Sanal Mohan Essay

SOUTH ASIA
RESEARCH
www.sagepublications.com
DOI: 10.1177/0262728006058760
Vol. 26(1): 540
Copyright 2006
SAGE Publications
New Delhi,
Thousand Oaks,
London
NARRATIVIZING OPPRESSION AND

SUFFERING: THEORIZING SLAVERY
Sanal Mohan
MAHATMA GANDHI UNIVERSITY, KOTTAYAM, INDIA
This article analyses the particular process by which

memories of the slave experience of Pulayas, Parayas and similar
castes are kept alive in contemporary Kerala by followers of the
Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha, a social and religious movement of Dalits started in 190910 by Poyikayil Yohannan in
central Travancore. The article shows how, over time, the
Christian orientation of the movement was modified by its
Dalit leaders, making intricate use of re-memorizing the slave
experience. The outcome is that new myths and concepts were
developed, evolving into new practices and discourses, including
prominently the narrativization of oppression and suffering and
rememory of slavery as part of initiation rituals into the
movement.
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS: Adi-Dravidas, Dalits, identity, Indian Christianity,

Kerala, missionaries, slavery
Introductory Overview
The Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha is a social and religious movement of Dalits
started in 190910 by Poyikayil Yohannan in central Travancore.1 Before going
into details of their distinct rememory of the slave experience,2 a brief contextualization of this movement will be useful. Yohannan belonged to the Paraya
community and many of his followers and front ranking leaders were drawn from
the Pulayas and Parayas, who used to be agrestic slaves engaged in agricultural
production at the bottom of the agrarian hierarchy in pre-colonial and colonial
Kerala. Referred to by different names regionally, they shared certain common
features recorded by colonial ethnographers (Mateer, 1991: 3359). In the 20th
century powerful social movements emerged, spearheaded by leaders of these
communities, that helped them to negotiate colonial modernity. Before this phase
of social movements, protestant missionaries had worked among them from about
1850 onwards and thousands had joined Protestant congregations. For example
the Church Missionary Society in central Travancore, by the turn of the 20th
century, had more than 35,000 Dalit Christians, more than half of their total
membership.3 The social movements of the 20th century thus took place in the
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South Asia Research Vol. 26 (1)
context of emerging colonial modernity among Dalits as a result of protestant

missionary activities.
The spread of Christianity among Dalits in Kerala and similar social groups
elsewhere was not a passive phenomenon as is made out in conventional
historiography.4 Right from the beginning of missionary activity among them,
Dalits in Kerala showed an intense desire to redefine their social selves by
following a variety of practices, albeit under the influence and control of
missionaries. Mention may be made particularly of their acceptance of changed
spatio-temporal notions and new conceptions of the body. There were definite
instances of reorganization of the space in which Dalits were located, including
their small huts and places of dwelling and the newly constituted sacred space of
the Church and the slave school: spaces which were not mediated by caste
hierarchy. The new notion of time was available in connection with daily prayers,
attendance in Church and school.5 This coordination was besides the usual
practice of labour, intensely familiar from pre-colonial times. Modernity marked
severe contests in all these realms. The people who joined the missionary Church
began to introspect their position in it and the local society as they were gradually
coming out of their agrarian slave past, though their everyday life was still
dependent on the local landed gentry and in many cases their lives were not better
at all. While they remained halfway between modern agricultural labour and slave
labour peculiar to caste formation in Kerala, they had the desire to break away
from such a labyrinthine existence. They were disturbed by the existence of caste
distinctions within the Church notwithstanding missionary assurances to the
contrary. Over the years these discontents acquired subversive potentials within
the Church, leading to contests over access and proximity to the sacred space and
objects, as well as radical movements couched in religious idiom articulating both
religious and mundane themes.
In this context the religious movement of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha,
sometimes referred to in missionary writings as a heretical movement, developed
in Tiruvalla in central Travancore, Kerala. Poyikayil Yohannan, a Paraya Christian
who was initially with the Marthoma Syrian Church and other Churches like the
Plymouth Brethren, founded the new sect in 1909. During the early phase of the
Sabha it imbibed the Christian worldview and was largely upholding Christian
cosmology, as testified by oral traditions and documents of that period. After the
death of the founder in 1939, the second rung of leadership took over and
gradually schisms evolved within the Sabha. In 1950, one section of followers
under the leadership of Yohannans second wife Janamma declared themselves to
be Hindus in a public meeting near Tiruvalla.6 Afterwards they gradually
transformed the biblical themes and metaphors in their songs and the Christian
practices in their everyday existence. One section of followers who considered
such practices contrary to the teachings of the founder, under the leadership of
Njaliyakuzhi Simon Yohannan, the president of the Sabha after the death of
Yohannan, sued Janamma in court and obtained a verdict in favour of their
argument that the Sabha was Christian and not part of Hindu religion.7 The
contest over this continued in the High Court of Kerala, which gave its final
verdict stating that it was neither Hindu nor Christian and that it was a brave
Mohan: Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering
attempt to create a casteless society.8 This particular verdict was decisive,

