Christianity

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The paper focuses on the history of the first three Bible women, Mary Wesley, Martha Reuben, and Bathsheba, who came from marginalised communities in Rayalaseema, and emerged as new leaders of social change in the context of colonial modernity and Christianity in the region. The emergence of a modern profession of Bible woman for Dalit women in the 1870s was transformative, opening doors of education, learning, and transforming them into local leaders. Bible women played a pivotal role in the history of Dalits, gender, and missions by shaping the life and community of Dalits and spreading Christianity in Rayalaseema.

Jawaharlal Nehru’s tryst with secularism and communal politics may be enumerated through a critical rereading of the religious apprehensions expressed by the Christian community over the question of their right to propagation. Was Indian secularism an effective ideological substitute to communal politics or merely a tactical tool for achieving political gains during Nehru’s times? Nehru’s vision of secularism, in having to negotiate the politics of Hindu fundamentalism as well as Congress majoritarianism, was forced to accommodate the flavours of a majoritarian cultural climate with some preferential treatment to Hindu rights.

Tackling the question of how to recalibrate the relationship between history and theory in our favour without falling into the trap of either an unqualified universalism or a naïve historicism, this article proposes that we move from the position of being a critic of Western theory to that of being a composer and assembler of a new theory from different sources and different histories.

Despite Christianity that made inroads into Kerala nearly two millennia ago, and communism that emerged as a powerful egalitarian force in the last century, caste continues to exercise an insidious, all-pervasive influence in Kerala. While the novel The God of Small Things attempts to subvert patriarchic norms that sustain caste and gender domination by its use of subversive comparisons and analogies, ancient hierarchies that sustain the caste and the gender question still remain assertive, unresolved even by the healing and redeeming powers of fiction.