was shielded from
interviewing them by his public status as an ordained Catholic priest.
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austerity with the emergence of his siddhis.165 While he is especially devoted to Velankanni
Madha, Arokiyadas likes to come to the St. Antony Shrine daily, presumably to enlist the saint’s
help dealing with black magic and possession problems for clients such as Agni. (This would
also help to explain the circumspection, as the shrine custodians are likely to actively discourage
exorcistic practices by lay people).166 Arokiyadas’ own connection with the St. Antony Shrine
began 40 years ago, with the saint curing a black magic problem; since then, he credits St.
Antony with saving him from injury in a three-story fall and an accident with a lorry. He
describes the temple as being especially good for black magic problems and families who need
babies, and remarks that the saint frequently turns bad people good.
Arokiyadas is not a convert, and must have been self conscious about how “Hindu” he
likely sounded to a Western Catholic as he remarked thoughtfully that Indian Catholics have
been Christian for many generations but “perhaps [they] have not ever [really] converted.” I
found him to know a great deal of orthodox doctrine without being committed to it—as if he
165
My acquaintance Anand in Chennai and an informant employed at a pilgrim’s hostel in Velankanni
describe the foot pilgrimage from Chennai to Velankanni as a common devotion. Beginning ten days or more before
the flag-hoisting on the first day of the annual feast, pilgrims wearing khādī and sometimes special, blessed mālās
set off on foot on a coastal route from Chennai to Velankanni, often carrying special home-made chariot shrines
bearing an image of Velankanni Madha. They must observe special austerities such as a vegetarian diet and
abstinence from pleasures while making the pādayātrā. They bathe in the sea upon arrival and are only allowed to
remove their penitential rosaries and return to normal patterns of behavior upon arriving at a small chapel that was
the site of one of Mary’s apparitions in Velankanni. The closest Indian model for this practice seems to be the
Sabarimala pilgrimage of Lord Ayyappan, which involves a similar form of dress and austerities. I observed
elements of the pādayātrā during my field research, as the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai boasted a small tēr chariot
in the courtyard which seemed to have been placed there roughly at the onset of the novena for Our Lady Queen of
the Angels to be venerated by groups of (mostly) female devotees who offered flowers and touched the tēr in
anticipation of a blessing. They identified the tēr as bound for Velankanni, and said this was the first time this
church would be a departure point for the pādayātrā. During the taxi ride from my hotel near Elliot’s beach to the
Chennai Airport on the day of my departure, the roads were flooded by khādī-wearing Velankanni pilgrims carrying
tēr chariots and sometimes flags with Velankanni Madha’s image making their way to Nagapattinam Velankanni.
166
Brigitte Sébastia, Les Rondes de Sainte Antoine: Culte, Affliction et Possession en Inde du Sud, pp. 16-17.
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carried two mental frameworks within himself (an “Indian” default, and a European Christian
frame he deployed only in discussion with priests, religious, and Western scholars).167
Arokiyadas tacked back and forth between affirming that Jesus is God and saying that Jesus is
like God, depending on context. In any case, he argues that Velankanni Madha is the superior
spiritual entity over Jesus, because as Jesus’ mother, whatever Madha says to Jesus he will do.
Arokiyadas says he believes in rebirth over many lifetimes, while being aware this is not an
answer many priests would like to hear.
Arokiyadas’ sidekick Agni Kumar claims that he is a Christian and did not convert from
Hinduism—a fact keenly disputed by Kumaressan, who learned that Agni’s parents have the
“Hindu” Sanskritic names Raj and Vimala and found Agni’s protestations to the contrary entirely
unconvincing. Agni’s manner did seem to be of a person caught in a lie, but it is not impossible
that he might have been telling the truth. As there are major social costs to conversion to
Christianity, I think it is likely that Agni is a Hindu Christ bhakta who has never formally
converted to Christianity or else did convert in the recent past and wished to be taken for a caste
Christian to avoid the stigma of conversion.
`
Agni claimed St. Antony as his ishta deivam and Velankanni Madha as his kula deivam,
and his list of personal pilgrimage sites is consistent with the identification. Agni has visited the
167
Selva Raj’s discussion of lay Christian “temple-crossing” and “deity-hunting” and the role of priests and
religious in creating artificial conceptual tension for lay Catholics is instructive. Raj argues that according to the
emic, insider perspective, there is only one Tamil Catholicism which includes both formal ecclesiastical practices
and popular devotions of Hindu origin of which priests and religious frequently disapprove; only for conceptual
outsiders such as priests, religious, theologians, and Western scholars are these additional practices extraneous to
Catholicism and subject to disapproval, guilt, or stigma. Raj insightfully argues that any guilt, shame, or
ambivalence for the Catholic laity about such practices results not from Tamil popular Catholicism itself but from
awareness and possible partial internalization of the outsider perspective, creating a kind of uncomfortable
theological double-mindedness for the small minority (Raj estimates five percent) of “elite” parochial school
teachers and lay catechists most deeply influenced by ecclesiastical currents. See Raj’s Interactive Religious
Systems in Indian Popular Catholicism: The Case of Tamil and Santal Catholics, pp. 257-265. Mosse also
discusses the dual conceptual frameworks inhabited by Tamil Catholics in The Saint and the Banyan Tree, pp. 88-90.
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Velankanni shrine in Nagapattinam, Besant Nagar Velankanni in Chennai, the St. Antony Shrine
at Alanthur, St. Thomas Mount, and the Infant Jesus of Gendu. His preferred day for church
visits is Tuesday, St. Antony’s day, though he says that St. Thomas Mount is his usual church of
preference. He first visited this particular St. Antony shrine five years ago, and said he was
present for our interview because he needed to deal with a black magic problem and get a job.
Agni described a special pūjā for getting a job he called the “marat prarthani,” which involved
offering a candle to St. Antony on Tuesday for nine weeks. He says that the site is always more
popular with Hindus than R.C. because of its reputation for solving all problems, and that he is
able to relax because he knows St. Antony will help him. Agni says that the church holds a
novena for the saint from June 1 through June 13 that concludes on the saint’s day, and there is
always a lot of free food for everyone—presumably āsanam offered in thanksgiving for vows.
Agni tended to efface his own attitudes and beliefs in order to emulate Arokiyadas, so it
was challenging to get an independent reading of his religious personality. Kumaressan believes
that he is Hindu, and I wondered if it is possible he claimed to be Christian in order to please
Arokiyadas; in any event, they seem largely cut from the same cloth, fluent in the language of
siddhis and boons and the baleful influence of sorcery.
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CHAPTER 5:
THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY
Introduction
In the course of these concluding remarks, I will argue that strategies for the taxonomy
and negotiation of religious difference at Vatican II represent a distinctly modern solution to
theological problems of early modern vintage, and therefore preserve or even deepen the
difficulties they are meant to address. I will demonstrate how this underlying modernist logic
undermines and compromises the ecumenical and interfaith goals of theologians, and call for a
ressourcement in which the texts of Vatican II are read in continuity with longer-standing
magisterial tradition.
Taking my cue from J.Z. Smith’s essay in Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies
and Alexander Henn’s account of the pluralization of religion in India, I rehearse the premodern
Christian use of “religion” and argue that Nostra Aetate’s significance lies not so much in
liberalizing attitudes toward non-Christians from a supposedly negative and oppositional default
stance but in enshrining the concept of multiple “religions” and the specific traditions
“Hinduism” and “Buddhism” as terms of theological discourse authorized by conciliar usage. I
draw upon my own fieldwork among Catholic and Hindu devotees of St. Antony in India to
argue that the turn to a modern taxonomy of religious difference in Nostra Aetate has significant
disadvantages when compared with a more traditional approach in which “religion” remained
singular, the most significant of which is the alienation as “syncretism” of “Hindu” religious
practices from Tamil Popular Catholicism in the account of elite theologians and clerics and the
hardening of religious boundaries in an increasingly communalist India. Rather than benefiting
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the situation on the ground by promoting dialogue and amity, the propagation of the notion of
“religions” which may engage in dialogue but are mutually-exclusive and hermetically-sealed
complicates the religious, cultural, and political identities of Indian Catholics, who are accused
of rejecting Indian culture.
Theology Before Modernity
The common (and mistaken) view of Catholic theology before the Second Vatican
Council is that it was exclusivistic, denied the salvation of non-Christians in absolute and nonuncertain terms, and aggressively policed its own borders to avoid borrowing from other
religions and expurgate any elements of magical and supernatural healing which may have
survived from antiquity. This picture is simplistic and incorrect, more closely approximating the
state of affairs in modern Christianity than the more traditional Catholic view. As discussed in
Chapter One, the premodern Catholic understanding of “religion” was unitary and inclusive,
offering an account of religious belonging in which there is only one “religion,” which admits of
degrees of participation and is capable of baptizing and assimilating alien peoples and customs to
itself without compromising its identity in the process.
Truth Outside the Institutional Church
While it would be anachronistic to speak of the Catholic view of other “religions” before
the plural concept of religion came into general use, it is accurate to state that strategies for
evaluating the truth, goodness, and value of cultural material from “pagan” sources varied in
premodern Christian discourse, and were by no means uniformly negative. As discussed in
Chapter One, Augustine predated the plural use of the word “religion” in Christian theology, but
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this did not make it impossible for him to affirm that true religion exists outside the institutional
confines of the Catholic Church. The Retractiones to De Vera Religione clarify Augustine’s
belief that true religion has always existed, but only recently has been called “Christian.”