determining the social identity formation of this group that remained, for most of
the 20th century, in a liminal space. The analysis of the foundational categories
introduced through the teachings of the Sabha shows that they created their own
myths once they reverted to Hinduism. All foundational concepts of their faith
were transformed into new concepts that later on evolved into new practices and
discourses, including the rememory of slavery.
Religious Ideologies and Social Critique

Exploring the ideology of the movement, one finds fundamental ideological
ruptures in its later phases. We do not have systematic written records on the early
history of the movement, the ideas of the founder and of those closely associated
with him, because this was a movement primarily of illiterate Dalits and discourse
was oral rather than written. But Church Missionary Society Records from 1910
onwards provide important though fragmentary information regarding the activities of the Sabha and the ideas of the founder and his close associates. Another
source of information is the oral tradition of the Sabha, printed only recently
(Poyikayil, 1996). This comprises mainly of songs sung during various ritual
occasions of the Sabha and in the families of the followers. These songs have a
history and genealogy of their own, undergoing tremendous transformation in the
1950s when the official Sabha and its leadership reverted to Hinduism. All the
songs, some circulated in print before 1950, were largely based on Christian
themes, mostly concerned with salvation of the soul and redemption from sins.
These songs deployed Christian motifs such as the Holy Trinity, the cross that
saves man, and the deliverance that the Holy Spirit offers. The use of these motifs
indicates that the foundational canon of faith was the belief in biblical truth,
though not accepted uncritically. It is difficult to confine the faith and practice of
the Sabha followers in pure categories. The doubleness characteristic of such faith
arising out of religious radicalism is a phenomenon observed in the religiosity of
lower classes in other historical contexts as well (Orta, 1999).
In the Sabha, religious radicalism tending to the rejection of the canons of the
Church was observed even during the initial formative phase. For instance, the
Bishop of Travancore and Cochin, reporting to the Travancore state authorities
that enquired into the alleged support of Yohannan and his followers of the Sabha
to the Germans during the First World War, observed on the Sabha that, [i]t is
religious, in that he proclaims himself as the new mediator or saviour and
preaches that people can only be saved (whatever he means by that) by coming to
him. In this way he is building up a sect, and denounces all existing Christian
Churches, and calls upon all Christian converts of Pariah or Pulaya origin to leave
their Churches and join his sect.9 At the same time their self-representation
makes easy straightjacket conclusions impossible. For instance in one of the
memoranda submitted to the Diwan of Travancore State in 1920, they represented
themselves as a people,
. . . who have come together from different communities and castes, realizing the
witness of the Bible and the faith in the Holy trinity expecting to realize heaven and

existing in the nomenclature of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha thankfully
acknowledge the good things that have been done to us for all these days and
believe that your reign marks the beginnings of a time of relief and blessings to us
and we wish and pray to God for your enduring reign and eternal blessings up on
your descendants, as the minister holding central position in the administration of
the Travancore state.10
In another memorandum submitted to Morris Watts, the Diwan of Travancore in

