LISTA DE COTEJO PARA EVALUAR ENSAYO

To be untouchable, able to worship Hindu gods only from the outer wall and to be confined to the sea-shore in order to protect caste Hindus from on e ’s polluting qualities would seem reason enough to seek to escape Hinduism. In addition, we have seen that fisherpeople are quasi-independent of upper caste power and patronage, with all relations with wider society mediated by trade. When an opportunity presented itself for Mukkuvars to resolve the anomalies of their position in caste society, they took it.

The occasion arose with the arrival of the Portuguese Jesuits, first on the Malabar coast, and later on the Corcmandel coast of eastern Tamil Nadu, in 1535. From the very start of Portuguese Catholic activity in south India, the question of conversion and proselytisation was bound up with issues of caste power, status, economic interests and colonisation. To the Portuguese, religion and trade were activities so closely related as to seem all but indistinguishable elements in the enterprise of colonisation. As Roche puts it:

The alliance of Portugal with the Papacy in Europe resulted in what church historians have called the ’padroado’ jurisdiction. The jurisdiction which gave Portuguese kings direct administrative responsibility over ecclesiastical affairs had important repercussions in the colonies. Portuguese officialdom was characterised not only by captains and factors but also by the padres. Both captains and clerics acted as partners in christianisation and colonisation as servants of the king. Indigenous groups found that the clerics were powerful negotiators in winning the protection and support of the Portuguese officials (Roche 1984:41-42).

The earliest presence of the Portuguese was in Calicut, where from 1498 onward, their trading and proselytising was carried out under the protective shadow of the forts. Their confinement to

trading posts along the coastal belt remained a problem throughout the first century of missionary effort. The key successes of the period were the conversions of the fishing castes on the eastern and western coastline of south India. These conversions presented the Reman Catholic Church a paradox with which it was to become only too familiar: conversion in India, while the result of efforts addressed, ideally, to the individual consciousness, was effective above all as a mass phenomenon. The conversions were an aspect of caste politics, of the jockeying of groups for a better position within the social order. If for the Portuguese, Christianity was to a considerable extent an instrument of economic and political interests, precisely the same was true for those who converted.

Yet the process cannot be entirely reduced to considerations of material interest. Fishing conmunities which turned to Christianity in the first wave of conversions in the sixteenth century used religion not simply to climb a status ladder, but to consolidate and further emphasise a sense of separation and difference from the rest of caste society.

Of the Paravas, living on the east coast, Roche writes:

The Parathars were people whose identity and social organisation was characterised by religion, exclusive settlements, kinship, closed marriage networks, constricted norms of social intercourse and an autonomous caste polity ... The pivotal element upholding the entire edifice of Parava social organisation, however, was the specialised corporate economy of the jati (1984:39-40).

The Mukkuvars shared all these characteristics. For both castes, Christianity has become a way of marking and further underlining their j a a t i , or ccmmunal identity.

There is, however, one crucial difference between the conversion experiences of the two fishing castes of the southern tip of India.

The Paravas had a far more diversified occupational structure, one which included not only ocean fishing, but a virtual monopoly over an extremely lucrative pearl fishing industry. Their economic strength contrasts with the precarious, hand-to-mouth existence of the Mukkuvars. The social hierarchy, with caste notables at the apex, was much more highly elaborated among the Paravas, who are moreover, far better known: the interest of the jaati elite who acted as conscious and literate leaders have ensured the survival of a relatively rich body of historical evidence. There are now two detailed social histories of the Parava comrnmity, by Roche (1984), and Bayly (1981a, 1981b). The Mukkuvars, who were and still are poor, illiterate community, have been the subject of little historical documentation. Their history remains wrapped in silence.

We know little of the Mukkuvar conversion, except that it followed that of the Parava conversion by ten years, and that it was a response to the missionary efforts of Francis Xavier, probably between 1544 and 1549. Xavier and subsequent missionaries worked also among lower status agricultural castes such as the Illuvans and the Pulayas (Forrester 1979). However, to this day, the term 'Latin Catholics' means only one thing in the Travancore region: the fishing castes, principally the Mukkuvars.

On the reasons for their conversion, we can only speculate. I have suggested that Christianity presented Mukkuvars with a means of resolving the contradictions of an anomalous position in caste society, and of affirming an already powerful caste identity as the KaDalkarai makkaL, or the people of the sea-shore tract. In contrast to the case of the Paravas, there seem for them to have been no inmediate economic and political benefits from conversion. However,

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recent historians of peasant movements have begun to accord fuller weight to non-economic motives even amongst the poorest strata. In his history of Christianity and its relationship with caste society,

Forrester writes:

What must never be neglected is that a conversion movement is like a kind of group identity crisis, in which the group passes through a negative rejection of their lowly place in Hindu society to a positive affirmation of a new social and religious identity (1980:71).

Among the Mukkuvars, conversion was the result of a (probably explosive) combination of factors: the humiliations of untouchability being sharpened by the aspiration to autonomy and economic independence. This interpretation finds support in the literature on mass conversions to Christianity in the nineteenth century. Thus Forrester (1980) and Oddie (1977) argue that conversion movements begin precisely among the more economically independent, and only later spread to the weaker sections of society.