Righteous pagans and the patriarchs and prophets of the Hebrew Bible did not practice
“Christianity,” but nevertheless practiced true religion.168
This positive judgment was by no means restricted to evaluating non-Christian cultures of
the past. Augustine explicitly affirmed that there were elements of truth and goodness in
contemporary non-Christian cultures which Christians should not hesitate to borrow. He claimed
that this program of borrowing was a norm not only with respect to secular subjects, such as
rhetoric and the other liberal arts, but also applies to cultural institutions possessing ethical or
religious significance:
If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed
true and well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said
should be taken from them … and converted to our use. … All the teachings of the pagans contain
not only simulated and superstitious imagining and grave burdens of unnecessary labor … but also
liberal disciplines most suited to the uses of truth, and some most useful precepts concerning morals.
Even some truths concerning the worship of one God are discovered among them … [NonChristian] clothing, which is made up of those human institutions which are accommodated to
human society and necessary to the conduct of life, should be seized and held to be converted to
Christian uses.169
Augustine’s language does not permit one to conclude he believed there are multiple “religions”
and more than one can be true, but it does permit one to see that even in the premodern, singular
religion model, the relationship between “Christianity” and “true religion” was not so absolute
that the presence of “religion” outside the visible confines of the Church need necessarily be
168
J.H.S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953, pp. 218, 231).
169
St. Augustine On Christian Doctrine, translated by D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice
Hall, 1997, p. 75).
185
denied. The Church could as easily borrow elements from Jewish monotheism, Graeco-Roman
rituals, and the beliefs and practices of Celtic and Germanic tribes where these were considered
expressions of true religion as it could denounce alien practices as demonic counterfeits
engineered to trick human beings into worshiping the Devil. Both strategies coexisted and were
pursued in different proportions at different times, with appropriation predominating before the
high Middle Ages and a significant sharpening of boundaries coinciding with early modernity.
With Augustinian theology guiding the Church through the early Middle Ages, it should
come as little surprise that the development of Catholicism represented an ambitious and
omnivorous program of religious inculturation. By the end of the classical period, Christianity
could be described as a pagan appropriation of the beliefs and practices of a messianic Jewish
sect of the first century CE in terms of Middle Platonic philosophical categories such as ousia
and logos under the influence of Roman imperial religion.170 The roots of this synthesis go back
further than Augustine himself. The Apostle Paul wrote of the sacramental practice of baptism
canceling the irreconcilability of “Jew” and “Gentile” and creating a single community open to
all nations and peoples on an equal basis.171 The term “catholic” in fact means “universal.”
Subsequent generations in the tradition of Justin Martyr borrowed the Greek intellectual tradition
of theologia from Stoic and Platonic schools, culminating in a series of conciliar creeds which
described the nature of the Hebrew God Yahweh in terms of Neoplatonic metaphysics.172
170
On the general idea that Christianity assimilated Jewish and Graeco-Roman cultural material from the
apostolic period through classical antiquity, see the discussion of Hermann Gunkel in Robert D. Baird, Category
Formation and the History of Religions (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991, pp. 145-146).
171
Eph. 2.12-19.
172
The term theologia is first attested in Plato’s Republic, where it describes the cosmogonies of Greek poets.
Aristotle borrowed the term and reframed it to correspond to his distinction between mythos and logos. It was
transmitted to Christian thinkers borrowing from Platonic and Stoic philosophical traditions probably through the
Middle Stoic Marcus Terentis Varro, whose use of the term is quoted in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica and
186
Monotheism bent so far as to permit sculptural and iconic images of Jesus and the saints to be
made and venerated so long as a technical distinction between the worship due to God alone
(latreia) and religious service due to saints (douleia) was observed, rendering monotheistic
Christianity visually indistinguishable from polytheistic paganism.173 Under the Christian
Roman emperors, Christianity assumed the mantle of the old imperial Roman religion, with the
pope assuming the title of pontifex at the head of the city’s priestly bureaucracy. This initial,
classical phase of inculturation, which Augustine theorized but did not himself inaugurate, is best
described as the wholesale Romanization of an originally Semitic religion.
Early medieval Christians took Augustine as their primary theological authority, adopting
Augustine’s singular definition of religio, his idea that elements of truth and goodness exist
outside the institutional ecclesia, and his norm that it is expedient to borrow elements from
“pagan” cultures that are not incompatible with Christianity. As Christianity moved beyond the
Mediterranean, it entered its next major phase of inculturation.
James C. Russell writes of the pervasive Germanization of the Church during the
medieval period as Christians reached out to evangelize Saxons and Franks and other tribes who
had never been assimilated to Roman culture.174 Frankish sacred kingship fused with Roman
Augustine’s Civitas Dei. On the attestation of the term, see Francis E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A
Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1976, p. 193).
173
The technical distinction between latreia and douleia was ultimately established at the Second Council of
Nicea of 789, an ecumenical council called to resolve controversy that had erupted in the Eastern Roman Empire
over the ancient practice of venerating icons. Alexander Henn discusses debate over latria and veneratio (the
ecclesiastical Latin translations of the key Greek terms) in early modern Europe in connection with
Protestant/Catholic iconoclasm on the continent and its transference to the Asian missions, observing that this
technical distinction was probably lost to most ordinary Christian lay people, for whom the two terms were
functional equivalents. See Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and
Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, pp 49-51).
174
James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to
Religious Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Russell summarizes the nature of the
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Christianity to create the ideal of a Christian king uniting his extended domains as a political
entity known as Christendom (Russell, 189-190). Roman basilicas gave way to Gothic
(Germanic) cathedrals whose vaulted shape was intended to resemble the forest canopies
Germanic pagans considered sacred.175 G. Ronald Murphy, Jesuit translator of the Frankish
Germanic inculturation on pp. 212-213 in twelve points. The basic claim is that a world-denying, ascetic-tending,
anomic, heterogeneous, urban, violence-negative Mediterranean tradition ran up against a world-affirming,
“sociobiological,” integrated, homogeneous, rural, and warrior-dominated Germanic culture it could not possibly
convert without pursuing a conscious policy of accommodation. Rather than insisting upon non-violence or worlddenial, the Germanic accommodation consecrated the Germanic warrior ethos in new “religiopolitical” institutions
such as Frankish sacred kingship, Christendom, and chivalry and offered new “magicoreligious” options to
Germanic peoples through the negotiated acceptance of magical practice in the context of the cult of the saints.
According to Russell, these measures were intended by missionaries to be provisional tactics in the interest of the
ultimate Christianization of the Germanic peoples, but as the older organic worldview was too entrenched to
displace, the net result was the Germanization of Christianity.
175
François-René de Chateaubriand, La Génie du Christianisme, Part 3, Book 1, Chapter 8 (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1966). Elizabeth Emery claims that the association between cathedrals and trees is a Romantic-era
myth in Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2001, pp. 13-14), but the interpretation of many premodern Christian worship spaces is
contested, and I accept G. Ronald Murphy’s association of tree motifs in early Scandinavian churches with the pagan
world-tree Yggrasil, which would provide an early architectural precedent for the identification. Commenting about
the Dream of the Rood, Gregory E. Jordan observes that there is no clear point in the inculturation of Christianity
among the Germanic peoples at which pagan and Christian associations with sacred trees parted ways, leaving open
the possibility of polyvalent iconography, such as Gothic cathedrals created in imitation of sacred groves, even at
relatively late dates. Jordan writes: “It is possible that trees could still have had religious associations, because in
pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon paganism, trees seem to have been worshiped either directly or as markers of cult sites.
The world-tree of Scandinavian mythology, Yggdrasil, played a role so similar to the cosmic cross in patristic
writings that some have wondered whether or not there was mutual influence … Religious devotion to trees
continued after the adoption of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England, as evidenced by its regular condemnation in
the law codes (even as late as the eleventh century) … From the language of these law codes, it appears that small
groups of people may have worshiped at the sites of certain trees. There is also some evidence, in the famous ‘Nine
Herbs Charm,’ that the Christian-era English were familiar with the myth of Woden hanging on a tree … From the
same period there were stories of ordinary church crucifixes which ‘were believed to have spoken, trembled, bled,
lost their crowns or intervened in human affairs in various ways’ … and it is tempting to wonder about the possible
continuities between these miracle stories and those told of worshiped trees or wooden idols according to paganism.
It would be difficult to decide where the dividing line fell in time and tradition between pre-Christian beliefs about
trees and Christians beliefs about crosses, but perhaps what is most important to point out is how it might be better
to see the two as continuous traditions across time with only faint marks of distinction occasionally applied to them
by those who used them. The Christian traditions about the cross in Anglo-Saxon England can thus be seen as using
pre-Christian traditions in a Christian context.” Gregory E. Jordan, Traces of Emotion in the Dream of the Rood
(Doctoral thesis, University of South Florida, 1996, pp 61-62).
188
warrior epic the Heliand, argues that Scandinavian stave churches and the distinctive round
churches of the island of Bornholm are architectural renderings of the pagan world-tree
Yggrdrasil, and documents pagan mythological motifs on Viking grave-crosses in Yorkshire.176
Murphy also describes pagan aspects of the runic Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire,
Scotland, an Anglo-Saxon preaching cross situated in Clan Johnston territory which is inscribed
with verses from The Dream of the Rood (Murphy, 125-153). Pope Gregory I writing to the
missionary Abbot Mellitus in the early seventh century urged the latter to maintain the customs
of the Germanic invaders of England so far as possible, even to the extent of rededicating former
temples as churches:
If the shrines are well built, it is essential that they should be changed from the worship of devils to
the service of the true God. When this people see that their shrines are not destroyed they will be
able to banish error from their hearts and be more ready to come to the places they are familiar with,
but now recognizing and worshipping the true God. 177
176
G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013). On the Yggdrasil motif in Scandinavian stave churches, see pp. 25-65. Murphy, a
medievalist, describes the visual ethnography he conducted of several stave churches throughout Scandinavia and
interprets his findings in terms of extent medieval Germanic literature concerning the world-tree. In pp. 66-97, he
offers a similar examination of round churches on the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm. Perhaps the clearest evidence
for pagan inculturation comes from Viking grave crosses at Middleton in Yorkshire, described at pp. 98-121.
