Honour, caste and conflict.
The ethnohistory of a catholic festival in rural Tamil Nadu (1730-1990)1
p. 71-120
Résumés
From the late 17 th century, Christian cult shrines and church centres established under the Jesuit mission in Tamil South India, were incorporated into local systems of political patronage and religious gifting. In particular, through systems of festival of honours, they served the same purpose as local Hindu temples in extending and legitimating the authority of rulers and village headmen, and in integrating the highly diffuse domains of political control which characterised the pre-colonial state in the Southern Tamil country. This paper describes the detailed structure of one such cult, that of St. James (Cantiyakappa) in the village of Alapuram. As well as articulating local political dominance, the festival honours at this shrine provided the chief idiom of caste rank and precedence in a religiously plural community. Moreover, being at the centre of the local discourse of caste and power, the festival honours equally became the most important institutional context for contesting and negotiating caste rank and social position. The shifting pattern of such conflicts is traced during the 19th and 20th centuries. During this time the position of the missionary priests changed. Under colonial government, Jesuit missionaries acquired a new authority, they ceased to be renouncer-teachers and became “rulers” of a Catholic religious domain newly separate from caste society. The paper explores the social significance of assertions of church authority as well as the intersection of conflicts between competing missionary organisations with local status disputes and low caste social mobility. It suggests that these provide a window through which to observe fundamental changes in popular religion and caste society in colonial and post colonial times.
Depuis la fin du xviie siècle, les lieux de cultes chrétiens et les centres religieux établis sous l’autorité de la Mission jésuite dans l’Inde du Sud tamoule, ont été incorporés dans des systèmes locaux de patronage politique et de donations religieuses. En particulier, par le biais des « honneurs cérémoniels », ils ont servi le même but que les temples hindous locaux en étendant et en légitimant l’autorité des dirigeants et des chefs de village, puis en intégrant les espaces de pouvoir hautement diffus du contrôle politique caractéristique de l’État précolonial dans le pays tamoul. L’article décrit la structure détaillée d’un culte de ce type – celui de St. James (Cantiyakappa) dans le village d’Alapuram. De la même façon qu’ils articulent la dominance politique locale, les « honneurs cérémoniels » à l’occasion de ce culte ont fourni le maître langage à propos du rang de la caste et de la préséance dans une communauté religieuse plurielle. En outre, situés au centre du discours de la caste et du pouvoir, les « honneurs cérémoniels » sont aussi devenus le cadre institutionnel le plus important pour contester et négocier le rang de la caste et la position sociale. Le modèle changeant de tels conflits s’est établi au cours des xixe et xxe siècles. Pendant ce temps, la condition des prêtres missionnaires a changé. Sous le gouvernement colonial, les missionnaires jésuites ont acquis une autorité nouvelle, ils ont cessé d’être des professeurs renonçants et sont devenus les « dirigeants » d’un domaine catholique religieux nouvellement séparé de la société de castes. Ce texte examine tant la signification sociale des revendications de l’autorité ecclésiale, que le recoupement des conflits entre organisations missionnaires concurrentes avec les querelles de statut local et la mobilité sociale des basses castes. Ainsi nous est offerte une fenêtre à travers laquelle s’observent des changements fondamentaux à l’intérieur de la religion populaire et de la société de caste durant la période coloniale et post-coloniale.
Texte intégral
I. Introduction
1The history of missions is undergoing something of a worldwide change. For long, Third World church history has been dominated either by the idea of the missionary as heroic agent of religious and cultural transformation, or by the image of the passive proselyte inexorably caught up in the modernising forces of colonialism. Such views are challenged in recent studies (for example, Comaroff 1985; Bayly 1989) which give new emphasis to the perspectives and agency of the missionized themselves. Here, converts can be seen as active creators and manipulators of symbolic and ritual systems which serve indigenous (as well as external) social and political ends. Rather than cultural heroes or purveyors of a dominant colonial culture, the missionaries themselves can be seen to be unwittingly drawn into evolving ritual and symbolic systems over which they exert only partial influence and which serve agendas other than their own.
2This paper examines the politics of religious synthesis in one evolving Catholic ritual system, that of a Tamil Nadu village and its region from the late 17th century. Firstly, I will examine in some detail the way in which mission Christianity, far from displacing indigenous social and ritual systems was, in fact, incorporated into an existing pattern of local social and political relationships based upon caste. Conceptualising the “caste system” in the context of religious pluralism, itself presents new analytical challenges which have to be addressed. Nonetheless, two things are clear. Firstly, relations of caste and power, which are conventionally expressed in Hindu religious idioms, have also been articulated through public forms of Catholic worship, in particular festivals of the saints. Secondly, within this Catholic ritual system, caste status has long been to some degree negotiable. For this reason church rituals have provided an important institutional context for social mobility, status competition and conflict during the past 150 years.
3The second part of the paper examines the change and transformation of this “fused” Hindu-Catholic ritual and political system during the 19th and 20th centuries. A crucial part of this change has been a shift in the nature of the “religious domain” and of the Church’s conception of its own religious authority – in pre-colonial, colonial and post colonial times. Indeed, the following ethnohistorical analysis of a village festival will illustrate a shifting and often contested frontier between Roman Catholicism and Tamil rural society.
4The setting of this study is a mixed Hindu-Christian village (Alapuram2) and its regional context – the dry eastern plains which comprise the modern district of Ramnathapuram (Ramnad) and the former kingdom and Zamindari of Ramnad. Available information takes the analysis back to the late 17th and early 18th centuries, after which there is a remarkably detailed record of village events produced by Jesuit missionaries of the Madura Mission. Above all, this record shows that many of the conclusions from recent research on the centrality of Hindu temples in the articulation of local political systems in Southern India can be extended to Christian churches and festivals. Before paying attention to studying the development of these Christian institutions in Ramnad, it will be helpful to begin with a brief review of the political context of missionary activity in the late 17th-century south eastern Tamil kingdom of Ramnad. This will indicate the central importance of temples to the exercise of dominance and control in the regional political system.
II. Christianity in the pre-colonial Tamil country
The political order and Hindu temples in Ramnad
5The integrating role of the temple in the “loose domain of authoritative control” (Price, n.d.: 11) which characterised pre-colonial political organisation in South India has been demonstrated in the work of Stein (1980) and Appadurai (1981). Appadurai argues that in medieval South India, temples had a central role in the extension of political authority. The endowment of temples was a particularly important means of extending royal control into new areas for the South Indian kings and warrior chiefs of the dry plains areas such as Ramnad during the Vijayanagar period (14th-16th century).
6With the militarisation of South India under the Vijayanagar empire, the Ramnad kingdom, its Maravar caste sovereign (the Cētupati) acquired a new prominence. The kingdom came to be organised around the provision of troops and military supplies for the Vijayanagar emperor and his Viceroys in Madurai, the Nayaks (Baker 1984: 36; Rajayyan 1974: 7-8; Kadhirvel 1977: 50-54). The political organisation of the Ramnad kingdom was segmentary, with smaller warrior chiefs of Maravar caste (pāḷaiyakkāraṉs, or “poligars”) maintaining considerable autonomy and in turn delegating authority to Maravar village headmen. These men, through expanding agricultural production, “achieved the upward flow of resources [and recruits] which the system demanded.” (Baker 1984: 45; Price 1979: 2; see Stein 1980: 366 ff.) They controlled the land and organised the local systems of production and redistribution and, while looking to the Cetupati at Ramnad as their political and military head, nonetheless retained economic independence.
7In this system of pyramidal political patronage – which also continued after the demilitarisation of the kingdom and its transformation into a Zamindari under British rule – power at every level resided in the capacity to direct ritual and material systems of distribution rather than on outright domination and control of resources (Price 1979; Dirks 1987). In practice this meant the capacity to allocate both shares in agricultural produce and rights to various insignia, titles and honours which conferred both status and legitimate authority. It is here that temples had a critical role. There was, as Appadurai puts it, an exchange in which rulers gave material resources to the temples and in return received not only ritual honours but also political constituencies from the religious leaders who “were crucial intermediaries for the introduction, extension and legitimation of warrior control…” (Appadurai 1981: 64, and cited in Stein 1980: 469.)
8Through the establishment and endowment of temples, and the recruitment of Brahman priests and other ritualists, the Maravars of Ramnad and other martial groups in the marginal dry and mixed zones of South India legitimised a growing power and profile within the overarching Vijayanagar empire. In doing so they employed symbolic actions such as religious gifting which both expressed their share in the sovereign status of their overlords, and marked their own political transformation from “warrior chiefs” to “little kings” (Dirks 1987: 71-96). In the process Maravar warrior chiefs promoted their own clan cults (to goddesses and warrior deities). Indeed, these deities, their temples and festivals, and the system of ceremonial markers of honour and ritual status associated with them became indicators of new kingly ideals (Bayly 1989: 44, 45). It is not difficult to see how Christian saints and later mission centres came to be viewed as another category of non-Brahmanic deities whose cults constituted ceremonial systems which dramatised warrior power and kingly honour.
9Dirks has shown the particular importance of the practice of gifting in this political system, and the significance of the ceremonial gift of the king to the temple deity as a sign of overlordship (Dirks 1987: 37). The principle ritual occasion for this gift to the deity (the great gift or mahadana) was, in Ramnad, the festival of Dasara or Navaratra (Tam. navarāttiri, or “nine nights”). Here, the king was portrayed as the principle devotee of the deity – itself the “paradigmatic sovereign” with whom the king is simultaneously identified (ibid.: 38-41). As the following sections will show, it is this ritual form, rooted in the devotional tradition of Puranic Hinduism, which merged with Catholic “novenas” to provide a model for public worship at Christian churches and shrines focusing on “warrior” saints in Ramnad (see below).
Conversion and Christian shrines in late pre-colonial Ramnad
10To Appreciate The Manner In Which Christian Centres Could Serve To Dramatise warrior power and create territories of influence and constituencies of political (and military) support (Bayly 1989: 44, 45), it is necessary to underscore the fact that Christianity in Ramnad did not have its origins as an adjunct to colonial domination, but rather (as I will illustrate below) in syncretic saint cults which spread inland following networks of trade and pilgrimage from the Portuguese missions on the coast in the 17th century (ibid.: 379-384). Cult affiliation was probably shifting and short-lived and certainly involved limited exposure to Christian doctrine or liturgy (ibid.: 387). Nonetheless, Christian saints were inserted into the regional pantheon, and their shrines, like those of Hindu gods, became central to the exercise of dominance and control in local political systems. During the 17th and 18th centuries this cult-centred Christian tradition was gradually incorporated into the formal structure of the Jesuit Madurai Mission.
11The Madurai Mission was founded in 1606 by the Italian Roberto De Nobili, who began one of the earliest Christian missionary projects of “cultural accommodation” (Pickering 1992: 104). De Nobili aimed to separate himself and his missionaries from the colonial trading powers on the Coromandal coast and their Portuguese missionaries, who, by fusing Christian faith and European culture, had (in the minds of the Brahman elite whom De Nobili hoped to influence) associated Christianity with inferior status, and conversion with joining the ritually impure community of parangis (firangi, franks, aliens or Westerners) (Neill 1984; Bayly 1989: 389-392). In De Nobili’s view, religion was ultimately a matter of spiritual realities, belief and liturgy, and the mission’s task was to present the distinctive soteriological message of the Gospel in Indian social and cultural form. Converts were not required to adopt new cultural identities or to abandon caste customs. Indeed, De Nobili’s missionaries themselves conceded to the rules of caste interaction by accepting a division among themselves – that is between those who served Brahman converts (who like De Nobili himself were referred to as sannyāsins), those who served non-Brahmans (paṉṭaraswamis) and (for a short period) yet others who worked among the socially subordinate and impure Untouchable castes (Dumont 1972: 250-251, 372; Ponnad 1983: 5).3
12As it happened, the Jesuit paṇṭaraswamis working in warrior Maravar dominated Ramnad were far more successful in setting up Church institutions than was De Nobili and his sannyāsin missionaries working among the orthodox Brahmans of Madurai city. In Ramnad, by the end of the 17th century, large numbers were entering the established Church as a result of group (rather than individual) conversions which followed caste and kinship networks.4 Converts included members of the dominant Maravar caste, members of its royal lineage and those with high office in the Cetupati’s army (Bayly 1989: 398; Nevett 1980: 217; Kadhirvel 1977: 40). Conversions increased in the 1680s as a result of the work of John de Britto, a Portuguese Jesuit and the most prominent figure of the mission in the “Maravar country” (maṟavarnāṭu, or Ramnad).
13This rapid progress of the Jesuit mission was helped both by the existence of earlier syncretic saint cults and the emerging political significance of Christian affiliation. But, if Christian cults and mission centres provided symbolic resources for the extension of warrior domains, these centres and conversion itself could also be read as dangerous marks of political opposition. This was more than clear in 1693 when John de Britto was executed, beheaded and impaled, on the orders of the Cetupati of Ramnad. His execution, as much as anything, illustrates the politics of Christian conversion in late 17th-century Ramnad. De Britto worked in a context in which there was intense competition for political power, manifest both in repeated royal succession disputes and in the tendency of lesser poligars to separate out domains of authority independent from the Cetupati in Ramnad. Through Christian religious affiliation and by the extension of chiefly patronage and protection to Jesuit missionaries and popular local saint cults, political opponents acquired important symbolic and political resources in challenging the Cetupati’s power.5 Since de Britto’s converts and protectors included influential Maravar chiefs or poligars and their followers – kinsmen of the Cetupati, members of his court and contenders for the Ramnad throne – the missionary’s activities were easily perceived as seditious by the Cetupati, who eventually had him executed at the border fort of Oriyur (Kadhirvel 1977: 41-42; Nevett 1980; Sauliere 1947).
14The number of Christians continued to grow following de Britto’s execution.6 Conversion was itself increasingly, as Bayly puts it, “conceived and understood as an act of statecraft” through which political alliances were forged or fissured. Maravar warrior chiefs sought affiliation with Christian cults and churches as “part of a wider strategy by which individual poligars sought to balance their claims of power and sovereignty against the demands of overlordship being asserted by the nayaks [rulers of Madurai]” (Bayly 1989: 396-397). Thus by the 1730s certain Cetupatis themselves, as well as lesser poligars, patronised Christian churches.7 The alternation between this and periods of politically motivated persecution as the ruling Cetupati challenged Maravar chiefs and made use of Christian cults to mark off competing dominions (ibid.: 400-401), is captured in the Jesuits’ annual letters of the time.
15The patronage of Christian institutions through church construction, and the granting of land and other rights to Christian shrines8 and to powerful Christian Maravar chiefs or headmen with influence over Maravar and non-Maravar Christians,9 was thus one way in which conflicting factions in the many royal succession disputes sought political support from a growing Christian population (Kadhirvel 1977: 37-45). The link between church patronage and the expansion or consolidation of rival political domains within Ramnad again emerged in 1710 and in 1762 when a new contender to the Ramnad throne sought support from dissident Christian members of the royal family settled in the village of Sarukani (below) through making grants of land (ibid.: 53, 143).
