This thesis seeks to present a study of one particular rural Paraiyar Christian community in Tamil Nadu, focusing on their religious identity and theological expressions. Such people, more commonly known as Dalits, or Untouchables are a largely socially marginalised group living within a dynamic and complex social matrix dominated by the caste system and its social and religious implications. They are heavily reliant on their landlords (the high caste Hindus) for their wages, food, and access to resources. The village has two Paraiyar communities, one of which is Hindu and other Christian, with intermarriage occurring frequently between them. With one exception, all of the thirty-one Christian families in the village were once Hindu Paraiyars before converting to Christianity. The first convert to Christianity was in the beginning of 20th century as the result of the American Arcot Mission. Fieldwork highlighted various tensions and areas of creativity regarding how Paraiyar Christians negotiate their lives within a marginalised and oppressed hierarchical system. Although the study focuses on the Christian community, it can only do so by examining their wider social context, which is dominated by religious and caste structures, ascribed and achieved identity, symbols, ritual, and boundaries. Recent writing within Dalit Theology naturally discusses Paraiyar Christians, but it is a contention of this thesis that much ‘Dalit Theology’ ignores the social, ritual and basis of rural Dalit life and thought, an omission which this thesis redresses. The main body of the thesis is divided in to three parts. The first part presents a review and discussion of written works on missionary encounters with the caste system in the church history of south India, as well as Dalit Theological writings. The second section concentrates on the ethnographic information gathered from eight months’ fieldwork and analysed under four different themes: understanding Paraiyar identity, Yesusami and the religious worldview of Paraiyar Christians, the utilisation of religious symbols and performances to advance social change, and, finally, the reproduction of social hierarchies among Paraiyar Christians. The final section attempts to articulate a relevant theological understanding of Dalit Christology using Gillian Rose’s concept of ‘Broken Middle’. This thesis does not set out to provide a comprehensive ethnography of this Paraiyar Christian community, nor does it propose a completely new theological system. Rather, it attempts to allow for the research subjects themselves to articulate their own perspectives and opinions regarding what it means to be Christians and Paraiyars simultaneously. This work allows for flexibility and volatility between the two identities combined within the Paraiyar Christian community. I argue that this is only made possible by their fluidity, being able to balance their individual and communal religious identities - creatively living in the middle of their multiple belongings.

In this study I analyse the thirty-year journey of Karunamayudu (1978), an Indian Jesus film, from its production to its recent reception. Drawing on a combination of historical and empirical data I explore questions such as: What religious traditions and experiences have informed Karunamayudu's production, content, distribution and reception? How has this film been appropriated by distributors, producers, and viewers? And how does such an understanding of the history of Karunamayudu (1978), arguably India's best-known Jesus film, contribute to our understanding of the tangled relationship between film, religion, and theology? In the first chapter I demonstrate how this study contributes to gaps in the existing scholarship on film, religion, and theology, Jesus in film, and religion in Indian cinema. In the second chapter I provide a rationale for the methodologies I employed. The third and fourth chapters address the production history and context of the film, and the fifth is a review of the film itself. In chapters six and seven I discuss the distribution and reception of the film, respectively, and in the eighth and concluding eighth chapter I reflect on the implications of this account for ongoing scholarship in the field of film, religion, and theology.

This dissertation applies ethnographic research to answer a question in the field of religious studies: to what degree does the prevailing world religions paradigm illuminate the interpretation of religious material that cannot easily be fit into a single major religious tradition. Indian Catholicism generally and Tamil Catholicism in particular have been deeply neglected both by scholars of India (who generally assume that Christianity in India is a "foreign" religion more-or-less indistinguishable from the Christianity of European missionaries) and by theologians and historians of Christianity (who often treat non-Western expressions of Christianity as somehow "compromised" by influence from alien religions such as Hinduism). By interrogating the early modern origins of the world religions paradigm and questioning its applicability to the particular case of Tamil Popular Catholicism, I intend to bring about a shift within religious studies and allied theological fields that will allow popular Catholicism to take a more central place within scholarship. The major issue I pursue in this dissertation is the manner in which European expectations about the nature of Christianity as a world religion impede the understanding of non-conforming expressions of Christianity, such as Tamil Popular Catholicism. My primary research agenda is a matter of ethnographically surveying a representative Tamil Catholic site to determine the characteristics of Tamil Popular Catholicism which most differentiate it from European expectations, and later to integrate these these findings with the theological self-definition of Catholic Christianity. Methodologically, my approach combines ethnography with oral history, aiming at a "thick description" of Tamil Popular Catholicism in its various manifestations which can be later used as a basis for theological reflection. Drawing on extensive field research at the St. Antony Shrine at St. Mary's Co-Cathedral in Chennai, I argue that popular, non-Western expressions of Christianity in Tamil Nadu differ from elite interpretations primarily with respect to the questions of exclusivity, openness to other communities, and the place of "magical" or supernatural healing traditions. There are concrete social and political consequences to the proliferation of Western religious categories in India, namely, the unraveling of the previously integrated Tamil religious culture into separate "Catholic" and "Hindu" identities and the social and political marginalization of Tamil Catholics. At the St. Antony Shrine, the local expression of Tamil Popular Catholicism defies description in terms of the prevailing world religions paradigm, which differentiates absolutely between "Christianity" and "Hinduism" and posits the existence of two hermetically-sealed religious communities ("Catholic" and "Hindu") where I argue there is but one (the popular religion of the Tamil people, in which "Hindu" and "Catholic" differ primarily by virtue of caste rather than religious classification or practice). The usual strategy within the world religious paradigm for describing non-conforming Catholic sites is to appeal to the concept of "syncretism," which refers to the mixture of two or more of the world religions into an incoherent third. This term carries heavy pejorative overtones and marginalizes religious phenomena so described, redirecting scholarly attention to religious phenomena that can be described using existing categories. By demonstrating how Western religious categories impede the understanding of a typical, non-eccentric Asian site, I show that the prevailing categories used by Western scholars to analyze religions are Orientalist in origin and logic and in need of drastic redefinition, which I provide in my conclusions by taking recourse to a premodern, Augustinian construction of "religion" which rejects the pluralization of "religions" in favor of a singular definition, circumventing the theological charge of "syncretism" and the legitimization of nationalist or communalist factions formed on the basis of pluralized religious identities.

