In the last post I wrote about fictitious conversion accounts and their potential vis-à-vis factual report. But as I mentioned there, many of these fictional accounts were based on ‘real’ lives. At our Delhi workshop I presented autobiographical accounts of the Mangalore-born Brahmin Anandrao who joined Christianity and, under his Christian name Herrman Anandrao Kaundinya, became the first ordained pastor in the ranks of the Protestant Basel Mission in India. His conversion in 1844 stirred up a controversy between his family, the missionaries and the British administration. While preparing this paper, I came across a novel that seems to be based on this story.

Fanny Emily Penny’s novel The Outcaste was first published in London in 1912. Not much about the author is known; she seems to have lived in Madras, moving in British colonial circles. Penny draws on the mentioned case that had involved legal action of the convert’s family against the British. Apart from the name Ananda, there is no direct link between Penny’s novel and the events in Mangalore. Yet, the narrative accentuates with literary means the dilemma that surfaced in the colonial administration’s proceedings: the tension between a proactive, civilising impetus and a strictly neutral attitude of non-interference with ‘native’ matters. In the novel, the characters of a British zealous missionary, Alderbury, and an equally British, but contained schoolmaster, Dr Wenaston, represent these two positions. Both figures react very differently to the deplorable situation the convert Ananda finds himself in after announcing to his family that he had converted to Christianity during his stay in England.

This tension is played out through the female character Eola, the sister of the schoolmaster: her reason sides with the neutral stance of her brother, her heart is drawn to the energetic missionary:

Eola was of her brother’s way of thinking. She too looked at Alderbury’s work with something like detached curiosity. His energy, his whole-hearted desire to see India Christianised, his indefatigable and unceasing sacrifice of self, appealed to the instinctive hero-worship that is implanted in every woman’s breast; but though she could wonder and admire and was insensibly drawn by his personality, she could not understand the fascination that held him to his chosen profession (p. 146).

Curiously, it is Eola’s nature as a woman, that makes her lean more and more towards the zealous missionary:

Eola felt the blood coursing through her veins with an emotion that was startling. […] She felt the infection of his hope and belief; but because she was a woman, there was something behind it that detached her mind from the cause for which he battled, and centred her thoughts upon the man himself. […] He was a born leader of men with a strong personal influence that was not to be denied; and the messenger occupied her mind more than the message he carried” (p. 174).

Finally, Eola literally ‘converts’ to the attitude of the missionary, consenting to become his wife:

“Eola, will you come and make my house a home for me? I want you; I can’t live without you,” he concluded with a strong man’s passion. She looked up at him suddenly serious. “Think how far I fall short of the ideal! I – Oh, really you are the most masterful man I ever met. Mr. Alderbury – !” And then her head dropped and she surrendered. “Are you converted to my way of thinking,” he said at last. “Or, shall I continue my arguments?” “I am quite converted; quite!” she replied, and her eyes shone (p. 377).

The novel is full of orientalist clichés and is certainly not highly literary in quality. But the message in favour of the civilizing mission, represented by the missionary Alderbury, comes across clearly – although ironically twisted by the hint of the flawed nature of women!

Matthias

Life stories of religious conversion appear in many shapes and are told from various perspectives. You might wonder why authors favour imaginative literature over factual reports. Perhaps this has to do with the potential of literary texts to draw vivid scenes, develop multiple plots and lines of argument, map out social environments and reflect inner motions that are inaccessible to external observation. Fictional texts – such as a well-composed novel with a set of characters, suspense, emotions etc. – open a whole universe to the reader that will surpass most plots one can experience in real life. In short, literature has the potential to be “more than real”, to take up the title of a book by David Shulman, in which he traces the history of the imagination in south India (Cambridge/Mass., 2012).

In India, the novel, in some cases published in serialised form in nineteenth and twentieth-century journals, proved suitable to explore issues of conversion publicly. Literary fiction helped missionaries to promote their cause both among potential converts in India and among potential donors in Europe. For the Indian elite, the recourse to fiction enabled a debate about modernity and religion without the need for the author to expose oneself. For Europeans in India, literature provided a field for reflecting upon their place in the colonial environment between religious institutions and secular administration. In all three cases, by supposedly exploring a hypothetical situation, literary fiction allowed an elaborate and pointed discussion of sensitive issues from a safe distance.

Take for instance the short novel Mimosa, who was Charmed by the Irish missionary Amy Carmichael, first published in London in 1924; a loose German translation appeared in Stuttgart and Basel in 1925. It is a typical piece of mission literature that appeals to the emotions. The reader is made to sympathise with a poor Hindu girl who is badly treated by her family, suffers the death of her son, struggles with her faith but eventually finds rescue and peace with Christian missionaries and their religion. The text is interspersed with ethnographic details and Tamil expressions to endow the novel with an exotic flavour. Carmichael uses a remarkable literary plot device to frame the story: already in her early childhood the heroine shows unconscious attachment to Christianity when she refuses to wear sacred ash on her forehead. This foreshadowing allows the narrative to present the conversion as a ‘rediscovery’ of the Christian truth that has already been planted in Mimosa’s heart at an early age.