16Of the various mechanisms of royal patronage in the pre-colonial state, the granting of privileges associated with tax free land (or inām) to religious institutions – temples, pilgrim rest houses and communities of Brahmans – was probably the most important.10 The church at Sarukani illustrates the way in which Christian churches and their missionary priests were included in this system of royal gifting, in which the raja gave over his right to a fiscal share in the land in return for ritual honours and the legitimation of his authority which these honours indicated. In the 1790s, Maruṭa Paṅṭiyāṉ (one of two Hindu Cervai caste brothers and ministers of the kingdom of Sivagangai11 who had managed to become de facto rulers) acquired support for his royal pretensions by granting the village of Sarukani for the support of the priest and for the maintenance of cults and festivals of the church.12 The Maruta brothers were ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to secure royal status, but the gift to the church was confirmed by Periya Vodaya Tevar (a Maravar) who assumed rajaship of Sivagangai in 1792. The copper plate inscribing the gift or cārvamāṉiyam13 (which was received by a “Goanese” priest Fr. Arulandaswami) closely parallels royal grants to Brahmans in emphasising the merit attached to the king in protecting the shrine and its presiding divinity (Mosse 1986: 523; see Dirks 1987: 121). In the cārvamāṉiyam the village of Sarukani is granted to the Catholic Church (or as the later Inam Commission (1864) recorded it, to “the manager for the time being of ‘Sarvesouran Kovil’” – i.e., the priest14) rights to the king’s or upper share (melvārām) of the produce of the village – “for lighting, incensing and other such religious worship for ever and ever…” (Cramam: 1-8). The priest as ināmṭār (holder of the granted land, or inām) oversaw the local system of agricultural production and controlled the distribution of shares both in the harvest and in the church festivals. As chief patron of the shrine, the raja of Sivagangai (or his representatives – the araṉmaṇaikkārars, or “palace people”) arranged the final procession of the image of the risen Christ in a huge ceremonial “temple cart” (or tēr) at the Easter festival, and, along with regional Maravar chiefs (nāṭṭampalārs), received “first honour” marked by prestations of cloth and betel nut from the hand of the presiding Catholic priest.15
17As already mentioned, given the logic of political relations in the pre-colonial state, the independence and sovereignty of subordinate chiefs marked by their gifting to, and patronage of, Christian churches was equally a challenge to the authority of overlords such as the Cetupati (Dirks 1987: 48). As foci for insurrection, the missionaries therefore also continued to attract acts of persecution – intimidation, the confiscation of lands, or the transfer of land grants (māṉiyams) from churches to Brahmans16 – in what amounted to a reversal of royal patronage.
18The patronage of Christian shrines by Maravar chiefs should not however be seen merely as a tactical ploy but rather, as Bayly argues, as an important means of displaying prestige and authority over a diffuse domain of control in the conventional way:
The uncleared fringe areas settled by these Maravar and Telegu warriors were remote from the centres of orthodox Hinduism such as those in the Tambraparni valley and other long settled regions of high culture. This made it easy for poligars to extend their patronage to heterodox shrines and folk cults as well as to Brahmins and vedic temples. What mattered was the martial leader’s display of ritual standing and the claim to territorial control implicit in his pledges to protect and endow shrines built in his palayam [fort].
(Bayly [nee Kaufmann] 1979: 194-195)
19In other words in pre-colonial Ramnad, Christian centres were actively incorporated into the local political system. Shrines and churches provided the same opportunities as did Hindu temples for the exchange of material resources and military protection for honour (and the legitimate overlordship which this implied) between religious leaders on the one hand, and kings, local chiefs or village headmen on the other. The Jesuit paṉṭaraswamis, because they depended upon warrior protection, entered into exchanges with local leaders, receiving protection and granting ritual honours. But further, missionaries enabled and authorised this process by incorporating Hindu ritual forms into Catholic festivals. In particular, in the shape of the novena (a nine-day devotion), the festivals of the saints reproduced not only the structure of the Hindu festival of Navarāttiri, but also the principle of the ceremonial gift of the king or locally dominant caste to the deity. The detailed manner in which the organisation of festivals at important Christian churches articulated the local political authority and caste honour is given below. By implication, early Christian cults became established as part of the region’s sacred geography to the extent that they succeeded in attracting the patronage of local and regional chiefs (Bayly 1989: 9).
The cult of St. James (Cantiyākkāppār) at Alapuram
20The rest of this paper will focus on the cult and church of St. James or Cantiyākkāppār kōvil at the village of Alapuram. This will illustrate the way in which devotional worship at Christian cult shrines and mission centres provided a context not only for royal gifting and patronage in the 18th century, but also for the articulation of a local system of caste ranking. The narrative will also show the way in which this system was transformed under colonial and post colonial regimes during the 19th and 20th centuries.
21The cult of St. James at Alapuram developed towards the end of the 17th century. According to local legend, four Pallar (Untouchable caste) brothers brought a miraculous cutting of a banyan tree to the village from the St. James shrine at Verkatu.17 These Pallars converted to Christianity after the healing of their crippled sister under the Verkadu tree. From the 1730s onwards the Annual Letters of the Madurai Mission record the existence of a cult to St. James focusing on a sacred banyan tree at Alapuram, “… where every Friday crowds of people (Hindus and Christians) come […] to fulfil some vows in return for favours asked or to ask for new ones.”18 The letters describe tremendous prodigies at the shrine, brought about by the tree and its leaves, but most prominent among them was the saint’s punishment of perjurers (those who made false oaths, pōy cattiyam in front of his statue; see Mosse 1994b).19 Under the patronage of Cetupati Kattatevar the Jesuits attempted to make this popular cult the focus of mission structure in Ramnad, but were overtaken by political events when the area was annexed to the Maratha king of Tanjavur.20 A church to St. James the Greater was nonetheless constructed in 1731 under the protection of the Sivagangai Raja, Nallukkotai Utaiyan Tevar, himself the beneficiary of a miraculous cure.21 The missionary priests came from their centre at Sarukani to preside over the annual festival of St. James, which by the 1740s attracted large crowds and a considerable income. Probably at this time local Maravar headmen had taken up the role of protectors or trustees of the shrine. This was certainly the case in the 1770s when it was they who erected the new church for a miraculous statue of St. James,22 and who received primary honours from the priest at the annual festival. Prominent here was Yagappa ( “St. James”) Ambalar, a Christian Maravar and political chief or nāṭṭampalār of the Mangalam nāṭu (micro-region)23 who built a number of churches and temples in the area and, as a mark of his political authority, received privileged honours at the Alapuram and other festivals. Again, in 1792, a land grant (māṉiyam) was made to St. James by the Cetupati Mutturamalingam (Ponnad 1983: 200).
22Although after the consolidation of British power at the beginning of the 19th century, and with the suppression of rival poligars, Maravars had for the most part ceased to identify themselves as Christians, Maravar chiefs and village headmen continued to patronise Christian churches, and to participate in popular regional saint cults and to receive honours which reflected and established their position of local dominance. As a popular cult centre, the St. James church in Alapuram attracted such support. This in turn increased the following and importance of the local Christian church. Conscious of the advantages of this to their mission, the Jesuits (and the “Goan” priests who took over the administration of the “Maravarnatu” churches after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773) continued to model the structure and organisation of the festivals of Christian saints on those of Hindu temples. These festivals did not only endorse local authority, they equally articulated and validated a local hierarchical caste order.

Cantiyākkāppār (St. James) in the church at Alapuram.
(Photogr. D. Mosse)
St. James’ church and the local discourse of caste
23In Ramnad, as elsewhere in Southern Tamil Nadu and Tamil Sri Lanka, caste is not primarily viewed as a social hierarchy based upon transactionally maintained differences in ritual purity, but as a royally ordained and historically instituted division of labour in which each group has specific rights (to hold office, provide service and to receive a share of the village produce) and rank. As Hocart suggested, “service” is a key principle of caste order (1950: 8, 68). Although the hierarchy of ritual specialists and menial servants which Hocart points to are a necessary provision for ordered village life, they are equally if not ideologically primarily necessary to serve the deities in the shrines protected by the ruler. Indeed, Hocart himself stressed the religious nature of service. More recent analysts also accord a primacy to the temple in social organisation and suggest a view of caste as a ritual organisation ideally centring on the deity as sovereign of a defined territory and enthroned in his kōvil (temple or palace). Thus Stein suggests that the medieval temple was seen:
… as a set of sharing beneficiaries in the generosity of a deity […] What shares of village income was for the distribution and redistribution of resources in the material order of time, shares of support to deities and prasadam from these deities was in the moral order of time […] there could be no complete moral order without the sharing and transactional nexus centring upon a god, whether of a family, a jati, a clan […] a village, a locality or a kingdom.
(Stein 1980: 452-453)
24The god in turn in being worshipped required the existence of “complex local communities of castes”: priests to conduct rites of worship and specialists of appropriate castes to attend to the deity (Marriot & Inden 1974: 985, quoted ibid.). It was the king who ideally provided this elaborate system of hereditary service for the temple deity, and whose authority and pre-eminence were legitimated through his role as protector of the shrine, “the creation of society merely (being) an incidental by-product” (McGilvray 1982: 72). In other words, the temple ideologically prefigures society, or as Stein puts, temples “… determine or fix boundaries of social groupings and social space reckoned to mark off the community of co-sharers in the worship of a particular god.” (Stein 1980: 454.) In social terms, the village is defined by the worshippers of its village deity or gramadeva (Tam. kirāmateyvam) rather than by its administrative boundaries (see Daniel 1984, ch. 2). It is in this sense that caste rights and rank are most focally expressed in the formal distribution of “temple honours” (kōvil mariyātai) at annual temple festivals, at which, moreover, the deity presides as sovereign of a local territory. These same principles could underlie the celebration at Catholic shrines such as St. James at Alapuram.
25The political function of the church of St. James – its ability to attract patronage and to be a locus of ranked caste honours – arose from some equivalence between Catholic saints and Hindu deities in symbolising and validating political control and social order. Underlying this symbolism was a conception of divine power as localized, material and not clearly distinguished from the secular power of the king; a power, moreover, which was focused on the deities’ seat or shrine, the kōvil – equally the deity’s royal palace (Ludden 1985: 30-31; Bayly 1989: 48). It is not difficult to see how the cult of the miraculous banyan tree of St. James (himself portrayed as divine warrior and protector of the village territory) could provide a suitable vehicle for expressing local political dominance which fitted in with prevailing notions of divine and secular power.24
26I am not, however, suggesting that the Catholic saints and church festivals are entirely circumscribed by pre-existing Hindu ideas,25 nor that patterns of festival organisation draw exclusively on local Hindu traditions. In a sense, of course, the festival honours system and the novenas are as much European as Tamil. The important issue, here, is not the cultural origin of individual elements, but the fact that as a whole the Catholic Church was constituted as a ritual system (centring on the presiding saint) which was perceived by both Hindus and Christians in precisely the same way as a Hindu temple, namely as a ceremonial context in which caste and relations of power could be symbolised and validated. This is strikingly evident in the organisation and history of festivals at major Christian churches such as St. James at Alapuram. It is here that the authority of the (Hindu) village headmen and the ranked division of labour and caste hierarchy is dramatised. Indeed St. James has long been Alapuram’s principle village deity (kirāmateyvam), that is the “god” whose protection extends to the village as a whole – both Christian and Hindu – and whose domain of “rule” includes those of the lesser (Hindu) village gods and goddesses (see Mosse 1994b) and above all whose festival involves the participation of persons of all social categories (of both religion and caste).
27At least from the late 18th century the system of festival honours at the St. James church was the chief context for ceremonial transactions validating and contesting status in the Alapuram caste order (see McGilvray 1982: 78). Through its various roles of patronage and service, its rights and its honours, the Church provided a “conceptual paradigm” for village society (organised around the worship of the village saint) both for Christians and Hindus, who were incorporated into a single caste hierarchy (ibid.). Here the priestly idioms of purity/impurity have a secondary organising role in a conception of caste, which with its emphasis on service (if not strictly sacrifice) and its ordering in relation to the king rather than the Brahman, owes more to Hocart than Dumont.
28Given this central importance of the St. James festival, in later sections of this paper it will be possible to trace changing patterns of caste relations in the village by following the historical developments in the festival. Before doing so, however, I want to adopt a synchronic perspective in order to outline the structure of the festival as a social system. Subsequent sections will show how this basic structure has been shaped and transformed by historical processes.
III. The structure of a Tamil Catholic festival
The St. James festival
29Every Catholic village in Ramnad, or every village with a Catholic church dedicated to a particular saint, has an annual festival in which the mobile images of the saints are adorned with silk cloth and mounted on decorated platforms (capparams) or carts (tērs) and taken in procession around the streets of the village. These festivals like those at Hindu temples usually last for nine days and are inaugurated by a ceremonial “flag-raising” (see below). The entire village and a sizeable crowd from the surrounding villages attend, together with numerous hawkers, gypsies, Christian and Hindu sannyāsis (those dressed in saffron), traders and beggars. During the festival days, the crowd mills about the shrine making offerings and fulfilling numerous kinds of vows. They slaughter goats and chickens in honour of the saint, cook, wash, eat and sleep in the vicinity of the shrine. The priests hear confessions and the catechists or kōvilpiḷḷais lead prayers in the church. The high points of the festival are the processions of the saints, particularly that of the final night of the festival. The processions are inaugurated by the priest, who, walking under a ceremonial umbrella (koti) on cloth provided by the washerman, is brought with drums and pipes (mēḷam and nākacuvaram) to bless the statues. People come forward to touch or to garland the statues with flowers or cloth. As the platforms are lifted up people raise their hands in worship or finger their rosaries in prayer, and women draw their sarees over their heads in respect (mukkāṭu mariyātai, “veil respect”). The carts and platforms carrying the saints in Alapuram are accompanied by a large cross, musicians, fireworks, flags, bells, and a huge crowd who throws offerings of salt, pepper and flowers among other things, to the saints. Some of the flowers are received back “from the feet of the saint” at the end of the procession as blessing (ācīrvātam) and placed in the rooves of the houses. The houses along the processional route have rows of small oil lights (deepas) set on their verandas. As the procession passes these houses, their members kneel to worship the saints. At the comers of the streets the procession halts before an arch of fire crackers strung across the streets. The clamour of the Paraiyar (Untouchable caste) drummers stops temporarily, as they tighten the hide of their drums over a pile of burning straw, and devotional songs are sung. The procession, which may last for hours, finally arrives back at the church. The saints are rotated a half-turn and amid a crescendo of drumming and clapping are lowered to the ground, before being returned to the altar in the church and garlanded again. After the procession of the final night there is a traditional Christian drama which lasts until daybreak, when the major mass of the festival is held. The festivals usually conclude with one final day-time procession of the statues.

Decorated capparam holding a saint statue.