This dissertation uses discursive formation as the methodological approach to examine representations of Indian Christians in eleven Bollywood movies released during the 2004-2014 decade. The decade witnessed the exit and eventual re-entry of the Hindu Right, and the citizenry during that period experienced centrist, liberal, and secular governance. Since the present of Indian Christianity is inextricable from a colonial past, and Bollywood emerges in response to colonialism, a postcolonial intervention in methodology and theory is undertaken. A postcolonial perspective illuminates the discourses that enable the formation of the postcolonial nation, i.e., the ways a nation imagines its culture, people, traditions, boundaries, and Others. There is a suggested relationship between the representations of Indian Christians in Bollywood movies and the decade of secular governance because the analysis is approached from the position that culture and media produce and re-produce each other. The representations of Christians in Bollywood movies are a product of contemporary and historical cultural, legal, political, and social discourses. This dissertation demonstrates that representations of Christians as hypersexual women and emasculated men within an emergent Hindu modernity discursively constructs India as a Hindu nation, and Christians as the westernized Other. The theoretical contributions pertain to belonging in the nation through homonationalism and hypersexualization; the relationship between democratic representations and media; the postcolonial ambivalent identity of the Bollywood industry because of way it represents Indian Christians in response to colonialism; and the Indian Christian community’s postcolonial identity as a way to make sense of their contemporary and historical identity.

No abstract available / Religious Studies / M.A. (Religious Studies)

The 2011 Indian Census indicates that children under the age of 18 constitute more than 400 million, and most of them are Children at Risk (CAR). This study suggests that the care and protection of children at risk is not a twentieth- or twenty-first-century secular enterprise but has precedents in Protestant missions in India from the late eighteenth century. In the first section, the study focuses on evaluating contemporary Protestant mission contexts in India and a brief historical survey of Protestant missions to CAR in India through case studies. The evaluation concentrates on the implications of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) for the predominant Protestant models of mission in contemporary India - which may be summarised as child evangelism, child compassion and child advocacy. The thesis argues that child care and protection is increasingly becoming secularised and professionalised. Moreover, with the emergence of new laws and with increasing, vigilance from international and national agencies, and from Hindu fundamentalists, Christian mission to CAR is itself at risk. Under these circumstances, the study also investigates whether there is a transition from ideas of 'saving' CAR to ideas of protecting the human rights of CAR. In the second section, this hypothesis is further substantiated by case studies of select Protestant churches and Christian NGOs engaging with CAR in the cities of Bangalore and Chennai. Using empirical data, it then claims that the predominant Protestant approaches of evangelism, compassion, and advocacy are still underdeveloped and inadequate primarily because the majority of caregivers working with children still perceive CAR as objects of their mission - an assumption that may be contrary to UNCRC (Articles 14 and 30). Further, it argues that the churches and agencies most active among CAR are from a 'conservative' background, who are often exclusively 'spiritual' and otherworldly in their concerns. The final and most constructive section, based on the evaluations of the empirical data, seeks to recommend a preliminary theology of mission in and through the idea of 'childness' based on Matthew 18: 2-5, an idea developed by Adrian Thatcher in the context of a theology of child participation. Based on these foundations, it suggests that UNCRC can be integrated as a set of principles for contemporary Christian missions with CAR in South India through a missiological process called 'dialogue,' emerging from a pluralistic Indian context. It further proposes that adults and children are to be perceived not as either independent (liberational) or dependent (paternalistic) agencies, but as interdependent agencies working together in God's mission. This thesis finally proposes basic principles for Christian mission to/for/with CAR - a multi-dimensional approach integrating CAR as subjects of God's mission and not just as objects.

No abstract available / Religious Studies / M.A. (Religious Studies)