177
Pope Gregory’s Letter to Mellitus is quoted in its entirety in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 56-57). Russell’s Germanization of Early Christianity
discusses the Gregorian mission strategy and the Letter to Mellitus at pp. 183-192. Russell notes that Gregorian
mission strategies were negotiated on a case-by-case basis, with an aggressive stance aimed at suppressing pagan
worship wherever that was possible, and accommodation and assimilation in the interest of gradual conversion
wherever suppression would prove impossible. According to Russell, “Gregory’s letter to Mellitus marks a ‘real
turning point in the development of papal missionary strategy.’ Whereas there had previously been an ‘almost
unquestioned policy of reliance on coercion by the secular authorities,’ there now existed a policy of
accommodation, backed up by less overt political pressure … The general missionary policy of Gregory, and later
Boniface, may be summarized as ‘that which cannot be supplanted by preaching or coercion, may be
accommodated’” (187). The result was not conversion but what Russell clumsily terms “syncretism,” resulting in a
situation in which “the worldly, magicoreligious, heroic, folk religiosity of the pre-Christian Germanic peoples was
transferred from Odin, Tiwaz, Thor, and Freyja, and the shrines and amulets dedicated to them, to Christus Victor,
his loyal saints, and their shrines and relics … Given the depth to which a worldly, heroic, magicoreligious
religiosity was rooted within the world-accepting, folk-centered Germanic worldview, the general result of this
policy of accommodation or ‘inculturation,’ whether intended or not, was the emergence of a worldly, heroic,
189
The literary and archaeological evidence bear out that this policy was instituted, with royal
burials such as Sutton Hoo and the Franks Casket combining Christian with Graeco-Roman and
Germanic religious motifs. New epic poems such as Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood
Christianized the Germanic pagan martial ethos, and poems such as the “Nine Herbs Charm” in
the Lacugna casually juxtaposed Christ and Woden for magical healing effects.178 Far from
being opposed to the assimilation of alien religious material as “syncretism,” the premodern
Church’s normal impulse was to baptize the pagan wherever feasibly possible and to understand
the continued retention of material it could not assimilate under the minor offense of
“superstition” rather than heresy or a definitive break with the Christian faith. Gustavo
Benavides describes the general situation before the eleventh century as a wholesale assimilation
of pagan practices characterized by a generalized, open use of magic.179 Although inroads were
made to limit “superstition” beginning in the high Middle Ages, pre-Christian magical practices
were largely tolerated, and any systematic efforts to extricate Christianity from “syncretism” or
extirpate “superstition” awaited early modernity.
During the high Middle Ages, Aquinas formalized and nuanced Augustine’s taxonomy of
religious difference and assessment of truth outside the institutional ecclesia but introduced no
magicoreligious Christianity. The magicoreligious reinterpretation of Christianity may be considered the most
immediate and salient effect of its Germanization” (188-189).
178
“In the famous ‘Nine Herbs Charm,’ healing is sought from Woden, the "wise Lord, holy in heaven where
he hung" … who sends two herbs, personified beings who fight on behalf of the patient … This seems to have been
a reinterpretation of traditional healing practices in accordance with a story that told how, at his Ascension into
heaven, Jesus was supposed to have given certain herbs the power to heal” (Jordan, 105-106).
179
Gustavo Benavides, “Modernity,” in Mark C. Taylor’s edited volume Critical Terms for Religious Studies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 198).
190
radical innovations. As discussed in Chapter One, religio remained singular and admitted
degrees of participation. Christians could defect into increasing degrees of infidelity including
schism, heresy, or even apostasy, the total repudiation of Christian faith. Jews and Muslims were
classified as heretics. Unlike Augustine, who used the terms more-or-less interchangeably to
refer to illicit aspects of pagan cult, Aquinas distinguished between idololatria and superstitio.
For Aquinas, superstitio was a generic category, with idololatria a particular member of that
category. Defined as worshiping other than one should, directing worship to the wrong object or
worshiping the right object the wrong way, superstitio was basically a miscellaneous category for
pagan survivals such as divination, magical practices, and idolatry.180 Unless superstitio was
aggravated by idolatry, heresy, or malevolent magic (maleficium), it was not a particularly
serious charge, and normally remained unpunished in both secular and religious tribunals until
the early modern witchcraft craze associated with the 1487 publication of the Malleus
Maleficarum.181 Like Augustine’s taxonomy, this was a relatively positive framework for
appropriating alien beliefs and practices, and Aquinas himself was famous for significant
appropriations from Muslim writers and the pagan philosopher Aristotle.
The Renaissance inaugurated a protracted parting of the ways between doctrinally
traditional Christians who remained faithful to the Augustinian/Thomistic taxonomy of religious
difference and modernists whose religious boundary-making activities ultimately resulted in the
world religions paradigm. I will discuss modernity and its discontinuities with the earlier
paradigm in a later section; for now, I turn to Renaissance currents in continuity with the
Augustinian/Thomistic program of cultural synthesis.
180
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Questions 92-96.
181
See Chapter 1 Note 9.
191
For Renaissance Catholics, the typical strategy for evaluating the complexes beginning to
be classified as plural “religions” was to interpret them as mythical survivals of a primordial
revelation to Adam and Eve, special divine revelations bestowed by providence to ensure that
people geographically and historically removed from Christ possessed some benefit of religion,
remnants of some early Christian missionary’s teaching, a fabrication of human beings that
expressed their innate desire for God, or else demonic delusion.182 These evaluations were not
understood to be strictly mutually-exclusive, so the judgment of particular theologians and
missionaries often vacillated between positive and negative assessments of different aspects of
the same cultural traditions. With the exception of demonic delusion, these strategies were
positive or at worst neutral in their evaluation of the truth and goodness of non-Christian customs
and implied that missionary activity should aim primarily at drawing out the positive elements
already present in other cultures rather than wholesale rejection and replacement.
When theologians and missionaries debated appropriate and inappropriate strategies of
religious inculturation, the terms of dispute were initially Augustinian/Thomistic, with the
terminology of ritus, idololatria, and superstitio as touchstones, but began to shift by the
seventeenth century to language explicitly presupposing plural religions with mutually-exclusive
boundaries. Nicholas of Cusa, describing in 1453 the diversity of ritual practice prevailing
among Judeans, Arabs, and members of various nations, wrote of “religio una in rituum
varietate,” or one religion in a diversity of rites.183 A detractor with a more negative appraisal of
non-Christian cultures might have written of Judeans or Arabs being given to superstitiones or
182
Trent Pomplun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Tibet (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010, pp. 79-79).
183
Nicholas of Cusa in James E. Biechler and H. Lawrence Bond’s translation of On Interreligious Harmony:
Text, Concordance, and Translation of De Pace Fidei (Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Press, 1990, p. 7).
192
idololatria depending on the severity of negative judgment, but he or she would not have written
of opposing religiones, and most likely would have followed Cusa in identifying the protagonists
in terms of ethnic as opposed to religious identities. Jesuit proponents of accommodation
referred to disputed practices in Asia as the Chinese and Malabar Rites (ritus) and appealed to
Pope Gregory’s letter to Abbot Mellitus to justify their present inculturation efforts, implying the
goodness and legitimacy of these alien practices as aspects of true religio and the continuity of
their own inculturation efforts with those of the medieval church, while their early opponents
tended to accuse these practices of being illicit idololatria or superstitio.184
Jesuit accommodation efforts rode a high tide of Renaissance enthusiasm about nonChristian cultures, historic and contemporary. Renaissance humanists extolled Greek and
Roman classical literature and accorded the pagan philosophers Plato and Aristotle an authority
only slightly less than that of scripture and the early church fathers (Pomplun, 79). The Council
of Florence sparked major Platonic and Hermetic revivals as Greek delegates arrived in Italy
bearing ancient texts that had been lost in the West since the fall of Rome. Neoplatonists such as
Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola offered theological justification for Christian study of
astrology, theurgy, natural magic, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism.185 Their works proved so
184
Roberto de Nobili, Customs of the Indian Nation 10.13, in Anand Amaladass, S.J., and Francis X.
Clooney, S.J., Preaching Wisdom to the Wise: Three Treatises by Roberto de Nobili, S.J., Missionary and Scholar in
Seventeenth Century India (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2000, p, 214).
185
For an illustration of the spirit of esotericism and cultural synthesis informing the Renaissance
Neoplatonists, I offer a short passage from Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1998, pp. 13-14): “Not only the Mosaic or Christian mysteries but also the theology of the
ancients show the advantages for us and the dignity of these liberal arts about which I have come here to dispute.