30The figure at the centre of this annual drama in Alapuram is St. James. If St. James can, like the presiding deities of Hindu temples, be described as the “paradigmatic sovereign” present in his royal abode (the kōvil), he is, furthermore, especially present and powerful during his annual ten-day festival26 in the month of Āṭi (Āṭi tiruviḷā, “the Ati festival”, 16-25 July). Following Reiniche (1979) I have argued that this special presence is understood as a transition of the saint from “inside” to “outside”: the saint ordinarily worshipped inside the church becomes simultaneously present outside, manifesting his royal presence among his people.27 The ten-day festival of St. James is, for example, inaugurated (like Hindu festivals in the area) with the raising of a koṭimaram or “flag tree”. There are several indications that, as Reiniche has argued for Hindu temple festivals, the raising of the koṭimaram is a “rite of passage” in which the saint (or Hindu deity) also becomes present in the flag post28 the ceremonial banner of which represents his royal presence and dharmic rule over the village (ibid.: 93-95). However, the clearest indication of the presence of St. James “outside” as sovereign are the processions of his decorated statue, accompanied by other saints, in the ceremonial vehicles around the broad “processional streets” (tērōṭṭam viti) on each of the nine nights of the festival. Furthermore, in travelling around the church compound it is evident that the saint extends his blessing and confers good fortune (cītēvi) to the limits of the domain over which he is sovereign. Indeed, in a sense during the festival the boundary of the church becomes co-extensive with the boundary of the village which it symbolises.29 Thus, after the “raising of the flag” a greater moral and sexual purity is required of villagers, and there is a prohibition on staying outside the village boundary overnight (koṭiṭaṭai, the impediment of the flag) (Mosse 1994b). Worship of the saint at his festival in fact involves two different types of interaction with St. James. Firstly, there are the private acts of worship often for the benefit of individuals or families and illustrated by vows (nērtikkaṭaṉ), fulfilled by making various offerings (candles, money, garlands, a goat or chicken, etc.) and penances such as tonsure, circumambulation, or the pilgrimage to the shrine itself, offered in return for the saint’s grace (aruḷ) and blessing (ācīrvātam). Secondly, there are public forms of worship in which participants are involved largely by virtue of their position in the community and in which services or gifts offered to the saint express the relationship of a group to the social whole of which it is a part (see Fuller 1979: 460). The caste-based services and honours described below are of this kind. Appadurai (1981: 33-34) characterises these two types of worship, private and public, respectively as reciprocal and redistributive transactions with the deity (or saint). He suggests that:

Statue of St. Sebastian in decorated capparam
… As a process the temple has a redistributive role, which in this cultural context consists of a continuous flow of transactions between worshippers and deity, in which resources and services are given to the deity and are returned by the deity to the worshippers in the form of “shares” demarcated by certain kinds of honours.
(Appadurai 1981: 18)

The priest arriving in procession to bless the statues in Alapuram.
31In Alapuram all members of the village (including Hindus) together with Christians from other villages in the parish were in different capacities “co-sharers” in the worship of the church – that is as sponsors, ritual specialists or servants, and accordingly were beneficiaries of the protecting “rule” of the saint as sovereign of the territory. These “shares” were, as at Hindu temples, marked by “honours” (mariyātail)30 which defined members of the village as interdependent and ranked parts of the whole. While the transactions involved in the festivals of the St. James church did not involve redistribution in any strict sense, the parallel with the Hindu temple system is both striking and clear to participants themselves. Thus, even more important than describing the territorial domain of the saint’s rule, the worship of the saint at his festival brought into play and validated the overall hierarchical constitution of the social order protected by the saint.
Church service
32First of all, the worship of the saint involved a series of caste specific hereditary ritual services. Each of the village officers and servants, having the hereditary right to a part of the village produce in the form of prescribed payments at the division of the harvest on the threshing floor, also had the right to participate in the St. James festival and to receive church honours or kōvil mariyātai. In the context of the Catholic festival this refers to the distribution of garlands, cloth (veṣṭ tuṇṭu), betel leaf and areca nut (veṟṟilaipākku) and sandalwood paste at the start and at the end of the festival to its participants in a prescribed order. An example of these church services and honours would be (a) the taccu kōvil mirācu (the carpenter’s church mirācu, or hereditary right),31 which refers to the carpenter’s duties in repairing the vehicles which take the saints in procession – the capparams and church cart (tēr or cattatēr)32 –, and (b) the corresponding ttaccu kōvil mariyātai ( “carpenter’s church honour”), which refers to the betel (etc.) received as honours during the festival. This latter, on the one hand authorised the carpenter’s special right to a part in the worship, and on the other established the standing of the caste that he represented (Ācāri), in the village hierarchy.
33A full list of the duties and services at the St. James festival is given in Appendix 1. For the purposes of comparison, Appendix 2 provides the same for Sarukani Church. These lists demonstrate the detailed hierarchical division of festival service which accommodated an elaborate ranking of castes in each village. Tasks involved in using the processional torches at the Sarukani Easter festival, for example, describe the relative ranking of four separate Untouchable castes and their service to higher castes in the village. Thus the most inferior Untouchable caste “Cakkiḷiyan” received “honours” at the festival for holding the container for a supply of oil that was carried by the “Tōṭṭi” (another Untouchable caste), that was poured by the “Koudoumban” (a third higher ranking Untouchable caste) onto the torch that was carried by the “Valeyan” when the statues were carried from the church by the “high castes”.
34One ritual service which requires some special mention is that of the office of kōvilpiḷḷai or catechist. This prestigious hereditary office was held by the Vellalar caste, and through its honours Catholic Vellalars of Alapuram acquired preeminent position in the local caste hierarchy. This office was established by Jesuits, who, in appointing catechists to look after groups of converts and in extending mission control over early syncretic Christian cults, deliberately institutionalised a pattern of spiritual leadership which was consistent with established ideals of priestly rank.33 Partly also fearing the loss of high caste converts, Jesuits gave the office of catechist to members of the high ranking Vellalar caste (often recruited from other Christian centres) to the exclusion of other castes (Bayly 1989: 410-419). In fact, Bayly argues, the Jesuits in effect supported the status claims of a heterogenous range of castes claiming the honorific title “Vellalar” or “Pillai” by giving them exclusive access to privileged ritual roles such as reciting prayers, officiating at mass or handling sacred objects (ibid.). By the 19th century, at least, the hereditary position of kōvilpiḷḷai in Alapuram had given Catholic Koṭikka Vellalar sub-caste equal rank with the Hindu Kārākaṭṭu Vellalars who held the village office of karṇam or village accountant. It was this Vellalar claim to superior ritual rank among Catholic castes, that was resented and challenged in the festival disputes of the time (below).
35The domestic ritual services (prayers for the dead or at life crisis rituals, etc.) provided by the kōvilpiḷḷai were, however, denied to low caste Catholics (Nātārs and Paḷḷars) (Mosse, n.d.). Excluded from high caste ritual services, Alapuram Pallars and Natars were served by separate catechists. Pallars, for example, had their own “Pallar catechist” or paṇṭāram, who “replicated” for them the ritual services of the Vellalar kōvilpiḷḷai34. As Moffatt’s study of a Hindu Untouchable community in Northern Tamil Nadu points out, where excluded. Untouchables replicate ritual service roles (1979, ch. 4). However, as Moffatt also shows, where included in village festivals, the roles of Untouchable caste specialists generally complement rather than replicate those of high castes. Such a hierarchical complementarity between the roles of high castes and Untouchables is, indeed, evident in the respective service roles of the Vellalar kōvilpiḷḷai and the Pallar paṇṭāram at the St. James festival. The kōvilpiḷḷai had the prestigious roles of reciting prayers, assisting the priest, adorning the statues to be taken in procession, bringing them down from the altar, and the distinctly priestly function of handing out the kōvil mariyātai or “church honours” (McGilvray 1982: 80-81). The paṇṭāram, on the other hand had the inferior task of decorating the capparam or tēr with engraved leaves of lead (īyam takaṭu) and hundreds of candles,35 and has the menial title of capparamēstiri ( “capparam head workman”).
36In sum, then, the Pallar paṇṭāram in decorating the processional vehicles, the carpenter or blacksmith in repairing them, the washerman in providing various cloths (māttu), the kuṭumpaṉ (Pallar) in making and carrying the processional torches (tivetti), the ampalār (ampalākāran, or Maravar headmen) in organising the village for the final procession of the saints at the festival, each offered caste-specific resources and services to the church and received back “honours” which denoted their caste status by virtue of their part in the worship. These hereditary church services, moreover, expressed a division of labour which was itself royally ordained and validated through annual prestations at the palace in Ramnad (Mosse 1986).
Church donors
37Hereditary service was only one form in which social groups held “shares” in the worship of the church. There were other more direct ways of acting as donors in the “redistributive process” of the church, and occasions in the festival cycle (Appendix 3) other than the St. James festival for notable or aspiring families, lineages or castes to obtain both the benefit of the saint’s grace (aruḷ) and social honour. This was, and is, usually a question of: (1) paying for a mass, the procession of a saint or some other part of a major ceremony, or making a special presentation to the priest (cantippu) or to the church (e.g., a statue); (2) fulfilling some honorific role such as carrying the saint from the church to the processional vehicle; and (3) receiving first respect (mutal mariyātai) at the distribution of honours to the participants in the ceremony.36 These “honours” were usually symbolised in cloth and betel nut prestation, but may also have included particular public blessings. On each day of the Novena of the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament (teviya narkkaruṇaitirunāḷ), for example, the procession was paid for by a different Uṭaiyār family. In 1935 the priest wrote in his diary:
It is ruled that […] those of the manthapapadikarers [donors] who give Rs.3 or more would have the benediction service of the Blessed Sacrament in the evening. Those who give less than Rs.3 will have only the benediction of the statue…
(AL, Veaux 6.6. 1935)
38The chief occasion for this kind of donation, as for church service, has always been the St. James festival. Specifically, the donor pays for the saint to be taken out in procession on one of the nine nights of the festival; that is to say the donor holds a maṇṭakapaṭi (or maṇṭaka-paṭi, maṇṭapapaṭi).37 The procession of the nine nights, plus one added for the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, were thus paid for by the following maṇṭakapaṭikārars or “donors” from Alapuram and other villages of the parish.
Table 1. Maṇṭakapaṭi donors for the St. James festival, Alapuram

* The list of statues taken by the different donors in the final procession was provided by one informant. The festival probably had this particular form by the 1870s, although festival maṇṭakapaṭis almost certainly existed throughout the 18th century. The role of the priests in creating and redistributing maṇṭakapaṭis is discussed below.
39N. B. The first maṇṭakapaṭi on the Feast of O. L. of Mt. Carmel, was created by the Jesuit priests to honour a particularly influential and wealthy family of Utaiyars who converted to Catholicism two generations ago. On this day the statue of O. L. was taken in procession. The second maṇṭakapaṭi (16th July) before 1872 was held by the Utaiyars of three adjacent villages.
40The caste and village involved in each maṇṭakapaṭi was represented by a headman (talaivaṉ) or elder (muttayaṇ) responsible for collecting contributions to the festival. A fixed portion of this festival tax (vari) was paid to the priest for the organisation of the festival and the payment of church servants. The rest paid for customary services from the donor’s village (for the washerman, and for kompu (horn) and tappu (drum) players, etc.) and other expenses. Indeed, the maṇṭakapaṭi not only involved a series of honorific roles but also provided occasions for competitive pageantry. The fourth maṇṭakapaṭi, for example, was referred to as Cankani kompu (horn) maṇṭakapaṭi because the Maravars of Cankani village would arrive for the festival accompanied by forty or so Paraiyar horn players, as well as the usual drummers and torches. A clear expression of their local power and political dominance.
41The holders of the maṇṭakapaṭi (or maṇṭakapaṭikārars) were met by Alapuram’s Untouchable drummers and brought to the church where, after offering prayers and garlands to the saints, the headman of the maṇṭakapaṭi (plus other notables) took the statues of the saints from the church to the capparams (decorated by the Pallar paṇṭāram). They then went to the priest and offered their festival donation and received his blessing, before bringing him with ceremony to bless the capparams. These were then taken up in procession. When the procession returned to the church, the donors were the first to receive the flowers offered to the saints, and the “big men” again took the statues back to the church. Finally, sitting outside the church on cloth provided by the washerman, the maṇṭakapaṭi headmen organised payment for the various services.
42Each maṇṭakapaṭi followed this basic pattern. Each had its own capparam, made by the village carpenter to the donor’s own specification, in which the statue of St. James rode. But also, on each successive day of the festival St. James was accompanied by one or more saints, since each maṇṭakapaṭi took all the previous maṇṭakapaṭi capparams in procession as well as its own. These processions are usually led by St. Michael the archangel, who, like Ganesh, is considered as the remover of obstacles.
43The eighth and ninth maṇṭakapaṭis were slightly different from the others, not only in the huge crowds present on these days, but also in that more than one caste group was involved. For this reason these days have often been the main focus of inter-caste disputes. The ūlūr maṇṭakapaṭi ( “internal, or interior village maṇṭakapaṭi”) involved three of the main Catholic castes of the village – Vellalars, Utaiyars and Pallars (Natars of the village contributed to their own caste maṇṭakapaṭi). These three castes, however, have always been unequal donors. Catholic Vellalars (for the most part relatives of the kōvilpiḷḷai) claimed ritual superiority, and until the 1880s held most of the privileged roles such as carrying the statues and receiving betel first at the end of the festival. Pallars by contrast, although in principle equal donors (in the sense of paying the same festival tax), were, until the 20th century, excluded from carrying the capparams or receiving the flowers from the “feet of the saint” at the end of the procession. Furthermore, until the 1920s Catholic Pallars received betel “honours” only as low status village servants, rather than as prestigious donors.
44In several Tamil temples, the last night of a festival is paid for by the local political dominants, who, acting as temple trustees (managing temple land, paying its servants, etc.) receive foremost respect in the distribution of honours (Reiniche 1979: 86-87; McGilvray 1982: 73). As chief donors they represent the yajamāna (sk.) or “sacrificant”, “dont l’image idéale est celle du roi” (Reiniche 1979: 87).38 It was in this capacity, as chief donors, holders of the final maṇṭakapaṭi and recipients of first honours, that Maravar headmen (Christian and Hindu) patronised Catholic shrines in the area. Displaying the conventional symbols of temple overlordship, mēḷam drums and ceremonial umbrella for example, they were brought in procession to conduct the final night of the festival (see McGilvray 1982: 95; Fr. S. Ponnad S. J., personal communication). By the end of the 19th century, however, it was the resident Catholic priest in Alapuram who held this kingly role in what became referred to as the cāmiyār maṇṭakapaṭi ( “priest’s maṇṭakapaṭi”), and it was he who received first the first respect (mutal mariyātai). Nonetheless, the authority of the Hindu village headman (ampalār) was recognised in Alapuram (until the 1930s) in his right to conduct the final day-time procession (on the tenth day) with the huge cattatēr cart, and to receive appropriate ceremonial honour. Indeed, it was at this point that the St. James festival was most clearly the inclusive village festival, involving Christians and Hindus of all castes, under the peculiar bicephalous authority of the Catholic priest and the Hindu headman.39
45It was after the final procession on the tenth day that the main “honours” were distributed.
Church honours
46The Alapuram caste hierarchy in its totality was particularly clearly expressed, validated and disputed at the distribution of “church honours” (kōvil mariyātai) at the beginning of the festival – before the raising of the ceremonial banner – and at its end – before the final tēr procession. On both occasions the village musicians called the village headman and accountant, who together with the influential men of surrounding villages (the nāṭṭars, headmen of the nāṭu or region) brought the priest in procession to the church. After prayers had been recited the priest touched the cloth, betel leaf, areca nut and sandalwood paste before they were distributed by the kōvilpiḷḷai. The latter called the following categories of participants in the given order (see Table 2).
