We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
PUZZLES ON THE GROUND, REMEMBERING THE CONTEXT
Let me start by stating how I have come to forge a relationship between subalternity, identity politics and Christian theology in India. In 2001 I took my class of twenty-four students to spend three days with a dalit Christian community in a Tamilnadu village in south India. I made this a requirement for my course on ‘dalit theology’, which I taught from 1996 to 2004 at the United Theological College, Bangalore. This pilgrimage was designed to enable all of us to journey into the community we studied in our classrooms. But it was also a journey into ourselves: our notions of self and other, our conceptions of mission and our realization of the nature of the Indian Church. During this visit, as is our custom, we slept and prayed in the church, ate, sang and danced with the families and spent our time visiting the various communities that made up this village.
Through our time there we discovered that the Indian community seemed to be divided along several lines. To begin with there was the caste community and the dalit community partition: there existed the obvious conventional division between the caste community and the dalit community. Apart from geographical distance, the lives of these two respective communities revolved around their own deities, their own cultural festivities and their own socio-economic network of interaction. Then, as is true of much of rural India, there was the intra-dalit community division.
In India the term “minorities” refers to religious communities present in much smaller numbers than Hindus—Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and Parsis/Zoroastrians. According to a 1991 census of India, out of the total Indian population of 846 million, there are 687.6 million Hindus of various sects, 101.6 million Muslims, 19.6 million Christians, 6.3 million Buddhists, 3.3 million Jains and 3.1 million adherents of other traditions. Christians are thus less than 3 percent of the total population whereas Hindus number about 83 percent. “Minorities” may also allude to those communities that have traditionally been kept outside the Hindu-based caste system—Dalits and Adivasis (or Tribals). Dalits number between 180 and 200 million and Adivasis number between 85 and 90 million in a population that has now crossed the one billion mark. While they are now included into the general category of Hinduism, these groups have been treated with overt hostility and repression, and have been the target of concerted and calculated attacks from the majority community. Christianity is also targeted violently and systematically in contemporary India, especially Christians who have been identified as Dalits and Adivasis. An analysis of the ideology and agenda of Hindu nationalism in an historical perspective will reveal the way in which the Dalits and Adivasis are perceived to present a threat to the fulfilment of this nationalist agenda. The Hinduization of India manifests itself with a propensity to eradicate all forms of variant plurality.
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.