1926, it was stated:
We the people numbering 10,000 belonging to Parayar, Pulayar and Kizhakke
Pulayar who have been slaves for a long time, and are in the lowest rung of the
society in terms of landed property and education have come together in the witness
of the holy Bible and joined together in the nomenclature of Prathyaksha Raksha
Daiva Sabha. We the original inhabitants of this land were for a long time steeped in
slavery, and had to depend on others as we did not have our own land to stay and
we lived like animals without education, social reform and such civilizational
qualities. We are a poor people who subsist from the little income that we get
from daily wage earning. Now in different parts of the state we have 63 parishes
and there we have churches and schools for the worship of God and education of
our children.11
What stands out in the above passages are the ideological positions of the Sabha
that cannot be reduced to neat categories with well-guarded boundaries. The
future project of the Sabha was nothing short of the agenda of modernity couched
in religious idiom in which acquisition of landed property, education, social
reform and other civilizational qualities became singularly important.
Contemporary representations of the founder of the Sabha and the world view
it projected help us understand the process of reinscription of the movements
foundational categories in the postcolonial phase. The missionaries consistently
characterized Yohannan as invested with superb qualities, as a clever speaker, who
has caused great unrest among the backward classes, through false teaching; his
success being due in a great measure to the ignorance of the people, and the lack
of someone qualified to meet him on his own ground.12 They were relieved to
note that his popularity was on the wane, but this turned out to be a premature
conclusion. As observed in the annual report of the missionaries for the year
1916, it was around Tiruvalla that the effect of Poyikayil Yohannans false
teachings was chiefly felt. Two outstations had to be closed, the people having
become his disciples. To counteract this mans influence, Mr Stephens, a
missionary in charge of the Tiruvalla mission station, wrote and published three
leaflets with wide circulation and travelled the district and Pastorates.13 The
challenge put forward by the movement continued, as noted by the perceptive
missionaries:
It is claimed . . . that it is the only way of salvation, that its author is the sole
depository of revelation to the present generation. Some former adherents who for
one cause or another left the party, gave accounts of the sermons of the leaders
and the doings in the jungle which is his headquarters. But these accounts were
always decried by Poyikayil and his followers. Outsiders are jealously excluded
from these gatherings. If any are suspected of being present, the meeting at once
disperses or is given an orthodox character. As far as can be ascertained it distorted