47The way in which this ranking of village offices and castes was contested through disputes over honours is the subject of the remainder of this paper. Rank was expressed both in terms of the quantity and quality of betel and cloth given and the order in which these were distributed. Moreover, while the Acari (carpenter) and all those before him received the church honours inside the church, the remaining village servants received the betel outside or standing on the steps of the church door (AL, Gnanaprakasam 25.7.1896, Gamon 25.7.1896, Veaux 25.7.1925).40 Appendix 2 indicates the Sarukani church honours distributed by the priest in front of the tēr before the final procession of the risen Christ at the Easter festival. This list of honours, presented in the order in which they were received, and recorded in 1876,41 clearly indicates the incorporation of the king into the church honours system and his right to first honour as the principle donor and protector of the shrine.
48The services and honours associated with these church festivals did not simply reflect an established caste hierarchy present at some other (more concrete) level of social reality. They actually constituted this hierarchy in the sense that it was through the ritual division of labour centring on the church and its honours, that the caste ranking of Hindus and Christians ultimately found justification and was contested. Church honours were certainly not a “passive scoreboard” of status and rank achieved in other areas of social life, but rather a “competitive game” in which status was negotiable (see Levinson 1982: 149 ff.).
Table 2. Distribution of the “church honours” at Alapuram

49Moreover, in representing the caste hierarchy, the kōvil mariyātai was able to integrate claims to caste status made on a variety of possibly quite different pretexts. Religious superiority, kingly authority, wealth and number (claimed respectively by Vellalars, Maravars and Utaiyars) were given concrete expression in the same metaphor of honour rights and office, implicit in the church honours (see McGilvray 1982: 81). The status of Pallars and other low castes was more closely linked to their service roles in relation both to the church and high caste patrons. Kōvil mariyātai – itself irreducible to any other single criteria of status – was the common currency of caste rank, expressing both religious and political pre-eminence among both Hindus and Christians. Indeed, arguably it was because these honours integrated so effectively different criteria of status (e.g., permitting the translation of wealth into honour) that they were so often the context of attempts at social mobility and hence the focus of so much conflict.
50Several of these features of Catholic festival honours are shared with those of Hindu temples, while others – such as the ability of low castes to translate religious rights to equal treatment as Christians into social honours for their caste – are distinctive features of the church. Also distinctive, is the position of the missionary priests, who, because they controlled access to ritual markers of rank (the honours, coveted roles such as carrying the statues, etc.) became themselves crucial arbiters of power and caste rank, as well as agents of social change (see below).
51While in some senses a Hindu institution (a religious institution involving ideas and ritual practices which are not clearly separable from those of Hindu religion; see Dumont 1972), the caste system is also able to take Catholic ritual form. That which in ecclesiastical terms was seen as Christianity “accommodating” caste, was, in social reality caste “accommodating” Christianity; that is, the active construction and appropriation of Christian ritual contexts as part of an indigenous social and ritual order.42 This was encouraged by Jesuit priests who, while tolerant of the strictly social order of caste, were uncompromising in their rejection of what was understood as Hindu religion (Mosse 1994b). Since what ultimately mattered was that Christians were “à faire rendre au Seigneur du ciel les hommages qui, jusque-là, n’avaient été rendus qu’au prince des ténèbres” (Saint-Cyr 1841: 274), the incorporation of customary practices, and Hindu forms of devotion in the public and private worship of the saints could only be encouraged. The 18th-century Jesuit and Goan missionaries in Ramnad conceptually distinguished indigenous (Hindu) ritual forms from the Christian content, caste from religion. In doing so they conceived of local ritual practice in ways which differed significantly from those of the actors themselves, for whom meaning lay not in the religio-cultural content (saint rather than deity; church rather than temple) but in the ritual form. This difference of understanding accounts for a constantly contested and shifting boundary between Catholic religion and caste society from the 1850s onwards.
IV. Conflict and change
52The following sections chronicle and interpret changes in the Alapuram festival system described here synchronically. The account will show how the festival provided a changing context for social conflict, particularly during colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries. One theme will be the changing configurations of power and the pattern of inter-caste conflicts at the festival. As such, little attention will be given to the many intra-caste disputes, including those over matters such as positions of caste leadership (talaivaṉ), the right to represent a maṇṭakapaṭi in receiving the betel honours or to carry the statues, or inter-family conflicts over the holding of offices such as kōvilpiḷḷai or village accountant (karṇam) and the receipt of appropriate honours. Perhaps it should also be said that while the emphasis will be on conflicts between the main Catholic castes of the village (principally at the 8th night, ūḷūr maṇṭakapaṭi), the St. James festival was also the focus of Hindu caste honour disputes in two ways. Firstly, the relative rank of Hindu castes in the village was represented and contested in the honours due to holders of village offices – as headman, accountant, etc., and village servants – as washerman, Pallar or Paraiyar drummers. Secondly, just as Christians participated in kōvil mariyātai disputes involving their caste at Hindu temples in nearby villages, similarly Hindu Utaiyars actively supported Catholic members of their caste in securing honours at the St. James festival.
53A second theme will be the changes in the ritual system itself, and in the parameters which defined it. It will become clear, for example, that colonial power introduced a quite different conception of religion and ecclesiastical authority, and that this, by degrees, re-configured the relationship between the Catholic Church and caste society which had been embodied in the pre-colonial Jesuit Madura Mission.
54The Jesuit paṇṭaraswamis in pre-colonial Ramnad provided a distinctly spiritual leadership as renouncer-teachers. They administered the sacraments and presided at Christian ceremonies, but did not claim an exclusive authority over the churches and their festivals, in which local headmen, regional chiefs and representatives of the different serving caste groups held recognised rights. From 1735, at Alapuram, the sacraments were administered and other ritual services for the St. James church and its festivals provided by the Jesuit paṉṭaraswami Fr. de Rossi (Cinna Saviar or “Little Xavier”) based in the village of Sarukani, until this role was assumed by the Padroado Goanese priests in 1775. Both Jesuit and Goan priests served the St. James church as visiting ritual functionaries. But the shrine was controlled locally by Maravar village headmen (with Jesuit-appointed kōvilpiḷḷais). As religious leaders the missionary priests did, however, control the granting of religious honours such as festival maṇṭakapaṭis, and had a role in arbitrating disputes over these honours, as well as pursuing their own goal of evangelism and the conversion of Hindus. As such, they established the same link “… between recruitment to the sect and the rewards for new recruits in the form of shares of some sort of temple service and temple honours,” as Appadurai observes of medieval Hindu sectarian leaders (1981: 77, author’s emphasis). However, while offering rewards for conversion to high caste groups and new opportunities for participation in religious ritual to low castes (e.g., Natars and Pallars) who were excluded from Hindu temples, the Jesuit priests in the pre-colonial period had no legislative authority on matters of caste honour.
55The Church and its honours system continued to be at the heart of the local discourse of caste and power and to articulate a pattern of pre-colonial Maravar dominance and overlordship well into the 1850s. British rule, however, allowed for a significant change in the position of the missionary priests. Most fundamentally, colonialism brought with it a distinctly European conception of religion as a domain separate from politics over which bureaucratic control could be imposed. By the mid-19th century this had already brought about a major change in local Hindu temple systems (Dirks 1987; Appadurai 1981). This bureaucratic conception of religion, together with the colonial administrative and judiciary system which implemented it, made it possible for Catholic priests to impose an exclusive authority over popular cults like St. James at Alapuram. However, there was one important reason why such administrative authority could not be asserted over Ramnad churches in the 1840s and 50s. Ecclesiastical jurisdiction over them was being disputed by two Catholic missionary agencies – the “Goanese” Padroado priests under the patronage of Portugal who had taken over the administration of the churches of Ramnad after the Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, and the French Jesuits under the authority of Rome who returned to the area in 1836 to stake their claim to be the true administrators of the churches of Ramnad. The particular pattern of conflicts over honours at the St. James church at Alapuram and other shrines was, however, shaped by wider changes in caste relations and the local structure of power brought about by colonial rule.
Caste conflict, sectarian affiliation and mission control over the St. James Church: 1856-1862
56By the mid-19th century the demographic and caste pattern of Alapuram had changed, reflecting wider political and economic changes in the Ramnad countryside. Until the late 18th century, Alapuram probably comprised dominant Maravar lineages, Hindu and Catholic Velallars, their dependent Pallar caste labourers and other service castes (artisans, etc.). But military service, an unstable agricultural base and regular migrations ensured a fluid population. In the 19th century local caste structures gradually became more localised (village-based), fixed (as armies were disbanded and stable settlement increased under British rule), complex and hierarchical.
57Rapid economic expansion in the 19th century had brought new settlers into the area. Catholic and Hindu Utaiyar agriculturalist castes from Tiruchi and Tanjavur, who migrated to the village around 1780, were granted uncultivated land by the raja and local headman. The growing economic power of this group – based on expanding cultivation and new commercial opportunities (particularly dryland cash cropping) brought about under British Rule – came to match and challenge the authority of the old order based as it was on kinship, political office and control of wet land (tank-irrigated) production, redistribution and revenue (Baker 1984; Mosse, in preparation). The St. James festival honours provided a context in which the authority of Maravar headmen and the royally instituted and supported hierarchy of offices, including ritual offices such as that of the kōvilpiḷḷai established by the old Jesuit mission, were challenged, and in which formerly low status but upwardly mobile caste groups sought to translate gains of wealth into legitimate status (see Baker 1984: 91).43
58In the 1840s and 50s the principle dispute of this kind in Alapuram concerned Utaiyars and Vellalars (Résumé: 59-60).44 Catholic Utaiyars were engaged in repeated attempts to erode the Vellalar caste monopoly of prestigious honours in the St. James church, conferred on them as holders of the ritual office of kōvilpiḷḷai Utaiyars, whose growing power was supported by strong regional caste leadership had, by the 1840s, in fact already won important caste rights and privileges from Goanese priests in churches in the major centres of Utaiyar settlement (e.g., the churches of Pulial, Oricottai, and Oriyur [ibid.: 59]),45 but had not yet obtained honours commensurate with their social position at the important St. James shrine. The wider importance of this to the Utaiyar caste as a whole is indicated by the mobilisation of regional caste networks (including Hindus) in the 1860s and 70s, by leaders who converged on Alapuram at festivals to support local Catholic Utaiyar claims to church honours (ibid.: 272-273). But equally, the Vellalars’ established rights were supported by the Maravar village headmen and other village officers46 with interests in preserving existing patterns of caste rank and authority.
59Ecclesiastical events in the 1840s and 50s contributed dramatically to the nature of these honours disputes. In a long drawn out struggle, the French Jesuits of the new Madurai Mission challenged the authority of the established Padroado Goanese priests over Christian centres.47 On both sides, the demonstration of support for their mission from local Christians was crucial to confirming legally their rights to patronage and authority over popular Christian pilgrimage centres. In Alapuram, these claims were pressed in an complex series of petitions, law suits, and appeals in the Supreme Court in Madras from 1858 (Bertrand, ed., 1865: 439-443).48 In order to secure popular support each mission was pressed into allocating privileges and honours to caste groups in the village, while at the same time asserting their authority over church rituals, which was necessary to uphold and validate these honours. This assertion of local control brought the Jesuit and Goanese missionaries into visible conflict at the village level. Unsurprisingly, the ecclesiastical conflict over patronage between Jesuif “intruders” and Goanese “schismatics”, and the caste conflict between wealthy Utaiyars on the one hand and Vellalars and the established village authorities on the other, intermeshed and found focus in the existing system of St. James festival honours.49 Both missions attempted to win support through controlling the established system of honours and by manipulating accepted idioms of ritual authority; for example by making lavish endowments to the shrine and celebrating the festivals with unprecedented ceremony. Thus, in 1841 a Jesuit priest built a chapel for his following in Alapuram and celebrated “with great pomp” an alternative St. James festival (Besse 1914: 246-248), and elsewhere impressive new churches were built next to dilapidated Goanese ones (Bertrand, ed., 1865, passim).
60In the 1850s, Fr. Edmond Favreux brought the revived Jesuit Madurai Mission to Alapuram. He initially solicited support from Utaiyars, who themselves perceived good opportunities to press further claims to caste honours with the arrival of this new ritual authority in the area. The Goanese priests, meanwhile, supported Vellalar resistance to Utaiyar pretensions (Résumé: 59). The backing which the Jesuits obtained from Alapuram Utaiyars was, however, qualified. On the one hand, Utaiyars were uncertain of Favreux’s ability to gain control of the Alapuram shrine and therefore his ability to adjudicate on festival honours in their favour. On the other hand, important church honours held by Utaiyars in other Christian centres (from whom Alapuram Utaiyars sought support) had been won from the Goanese rivals (ibid.: 60).50 Catholic Utaiyars both in Alapuram and in these other centres in fact skilfully played one Christian sect off against the other, until in 1857 a “concordat” was signed (between Rome and Portugal) which established a system of “double jurisdiction” and left Alapuram under Goanese patronage. This resolution, which temporarily denied Utaiyars new privileges in the St. James church (i.e., from the Goanese priest) was, however, short lived. In 1858, Fr. Favreux effectively outbid the Goanese priest with a profligate display of ritual and ceremony which won him popular support, including that of the Hindu Maravar village headman. In keeping with his overt claim to be protector of the shrine, Favreux was brought on horseback together with a colleague in a massive procession to celebrate the St. James festival in 1858:
… Tous deux à cheval, nous nous dirigions vers [Alapuram], D’un commun accord par les payens aussi bien que par les Chrétiens, toutes les trompettes si éclatantes du pays qu’on avait pu réunir, annonçant notre passage et semblant donner le signal de l’assaut [on the shrine] – tamtams, tambours de diverses formes […] c’était vraiment spectacle curieux de voir, au fur et à mesure que nous avancions, s’agglomérer le monde autour de nous par les députations des villages […] dans le voisinage chacun nous saluait à l’envi comme les libérateurs de ce Sanctuaire dont tous voyaient avec peine les ruines s’agrandir…
(Résumé : 96)
61In the course of the festival that year (1858) there was direct and aggressive confrontation between Jesuit and Goanese parties, which even prompted one local Maravar ex-warrior chief to offer to raise 400-500 men for Favreux’s defence of the St. James shrine. Confusion and violence during the ūḷūr maṇṭakapaṭi was generated simultaneously by conflicts over caste status and sectarian affiliation. Only the police, who sought to keep the “warrior priests” and their ceremonial armies apart, were able to conclude the festival in the end by expelling the Goanese priests (Résumé: 105-116; Mosse 1986: 322-324).