For what else is meant by the degrees of initiation that are customary in the secret rites of the Greeks? First, to those
who had been purified by moral and dialectic arts, which we have called, as it were, purgative, befell the reception
of the mysteries. And what else can this reception be but the interpretation of more hidden nature by means of
philosophy? Then lastly, to those who had been thus prepared, came that epopteia that is, a vision of divine things
by means of the light of theology. Who does not seek to be initiated into such rites? Who does not set all human
things at a lower value and, condemning the goods of fortune and neglecting the body, does not desire, while still
193
influential that a floor mosaic of Hermes Trismegistus was installed in the Cathedral of Siena,
where it remains to this day.186
According to Trent Pomplun and David Mungello, Hermeticism was tolerated within the
Jesuit order and significantly influenced the Chinese missions through Bouvet, Kircher, and the
Figurists.187 In the Siena cathedral mosaic, the figure of Hermes Trismegistus was identified in a
caption as a pagan contemporary of Moses responsible for bestowing laws and letters upon the
Egyptian people. For theologians and missionaries influenced by the Hermetic tradition, Hermes
Trismegistus was credited with the cultural diffusion of Platonic and “Pythagorean” doctrines,
being regarded as an exemplar of a primordial revelation of the Gentiles and the ultimate
historical source of the Platonic tradition (Copenhaver, xlviiii). Theologians and missionaries
would attribute “Pythagorean” doctrines such as reincarnation encountered in Asia to the cultural
continuing on earth, to become the drinking companion of the gods; and, drunken with the nectar of eternity, to
bestow the gift of immortality upon the mortal animal? Who does not wish to have breathed into him the Socratic
frenzies sung by Plato in the Phaedrus, that by the oarlike movement of wings and feet he may quickly escape from
here, that is, from this world where he is laid down, as in an evil place, and be carried in speediest flight to the
heavenly Jerusalem. We shall be possessed, fathers, we shall be possessed by these Socratic frenzies, which will so
place us outside of our minds that they will place our mind and ourselves in God. We shall be possessed by them if
we have first done what is in us to do. For if through morality the forces of the passions will have been so stretched
to the [proper] measure, through due proportions, that they sound together in fixed concord, and if through dialectic,
reason will have moved, keeping time in her forward march, then, aroused by the frenzy of the muses, we shall drink
in the heavenly harmony of our ears. Then Bacchus the leader of the muses, in his own mysteries, that is, in the
visible signs of nature, will show the invisible things of God to us as we philosophize, and will make us drunk with
the abundance of the house of God. In this house, if we are faithful like Moses, holiest theology will approach, and
will inspire us with a twofold frenzy. We, raised up into the loftiest watchtower of theology, from which, measuring
with indivisible eternity the things that are, will be, and shall have been, and looking at their primeval beauty, shall
be prophets of Phoebus, his winged lovers, and finally, aroused with ineffable charity as with fire, placed outside of
ourselves like burning Seraphim, filled with divinity, we shall now not be ourselves, but He himself who made us.”
186
Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New
English Translation with Notes and Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. xxi-xxxii, 222).
187
Pomplun 182-185 and David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of
Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, pp. 29-31).
194
diffusion of the Egyptian revelation to Hermes Trismegistus, or alternately interpret ancient
culture-givers such as Fuxi (traditional author of the Yìjīng) as misidentified Biblical personages
whose writings dimly preserve a primordial revelation to the gentiles (Pomplun, 183; Mungello,
31).
In Vico’s New Science, non-Christian mythologies are reconciled to a Biblical chronology
and read as sources of ancient customs and laws which reflect God’s providential concern for the
gentiles, which as such should be reconciled to Christianity and preserved to the maximum
degree possible.188 Although the scope of this Renaissance synthesis goes well beyond anything
attempted in the classical or medieval period, the idea that religion is singular, truth and
goodness are present outside of the boundaries of the Christian Church, and that one should build
upon the customs of non-Christian peoples insofar as they can be incorporated into Christianity
simply continues the ancient tradition of inculturation inaugurated by the early church and
theorized by Augustine and Aquinas.
Premodern Recognition of Non-Christian Salvation
If there were few artificial barriers in the way of religious borrowing in premodern
Catholicism, what were the attitudes of theologians concerning the salvation of the non-Christian
and the soteriological efficacy of non-Christian traditions? While answers to these questions
varied, the situation did not amount to the unequivocal exclusivism contemporary interpreters
often attribute to Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council. Francis A. Sullivan offers a
book-length treatment of the topic under the title Salvation Outside the Church? in which he
tracks Christian inclusivism from the New Testament period to Vatican II and finds that the
188
Preus, 59-83 and Giambattista Vico, The First New Science, edited and translated by Leon Pompa (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 231-274).
195
theological dictum extra ecclesiam nulla salus was rarely interpreted to mean that no nonChristian could ever be saved. I will weave Sullivan’s account with Trent Pomplun’s description
of the missionary Ippolito Desideri’s encounter with Tibetan Buddhism, as Pomplun both
summarizes Sullivan and demonstrates how the older taxonomy of religious difference was
applied in the Jesuit missions before the practice of accommodation was officially banned.
According to Pomplun, premodern theologians sought to reconcile two competing
teachings of scripture, Mark 16.16 (a scripture expressing the view that a person must believe in
the Christian Gospel and undergo baptism to be saved) and 1 Timothy 2.1-4 (a scripture that
claims God desires all persons without exception to be saved). These competing emphases had
presented theologians with marginal cases to consider since antiquity. What happens to
catechumens who die before they can receive baptism and martyrs who are killed for the faith
before being baptized? What if a person lived before the coming of Christ, or after that, lived
and died without ever hearing the Christian message? The classical answer, the most extensive
medieval form of which was articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, was that it was possible for any
of these hypothetical persons to be saved because both faith and baptism can take implicit or
explicit forms.189 The catechumens’ and martyrs’ faith and desire for baptism were explicit – had
these not met with untimely ends, they would have been baptized. For others in the past, for
example the Jewish patriarchs and righteous pagans, such desires could only be implicit, as they
would not have known of Christ’s coming or the necessity of baptism. For people living before
the time of Christ, those with faith in God and his providence would count as having “implicit”
faith in the Christian Gospel and desire for baptism, thereby qualifying for salvation.190
189
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Third Part, Question 68, Article 2.
190
Francis A. Sullivan, Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response
(Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1992, pp. 49-51).
196
Thinking that the entire known world had been exposed to the Christian message,
Aquinas insisted that everyone since the time of Christ must believe explicitly in Christian
doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation in order to be saved, but reasoned that if someone
did not know about Christ who would otherwise wish to be saved, God would send that person a
private revelation through the ministry of an angel (Sullivan, 52-55; Pomplun, 77). As
theologians learned of the vast numbers of people living in Asia and the Americas who had never
been exposed to Christianity, the private revelation theory fell out of favor and a general
consensus emerged that implicit faith would suffice wherever the existence of God and his
providence were not explicitly denied (Sullivan, 91-99; Pomplun, 77-78). Aquinas’ principle
that God makes salvation a real possibility for each and every human person remained
unchanged, but this was theorized to come about through the ordinary means of implicit faith, as
it had before Christ’s birth, rather than the extraordinary expedient of angelic revelation. In
dealing with Buddhists in Tibet, Ippolito Desideri argued that implicit faith was possible even in
the case of Buddhists who explicitly denied the existence of God because they sincerely accepted
an object of religious refuge and a moral order in which goodness is rewarded and evil requited,
which served as a functional equivalent to belief in deity and providence (Pomplun, 95-96).
Although Aquinas’ inclusivistic views were not universal and there were certainly exclusivists
both before and after the transition to modernity, clearly Desideri was in no need of Lumen
Gentium or the Second Vatican Council to persuade him that the salvation of the non-Christian
was possible or find traditional theological principles to explain how it might come about.
Modernity
From being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge,
religion has come to be abstracted and universalized. In this movement we have not merely an
increase in religious toleration, certainly not merely a new scientific discovery, but the mutation of a
197
concept and a range of social practices which is itself part of a wider change in the modern
landscape of power and knowledge. That change included a new kind of state, a new kind of
science, a new kind of legal and moral subject.191
There were no medieval religions.192
Modernity pluralized “religions” at the cost of reifying them as antagonists. Rather than
opening a space for Christianity’s amicable coexistence and dialogue with its religious other, the
shift from a premodern taxonomy of religious difference to one postulating the existence of a
number of discrete, mutually-exclusive “religions” admitting no combination or admixture
served primarily to deepen divisions. The transition into modernity witnessed a massive
retrenchment by both Catholics and Protestants with respect to the toleration of religious
difference.
Early modernity was a disaster for Christian toleration of religious difference and
absorption of alien religious material. The Spanish Inquisition engaged in massive, systemic
persecution of so-called conversos, Jewish converts to Christianity suspected of retaining
previous customs.193 The reach of the Inquisition was global, producing martyrs and victims as
far away as the Americas.194 Pre-Christian supernatural healing practices previously
Christianized or else categorized as the relatively minor offense of “superstition” became the
191
Talad Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993, pp. 42-43.
192
Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012, p. 258).
193
Henry Arthur Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997, pp. 28-65.
194
Significant numbers of Sephardic conversos fled to Portuguese Goa and the Spanish New World to escape
the Inquisition, and many were ultimately martyred in their destinations when the Inquisition was ultimately
established in the colonies. Cf. Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the
Iberian World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
198
basis for a violent and repressive witch hysteria in Europe with the publication of the Malleus
Maleficarum.195 Yet another Inquisition was launched in Goa in response to Jesuit missionary
Francis Xavier’s concerns that Indian castes which had collectively embraced Catholicism
retained traditional Indian customs (Henn, 47). Matteo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili’s
accommodation efforts in Asia were ultimately banned and the Jesuit order itself suppressed
(Sullivan, 103). Perhaps the most telling transformation of early modernity was the invention
and deployment of a new theological category known as “syncretism.” The word had ancient
pre-Christian roots, but was first used in a Christian context in early modernity, where it referred
to efforts to combine elements of both Protestant and Catholic theology into a single system;
originally a positive term used by Erasmus, who praised it as an instrument of reconciliation, the
word quickly acquired deeply pejorative overtones and degenerated into a term of abuse.196 As
modern historians of religion such as Hermann Gunkel have sometimes asserted on the basis of
the premodern history of Christianity that the religion simply is syncretism, this state of affairs is
odd. After Erasmus, the category appears to have been deployed primarily to reflect a new
taxonomy of religious difference in which there are multiple, irreconcilable “religions” whose
boundaries are sacrosanct and should not be transgressed.