interpretations of Holy Scripture and introduced a kind of rapturous revivalism,
mixed with Animistic or some similar rites that constitute the doctrine and
practice of the cult. It cant be said to have lost its attractive power though some
who had been led away returned to the church. It attracted other Christians
besides those of outcaste origin, and, as has been said drew to itself the interest of
Hinduism, represented by the Ramakrishna Mission. Mr. Stephens cooperated
with the Pastors and other leaders in the parts most affected, which lie round
about his stations of Tiruvalla, in fighting this foe. He organised conventions in
several places near Poyikayils stronghold, employed trusted men to work among
the congregation and wrote and printed leaflets dealing with the heresy.14
An article published in the Diocesan Record under the title Concerning the
Heresies pointed out that Travancore was not the only mission field of the
Christian Mission Society (CMS) to encounter heresies.15 The radical dimensions
of the teachings of Yohannan in Kerala made the missionaries and the Church
hierarchy in Travancore view it as heresy. Considered in the context of such
movements the trial in Travancore was not strange.16 The article exhorts the
Church to be prepared to resist strange heresies that might arise among believers.
Regarding heresy, it was observed that psychologically such phenomena should
appear where masses of primitive people had been transformed from heathenism
to Christianity. Centuries of animism were bound to produce certain instincts of
which animism was itself the product or expression. The transfer of an animist
people to Christianity with its totally different outlook and implications produced
mental and emotional ferment.17
The sudden transfer of an animist people to the practice and teachings of
Christianity offered them space for constructing their own ideological hybrid alternatives. This is only reluctantly admitted by the missionaries who asked themselves
whether the new spirit of Christ had completely dethroned and abolished the old
animist instincts. The second reason attributed to heresy was that the Sunday Services
often seemed humdrum to mass converts and the Christian discipline appeared
irksome. A more tangible reason apart from caste and race feelings may have been the
resentment of the have-nots against those who have, reflected in observations to the
effect that these poor sheep dimly feel that they are more likely to get what they want
by following some leader of their own.18
Prophecies were not deemed strange and the Church hierarchy identified
personalities like Poyikayil Yohannan and Venkotta Yohannan19 in Travancore
along with heretic prophets from Africa. While the Church would like to dismiss
them as insignificant, Travancore heretics, like many others, were blending
Christianity with non-Christian philosophy. There was an unwillingness to accord
the status of heretic to Venkotta Yohannan beyond the point that his ideas are just
self-willed choice and it was not deemed fit to extend the privilege of being
heretic to either of the Travancore prophets.
Missionaries in charge of the Tiruvalla mission made all possible efforts to
understand the teachings of Yohannan, sometimes by trekking through intractable
stretches of jungle.20 In one such instance in 1916, missionaries sent three men to
the jungle where Yohannans clandestine convention took place. They crept up
10
closely to listen and observe. On the third evening their presence was detected and
the preacher brought his discourse to a premature close.21 The three therefore
revealed themselves and had an interview with him. They had observed that
Yohannan generally gave his discourses on religious themes and when he suspected
outsiders listening, he would muddle the themes by discussing matters that would
appear obscure to those not from the lower castes. He would refer to the historical
experience of Dalit slavery in Kerala. In the latter phase of the Sabha, particularly
after his death, some of his followers derived further notions of the slave
experiences of Dalits in Travancore based on themes introduced by Yohannan.
During the early phase of the Sabha its worldview was a pastiche of Christian
themes and a strong component of the historical experience of slavery and
oppression. Writing in The Harvester Field, the Travancore missionary W.S. Hunt
(1919) tried to give a contemporary assessment to the mass movement of
Yohannan. He had observed fundamental changes among Dalits that encompassed
diverse spaces, such as manner of worship, demeanor of outcaste converts, and a
passing of the old simplicities. For a good many years, indeed, complaints of their
uppishness have been heard and certainly the community has been displaying the
awkwardness of adolescence (Hunt, 1919).
There is a striking parallel to this missionary perception in the approach of
the Travancore government to Dalit problems. Regarding the desire for social
development, the Travancore Government also felt that the Dalits were extremely
eager to move upwards and that their eagerness would endanger the status quo. In
reply to the address presented to him by the Pulayas of central Travancore in 1914
requesting him to grant them puduval (fallow cultivable lands) registered to them,
the Diwan Bahadur M. Krishnan Nair replied:22
Every measure intended to ameliorate your social condition has to be thoughtfully
conceived and delicately applied. Government are convinced that the healthy wellbeing of the state depends a good deal upon your social and economic
enfranchisement and they will only continue to push forward the history of your
community that has already been written. But I may be permitted to remind you
that it is not in the interest either of the state or of yourselves that in the hurry to go
forward, the pace of progress should be violently forced ahead and your interests
brought into collision with those of the other communities whose active good-will and
sympathy are so essential for your progress. Your community should clearly bear this in
mind and also remember that many a stronghold of prejudice and conservatism can be
stormed only by time.
The paternalistic attitudes of the missionaries made them read meanings into the
modernist desire for social transformation as awkwardness of adolescence. It
amounts to reading into the social selves of Dalits phases of human biographical
stages, particularly that of adolescence, an age of uncertainty before emotional
maturity.
Yohannan is even reported to have said that in the Old Testament, you find
God the Father at work in the world, in the Gospels God the Son and in the
Acts, God the Holy Ghost. But in Travancore you see no God working, yet you
are sure He would not leave His children without some revelation. An argument
for the rejection of the book becomes that it was written to Romans, Corinthians
11
and others, but contained no messages addressed to the Parayas of Travancore.