62This visible change of patronage from the Goanese to Jesuits provided opportunities to redefine local ceremonial rights and honour between the competing castes, and Favreux was bombarded with demands for caste privileges “jusque dans la basse caste des Pallars” (Résumé: 101-102), claimed as customary or as rewards for supporting the Jesuits. The disappointed parties in the persisting caste conflicts, sought to challenge Jesuit patronage by making contact with local Christian groups of their own caste under Goanese patronage. Building on this frustration, “les émissaries du schisme” gradually built up a following in the village until a court order in their favour brought Goanese priests back into the village (ibid.: 125, 137- 138, 143-145). This time the Goanese sought the support of influential Utaiyars by offering to put the name of their caste to new construction works at the shrine,51 but failed because the priest continued to endorse the ritual pre-eminence of Vellalars.52
63Finally (later in the same year, 1859) the Madras High Court passed sentence in favour of the Jesuits, bringing Favreux back to Alapuram as the first resident parish priest (Résumé: loc. cit.). This did not, immediately, mark the end of competition over patronage between missionary groups, nor its significance to Utaiyar caste status striving. Firstly, as long as the rule of “double jurisdiction” still held force in the parishes of the area, Jesuits attempted to win further popularity for their centres (such as Alapuram) by duplicating and elaborating festivals conducted in neighbouring Goanese churches.53 Secondly, between 1858 and 1861, Alapuram Utaiyars continued to use the Goanese presence to wrest the right to receive “first respect” (mutal mariyātai) in the distribution of betel at new (e.g., Easter) or old festivals from Vellalars and Maravar village authorities. Utaiyars petitioned the Goanese priests, threatened to convert to their sect, and invited neighbouring Goanese priests to conduct ceremonies in the village (e.g., the St. James festival “flag raising” in 1859) all to win honours in the Alapuram shrine from the Jesuits. Indeed, such tactics were important right up until the end of the century. Thus in 1895 Utaiyars threatened to call the infamous “schismatic” Soarez54 if they were not handed honours before Vellalars.55 Equally, Vellalars exploited alliance relations with kōvilpiḷḷais at Goanese churches in Oriyur and Sarukani to preserve their own rights and privileges (ibid.: 248, 252, 256-257). Finally, the presence of Protestant Christian missionaries (who from the 1850s were largely working with the lower Natar caste) provided alternative sources of patronage and additional opportunities to manipulate sectarian affiliation – through conversions (usually short term) or threats to convert – in order to press caste honour-related claims (ibid.: 78-79; Bertrand, ed„ 1865: 431-432; see Bayly 1989: 424).
64Clearly the ecclesiastical conflict over patronage and local conflicts over precedence intersected. Caste leaders were able to manipulate missionary patronage to serve their own goals in the competitive demonstration of caste power and position. The missionaries, themselves, exploited their old role as custodians of festival privileges and arbiters of caste rank to win support. New festivals were inaugurated, old ones elaborated and rights to honours were transferred between caste groups. Indeed, these disputes tended to embellish and extend the system of ritual privileges and caste honours in the region’s churches and their festivals.
65As the dispute between the Jesuits and Goans diminished, parish priests were able to assert a new identity and administrative control over the churches in Ramnad which re-defined the nature of rights in these shrines. In the 19th century context missionaries were no longer renouncer priests or serving ritualists under the patronage of the king. Instead, they themselves began to employ distinctly royal idioms and symbols of overlordship to express a new “rule” over the churches. They began building and endowing new churches, took over the kingly role of chief festival donor – in the sense of paying for the last maṇṭakapaṭi–and displayed other symbols of “temple” overlordship such as arriving for processions on horseback under processional umbrellas and the arbitration of disputes (see Appadurai 1981: 28).
66The challenge to the local caste and political leaders who continued to claim rights in the festival system was more than symbolic. From the 1860s, Catholic priests used the courts to assert control over “their” shrines, to appropriate the former functions, and erode persisting rights, of Hindu kings and village headmen in the churches and their festivals. The resulting tensions are illustrated in the case of the Sarukani carvamāṉiyam, or royal grant (above). What the raja of Sivagangai understood to be a royal gift for the maintenance of the cult of the shrine and the support of its serving ritualists – including the presiding Catholic priest –, Jesuit missionaries took to be their appointment as sole administrators of the village and church. In a series of court cases56 the Sivagangai raja challenged the right of the priest himself to claim the “upper” share of the grain (mēlvāram) or to interfere in matters concerning the hereditary rights of village servants (as the priest had done in displacing the village headman) or to arbitrate disputes over festival honours. The fact that the Madurai court constantly ruled in favour of the priest and against the raja is indicative of the ascendency of a bureaucratic understanding of religion as separate from society and politics. Even as late as 1956, the priest of Sarukani challenged the rights of Hindu headmen in the area to conduct the large chariot procession of the risen Christ (see above) on the grounds that this “is not part of Christian ritual” and that the only rights existing in Catholic religious observances were those granted by canon law administered by the bishop.
67After the Jesuits had won jurisdiction of Alapuram, the resident priest Fr. Favreux also began, from 1860, to assert a new authority over the St. James shrine, and to erode other rights in its festival system. Firstly, he made himself the sole possessor of the church (Résumé: 151), and, secondly, he not only abolished other rights in the shrine, but actually demolished the church building, in which he perceived caste rights and rivalries to be rooted (ibid.: 175).57 He was vigorously, although unsuccessfully, opposed both by Vellalars supported by the village officers and by their rivals the Utaiyars some of whom again turned to the Goanese.
68But Favreux was mistaken in believing that demolition of the church structure would eliminate conflicts over honours. Alapuram Utaiyars, who had failed to press their claims to first honours through contact with Goan priests, resorted to direct intimidation at the Easter festival of 1862. Open and violent conflict broke out when village Utaiyars together with Utaiyar headmen from surrounding villages gathered at the distributions of the betel to resist the pre-eminence being accorded to Vellalars (Résumé: 272-273) and to demand their exclusive right to carry the capparams (the processional platforms on which the statues of the saints rode). The priest suspended the procession. Following a caste panchayat, Utaiyars remonstrated about the affront to their caste honour in being refused the right to touch the capparams which was then held by Vellalars and Hindu Maravars (ibid.: 275), and further insisted that the office of kōvilpiḷḷai and church guardian should be withdrawn from Vellalars. When the priest ignored these demands, Utaiyars boycotted mass and festivals at Alapuram, and refused the priest entry into 28 Utaiyar villages in the area (ibid.: 275-277). This boycott broke after four weeks for reasons which suggest both the weakening of Utaiyar regional caste networks and the growing power of the priest (arising among other things from the receding Goanese threat) (see Mosse 1986: 327-328).
Utaiyar-Vellalar church honours conflicts: 1863-1915
69The dispute over precedence in the receipt of honours at the St. James festival between Utaiyars who were economically powerful and Vellalars who were invariably backed by the Maravar headman and his kinsmen and dependents, continued until 1915. The focus of dispute was the distribution of betel mariyātai during the village procession (ūḷūr maṇṭakapaṭi) on the 8th night of the festival. The Parish diaries make particular note of the circumstances of claim and counter claim as this dispute recurred at the festival year after year: in 1862, 1868, 1870, 1872 (etc.).58 Between 1873 and 1892 a succession of ten different Jesuit priests (following on from Favreux) generated new opportunities for the redefinition of precedence between the two castes. By 1892 Utaiyars had achieved a new parity with Vellalars in that the priest then decided to give precedence in the receipt of betel to both castes but in alternate years. However, neither this solution nor the proposal that Utaiyars celebrate the 8th night maṇṭakapaṭi and Vellalars the 9th was acceptable to either caste. Utaiyars refused to contribute vari (festival payments) and again signalled interest in other Christian sects, while Vellalars withdrew from the festival entirely rather than concede honours to Utaiyars.59 Indeed, it was not until 1928 that Vellalars re-joined Utaiyars for the ūḷūr maṇṭakapaṭi on equal terms, agreeing to rotate precedence in the receipt of betel honours both at the ūḷūr maṇṭakapaṭi, and at the festival’s “flag hoisting” ceremony and on the last day.60
70The stalemate at the ūḷūr maṇṭakapaṭi between 1892 and 1928 did not, however, rule out Utaiyar-Vellalar dispute over other honours. In 1896, for example, Utaiyars mounted a concerted effort to recover the second-day maṇṭakapaṭi. This maṇṭakapaṭi was originally held by the Utaiyars of a neighbouring village, but had been transferred to the Vellalar kōvilpiḷḷai’s family in the early 1890s following an internal Utaiyar conflict over maṇṭakapaṭi headship. As in the 1850s, the Maravar headman supported the kōvilpiḷḷai’s family. The dispute, which was referred to the Sub-Magistrate, was eventually concluded with the return of the second maṇṭakapaṭi to Utaiyars.
71Another Vellalar-Utaiyar conflict focused on the right to represent “the village” (kiramam) during the St. James festival, to accept the betel honours and then and distribute them to the village officers and servants.61 Apparently by the 1920s Catholic Utaiyars had won this privilege from the village karṇam. Of course the Vellalar kōvilpiḷḷai still handed out all these church honours, and had, himself, the opportunity publicly to snub Utaiyars, which he did in 1903 by handing them the Acari (or carpenter’s) betel.62 Again, in 1912 Utaiyars withheld payment of a church tax on marriage (kalyanam van) because it was raised to pay the kōvilpiḷḷai’s monthly salary.63 By 1915, however, Catholic Vellalars retained only a few markers of superior ritual rank, for example, in presenting their “ceremonial gifts” (cantippu) to the priests or visiting bishops separately from other Catholic castes. In that year even this was abandoned as Utaiyars and Vellalars began to acknowledge a measure of status equivalence.64 To some extent this was a new alliance in common opposition to an emerging status threat from Untouchable Christian castes (below).
Church honours in colonial Ramnad
72Throughout the 19th century, festival honours at churches such as Alapuram remained focal to expressions of caste power and status both locally and (as witnessed by Utaiyar caste regional networks) regionally. The church honours of St. James, for example, played an important part in the strategy of newly immigrant Utaiyar cultivators to insert themselves into an established caste order. Indeed, as Dirks’s work in neighbouring Pudukkottai confirms, contests over church and temple honours actually increased under colonial rule since these became the institutional context in which the tensions resulting from wider social changes were manifest (Dirks 1987: 363-374). Kōvil mariyātai (church or temple honour) was the medium in which the caste and kin-based authority of the old order was challenged, whether by agricultural and merchant wealth, or the power of new administrative offices. On the latter, the growing importance of the office of village accountant (karṇam) in Alapuram was expressed, from 1871, in a series of disputes over St. James’ honours, in which the (Hindu) karnam and his relatives challenged the right of the (Hindu) Maravar village headman (ampalār) to receive honours first.65 As Dirks puts it, the struggle between the old order (in which authority was defined by positions of caste and lineage) and the new (in which official positions created by the colonial state and the gains of commerce had to be incorporated) “took place in the old regime form, in temples over honours” (1987: 373).
73Catholic churches were not, however, quite the same as Hindu temples. While a branch of the revenue bureaucracy (the Devasthanam Department) replaced the king in arbitrating honours, disputes at Hindu temples, at Catholic churches, the priests (with the backing of the state) secured this authority for themselves. Jesuit priests in Alapuram were indispensable to the validation of existing honours marking caste status and to the securing of new ones. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries they inaugurated new festivals, created new honours or eliminated existing ones as a means to secure and assert a new religious authority. Fr. Favreux, for example, instituted a new procession to the Virgin in the month of May 1862 and gave the primary honour of organising the first ten-day ceremony to Vellalars at the time when Utaiyars had organised their mass boycott of the church (Résumé: 277-278). After their return to the fold, he rewarded Utaiyars with the privilege of placing a new wooden altar in the church (ibid.). Then, in the 1860s and 1870s there were several transfers of maṇṭakapaṭis from one caste group to another.
74Despite objections and challenges from Utaiyar and Vellalar contestants for honours, or from the Maravars and Hindu village officers whose established festival rights and honours were being progressively undermined, the priests’ position strengthened throughout the last decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century. The ability of a caste group to manipulate the priest through sectarian affiliation or the withdrawal of support for the church (e.g., the refusal to pay festival taxes or boycott of mass) was weakened in comparison to the priest’s ability to exclude them from maṇṭakapaṭis or to abandon important ceremonies altogether.66 Church honours system, then, both contributed to a re-ordering of a village caste order, and advanced the new role for the Catholic priest as administrative head of the church as separate religious domain. However during the early 20th century, priests used this authority to undermine the system itself. It was not that the Jesuits objected to institutions which were caste-based. Rather, they became less tolerant of compromises to their own authority within the domain of the church.
From village festival to church festival in 1936: the creation of a catholic religious domain
75In 1936, at the betel distribution before the “raising of the flag” for the St. James festival, the Alapuram priest refused to hand the betel and sandal paste “honours” to the Hindu village headman and officers inside the church, “as it is not becoming chiefly when there is the Blessed Sacrament” (AL, Sousaiyamanikam 17.7.1936). The affronted headman threatened to stop the festival. The priest reacted by contacting the Sub-Inspector of Police, the Superintendent, Deputy Superintendent and Circle Inspector to get protection during the festival, and sent a complaint against the headman and his brother to the Collector, the Sub-Collector and the Sub-Magistrate. Thus underpinned by the forces of the law, the priest set about denying the headman rights in the church (ibid., 22.7.1936). At the final night’s procession (camiyār maṇṭakapaṭi) the headman and karṇam (accountant) were deliberately not invited by the village drummers to participate in the procession, which in the end all but the Pallars boycotted (ibid., 25.7.1936). On the final day:
At 5pm as we are preparing to distribute the vetileipakkou [sic, betel honours] before the procession, there arrives a bus bringing the Sub-magistrate of Paramagudi, the Sub-Inspector of Police, Ilayangudi, the Head Constable and some other influential men of llayangudi. We four fathers [three priests from elsewhere assisted at the festival], the Government officials and the two men sit in a row under the pandal in front of the steps before a vast crowd. The Headman and Karnam present themselves. The distribution begins. First Kovil, then “Sicar”. The Headman and Karnam are excluded from touching the cantaṉam [sandal paste] or receiving veṟṟilaipakku [betel honours]. Third kirāmam [village]. The maṇṭappaṭi follows…
(AL, Sousaiyamanikam 26.7.1936)
76The headman, forced to acknowledge the loss of minimal rights in the Catholic shrine, yet not wishing to admit to the loss of standing that receipt of the “honours” outside the church would entail, persuaded the priest to abolish these kōvil mariyātai entirely in 1937. In that year the procession with the cattatēr, which had always represented the hierarchical unity of the village, and which was the responsibility of the Maravar headman, was also abandoned.
77From then on, Hindus participated in the festival only as individual devotees without specific rights and honours and their own conflicts over caste status tended to focus on the “honours” at the festival of the Hindu Aiyanar temple (see Mosse 1986: 378 ff.). This marked the collapse of the St. James festival as a village festival which integrated Hindus and Christians of the village into the same and single social and ritual system, and its transformation into a Christian religious festival. The honours and privileges which remained (the right to pay for processions, to carry statues, etc.) continued to be contested among Christians of different castes (as will be seen below), but were now separate from the bundle of rights of which they had originally been a part.
78Rights in the St. James church, including shares in the worship marked by honours, had historically been inseparable from the rights in the village – including rights to office or service roles, rights to land and to a grain share of the village harvest – which were instituted by the king of Ramnad in the 17th or 18th century and controlled locally by the Maravar headman (see Dirks 1987: 369, 378). The local social order was expressed and dramatised in the organisation of the final day’s procession by the Hindu Maravar headman and his receipt of “first honour” in a public prestation which displayed the hierarchy of Christian and Hindu village officers, artisans and village servants. As an idiom of local caste and political order, the St. James kōvil mariyātai had meaning to the extent that church (kōvil) and village (kirāmam) were inter-linked. The priests’ assertions of authority over the kōvil as a separate Christian domain, and their refusal to recognise the rights of “pagan authorities” in the festival system, made this linkage increasingly fragile.