Like J.Z. Smith before him, Alexander Henn traces the advent of the world religions
paradigm to the Wars of Religion that engulfed Europe from the mid-sixteenth century and
Iberian Catholicism’s colonial encounter with sophisticated religious cultures in newlydiscovered lands. Henn complements Smith’s account, focusing not on the Spanish Americas
195
See Chapter 1 Note 9.
196
Peter van der Veer, “Syncretism, Multiculturalism, and the Discourse of Tolerance” in Charles Stewart and
Rosalind Shaw’s Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.
196-197).
199
like Smith but on Portuguese India as an unexplored part of the modern religious transformation.
In both contexts, a premodern ambivalence toward the alien which allowed either oppositional or
assimilationist readings of religious difference uultimately resolved into a taxonomy of religious
difference separating and dichotomizing distinct “religions” and condemning “syncretism.”
Spanish sources on the Americas speak of native “religion” early. Already in 1520,
Hernan Cortes wrote of Aztec “religious” (ritual specialists) who “entran en la religion.”197
Although Piedro Cieza de Leon wrote in 1553 of the indigenous peoples of the north Andres as
“observing no religion at all, as we understand it” with no “houses of worship,” his opinion did
not prevail, with Joseph de Acosta referring again to the “priests” and “religious” of Mexico in
1590 (Smith, 269-270). Cortes represents a more oppositional approach to the premodern
taxonomy of religion than Gama in India, conceiving of Aztec religion as “idolatry” and
endeavoring to destroy idols and replace them with images of the Virgin Mary. Rather than
assimilating the religious alien to Christianity like Gama, Cortes seems to have interpreted his
relationship to Aztec religion in terms of the Spanish Reconquista and its conflict with Islam,
using the Spanish loanword for a mosque (mezquita) as the word for an Aztec temple and
endeavoring to destroy temples (270). These early Spanish invocations of “religion” do not
pluralize the concept of religion or set up an abstract, generic category “religion” admitting
multiple religions. Cortes could recognize “religion” in the Aztec culture and yet condemn it on
analogy to the Spanish treatment of Islam as a heretical and destructive manifestation of the
Christian religion. Later missionaries in the Americas such as Blas Valera would adopt the more
assimilationist posture of the same paradigm, reading indigenous beliefs and practices as
197
J.Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious” in Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 270).
200
prefigurements of Christ.198
Henn’s account depicts similar ambivalence in India. Gama’s assimilationist
interpretation of native religion as “Indian Christianity” was as early as 1522 opposed by Bishop
Nunez, who called for the destruction of “idols” and “temples” and their replacement with
Christian churches (Henn, 41). As late as the end of the sixteenth century, Diogo do Couto still
expressed ambivalence in his terminology, referring to the natives as practicing a religiao while
at times condemning them for idolatry and even devil worship (32-36, 172). While Gama and
Couto appear to have remained largely within the premodern taxonomy of religious difference
(singular religion, no generic concept of religion, assimilationist and/or oppositional approaches
to religious plurality, and so forth), a new taxonomy was developing, with the Goa Inquisition as
a catalyst and early manifestation.
Crucial to Henn’s account of religious differentiation in India is the influence of the
Protestant Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion on Christianity in Europe. Protestant
theological polemics politicized the Catholic veneration of images and led to waves of
iconoclastic violence throughout mid-sixteenth century Europe (47-54). At the same time, both
Catholics and Protestants moved toward a more ideological and less sacramental understanding
of the faith as sectarian conflict sharpened boundaries and led to ever more precise articulations
of doctrine. Henn calls this new model of Christianity a “semiotic ideology,” a set of
“theological principles and practical attitudes controlling and disciplining the use of images,
rituals, and the body, and favoring the significance of text, education, and personal creed” (Henn,
198
Sabine Hyland, The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2011, p. 1). Valera advocated retaining many aspects of pre-Spanish native religion,
claimed that the Incas had an implicit knowledge of Christ, and wrote of the deposed Inca emperor Atahuallpa as a
saint in heaven.
201
54). The dynamic of Catholic-Protestant conflict in Europe was replicated by the Portuguese in
India, resulting in waves of iconoclasm directed at temples and images from the early 1540s, the
installation of a printing press by the Jesuits to promote the theological principles of the Council
of Trent, and ultimately the establishment of the Goa Inquisition to suppress native Christian
participation in non-Christian rites and practices (47). Gama’s “Indian Christianity” had become
to European Christians if not to their converts a rival, mutually-exclusive “religion” which
Christians could not participate in without compromising their loyalties. For Henn, the
“confessionalization” of early modern Christianity and the gradual “syndication” of Hinduism as
its mutually-opposed other was a key step in the global pluralization of religion and thus the
world religions paradigm (172). The premodern taxonomy of religious difference continued to
exist and had exemplars up to the Second Vatican Council, but was gradually displaced by the
new paradigm, fatally compromising the Jesuit theological project of accommodation.
The Chinese and Malabar Rites Controversies that followed the Goa Inquisition offer an
ideal window into the developing taxonomy of religious difference in early modernity. After
initial successes, Jesuit defenders of the Rites ultimately were defeated and the order suppressed
not because the theological precedents for their program of accommodation had changed, but
because the semantic ground surrounding the key terms of debate had shifted, making a defense
of the Rites based on the older conception of religio increasingly untenable. Originally, the
controversy between the Jesuit Asian missions and their Franciscan, Dominican, and Jansenist
detractors was debated in largely traditional terms, but by the end of the conflict, both parties had
drifted in terminology from the medieval taxonomy, with the Jesuits’ opponents going so far as
to consider any participation in non-Christian ritual practices an illicit participation in a
mutually-exclusive system of cult.
202
In the initial phases of conflict, both sides were at their most traditional, and the debate
was conducted in terms of conventional theological categories such as superstitio and
idololatria. Both sides appeared to accept a singular definition of religion admitting of degrees
of participation, and neither side appealed to the early modern distinction between distinct
“secular” and “religious” spheres of life.199 Matteo Ricci referred to Confucian, Buddhist, and
Daoist practices as three Chinese approaches to “religion,” rather than three “religions”
(Standaert, 88-89). Ricci’s evaluation of Chinese ancestor veneration and rites for Confucius
was that such practices were “certainly not idolatrous, and perhaps not even superstitious” (88).
His detractors argued that the rites were certainly superstitious and probably idolatrous, and took
their case to Rome, hoping to get the practices banned (Pomplun, 136). A 1645 decision of the
Congregatio de Propaganda Fide condemned the Chinese Rites as “superstition,” but used no
stronger language. This initial decision was reversed in 1656.200 Although the debate was
traditional in terminology, the dispute has an element of novelty in that one side held that mere
superstition, rather than the more serious offense of idolatry, should be a matter for serious
controversy. Going back to Pope Gregory the Great’s Germanic inculturation program, the
recommended response to superstitio was tacit toleration in the interest of evangelization,
although Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions and European witch hunts from the mid-fifteenth
century were beginning to invest the charge with greater seriousness.
The next major phase of controversy occurred nearly simultaneously in India and China
between Italian Jesuits committed to the program of inculturation and their mostly Spanish and
199
George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy from Its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola
Press, 1985, p. 20) and Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between
China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008, p. 89).
200
Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial
China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 274).
203
Portuguese rivals. Roberto de Nobili in Madurai and Matteo Ricci’s successors in the Jesuit
Chinese mission maintained a singular definition of religion, but some of their rivals already had
conceived the opinion that Christianity and “paganism” or “superstition” constituted mutuallyexclusive systems of cult. The Archbishop of Goa, Cristovão da Sá, sought the condemnation of
Nobili and his Malabar Rites, arguing that “a Father of the Society of Jesus has gone over to
paganism, and he asks me to connive in his apostasy” (Pomplun, 137). As “apostasy” requires
complete repudiation of the Christian religion and superstitio and idololatria are defined as
improper forms of participation in the one true religion rather than its complete repudiation, it is
clear that Sá implicitly accepted a plural conception of religion in which religions are distinct
and mutually-exclusive, with participation in one necessarily entailing rejection of another. This
is consonant with Henn’s account of the emergence of the world religions paradigm in
Portuguese Goa (Henn, 172). Writing from France, the Jansenist Noël Alexandre accused the
Rites of being idolatrous in 1700, following the language of Pascal’s 1656 Fifth Provincial
Letter, which polemicized against the Jesuits for permitting “idolatry itself” in Asia.201 Nobili
and the Jesuits in China compensated for this development by appealing to an emerging early
modern distinction between sacred and secular forms of ceremonial, arguing that the disputed
rituals and customs possessed only “civil” and not “religious” significance (Nobili, 210-214;
Standaert, 89-90) If non-Christian rituals were interpreted as “civil” rather than “religious”
ceremonial, there would be no forced choice between mutually-exclusive religious traditions
involved in participating in such practices. Roman judgments in the Rites Controversy followed
a trajectory of increasing implicit investment in the emerging world religions paradigm,
201
Guy Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010, p. 148) and Blaise Pascal, Pensées and The Provincial Letters (New York: Modern Library,
1941, p. 375).