Similar plot devices are often used in autobiographical narratives so a clear distinction between fact and fiction is not really possible and rather futile for understanding conversion narratives. Accounts that are presented as ‘authentic’, either by converts themselves or by observers like missionaries, are always trimmed to suit a certain audience or purpose. On the other hand, stories that are explicitly fictitious often draw on ‘real’ cases and I’ll discuss an interesting example of this in my next blog.

Matthias

After a successful New Delhi workshop in December 2015 the project team have a panel at the 24th ECSAS (European Conference on South Asian Studies)  at the University of Warsaw from 27 to 30 July 2016.

Keep up to date with all our conference news here.

What elements of a ‘life’ can be captured in narrative and conversely how do narratives handle the ‘unspeakable’?

In several of the autobiographical narratives we discussed at the Delhi workshop, we noticed the palpable presence of emotion, challenging us to examine the function of the ‘affective’ in narratives of transformation. At various points, narrators are overcome by doubt, fear, anger, remembered pain, shame or even disgust. Accompanying these emotionally charged moments, we noticed references to the inexplicable: ‘sins,’ ‘miracles,’ ‘tears,’ ‘prayers,’ even ‘physical illness.’ These moments of pain, recollected through narrative, connecting reason and the irrational, associating the body, mind and soul, seemed to signal the refusal of emotions to be contained by narrative.

‘Sin’ or sinning appears to be one such area of the inexpressible and inexplicable: sin materialises in the heart but is manifested through the body; while references to sin commonly recur, the specific nature of the sin remains unidentified. The pain and shame of the sin, it seems, is accompanied by the desire to separate oneself from the sinning body. Poised between revelatory confession and the inadmissibility of full disclosure, the narratives take comfort in describing in greater detail the emotional trauma that the sinning self has caused the narrating self.

Udaya, for instance, spoke of the nineteenth-century Kerala prince Jacob Ramavarma’s use of bodily metaphors of self-exposure when it came to confessing sin: illness, vomiting and disgust for food accompany his references to his sinful self. Anandrao Kaundinya, the protagonist of the narratives Matthias examined also remains silent about the specific ‘sin’ that he has committed. Interestingly both present their conversion narratives on the occasion of their ordination to the Basel Mission. Udaya’s suggestion that their reticence may have been the result of the logic of decorum is something to be explored further. After all, the solemnity of such a public occasion does bring to bear ideas of what is socially appropriate to speak about. So rather than understand the act of ‘going public’ merely as the space for transparency and full disclosure (as opposed to the hidden private), considerations of “publicness” may also draw into the equation notions of propriety. The pain, shame or the loss that the convert experiences must be suppressed to produce a text that is socially acceptable to the community.

I end with several interesting questions that were posed at the last round table: How do we interpret the tension in these texts between emotional breakdown that interrupts speech and the eloquence of speaking/writing a narrative? To what extent does the language of emotion help to ‘translate’ the unspeakable into a socially recognisable or even acceptable narrative? What is the status of the narrative in the conversion narrative? And what function does the narrative perform in allowing the eruption and display of emotion? Finally, if emotion has such a fraught relationship with language, to what extent and purpose will it translate across languages?

Stay with us as we explore further….

Mettika

Though I am weak and tired now,

And my youthful step long gone,

Leaning on this staff,

I climb the mountain peak.

My cloak cast off, my bowl overturned,

I sit here on this rock.

And over my spirit blows

The breath

Of liberty

I’ve won, I’ve won the triple gems.

The Buddha’s way is mine.

[Trans. Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy][1]

This poem from the ‘Therīgāthā’ (a collection of poems written by senior Buddhist nuns from about 600 BCE) is one of the earliest extant personal accounts written by a woman focusing on following a specific religious path. She doesn’t say much, this anonymous woman, but the sense of discovery and clarity as she sits poised for a fresh beginning is clear. The mix of anticipation and excitement at having found a path or ‘way’ that is as precious as the jewels she may have once worn makes her voice audible across time. What is remembered here is not the every day detail of a lifetime but an entire life distilled into one precious moment of change.

Is the autobiography not popular amongst Indian writers?

The idea that Indian writers have historically not been very comfortable writing about the self or using the autobiographical mode is a popular one. This is a point of view I heard often enough last summer, when I was based at the École Française d’Extrême Orient in Pondicherry to investigate autobiographical traditions in Tamil literature. Tamil pundits declared either that ‘great’ Indian writers do not believe in self-aggrandizement to the degree that writing an autobiographical account would require or agreed with the widely held opinion that Indians value community over the individual. Applying definitions of autobiography arising from European literary traditions to the Indian context has lent credence to the idea that (auto)biographical and historical writing came to South Asia with Mughal and later colonial introductions of these genres.