79The exclusion of the headman was in fact only one particularly important moment in a series of moves by which Catholic priests, visibly supported by the colonial administration, made concrete the European conception of religion as a “bounded domain of action separate from other domains”; and at this point the Christian kōvil (temple/church) ceased to resemble the Hindu kōvil (Stein 1980: 452). The St. James church became a religious institution under the exclusive authority of the Catholic priest, clearly separate from the secular authority of the Hindu village headman.
80Significantly, the Alapuram priest challenged the caste rights of Hindus on the grounds that they compromised Catholic sacred space (defined by the presence of the sacrament). This is not to say that Jesuit priests of the time objected to kōvil mariyātai and rights such as carrying the statues. In fact, adopting a perspective which derived from Robert De Nobili’s “accommodation method”, these “honours”, like the caste’s generally, were considered “worldly honours” to which castes might claim privileged access. These were of wholly secondary importance to matters of religion, which was ultimately a private affair of the individual.67 Nonetheless, a practice – handing honours to the Hindu headman and karṇam inside the church – which earlier Jesuit (and Goanese) priests had considered as secular and separate from Catholic religion now compromised it. Here, questions of authority and those of religion are inseparable. The Hindu headman’s presence in the church was clearly anomalous, but not because he was participating in an indigenous (or Hindu) institution which was no longer acceptable to the church. After all, Catholics continued to receive caste honours at the festival. Rather, what was viewed as anomalous was his assertion of a social right in an area of Christian ritual over which the priest now held authority. It was this extended domain of church authority which defined the presence of Hindus and (later) all expressions of caste rank as out of place. In effect the realm of Catholic religion had become firmly institutionalised as, and synonymous with, that of church authority. This view of Catholic religion as an institution was significantly different from its earlier equation with the renouncer (see Mosse 1994c). As institution, Catholicism would no longer permit expressions of caste – as a ritual and social system – in the church.
Untouchable caste (Pallar) challenges to high-caste ritual pre-eminence: 1912-1923
81Among Jesuit missionaries caste was mostly viewed as a social institution, comparable to the “Estates” of Europe. While equality before God, manifest in the religious right of all castes to hear mass in the same church and to honour the saints at their festivals, was stressed, there was no decisive objection to expressions of caste rank or social honour at festivals or even in the central rite of the mass. This view held force throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus up until 1919, in Alapuram, low caste (Pallar) Catholics received the sacrament after high castes and at a separate rail at the back of the church where they sat. Many churches had separate entrances and exits for different castes, separate burial grounds and often entirely separate churches dedicated to different saints and celebrating different festivals (although as a matter of religious principle a single mass was usually celebrated in the central parish church).
82Until the 1930s Catholic Pallar Untouchables in Alapuram held rights at the St. James festival only by virtue of their position as dependent village servants (kuṭimakaṉ), and in the form of inferior or menial service roles such as carrying processional torches or beating church drums. The festival “honours” (betel and cloth) handed to the Pallar holder of the service office of kuṭumpaṉ (village grain measurer) explicitly stated and validated Pallars’ inferior position in the ranked caste order of the village (Mosse 1994a).
83In the 20th century, the growing economic independence of these Untouchable labouring castes – based largely upon new opportunities from salaried employment and migration facilitated by education made available from the church68 – was expressed in the form of challenges to the existing pattern of caste dominance symbolised in church ritual, especially festival honours. Here, in the 1920s and 30s Pallars laid claim to the honour associated with being festival donors (maṇṭakapaṭkārars) in their own right, having the honour of carrying the saints and their capparams, or singing on the processional route.69 It was these claims that came to be so vigorously resisted up until the 1960s.70
84From the beginning of this century, the authority which the Jesuit priests asserted over Catholic ritual progressively challenged expressions of caste in ways which came to support Pallar and other low-caste status ambitions. Reforms to remove the “pride of caste” began with the sacrament and the physical space of the church. Between 1917 and 1919 the Alapuram priest acted to introduce more equality in the administration of the sacrament. For example, he moved Pallars to the southern transept of the cruciform church, where they would be closer to the altar (a move which incidentally had failed in 1876).71 Although this occurred a decade or so before Pallars themselves began to claim markers of enhanced social respect, it was clearly understood and resisted as an effort to raise Pallar caste status.72
85The opening up of festival honours to Pallars began in 1913. In 1913 and 1914 the priest offered two Utaiyar caste maṇṭakapaṭis – the second (Utaiyanur village) and third (Vatatirukkai village) maṇṭakapaṭis – to the Pallars of neighbouring villages after Utaiyars of the entire region had withdrawn from the church, its sacraments and festivals in a major dispute over kōvilpiḷḷai privileges which had began the previous year.73 The priest used the police and courts to protect these Pallars from reprisals from high castes and the village headman.
86Although, with the end of the boycott and the return of Utaiyars to the church in 1915, Pallars lost these newly acquired privileges (AL, Gamon 15.7.1915), it was already clear that church honours granted and protected by the priest were a particularly effective means of channelling new economic independence into caste status. Thus by 1924 the priest can write that “the Feast of the Sacred Heart with sapram [capparam] was celebrated as usual by a Pallar [from] Colombo” (AL, Veaux 12.6.1924). However, repeated efforts from Pallars to obtain honours as donors or maṇṭakapaṭikārars at the major St. James festival were unsuccessful. Even though the priest offered Pallars ad hoc privileges74 and supported minor protests,75 by 1924 Pallars had been granted only qualified honours. While they had obtained a share of the maṇṭakapaṭi betel, this was neither proportionate to their contribution to festival expenses, nor was it handed to them inside the church by the Vellalar kōvilpiḷḷai. Instead the Pallar share of the betel was given to the Utaiyar headman who then passed it on to Pallars outside the church beside the capparams (AL, Veaux 27.2.1924). Over the next few years Pallars repeatedly pressed for a more equitable share (a third share or one year in three) of festival betel as an indication of their participation as festival donors rather than low status village and church servants (ibid., 20.7.1928). When they failed, Pallars began to withdraw from festival service roles, refusing to carry processional torches or to drum.
87Although Pallar claims between the 1920s and 1940s were widely understood as social rights and matters of caste honour and power, what the priests felt justified in defending were the religious rights of Pallars as Christian individuals.76 Rights to religious equality as Christians could be pressed more convincingly after 1936, when the St. James festival was more clearly a Christian rather than a village affair, and when village service roles and honours had been abandoned. Indeed, Catholic priests offered Pallars opportunities to translate “religious equality” (as Christians) into caste honours decades before, in the 1940s, they concerned themselves with the support of low castes for reasons of social justice.
Our Lady of Lourdes (Lūrtumātā) as a Pallar festival
88By the 1940s Pallars had withdrawn entirely from the St. James festival. Despite the abolition of betel honours in 1936, privileges such as carrying the status or singing processional songs remained, and Catholic Vellalars and Utaiyars guarded these privileges, drawing on Hindus from other villages to carry the capparams, rather than involve Pallars (AL, Mahé 23.7.1942). Pallars, meanwhile, directed their attention to a secondary village festival – the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes (Lūrtumātā). By 1939, having mobilised support from surrounding villages, they had become the dominant presence during the three-day processions. While denied the honour of paying for the processions, they organised a festival drama in that year and continued to flaunt signs of “caste pride” in the following years (ibid., 19-25.5.1939). In 1943 they decorated their caste society (caṅkam) hut with flags and organised devotional singing (bhajan) (ibid., 29.5.1943). Given the recurring conflicts with “high castes” which arose from this hubris, and over the carrying of capparams, the priest muted the idea of creating three maṇṭakapaṭis and giving one to Pallars (ibid., 28.5.1948). However, it was not until 1969 that Pallars obtained such honours and then only as a result of a violent clash at the festival in which they forcibly took over the final day procession, grabbing the statues from the hands of Utaiyars and Vellalars. The priest responded by handing the Lurtumata festival entirely over to Pallars, and granting Vellalars and Utaiyars exclusive honours at the St. James village festival.
89The control of a festival at a major shrine by Pallars (an Untouchable caste) and the retention of key signs of caste honour – carrying the statues, organising the procession – was unprecedented in the region. Pallars richly elaborated the celebration with dramas, ceremonial stick fighting (cilampu viḷayāṭu) (etc.) and often secured police protection against high caste recrimination. Elsewhere, I have examined the part that this played in the wider status striving and political mobilisation of the caste in the 1960s and 70s (Mosse 1994a). It is enough here to note that the annual celebration of the Lurtumata festival, firstly, involved the extension of a widening caste network; secondly, was used by the educated Pallar youth leadership to articulate a new caste consciousness (e.g., through social and political dramas performed at the festival); and thirdly, provided the context for new forms of caste organisation (i.e., a village-level Ambedkar Club, an Educated Harijan Youth Organisation, and an emerging state-wide Pallar caste association). Moreover, the Lurtumata shrine and its festival came to symbolise the distinctive honour of the Pallar caste in a militant caste dispute and political struggle against high castes and the practices of “untouchability” which erupted in 1969. These festival honours not only marked an equivalence with upper castes, but also a separation from other Untouchable castes in the village, regarded as socially and ritually inferior (ibid.).
90The opening of opportunities for participation in prestigious ritual events to low castes (Pallars and Natars toddy tappers) was a unique feature of Catholic (as against Hindu) festival systems. For this reason, the Catholic Church in Alapuram provided a key institutional context for low caste social protest and status striving for most of the present century. Crucially, while retaining a hierarchy of statuses and ranked ritual roles, it allowed an otherwise excluded group to claim ritual status commensurate with their social and economic position.77 This meant that, unlike other Untouchable castes in the area, Alapuram Pallar social mobility involved not only assertions of autonomy and social independence, but also making positive status gains within a widely acknowledged public system of ranking; that is appropriation of the signs and symbols of caste dominance. However, just as Pallars had begun to acquire these honours, the organisation and meaning of the saint’s festival had begun to change.
Struggling for honours and the abolition of the maṇṭakapaṭi system: the 1980s
91After 1969, Pallars continued to challenge caste-based privileges in the church, both at the St. James festival and elsewhere. Pallar boys appropriated the role of altar-boy previously reserved for high castes, and commandeered the high caste funeral bier for their own use (Mosse, n.d.). In 1980, the focus was again the St. James festival. Pallars asserted their right to sing hymns during the procession of the camiyār maṇṭakapaṭi and on being resisted seized the microphone from the Utaiyar singer. The priest left the procession, the cable from the generator was cut by incensed high castes and disorder escalated as Pallars attempted to carry the statues from the capparams at the end of the procession. The priest responded by abandoning his maṇṭakapaṭi, which in his view had become the source of too much conflict, and transferring it to a single caste, the Natars of the parish, for the 1981 and 1982 festivals. Indeed, during these years inter-caste clashes were minimised by eliminating multi-caste maṇṭakapaṭis and further breaking the festival cycle down into caste-specific units. From 1981 Catholic castes therefore celebrated the St. James festival in segregated parts as independent competing groups – each night being celebrated by one caste only – rather than interdependent and hierarchized parts of a social “whole”. The image of social order which the festival then represented had, in Dumont’s terms, shifted from caste as a holistic structure, to caste “substantialised” (1972: 269).
92At the All India Catholic Bishop’s Conference in Tiruchi in 1981, it was decided that no village festival should be celebrated on the basis of caste, and therefore that the maṇṭakapaṭi system should be abolished. The Alapuram priest sought to implement the ruling in 1982 by abandoning the Pallar Lurtumata festival but was unable to halt preparations. Only in May 1983 was the priest able to present the Bishop’s declaration in the form of a circular letter, which contained four key rulings relevant to the St. James festival: (1) the festival was to be celebrated without extravagance and without distinctions of caste on only one day; (2) on each of the nine days following the “flag hoisting” there was to be a mass and a small capparam procession organised by representatives of the different castes of the parish; (3) the festival would be organised by a committee of representatives from each former maṇṭakapaṭi and of each caste; and (4) if people refused to comply with these rules, the festival would be abandoned.
93Alapuram Utaiyars objected to the proposals insisting that either the festival would be celebrated according to established custom (māmūl) or not at all. Pallars, unsurprisingly, supported the proposals, although a minority objected to the loss of the Lurtumata feast as a Pallar festival. In July 1983, only at the last moment had the priest gained enough support from high caste individuals to reverse his initial decision to abandon the festival. As a precaution against further dispute, it was arranged for the statue of St. James to be decorated jointly by the Vellalar kōvilpiḷḷai and the Pallar pantaram, who would place it a “caste-neutral” tractor and trailer before the procession. At the end of the procession the statue was to remain on the trailer and be returned to the church during the next day by the kōvilpiḷḷai, who would also then distribute the garlands offered during the procession. On the day itself (as I witnessed it), the festival went as planned except that it was agreed to use the Natar caste ratam (festival chariot) for the statue instead of the tractor and trailer. The turnout for the festival was small and made smaller by torrential rain, and an almost complete boycott of the procession by high caste Catholics. The chariot was dragged almost exclusively by Alapuram Pallars and Natars from the villages of the parish, together with high caste individuals recognisable as allies of the priest. All of the other privileged roles were performed by the kōvilpiḷḷai.
94The dismantling of the tradition of festival donors and honours was a decisive move against caste by the Church. The decision of the Bishop’s Conference (1981) to eradicate what remained of the St. James maṇṭakapaṭi (which continued to exclude Untouchables), was not simply a matter of the Church asserting its authority over its forms of worship, or of upholding the religious rights of its low-caste parishioners. It was also a question of social ethics, and desire to bring the Church more into line with both the anti-caste position of the modern Indian state, and a post-Vatican II emphasis on social justice. A firm dichotomy between religious and social action which the Alapuram priests had inherited from the early Jesuit missionaries was now largely displaced.
A democratised festival: 1984-1991
95During the last eight years (1984-1991) the church and its festival has been further democratised.78 Remaining caste privileges in the church – such as separate seating areas in the church,79 or the use of separate funeral biers by high castes – have been eliminated. A series of socially more radical priests have stressed class interests and avoided emphasising caste as a basis for social action (see Mosse 1994a). Thus from 1985, the priest began organising mixed caste youth and women’s groups in the 73 villages of the parish. The educational and “animation” work which focused on these groups and was inspired by liberation theology drawing on Paulo Freire’s techniques of “conscientisation”, was organised by a core team of educated youth and teachers from high and low castes (ibid.). Moreover, the celebration of the festival itself now emphasised residential (village) rather than caste identities.
96In 1985-1986 the parish was divided into 9 “zones” (vaṭṭaram) each comprising 4-5 villages, of which Alapuram itself (being a very large village) was one. Each (multi-caste) zone organises one day of the festival. The ninth (and now last) festival day, to which all come, is arranged by Alapuram village. This has not entirely removed caste competition. Indeed, “zonation” itself has, reportedly, been a subject of caste competition in which, as formerly, the priest has given privileges to groups willing to cooperate with the Church. Thus one vaṭṭaram was held in the name of a Pallar hamlet because the surrounding high caste (mostly Utaiyar) villages refused to cooperate with the priest.80 Also, Utaiyars and Konars, respectively dominant castes in two parish villages, put in a bid to the priest for a separate vaṭṭaram for themselves. This was agreed on condition that these castes participate fully in church activities and celebrate the festival along with Pallars in their villages.