204
gradually moving from condemnations of “superstition” to condemnations of “idolatry,” while at
the same time drifting from the more traditional idea that any non-Christian ceremonial that is
not intrinsically opposed to true religion may be adopted, to the modern idea that any
participation in non-Christian ceremonial is opposed to true religion as such, merely by virtue of
its origins.202
The Second Vatican Council
The Vatican II documents Nostra Aetate and Lumen Gentium have sometimes been
interpreted as representing a watershed moment in the history of Christianity when Christians
conceived of a constructive, non-oppositional posture toward religious difference for the first
time. Starting at Vatican II, religious material from other traditions could be borrowed by
Christians and Christians accepted that non-Christians could be saved. As we have already
discovered, nothing about this picture is in fact accurate – with respect to borrowing from other
traditions, this has been undertaken wholesale from the very beginning of Christianity, and with
respect to salvation, the Thomistic expedients of individual revelation and implicit faith have
been perennial resources for the assertion that non-Christians could be saved. Premodern
Christianity knew of no concept of “syncretism” to complicate its borrowing of alien cultural
202
The drift in conceptuality is apparent from a comparison of Clement XI’s 1715 bull Ex Illa Die
(reaffirmed in 1742 by Benedict XIV in Ex Quo Singulari) with earlier magisterial documents such as Propaganda
Fide’s ruling in favor of the Rites in 1659. Clement’s bull permitted only “Chines customs and traditions that can in
no way be interpreted as heathen in nature.” Under the earlier judgment, Chinese Christians could observe “their
rites, their customs, their ways, as long as these are not openly opposed to religion and good morals.” In the earlier
judgment, alien religious material not in direct contradiction to Christian religion could be assimilated; in later
judgments, any connection with alien religion whatsoever taints otherwise acceptable material. To the best of my
knowledge, the first magisterial document to actually go so far as to refer to the Chinese Rites as “idolatrous” rather
than merely “superstitious” is Clement XIV’s Dominus Ac Redemptor Noster of 1773, the papal decree that
suppressed the Jesuit Order.
205
materials and postulated no non-Christian “religions” with which Christianity might stand in an
inimical, mutually-opposed relationship. When Vasco da Dama encountered “Hindus,” he
systematically interpreted them as “Indian Christians” (Henn, 19-22). Far from being unique in
offering this interpretation of religious aliens in terms of degrees of participation in Christianity,
Gama was joined in this strategy by Jesuit theologians in Europe such as Suarez and Lugo,
missionaries such as Ippolito Desideri in Tibet and Blas Valera in Peru, and Renaissance
philosophers and theorists of religion such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and
Giambattista Vico.203 If one were to imagine a world in which Nostra Aetate and Lumen
Gentium had never been written, but the Augustinian taxonomy of religious difference persisted
and continued to be expressed in terms of the missionary strategy the Jesuits named
“accommodatio,” it is difficult to imagine what positive goods would be lost to the theological
tradition in the areas of ecumenical goodwill and mutual understanding. It is undeniably true
that Nostra Aetate and Lumen Gentium were important developments in twentieth century
Catholicism, but for different reasons than commonly supposed. Rather than introducing novel
teachings, they recapture some of what was lost in Christian theology’s fall into modernity and
the world religions paradigm, although at the risk of further reinscribing the world religions
paradigm they reinterpret.
Of the two major Vatican II documents, Lumen Gentium is the more traditional. After
noting that all human beings are called into the Catholic Church and that all persons either
belong or are related to the Church, Lumen Gentium refers to Jews, Muslims, and “those who in
shadows and images seek the unknown God” as included in the Christian plan of salvation and
affirms that whatever elements of grace and truth exists among them is a gift from God offered to
203
On the inclusivism of Suarez and Lugo, see Sullivan, pp. 91-99.
206
prepare them for the Gospel (LG 14). Lumen Gentium also explicitly affirms that non-Christians
can attain salvation (LG 16). These statements would not have been out of place in the writings
of Thomas Aquinas, as they maintain the singularity of religio, the necessity of implicit or
explicit faith in Christianity for salvation, and the availability of salvation to all persons through
the elements of grace and truth God has made available to them in their own traditions. No
complex of belief and practice other than Catholic Christianity is enumerated as a “religion,”
Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism remain both undifferentiated and unnamed, and
the taxonomy while mentioning Jews and Muslims interprets Jews as belonging to a people and
Muslims as professing a faith, with neither practicing a distinct “religion.” Nor would the
document appear radical in comparison with its immediate magisterial precedents, which
included Leonard Feeney’s censure and excommunication for denying the salvation of nonChristians, the 1854 papal allocution Singulari Quadam which affirmed that “invincible
ignorance” excuses from guilt in denying the one true religion, and the reversal of the
seventeenth century suppression of the Chinese and Malabar Rites by Pope Pius XII.204 Rather
than representing any degree of doctrinal innovation, Lumen Gentium amounted to a forceful
restatement of then-current teaching.
The other major Vatican II document concerning religious difference is the Declaration
on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, or Nostra Aetate. Like Lumen
Gentium, Nostra Aetate is positive in evaluating the truth, goodness, and soteriological potential
of non-Christian customs, but when considered overall is significantly less traditional a
document, identifying cultural systems which propose doctrines, moral precepts, and rites as
204
On Feeney, see Sullivan 3-5. On Magisterial documents pertaining to the salvation of the non-Christian
before Vatican II, see Sullivan 6 and Neuner and Dupuis’ The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the
Catholic Church (New York: Alba House, 2001, p. 311-313). On the reversal of the judgment against the Chinese
and Malabar Rites, see Chapter 3 Note 129.
207
“religions” distinct from Christianity (NA 2). Nostra Aetate opens by offering a general ontology
of religion, in which “religions” are those entities to which people look for the answer to
“unsolved riddles” of human existence. These riddles are existential, dealing with concerns such
as the meaning and purpose of life, morality and immorality, the origin and purpose of suffering,
the way to authentic happiness, the nature of death, post-mortem rewards and judgment, and the
so-called “the ultimate mystery” - a transcendent ground of being beyond human understanding
which encompasses the totality of existence, humanity’s origin and final end (NA 1). This
understanding of religion is broadly phenomenological and Tillichian, conspicuously midtwentieth century in formulation, and deeply at odds with a more traditional definition of religion
at work in later sections of the document. The slippage between traditional and modern concepts
of religion is also reflected in the contradictory language about Muslims and Jews, who are
presumably deemed members of non-Christian religions by virtue of their inclusion in the
document, but, as opposed to Hindus and Buddhists, are never directly referred to as such. Jews
are termed the “stock of Abraham” (stirpae Abrahae), “Jews” (Iudaeis), the “daughters and sons
of Abraham,” and even “Israelites,” but are never referred to as practicing “Judaism” or even a
“religion” (NA 4). Muslims profess a “faith” (fides Islamica, with Islamica operating as a
qualifying adjective rather than a substantive noun), but are not explicitly stated to practice a
religion called “Islam” or indeed any other “religion” (NA 3). The treatment of Jews and
Muslims is inconsistent with the ontology of religion offered in NA 1 and even the more
traditional “doctrine / moral precepts / sacred rites” formulation of religion at NA 2, but
consistent with the premodern Christian taxonomy of religious difference in which their
traditions were classified as specific forms of infidelity vis-a-vis the Christian dispensation rather
than “religions” in their own right. Nostra Aetate is positive about both groups and states that
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the Old Covenant is eternal and valid, the charge of deicide made against the Jews should be
rejected and that antisemitism and discrimination and religious persecution are unacceptable, but
nevertheless it preserves premodern language about the nature of Jewish and Muslim religion.
The reasons for this basic inconsistency in terminology is that section 4 of Nostra Aetate evolved
from an original document called Decretum de Judaeis that exclusively concerned the Church’s
relationship with the Jewish people but was subsequently merged into a Decree on Ecumenism
and further edited to become a more general document on the Church’s relationship with nonChristians.205
The most significant conceptual innovation in Nostra Aetate is the implicit and explicit
pluralization of religion and the enumeration of “Hinduism” and “Buddhism” as two of its
exemplars. In this taxonomy of religious difference, concentrated in the frame sections of the
document (NA 1-2, 5), there is a general class “religion” defined by a shared ontology and set of
existential concerns which encompasses a number of discrete, mutually-exclusive “religions.”
Essentially, this represents a mid-twentieth century articulation of the world religions paradigm
familiar from secular religious studies. In describing what a “religion” looks like in concrete, NA
2 focuses on the idea that a “religion” will provide a “program” or “mode” of life organized
around intellectual, moral, and cultic elements, or “doctrine, moral precepts, and sacred rites” in
the original language of the text. The Church holds a “high regard” for the overall program of
life recommended by non-Christian religions as for the “precepts and doctrines which, although
differing in many ways from its own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which
enlightens all men and women” (NA 2). At the same time, the Church possesses a missionary
obligation to proclaim Christ, in whom “the fullness of … religious life is found” (NA 2).
205
On the draft history of Nostra Aetate, see John Oesterreicher, The New Encounter: Between Christians
and Jews (New York: Philosophical Library, 1986, pp. 103-295).
209
Religion is constituted as a universal category of human experience on the basis of the
common humanity of all religious groups (NA 1), their shared ontology and existential concerns,
and “a certain awareness of a hidden power, which lies behind the course of nature and the
events of human life” giving rise to a generic “religious sense” on the part of human beings (NA
2). On the basis of the providential dispensation of truth to non-Christians and the shared
ontology of religions, “the church … urges its sons and daughters to enter with prudence and
charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions … [and to] preserve
and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, together with their
social life and culture” (NA 2). This call for interreligious dialogue and respect is reiterated at
later points in the document. Christians and Muslims are urged “to forget the past … that a
sincere effort be made to achieve mutual understanding … [and] together preserve and promote
peace, liberty, social justice, and moral values” (NA 3). Jews and Christians have “such a
common spiritual heritage [that] this sacred council wishes to encourage … mutual
understanding and appreciation … by way of biblical and theological enquiry and … friendly
discussions” (NA 4). The understanding of religion implicit in these passages is essentially the
same approach termed “crypto-theological” or “liberal ecumenical theology” by McCutcheon
and Fitzgerald, but it is neither more or less so than its secular counterparts of the era; essentially,
it just is the secular world religions paradigm conceived on the existential-phenomenological
model.