Since our primary texts are autobiographical accounts of conversion, we have been looking into the history and parameters of this literary form: to what extent can we take such statements on life-writing at face value? Did the authors of these accounts draw mainly on European patterns of writing about the self or was there also a repertoire of literary conventions and traditions available from within Indian literary and religious traditions that they could draw on? If, as it is widely held, the autobiography had not flourished as one of the better known literary genres, how did religious converts from before the eighteenth century express their changing beliefs? Were there any useful literary devices and tropes of life-writing that could be molded for this purpose? And did these mainly flourish within poetic genres?

Buddhist narratives: biographical traditions and speaking about the self

Attending the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions in April this year (http://spaldingsymposium.org/2015/05/13/the-40th-anniversary-spalding-symposium/) gave us some useful leads that we’ve been able to follow up on. The Buddhist tradition for example has a strong biographical tradition, where as Juliane Schober (1997) tells us, the act of remembering the past lives of the Buddha and saints has played an important part in bridging the gap between “the ideal and the real” and between “the conceptual and the pragmatic”. The ‘Theragāthā’ and ‘Therīgāthā,’ poems by Buddhist monks and nuns, even if they may have survived as autobiographical fragments, provide us with fascinating glimpses into a tradition of writing about the self clearly conscious of its position or development within religious contexts. Handed down within a rich oral tradition, later preserved in writing from the first century BCE, what part, if any, have these played in the cultural memory of the writers we study from a more recent past?

[1] From Women Writing in India: 6oo BC to the Early 20^th Century, ed. Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, London: Pandora Press, 69-70.

It was Matthias who stumbled upon our second image on the home page, ‘Barber at Work,’ when buying old postcards on the internet. The rest of us agreed that this striking picture should form part of the website since it resonates with the several themes of the project.

This photograph from the 1920s captures a move from one state to another in medias res, focusing our eye on that ‘in-between’ stage that is so difficult to speak about. What fascinates me is the foregrounding of the body here, a body that is clearly experiencing a process of change… a body that is neither here nor there (or, even if one were to see it as a simple hair makeover, neither before or after), not yet anyway. What is this young man thinking as he sits on the mat with head bowed to the razor’s edge in the skilled hands of the barber?

Tonsure or the shaving of the head is an act of significance in several religious traditions of South Asia: Buddhist or Jaina monks are expected to undergo tonsure as a sign of renouncing the world and entering monkhood; in most Hindu households, performing a first tonsure marks a male child’s transition from infancy to childhood or a full tonsure may mark the change of ritual status incurred by the death of the father. But importantly, full or partial tonsure also mark the social significance of the body in India: high caste status, for instance, was traditionally marked by a full tonsure of widows in the case of Brahmin women or a partial tonsure of the head, retaining a central tuft or ‘kudumi’ (in Tamil) in the case of the male.

In South India, it is this ‘kudumi’ which often became an object of fierce controversy in the context of Christianity. The kudumi found supporters and detractors from amongst both missionaries and new converts to Christianity across denominations. Some missionaries, such as the Catholic Robert de Nobili (1577–1656) in Madurai, sported the kudumi himself, amongst various other bodily and ritual signs, to adopt the role of a ‘sannayasi’. Needless to say, his dress code did not appeal to his colleagues and his rationale that emphasized the social (and not religious) significance of the kudumi was investigated at several points!

As one might expect, men and women from across the caste spectrum converted to Christianity and missionary records from the various societies show that while some high-caste male converts wanted to retain their ‘kudumi’ as a marker of their social status, others very willingly had their kudumis shaved off at conversion or baptism. The controversy over exactly what the kudumi signified continued through the centuries attracting statements for and against it. One I find amusing is when Bishop Robert Caldwell (1814-91) of Tirunelveli treats this “tuft of hair” as a bad fashion statement: “It is a matter of indifference to me how people wear their hair, provided they take care to keep it clean. All I argue for is that it should be regarded as a matter of taste, not a matter of religion, and that if we dislike the kudumi and wish natives to cut it off and to shave their heads, we should appeal, not to their consciences, but to their wish to improve their looks” (Indian Antiquary in 1875: 173).

I’d rather not relegate the kudumi to mere fashion however. When Tamil converts to Christianity chose to keep or shave their kudumis, they were making visual statements through their bodies—statements regarding their bodies (and by implication their souls) that were taken seriously by those around them. Although we focus on textual accounts in this project, this photograph is a reminder that converts “spoke” of their conversion in different ways, signalling the complexity of their transition. So what tools can we use to study and compare such ‘in-between’ moments that are so difficult to grasp, whether in images that translate them into visibility or through narratives that attempt to recount them through writing?