97The events of the festival days have also changed. Apart from the mass and processions, there is now an emphasis on social and moral education, and theme-oriented slide shows and dramas which are scripted and rehearsed for each day of the festival by the separate “zones”. The generally anti-caste themes81 or slogans for the day (e.g., “let us all be united”, “let us eradicate caste”…) which are printed on the festival notice and made into banners, have also raised objections from certain high castes. Indeed, growing tensions between the priest and high castes (Christian and Hindu) have arisen both from the erosion of caste privileges in the church, and the new priests’ strategy of class-based organisation of “oppressed” (often low-caste) groups. This tension has, in recent years, erupted in the form of threats and physical assault on radical parish priests. In 1989 and 1990 high caste Catholics even lent tacit support to rallies organised by the Hindu fundamentalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss) in Alapuram which protested against the priests’ attack on caste and the removal of traditional caste honours in the church festivals.
98The recent democratisation of the St. James festival has had two consequences, one immediate, the other in the longer term. Immediately, the festival became dominated by low castes exploiting unreserved access to honoured roles, even though such roles have themselves gradually become devalued as markers of social status. Low castes (Pallars) in fact now employ a range of alternative strategies of status striving and new symbolic resources and religious identities (Mosse 1994a). In the longer term, a more significant change had taken place. With the abolition of the maṇṭakapaṭis all remaining shares in the worship of the church held by villagers as members of social groups were eliminated. Today, participation in the festival is defined not in terms of a person’s place in society (by virtue of membership of a particular kin or caste group) but by a person’s relationship to the church. All of the key roles in the festival (carrying the statues, etc.) are now performed by officers of the church (the priest, the catechist) or by laymen condoned by the priest. Here then, is the final stage in the transformation of the St. James festival from a political institution to a Christian ceremony. Not only has the festival ceased to be a village festival and become a Christian festival, but it has now also ceased to be a social event and become a religious ceremony divorced and disengaged from the local social order and exclusively controlled by the Church. In short, Alapuram church and its festival non longer incorporates Hindu socio-ritual forms and has ceased to be at the centre of the local discourse of caste and power.
V. Conclusions
99The St. James festival in Alapuram has been an indicator of the shifting relationship between Roman Catholicism and caste society in Tamil Nadu over the past 300 years. Analysis of the festival also shows how the institutions of caste society and those of the Church have undergone transformation.
100In the 17th and 18th centuries devotional worship at Christian saint cults and mission centres provided a context for the type of gifting and patronage which was a defining feature of kingship under the Vijayanagara. The fact that De Nobili’s missionaries dichotomised reality into the spiritual and the temporal and so placed the ultimate matters of Christian faith beyond caste, allowed and encouraged the incorporation of Catholic ritual into the working of a regional political and caste system. This generated a remarkable Hindu-Catholic cultural synthesis, in forms of Catholic worship and ritual, which was strongly underpinned by, and articulated, local relations of power.
101Nineteenth-and early 20th-century British government not only transformed the old political order but also introduced a very different conception of religion and its relation to society. In this context missionaries began to impose a distinction between the institutions of the Catholic religion (that is, the church, festivals – embodying the authority of the priest) and those of caste society (e.g., the festival honours). Village Christians, however, continued to treat church ceremony as a ritual dimension of caste. Indeed, the church festival honours provided an important context in which the struggles and tensions arising from the transformations of colonialism took place and were dramatised. The inconsistent meanings attached to the festival by Church and people generated a long series of disputes between priests and villagers. In the mid-19th century the dispute over jurisdiction between Goan and Jesuit missionaries forced the priests to continue playing an earlier role as custodians of ritual honours and arbiters of caste rank. However, from the 1860s, the authority of the priests in Alapuram increased such that they were, by degrees, able to institutionalise Catholic religion as a domain ritually separate from Hindu and caste society.
102Among other things, this meant that expressions of caste were progressively challenged in the 20th century. This began with the sacrament and the physical space of the church. In 1936 Hindu social honours had become incompatible with Christian sacred space. The headman was denied honour and all Hindu “shares” in the festival process were removed. In 1983 all vestiges of caste-based privileges were removed from the St. James festival and in 1989 the priest refused to bless any festivals which were celebrated separately by different castes in the same village. The earlier stages of these changes were driven by concerns about the priest’s authority over his religious domain, and the religious rights of his parishioners. The more recent and final separation of Church from caste society, however, derives from a social critique of hierarchical social and ritual forms. This has even extended to criticism of the church hierarchy itself and led to some experimentation with consultative church decision-making and a new structure of “parish councils”.
103The 20th-century rejection of caste discrimination in Catholic ritual coincided, interestingly, with a new social mobility among low castes and its resistance by higher castes. The 19th-century status conflicts between Vellalar and Utaiyar “upper castes” were entirely displaced by “upper” caste/Untouchable caste divisions. From the 1930s, this became the principle focus of social conflict in the village. In extending a Christian ritual domain apart from caste society, priests also supported the status striving of low castes. Initially, low castes (Untouchable Pallars) were able to win Church support and lay claim to festival honours as the signs and symbols of caste status. Pallars exploited a religious egalitarianism not to abandon caste hierarchy but to gain position within it. More recently, however, parish priests have supported Pallars on the grounds of social discrimination, and low castes have, in turn, supported the abolition of all indicators of caste privilege.
104Today the Catholic Church presents a clearly distinct religious and ritual domain, disengaged from indigenous socio-cultural forms. The imposition of church authority and the dismantling of indigenous forms of public worship at Catholic festivals has accompanied other changes. A move away from the otherworldly pietism of earlier times, for example, now means that the cult of Catholic saints itself receives less enthusiastic support from many a clergy, who portray figures such as St. James as exemplars of the Christian life rather than as divine kings and sources of supernatural power (see Stirrat 1979). Devotions and saints festivals are encouraged only because they bring people to confession and offer opportunities to communicate social messages (Mosse 1994c). The symbolic equivalences which made Catholic saints’ festivals (like their Hindu equivalents) powerful idioms for caste power, are themselves undermined. The former incorporation of Hindu ritual forms into the church, to some extent, generated a shared Hindu-Catholic religious culture. In Alapuram, this was publicly expressed in the recognised roles for Hindus at the saint’s festival, which also gave this an integrating role in the village. When Hindus withdrew from the St. James festival, Hindu and Christian religious systems became in social terms uncoupled and separate.
105The re-moulding of Catholicism in rural Ramnad as a world religion separate from local (Hindu) culture, is, ironically, taking place just when the Post-Vatican II ecclesiastical policy of “inculturation” encourages a more tolerant attitude towards Hindu religion, inter-faith dialogue and moves to “Indianize” forms of Christian worship.82 One cannot fail to be struck by the paradox that these moves of “inculturation” are occurring at a time when the Church in practice stresses fundamental differences in belief and social ethics between Christianity and Hinduism, and when the religious lives of Christians and Hindus are separate to an unprecedented degree. The complex paradoxes here are treated more fully elsewhere (Mosse 1994: 97-103).
106In asserting its separate religious authority the Catholic Church has eroded the specific privileges symbolic of high caste social dominance (i.e., it acted in ways which reduced their share of symbolic capital; see Harrison 1995: 268-269). For exactly this reason, the erosion of tradition and its replacement by church administration have won support from low castes. This is, in fact, part of a wider discourse in which indigenous (dominant) cultural forms (and the church honours would be included here) are rejected by low castes because of the hierarchy and subordination they imply. This does, however, present a dilemma to established Christian churches in India which are attempting to “inculturate” in the context of a firm commitment to social justice and have a membership which is overwhelmingly low caste (or tribal). The problem is this. Challenging social subordination isolates the Church from local cultural traditions (as in the case of the St. James festival); but indigenisation accommodates hierarchy. One response to this dilemma has been an emphasis on subaltern culture or “Dalit theology”.83 This combines traditions of liberation theology and inculturation. Dalit theology generates a critique both of hegemonic Hindu religious culture and of Indian Christianity’s “Latin and Sanskrit captivity”, and sets about constructing liberating Dalit counter-cultures, emphasising non- or pre-Hindu religious traditions as the proper basis of Dalit Christian inculturation (Prabhakar 1989; Irudayaraj 1990; Ayrookuzhiel 1983; Chatterji 1989).
107The concern with culture is inextricably linked to another contemporary shift in practice of the Church, namely away from any other worldly pietism and a stress on conversion towards social action in religiously plural communities. The emphasis on a strongly anti-caste “social gospel”, the rejection of a separation between the sacred and the secular, and the replacement of individualistic spirituality with direct involvement in social and political action departs fundamentally from the very basis of De Nobili’s “accommodation” method.
108As might be expected there is a wide spectrum of opinion on the questions of “inculturation”, the sacramental or social role of the Church, and Dalit theology among the clergy of Ramnad (see Mosse 1994c; Houtart et al., n.d.). Interestingly, however (and as shown elsewhere; Mosse 1994c), while inculturation and the social gospel dominate contemporary discourse in the established church, it is the growing popularity of charismatic and pentecostal Christianity which is the most significant recent change in popular Catholic practice. In its universal fundamentalism this emerging global Christianity is yet further disengaged from indigenous social institutions and conceptual structures (see Mosse 1994b), and yet in its emotional directness, its conception of divine power and healing, and its attraction of large Hindu following, strongly indicative of a continuing shared popular religious culture (see Caplan 1991).
Glossary
109Most local terms are explained where they occur in the text. This glossary includes terms which are used repeatedly in the paper. For caste names the respectful and currently used “-ar” ending is employed rather than the formerly common and disrespectful “-an” (i.e., Pallar or Utaiyar, rather than Pallan or Utaiyan). Diacritics on proper names are omitted after their first appearance in the text.

Bibliographie
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Saulière, A. (1947), Red Sand: A Life of St. John de Britto S. J., Martyr of the Madura Mission. Madurai, De Nobili Press.
Stein. B. (1968), “Social mobility and medieval South Indian Hindu sects”, in J. Silverberg, ed., Social Mobility in the Caste System in India. The Hague, Mouton.
Stein, B. (1980), Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi, OUP.
Shorter, A. (1988), Towards a Theology of Inculturation. London, Geoffrey Chapman.
Stirrat, R. L. (1979), “A Catholic shrine in its social context”, Sri Lanka Journal of Social Science, 2, pp. 77-108.
Stirrat, R. L. (1992), Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting: Sinhala Catholics in Contemporary Sri Lanka. Cambridge, CUP.
Wilson, S., ed. (1983), Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History. Cambridge, CUP.
Annexe
Appendix 1. Alapuram church services

Appendix 2. Sarukani village church services

NB. The order simply reflects the list of payments (in kind and cash) made by the priest and listed in Cramam, Usages des Fêtes, 1876.
Appendix 3. St. James church festival cycle*

* These were all at one time or another publicly celebrated in some way in Alapuram but only those underlined regularly appear in the records as major festivals.
Appendix 4. Sarukani church honours, 1876

* Read: Betel and cloth (dhoti) costing 1/4/0. The figures refer to rupees/annas/paisa.
Notes de bas de page
1 This article is based on fieldwork carried out in the village of “Alapuram” (a pseudonym) in Southeastern Tamil Nadu in 1982-1984 together with brief visits between 1988 and 1994, and on archival records of the Jesuit Madurai Mission (at the Sacred Heart College, Shembaganur, Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu). Archival sources are mostly “Alapuram” parish diaries (1854-1948) which are referenced by author and date of entry. Two diaries in Latin covering the period 1854-1865 are summarised in French in Résumé du Diarium Maravae written by Fr. Favreux (c. 1865-1866) and cited as Résumé. I am grateful to the ESRC who provided me with a research grant, and for field assistance from Mr. M. Sivan. Transliteration in the text follows the conventions of the Madras University Tamil Lexicon.
2 The pseudonym for a mixed Hindu-Christian village in (old) Ramnathapuram District, in which I lived from 1982 to 1984. Alapuram is situated in a region in which around 15 per cent of the population is Christian, mostly Roman Catholic, and its own population (1,704 in 1983) is itself divided almost evenly into Christians (51.3 per cent) and Hindus (48.7 per cent).
3 De Nobili’s experiment was a marked departure from the post-Tridentine standardization of Catholic missionary practice. The mission generated a complex controversy surrounding the method of “accommodation” to Hindu cultural traditions (in particular caste practices) known as the “Malabar Rites”. Disagreements with Rome eventually led to the suppression of the Society of Jesus by Papal Bull in 1773, and the Jesuits were expelled from India (Neill 1984). The Madurai Mission then came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the See of Goa, and it was Portuguese and Syro-Malabar priests from Cochin and other West coast Church centres – all referred to as “Goanese” or Goan (being under the Padraodo, or patronage of the king of Portugal), who administered the churches of Maṛavarnāṭu.
4 Between 1640 and 1690 Jesuit missionaries claimed 8,000 converts in the “Maravar country” or Ramnad (Bayly 1989: 394).
5 Links via the missionaries to the foreign coastal powers also presented a potential military threat to the ruling Cetupati.
6 One missionary, Fr. Laynez (Maṭurendira Swami), reportedly converted 10,000 people in 22 months during 1693 and 1694 (Ponnad 1983: 137; Bertrand 1865: 442).
7 The Cetupati Kattatevar, for example, built the first shrine at the site of de Britto’s execution in 1730 (Annual Letter of the Madurai Mission 1734 (henceforth: AL), Fr. J. Vieyra 14.7.1735).
8 For example, at the village churches of Oriyur, Sarukani and Pagani (Khadirvel 1977).
9 Twenty Maravar “Ambalakarars” (village headmen) around the village of Ponnalikkottai were reportedly converted by Fr. Peter Martin between 1708 and 1711 (Ponnad 1983: 137).
10 In the 19th century, 70 per cent of cultivated land in Pudukkottai was inām, or tax free (Dirks 1987: 117), and in Ramnad Zamindari, 932 out of a total of 2,167 villages were recorded in 1889 as gifted as inām (Rajaram Row 1891: 19).
11 Sivagangai separated from Ramnad and was established as a separate kingdom in 1730.
12 In particular, this refers to the major “temple car” processions which were established as a feature of the Easter festival by Fr. James de Rossi, priest in the village, 1736-1774. By the 1780s, these were patronised by the Sivagangai raja
( “Note on Sarukani Village”, church records, Sarukani village).
13 A term used for gifts to Brahmans (Dirks 1979: 192).
14 This point of whether the royal grant was to the church (i.e., to the divinity) or to the presiding missionary was a source of conflict between the priests (Goan and Jesuit) and the Sivaganagi raja in the 19th century (see below). The source for this material is a handwritten notebook (in French) dated around 1880 titled Cramam de Sarougani (henceforth: Cramam), at the Jesuit Archives of the Madurai Mission, Shembaganur. Parts of this text have been typed and page references refer to these sheets. There is no other pagination, so I will make reference to section titles. A translated transcript of the copper plate cārvamāṉiyam is also available at the Madurai Mission Jesuit Archives.