Another indication that Vatican II was deeply influenced by the world religions paradigm
may be gleaned from Ad Gentes 22, which calls for an adaptation of Christianity to non-Christian
cultures which steers clear of both “syncretism,” the inappropriate mixture of religions, and
“exclusiveness.” A more traditional formulation of the same practical goal is offered in
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Sacrosanctum Conclium 3, which allows liturgical adaptation to “cultivate and foster the
qualities and talents of the various races and nations” and allows “anything in people’s way of
life which is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error” to be studied “with
sympathy” and wherever possible preserved intact. Both passages envisage the premodern
practice of accommodatio, but Sacrosanctum Concilium does so on more traditional terms.
While Ad Gentes disallows “syncretism” (the mixture of two or more world religions, even
where the elements are compatible), Sacrosanctum Conclium permits everything that is “not
indissolubly bound up with superstition or error” (that is, inimically opposed to the Christian
faith).
The novelty of Nostra Aetate and allied Vatican II documents such as Ad Gentes lies not
in an optimistic stance about the truth and goodness often present in non-Christian cultures or the
possibility of accommodating the Christian message to the expectations of new cultures. These
already existed in early modernity, a gift from the Church’s Augustinian and Thomistic
theological patrimony. The disputes between missionaries and orders in the early modern
mission fields was about the extent rather than the liceity of accommodatio, and except for the
Jansenists associated with the French Foreign Missionary Society, the debate about the salvation
of non-Christians was more a matter of determining the circumstances under which it might
occur than a question of whether it occurs at all (Pomplun, 152-159). Rather, Nostra Aetate is
novel for being the first magisterial document to clearly presuppose the modern world religions
paradigm and reify that paradigm by precedent of usage. To the extent that the world religions
paradigm is problematic, Nostra Aetate will be likewise problematic, and its program of dialogue
will at best remedy some of the theological damage modernity has done to the Christian
tradition.
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Conclusions
In the end, the primary disciplinary intervention sought in this dissertation is the
abandonment of the world religions paradigm in each of the major subdisciplines of Catholic
theology. The world religions paradigm distorts the Church’s recognition of itself in sacrament
and devotion and complicates the negotiation of religious diversity by bracketing certain beliefs
and practices as belonging to a non-Christian “religion” which would then be off-limits to
Christians, rather than facilitating the absorption of these beliefs and practices and their
adherents into the Christian Church. Indian Catholicism will be misrecognized as “syncretic” or
even “Hindu” rather than being perceived as a particular rite within the universal church.
Without the hermeneutical distortion introduced by the world religions paradigm, the “syncretic”
rituals Indian Catholics share with non-Christian neighbors are simply what Roberto de Nobili
championed as the “Malabar Rites,” a distinctly Indian inculturation (or to use the older category,
accommodation) of universal Christianity to the exigencies of culture not different in kind from
the Graeco-Roman or Germanic inculturation in classical and medieval Europe.
Although this move would militate against intellectual programs such as theology of
religions, interreligious dialogue, comparative theology, and multiple religious belonging as
these enterprises are currently conceived, the goods intended by these approaches could be
preserved or even facilitated by abandoning the world religions paradigm. The theological
expedients of implicit faith and baptism of desire provide mechanisms for theorizing the
salvation of the non-Christian, obviating any necessity to develop a theology of religions.
Likewise, theology’s engagement with secular culture puts active dialogue with non-Christians
and their philosophies, customs, and literature on the agenda without any need to conceive of
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these traditions as belonging to alternate “religions” it is necessary for Christians to cross
boundaries to engage. Jesuit accommodation became impossible and the order itself suspect the
moment that the Chinese and Malabar Rites were perceived by European Christian elites as
trafficking in non-Christian “religions.” Comparative theology recaptures some of the ground
that was lost with the end of accommodation by reaching out across religious boundaries in
search of wisdom and understanding, but the Christian tradition would not have lost access to
this wisdom and understanding in the first place without dichotomizing it as belonging to an
alien religion. Multiple religious belonging can remedy some of the communal divisions
introduced by parceling out the world in terms of separate religions, but would not be necessary
in a world where religious affiliations were normally conceived as organic and segmentary, a
matter of default participation in overlapping systems of culture, rather than voluntaristic,
mutually-exclusive, and discrete. Christian theology has nothing to lose, and the potential riches
of the entire world to gain, in divesting itself of the world religions paradigm.
In light of the foregoing, I propose:
1. Nostra Aetate and allied Vatican II documents such as Ad Gentes should be read in
continuity with the older and deeper magisterial tradition of hermeneutical accommodation of
culture rather than in terms of the world religions paradigm and the practice of interreligious
dialogue, reflecting an overall approach of ressourcement rather than aggiornamento to the
teachings of the Second Vatican Council. One should prioritize NA 3-4, in which Jews are
members of an ethnic group partially sharing Christian religio and Muslims profess a belief
system (fides Islamica) rather than belonging to a non-Christian religion, over the frame
narrative of NA 1-2 and NA 5 which deploys the world religions paradigm and identifies
Hinduism and Buddhism as separate “religions.” This move will reconcile apparent theological
213
differences in the teachings of Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, facilitate a hermeneutic of
continuity toward the Catholic theological tradition as a whole, as well as obviate the theological
and ecumenical difficulties introduced by the reification of the world religions paradigm and its
member traditions.
2. Comparative theology should divest itself of the world religions paradigm and
reconceptualize itself as a form of ethnographic theology drawing upon the embodied selfunderstanding of Christians negotiating a variety of cultures.206
Changes of this kind would benefit the intellectual disciplines of Christian theology and
secular religious studies, offering more adequate theoretical categories to replace those identified
as flawed in Chapter One and these present remarks. Arguably (and much more importantly), the
Catholic Church in India, its individual members, and affiliated Hindu communities could
benefit in practical ways from the proposed shift of categories. To conclude this dissertation, I
will draw out the most important practical implications of my proposals, weaving my major
theoretical findings into the course of my discussion.
Like comparable popular shrines appealing to a diverse religious clientele throughout
Asia, the St. Antony Shrine is exceptional and noteworthy primarily because of early modern
transformations of European intellectual categories and the negative impact of colonialism on
Asian societies. As noted in Chapter One, these sites are avoided by theologians and scholars of
religion primarily because of deficiencies in mainstream theoretical analysis that resulted from
the introduction of the world religions paradigm. Appearing to be instances of “syncretism”
206
Ethnogaphic theology is an emerging area of theological inquiry which, based on the liturgical principle
lex orandi, lex credendi, attempts to read doctrine out of the devotional life of Christian communities. As the name
suggests, the approach incorporates anthropological and social sciences methodologies to generate data, which later
serve as the basis for sustained theological reflection. For a basic interview to the discipline, see Christian Scharen
and Aana Marie Vigen’s Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2011).
214
rather than “authentic” religious phenomena, popular incarnations of Christianity and Islam in
India are neglected in favor of less eccentric traditions and sites.
The site is more interesting to anthropologists because, despite the disintegration of the
South Indian ritual honors system and the turn toward religion as a statebuilding technique in
post-Independence India, it continues to attract a diverse clientele. Increasingly, “Hindu” and
“Christian” identities are construed to involve separation into mutually-exclusive ritual
communities, impeding the social cohesion historically obtained through participation in joint
ritual ventures, thereby promoting communal violence. This renders the temples, churches, and
shrines where the older pattern of relationship still holds increasingly unusual and perhaps even
marginal. A Jesuit of the Madurai Mission or a Paravar Christian from the sixteenth century
magically transported to the present and allowed to wander the St. Antony Shrine would find
nothing unusual, and probably wonder why someone would bother to write a dissertation about
the church. In the present day, most of my informants expressed awareness that there was
something unusual about the shrine and that their boundary-crossing activities could be
considered controversial, with more educated and elite figures such as my Hindu translator and
the Christian religious in charge of the shrine suffering from the greatest degree of cultural
dissonance. This is not because the external shape of Indian shrine culture has changed
substantially since the sixteenth century, but because the interpretive framework brought to bear
in understanding it shifted as a result of the colonial encounter.
The features of the St. Antony Shrine which render it interesting to contemporary
anthropologists and unremarkable to premodern observers render the site marginal and suspect to
theologians and students of religious studies. This discontinuity in interpretation illuminates the
conceptual rupture between premodern Augustinian religio and the modern world religions
215
paradigm, offering the reader a vantage point for assessing the potential benefits of abandoning
the taxonomy of religious difference in Nostra Aetate and Ad Gentes in favor of the more
traditional model.
As hinted at in Chapter Three, the Salesian priests Pietro Maggioni and Xavier Packiam
represent conservative and permissive theological applications of the same modern taxonomy of
religious difference. Writing before Vatican II and therefore more negative in tone, Fr. Maggioni
interpreted religions in the modernist manner as mutually-exclusive systems of belief and
practice and forbade any practice that that did not have a pedigree in official, European
Christianity. Any sign of Hindu or non-elite origin would be sufficient to render a practice nonChristian, and thus impermissible, because “Hinduism” and “Christianity” were conceived of as
separate “religions” having impermeable boundaries. Fr. Maggioni’s disciplinary interventions
at the site focused heavily on suppressing aspects of integration that were permissible in the
Indian Jesuit missions, even after the Holy See ruled in favor of the Malabar Rites and a degree
of ritual integration was officially permitted.
Even as late as Fr. Maggioni’s tenure, devotees related to the St. Antony Shrine in a
manner consonant with Tamil Popular Catholicism prior to the spread of the modern world
religions paradigm, with its enforced separation between “Hindu” and “Catholic” religious
communities. Fr. Maggioni’s disciplinary interventions target uses of the site as a South Indian
kōvil with an implied social function of integration through redistribution. As discussed in
Chapter One, the primary function of a premodern South Indian shrine was to integrate diverse
constituencies into a coherent social fabric through an “honors system” based on the
redistribution of gifts and prestige in a shared ritual context. Key to the operation of the honors
system were symbolic rituals and exchanges at the annual shrine feast, in which flag-raisings at
216
the koṭimaram and a vehicle procession of deity claiming the village or neighborhood for its
protector were central ritual occasions. By banning the annual feast and procession, replacing a
popular St. Antony relic with an “official” European relic, and prohibiting the exchange of
shakti-imbued substances such as garlands, oils, holy water, and saris, Fr. Maggioni struck a
blow against the honors system in which local Catholics might take their place as a particular
caste within a shared religious fabric.
Complementary to these efforts to transform Tamil Catholicism into a mutually-exclusive
“religion” rather than a “caste lifestyle,” Fr. Maggioni’s efforts militated against individual
Catholics’ interpretation of the religion as personal bhakti. Fr. Maggioni’s strictures about
“chits” (nerccai) and the exchange of shakti-imbued substances such as garlands and oils
militated against the Tamil devotional practice of making contractual vows to deity in return for
particular boons. Rather than being ideally disinterested (as in classical Sanskritic bhakti), Tamil
bhakti is better conceptualized a microcosmic, individual integration with a personal deivam,
analogous to the macrocosmic feast of the shrine deity in that it formalizes a relationship of
mutual-dependency between superior and client through ritualized exchange of substances. In
limiting certain “contractual” offerings as off-limits magicoreligious practices, Fr. Maggioni
seems to have intended to redirect Tamil bhakti into official, European patterns of devotion.
Fr. Xavier, although allowing practices that substantially imitate patterns of premodern
ritual integration, expresses deep conceptual ambivalence about his project. His theological
vocabulary is modernist, derived from Vatican II, and reflects the ambivalence toward nonChristian religious material contained in the official conciliar documents. Although Fr. Xavier
permits controverted practices suppressed by Fr. Maggioni, it is unclear when this results from
theological conviction and implements more positive Vatican II directives concerning
217
inculturation of elements of truth found in non-Christian religions, or is a tactical matter of
toleration in which inappropriate acts of what Ad Gentes terms “syncretism” are permitted in
order to avoid the possibility of communal violence and scandal.
While more permissive than Fr. Maggioni in outcome, a great deal of Fr. Xavier’s
language is negative in tone and informed by the same modernist presuppositions. “Popular
devotion” is not a term with positive emotional valence for Fr. Xavier, but rather a synonym for
disreputable acts of syncretism which he must tolerate. While Fr. Xavier’s homilies encourage
trust in God and the saints and the possibility of the miraculous, they are also critical of the
contractual do ut des aspect of devotion at the shrine and advocate moving beyond petitionary
prayer to unconditional surrender to God. This ambivalence does not represent dissent from the
doctrines of Vatican II, but reflects the basic tension of official Vatican II documents dealing with
the interpretation of religio outside the institutional Church. Are alien cultural practices part of
mutually-exclusive complexes of belief/practice known as “religions” which cannot be borrowed
by Christians without the sin of “syncretism,” or are they elements of “goodness and truth” to be
adopted by local churches as part of the inculturation process? I argue that this basic ambiguity
is ineradicable within ecumenical/interfaith efforts based on the modern taxonomy of religious
difference. The world religions paradigm, which treats “religions” as mutually-exclusive rather
than potentially-nested systems and stigmatizes “syncretism,” inherently problematizes acts of
borrowing which are more straightforwardly permissible under the premodern Augustinian
taxonomy.
The cloud of marginality and tension surrounding what was once a common pattern of
religious affiliation and patronage undergirded by native and European taxonomies which
supported it limits the religious, cultural, and political subjectivities of contemporary Indians,
218
who are increasingly pressured to conform to “communal” and “nationalist” construals of
personal identity and, in the case of Christians, assume a marginalized minority status within a
Hindu majority nation-state.
As a minority community, the ordained leadership of the Indian Catholic Church aligns
itself by default to the Congress Party in national elections, hoping that a discourse of
“secularism” and religious inclusion will best safeguard the interests of religious minorities. Fr.
Xavier Packiam, for example, weaves his justification for the toleration of popular devotions at
the site with the political discourse of secularism. Christians are increasingly politically
marginalized by the B.J.P. government and have been the object of dozens of violent attacks
since Narendra Modi took power in May 2014. Although alliance with secular parties remains
politically feasible, the premodern taxonomy of religious difference in which “Hindu” castes and
“Catholics” are understood to be caste groups within a shared cultural/religious framework is
consonant with the B.J.P. political program and would permit Indian Catholics to self-identify as
a group which is politically and culturally “Indian,” allowing greater versatility in choosing
political coalition partners and potentially greater security for minority rights.207
The politically-fraught issue of “conversion” to Christianity likewise need not be
problematic in a scenario in which “Hindu” cultural identity and Catholic practices are perceived
as nested rather than mutually-exclusive loyalties. The range of acceptable religious identities
207
In a 2013 New York Times “India Ink” interview, Goa’s Chief Minister, Manohar Parrikar of the B.J.P.,
explained Hindu nationalism as follows: “India is a Hindu nation in the cultural sense … A Catholic in Goa is also
Hindu culturally, because his practices don’t match with Catholics in Brazil … except in the religious aspect, a Goan
Catholic’s way of thinking and practice matches a Hindu’s. So Hindu for me is not a religious term, it is cultural.”
See Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi, “A Conversation With: Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar,” New York Times,
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/a-conversation-with-goa-chief-minister-manohar-parrikar/?_r=0
(accessed April 20, 2015). Indian Catholics could adopt similar language and reap political benefit with moderate
Hindu nationalist parties.
219
could expand, allowing Christ bhaktas and other Hindu participants in Tamil Popular
Catholicism greater freedom to express themselves in whatever idiom most appealed to them
without fear of political or social reprisals. Christ bhaktas could, if they wished, receive baptism
and participate in the formal sacraments. Informants interviewed in Chapter Four such as Agni
Kumar, who may have been a Hindu Christ bhakta who formally “converted” to Christianity,
need not be so secretive about their religious credentials. Informants such as Neil might consider
converting, or remain in their current position. Christians and Hindus who patronize one
another’s places of worship and venerate ishta devatas that cross religious boundaries, such as
Nageshwara and Pravesh, might not always be praised as the most loyal Christians, but need no
longer be ostracized as “compromised” or “denationalized” Hindus.
If the ordained Christian leadership reverted to the premodern taxonomy of religious
difference and interpreted individual acts of ritual transgression on the part of Christians and
Christ bhaktas in terms of superstitio or idololatria, rather than total defection to an alien
religion, they would have greater pastoral flexibility in discriminating between tolerable and
intolerable behaviors on the part of devotees, catechumens, and parishioners and need not
necessarily adopt a harsh or punitive posture. There would be fewer acts of ritual transgression
to police under the older taxonomy of religious difference as well, because the singular definition
of religion and the premodern program of accommodation permit borrowing of elements of true
religion found outside the institutional ecclesia and the adoption of these elements as Christian
“rites.” With fewer disapproved practices, and more pastoral flexibility about the degree to
which disapproved practices can be tolerated, priests, religious, and laity could adopt a more
cooperative posture toward Indian culture and one another. Boundary-conscious priests, such as
Fr. Pietro Maggioni, would have fewer absolute boundaries to police. Priests committed to
220
inculturation, such as Fr. Xavier Packiam, need not adopt the policy of speaking disapprovingly
about popular devotion even as he tolerates it, or preach against the very practices that bring
most people to his shrine. The ideological tug-of-war between priests and laity characterized in
Chapter Three in terms of “contestation, conflict, and compromise” could resolve itself more
harmoniously as “communion,” and the shape of Indian Christianity could follow popular
devotion.
Perhaps the ultimate desideratum of the proposed shift in categories is that the
Christianity of Asia, historically subaltern and presently accorded at best a marginal status in
theology and religious studies scholarship, could assume theoretical importance equal to its
demographic weight. As Philip Jenkins argues in The Next Christendom, there is something odd
and even perverse about Christian communities in the Global South, demographically poised to
overtake European and North American Christianity within the present century, having
practically no representation in mainstream scholarship about Christianity and little voice within
global theological debates.208 Nor is it altogether seemly that a religious tradition older than the
bhakti movement, Indian Christianity, is typically not classified as Indian or included within
introductory courses on religion in South Asia. The place of Asian and especially Indian
Christianity in the interstices between Western theoretical categories is no doubt responsible for
the marginalization of this material, and the retirement of the world religions paradigm could do
naught but improve its visibility. While the postcolonial inculturation of St. Mary’s CoCathedral as Antoniyar Kōvil displaced European Catholicism and affords Tamils of all castes the
opportunity to practice the Christian religion in Indian cultural forms, the recalibration of
theoretical categories to embrace characteristically Indian traits such as cultic non-exclusivity,
208
Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007, pp. 3-6).
221
the integration of diverse communities within a common religious frame, and an emphasis on
pragmatic concerns such as supernatural healing over matters of doctrinal orthodoxy, would
move devotion to St. Antony at the shrine out of the margins into global Christian consciousness.
222
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