15 Cramam: 1-8, 26-32, “Usages des Fêtes” (1876), see below and Appendix 2.
16 E.g., at the churches of Oriyur, Pulial and Tiruvadanai in 1721 (Kadhirvel 1977: 52 n. 85).
17 St. James was an established tutelary of the Paravar fishing caste on the Coromandel coast (Bayly 1989: 382).
18 AL. Fr. J. Vieyra 1734.
19 AL, ibid., Fr. M. Orti 1734, Fr. J. Khrening 1745, Fr. Felix 1749. Even in 1896 “The Revenue Inspector of Mangalam sent two litigants […] each of whom charged the other with having felled a certain number of trees […] to take oath at St. James’ church” (Parish Diary, entry Fr. Gnanaprakasam 10.2.1896).
20 The Maratha king at first granted land to the saint, but them withdrew it. The Jesuits then set up their “Maṛavarnāṭu” centre at Sarukani under the patronage of Nallukkotai Utaiyan Tevar, raja of Sivagangai, cf. Kadhirvel 1977: 61; AL, Fr. J. Vieyra 1730, Fr. C. J. Beschi 1731; Besse 1914: 246.
21 AL, Beschi, loc. cit., Fr. J. Vieyra 1733.
22 This is recorded in palm leaf manuscripts (olai) found by Jesuit missionary Fr. Favreux c. 1858, and written when the church was built (c. 1778), Résumé du Diarium Maravae (henceforth: Resumé): 148. This letter is a handwritten account of “Alapuram” and environs covering the period 1854-1865 (c. 1865-1866) summarising two lengthy diaries in Latin. Page references refer to the typescript held with the Archives of the Madurai Mission.
23 On the nāṭu as a micro region in South India see Stein 1980, ch. 3. The role and importance of nāṭu structures in pre-colonial Ramnad is the subject of current research (Mosse, in preparation).
24 The cultural definition of St. James as a “warrior” saint is discussed elsewhere (Mosse 1994b).
25 The relationship between Christian teaching and the local social and cultural context, and particularly the relationship between Catholic saints and Hindu deities, is explored in Mosse 1994b.
26 For similar ideas in the cult of saints elsewhere, see Wilson 1983: 11; Sanchis 1983: 264-265; Gaborieau 1983: 278-280; Brown 1981, ch. 5.
27 In another parallel with Hindu temples, the festival also inaugurates a movement between the valued spaces of “the forest" and “the village”: the arrival of St. James in the village from his forest/coastal shrine at Verkāṭu. For further discussion of parallels in the cultural construction of local Catholic saints and Hindu deities, which in my opinion justify the extension of this sort of analysis from Hindu temples, see Mosse 1986; 1994b.
28 The “presence” of the Catholic saint’s power in the koṭimaram is concretely demonstrated during the festivals of saints with a reputation for exorcising possessing evil spirits (pey-picācu). As the possessed victim approaches the koṭimaram she begins to shake (aṭu, “dance”) which is something that usually occurs as the possessed faces the statue or touches the tomb of the saint and which indicates the spirit’s discomfort in close proximity to the holy power of the saint (Mosse 1986).
29 This identification of the church compound and the territory protected (cf. Beck 1972: 121) is suggested in the following entry in the priest’s diary in 1896: “[The villagers] […] having had no rain that year nor water even to drink, they had a meeting in order to decide upon what is to be done in order to obtain rain. It was resolved that they should at once rebuild the ruined wall that surrounded the church compound. As the bricks were ready they at once set to work. Scarcely was the wall finished, when a heavy rain fell on the country and gave them a plentiful supply of water for the fields and for drinking.”
30 The term mariyātai (sk. maryāda) glossed often as “honour” also refers to substances in Hindu temples which are received as piracatam from the god and which signify or embody that honour (Appadurai 1981: 34).
31 Mirācu is an Arabic term referring to rights to landholding or service.
32 The cattatēr was a large decorated cart used for the final procession and assembled from its parts after a special rite called, in Cramam, “kouttancal”
( “Usages des Fêtes”, Decoration de tēr).
33 From what is known from popular tradition and the myth of the St. James cult, there was also a shift (probably at some point in the 17th century) from a crude low caste devotional cult to ritualistic Christian worship based on Vellalar learning and spiritual authority (see Mosse 1986: 138-139).
34 Following the same principle of priestly rank, the Pallar Pantaram belongs to a separate and slightly higher subcaste (Ayyā Pallar) from those he serves (Ammā Pallars). From the 1890s there was also a separate catechist for Catholic Natars in the village (Parish Diary, Fr. Gnanaprakasam 7.10.1896, Fr. Gamon 24.12.1904).
35 Today capparams and ters are decorated with coloured paper and “tube light” powered by a portable generator which accompanies the procession on a bicycle or bullock cart.
36 There were, in fact, many occasions for conspicuous public expenditure for religious purposes. The parish diaries contain examples where influential villagers decorated the church, paid for new statues of the saints, for a new flagpost (koṭimaram), for an umbrella and other ritual paraphernalia for the priest or paid for the preparation and distribution of food on special occasions (cf. Parish Diaries, Fr. Gnanaprakasam 3.10.1896, 22.11.1986; Fr. Veaux 18.3.1928; Sarukani Diary, 10.3.1911).
37 Regarding the term maṇṭakapaṭi Reiniche writes: “Tous les dictionnaires s’accordent pour donner le terme comme un équivalent de maṇṭapa-paṭi “dépense du maṇṭapam” ou, plus exactement, dépense nécessaire pour amener (ou recevoir) une divinité sur le maṇṭapam un jour de fête […] Le maṇṭapam est le hall (sureleve) […] qui précède le sanctuaire ou qui se trouve a l’extérieur du temple; il est l’endroit (public) où la divinité est offerte à la vue de l’ensemble des dévots en période de fete. À la limite (et implicitement), avec le terme maṇṭaka-paṭi on a l’idée d’un passage de la divinité de l’interieur du sanctuaire a un endroit exterieur oil elle est exposee a la vue de tous les hommes (sur terre), et ce passage ne peut se faire sans un culte (done des dépenses) spécial.” (1979: 87 n. 7.)
38 Reiniche (1979) contrasts this role to that of the Brahman priest who never acts as a donor at major village festivals.
39 It is significant that this relationship between priest and local dominant, itself consequent upon the Catholic priest’s assertion of some sort of ritual kingship in the 19th century (see below), undermines the ordinary Hindu complementarity of Brahman and king. This in fact led to a good deal of tension in the relationship between the priests and the Maravar headman (which is discussed in the following sections).
40 One Paraiya informant maintained that the castes receiving honours divided themselves into left and right according to which side of the east door of the church they stood. This was the only suggestion of a left right classification of castes, which Beck holds to be so important in Koṇkunāṭu, that I came across. Even then, the classification given does not accord with Beck’s observation that left-hand castes are not included in the village festival (1972: 118).
41 Cramam ( “Usages des Fêtes”, Semaine Sainte et fête de Pâques) (bétel distribué).
42 Saints’ festivals are not the only occasions for this sort of public synthesis. Catholic life-cycle rituals such as puberty, marriage and death all retain Hindu ritual forms to express caste status (Mosse 1986, n.d.).
43 Bayly shows how the ritual pre-eminence of Christian Vellalars ( “Pillaimars”) which derived from the Jesuit office of kōvilpiḷḷai was challenged by Padroado priests attempting to assert their own authority over a shrine in Tirunelveli, and how this lent tacit support to status claims of the commercially successful but low caste Shanar (Nāṭār) trader Christians (Bayly 1989: 420-452).
44 The records of these conflicts begin with Fr. Favreux’s Diarum Maravae covering the period 1854-1865 and summarised in Résumé.
45 Résumé: 59. At the shrine of the martyr John de Britto in Oriyur village, Utaiyars controlled a lucrative exorcism cult (Parish Diaries, Favreux 8.9.1872, Darrieutort 1876; see Mosse 1994b).
46 The Hindu Vellalar village accountant or karnam, the Maravar ampalakārar or headman, the Cervarar (caste) talaiyāri or village watch (kāval) and the Konar (shepherd caste) headman or mukkantar.
47 In 1836, French Jesuits returned to India and a Papal Bull entrusted the new Madurai Mission entirely to them. Even before, this conflicts had arisen in the area, when French priests under the Bishop of Pondicherry challenged the authority of the “Goanese” priests under the Bishop of Cochin at Sarukani village (Madras District Records, Madurai District, Vol. 4682, Tamil Nadu State Archives). There are parallels here with conflicts arising from competition between Portuguese missionaries, and West Asian (Nestorian) clerics over the Syrian Christians in 16th century Malabar (Bayly 1989: 258-260).
48 As early as 1839 the Madurai Collector was receiving petitions from Roman Catholics in Ramnad pressing for authoritative backing for one or other of the competing missions, Board of Revenue, 22 July, Back No. 75, 9050, 15 Aug. Back Nos. 59, 60, 16887-90.
49 There are parallels with the situation further south in Tirunelveli at the beginning of the 19th century when the Goan ecclesiastical hierarchy attempted to assert Padroado control over the parishes of the earlier Jesuit Madurai mission, and again when the Jesuits of the newly re-instituted Madurai mission returned in the 1830s. Here the honours disputes concerned a challenge to Vellalar ceremonial precedence from Natar (Shanar) trader-cultivators (Bayly 1989: 422-452).
50 The Utaiyar chiefs of Oriyur and Pulial had in fact even raised funds to help the Goanese priests fight court cases against the Jesuits over rights of patronage of their churches (ibid.).
51 This was an honour which Utaiyars had obtained from Goanese priests in other Christian centres to the north.
52 This pre-eminence was also strongly championed by the Maravar headman and the other village officers, who had again switched support back to the Goanese.
53 In 1859 Favreux inaugurated an Easter procession of the image of the body of Christ and the saints and a passion play (paska) to attract crowds away from the older festival of the Goanese church at the village of Kokkurani (Résumé: 172).
54 “Soarez was a near-illiterate Eurasian born in Goa, excommunicated by the Padroado church authorities, and ordained illegally by another renegade Goan…” with whom he formed a breakaway sect based in Colombo and called the Independent Catholic Church of Ceylon, Goa and India (Bayly 1979: 257; 1989: 316ff.).
55 Parish Diaries, Fr. Gnanaprakasam 23.6.1895, 7.7.1895.
56 In 1811, 1829 and 1849 (Cramam: 7).
57 The same tactic was employed by Jesuits elsewhere to shift the balance of caste rights and privileges and to assert control over shrines (Bayly, 1989: 316 ff.).
58 Ibid.: 318-319, Parish Diaries, Fr. Favreux, July 1868 and 1870.
59 Parish Diaries, Fr. Gnanaprakasam 23.6.1893, 7.7.1895.
60 Parish Diaries, Fr. Veaux 20.7.1928.
61 Parish Diary, Fr. Gamon 24.7.1914, 24.7.1915,11.11.1915.
62 Parish Diary, Fr. Gamon 25.7.1903.
63 Parish Diaries, Fr. Gamon 18.6.1912, 8.7.1912.
64 Parish Diary, Fr. Gamon 24.7.1915
65 See Baker (1984: 447) on the changing relationship between kamam and headman in the villages of the Madras Presidency.
66 Thus the passion play (paska) brought to Alapuram in 1859 (see note 52) was transferred to another church in 1872 following Utaiyar withdrawal over the question of festival honours (Parish Diary, Fr. Favreux, April 1872, 16-25.7.1872).
67 Compare Dirks’ comments on the Brahman administrators of Pudukkottai temples who increasingly employed a bureaucratic conception of religion in which worship was an individual rather than a social matter (1987: 380-383).
68 I have examined the socio-economic basis for these and other assertions of independence and caste honour among Untouchable castes in Alapuram in Mosse 1994a.
69 On the status difference between contributing money or grain as opposed to labour or menial service in South Indian festivals, see Hanchett 1970: 215.
70 I have elsewhere, discussed the way in which obtaining festival honours has been employed as one strategy (among others) for status striving among Alapuram Pallars (Mosse 1994a).
71 These events and the high caste boycott which they sparked off are detailed in Mosse 1986: 333, see Parish Diaries, Fr. Gamon 13.5.1917, 21-28.3.1919).
72 That this and other initiatives of the kind came from the priest rather than from Pallars themselves is evident from their ambivalent reaction. In a response which speaks of the power of patronage relations at the time, Pallars in fact initially resisted the priest’s moves and reacted with threats of conversion to Protestantism if seating arrangements were changed (ibid.).
73 Parish Diaries, Fr. Gamon 18.6.1912,8,13.7.1912, 14.7.1913, 18.7.1913, 17-25.7.1914.
74 E.g., the right to drag the Natar caste ratam, or processional chariot when Natars withdrew from the festival owing to an internal caste dispute (Parish Diaries, Fr. Veaux 23-25.7.1923).
75 E.g., support for Paḷḷar drummers’ refusal to bring the Maravar village headman in procession for the kōvil mariyātai in 1923 since he insulted them by denying them their betel the previous year (Parish Diaries, Fr. Veaux 23-25.7.1923).
76 Priests also extended support to Christian low castes withdrawing from ignominious ritual service roles, especially those connected to Hindu temples. Here the missionary concern had more to do with objection to low caste converts being treated as Hindus than their treatment as low castes (Mosse 1986: 335-337; 1994a).
77 As noted elsewhere (Mosse 1994a; 1986), this brings to mind the parallel with temple-based devotional religion in medieval Tamil Nadu which, in providing a hierarchy of statuses and ranked ritual roles, enabled “… powerful and populous part [s] of Hindu society [i.e. peasant elites] (formerly excluded by criteria of purity by birth) […] to enjoy ritual rank commensurate with [their] ranking in other aspects of south Indian life” (Stein 1968: 81).
78 Information in this section comes from visits to the village between 1987 and 1991, and from interviews with the three parish priests in office, 1985-1991.
79 It was suggested to me that the priest abolished separate seating arrangements around 1986, first by reversing the usual manner of aspersing holy water during the mass – that is from left to right, or from high castes (seated in the northern transept and main aisle) to Pallars (seated in the Southern transept).
80 The case was, however, argued on the grounds of the geographical centrality of the Paḷḷar hamlet.
81 The street plays have also dealt with issues of corruption, dowry, the ill treatment of women, etc. Some of these have also provoked high caste reactions – not least because the dramas are able to make veiled but public criticism of individual elites.
82 The term “inculturation” has a rather specific usage in contemporary missionary discourses (e.g., Shorter 1988). This is in important ways quite different from the “cultural accommodation” (Pickering 1992) of De Nobili which informed Jesuit missionary work in the 18th and 19th centuries. For one thing, a shift away from a spiritual/temporal dichotomy means that in contemporary Jesuit “formation” the model of Indian spirituality comes, for example, from the Gandhian ashram with its distinctive combination of contemplative spirituality and social action, rather than from the traditional Hindu ashram which has no notion of social involvement. Other departures from De Nobili would include the emphasis on regional or local religious and cultural traditions (rather than primarily on textual traditions) and therefore a positive re-appraisal of popular Hinduism; also the emphasis on personal experience of these (Hindu traditions) and on life in communion with Hindus (see Clementin-Ojha, this volume).
83 This term was first used following the first National Conference of Christian Dalits in 1985 organised by the Dalit Liberation Movement (Prabhaker 1988: 35).
Auteur
-
David Mosse
Univ, of Wales, Centre for Development Studies (U. K.)
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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