Hence, [a] man must be commissioned to deliver that message (Hunt, 1919). As
God appointed Moses, so has he appointed Yohannan, a Paraya, to deliver the
Travancore outcastes from the bondage of the Christian Church. Yohannan sought
to be placed within the ideological world of the Church, but at the same time
transcended it when he derived his own critiques, including an alleged preference
of God for younger sons that necessarily gave agency to his Dalit followers (Hunt,
1919).
The image of a deliverer like Moses and the long struggle of the Jews under
captivity was a potent imagery, repeated endlessly in missionary observations on
the position of Travancore slave castes. Similar readings appear even today in the
discourses of the Sabha.23 Similarly the favour that younger sons may receive is a
potential metaphor that reworks the notion of preference that the despised would
receive in the Kingdom of God which, translated locally, refers to the position of
the socially inferior lower caste Christians in Travancore society. Yohannan
attached immense importance to certain passages, usually interpreting them with a
mixture of extreme literalness and fancifulness. The other heresiarchs tended to
do this, too, and the tendency spread among the outcaste Christians. The term
generations was to assume extraordinary significance in the later discourses of the
Sabha that introduced notions like the present generation to refer to the people
contemporary to Yohannan. Similarly, during his lifetime the ambiguous notion of
descendants was introduced. After his death it was interpreted to mean his own
sons who would lay claim to reign. Hunt (1919) felt that some of his teachings
and acts were frankly antinomian.24
The Ideological World as Reflected in Songs

Having discussed the ideological aspects of the movement, we can now explore
more intimate aspects of religious life in the prayer songs of the Sabha of that
period (Poyikayil, 1940). These prayer songs open up a significant terrain for
analysis by social scientists and elucidate the history of the sect. These songs were
composed in chaste Malayalam, quite different from the everyday language of
Dalit communities. The use of modern language by subordinate groups in the
context of colonial modernity and missionary Christianity has been identified as
an instance of linguistic modernity by social scientists in similar contexts
(Robbins, 2001) but is different from the process referred to as creolization in
other contexts.
Language plays a crucial role in constructions of the images of slavery and
builds primarily on social memory. In the example of the Sabha, the songs of the
oral tradition as well as those that were printed and circulated are in modern
literary Malayalam retaining fine lyrical qualities. This language would be quite
different from the daily language used among Dalits during the first half of the
20th century when many of those songs were composed. This shows the instance
of linguistic modernity. Social historians have argued that it is necessary to treat
[l]anguage as an object, a resource, for historical enquiry in its own right, rather
than as just a window on to the past (Porter, 1991: 2). Similarly, it has been
12
observed that the deployment of holy tongues, especially perhaps transcendental

and numinal, offered small, weak and marginal religious groups the only mode of
authority they could realistically seek to command: the Highest (Porter, 1991: 3).
The composition made use of modern Malayalam imaginatively, to be recounted
as ritual songs, even though it was not a holy tongue. This was definitely
important when considered in the context of collective cultural identity and
history (Porter, 1991: 10). As noted in other situations in struggles for identity,
emancipation and mastery, language ceased to be merely a medium of clear
communication and became key to the collective soul. The use of modern
Malayalam by the Sabha assumes significance here in that language becomes a
semiotic cultural field in which negotiations take place.
To analyse the intricacies of worldview, we consider here the songs in
circulation among the followers of the Sabha from its early phase, though the
version that is cited here was only published in 1940. Most of these songs
(Poyikayil, 1940) focus on the Christian theme of salvation. In this period the
Sabha existed in a liminal space without as yet defining itself against the agenda of
the nation state and being either Hindu or Christian. At the same time, some of
the practices of the Sabha made missionaries think that they were not Christians
and contradicted the Bible. Missionaries could not understand the doubleness
characteristic of the movement.
These early songs deal with Christian themes that were completely erased in
the later history of the Sabha.25 The foundational category here is Jesus Christ and
the faith reposed in him as the saviour. The ideas are expressed in a variety of
tropes deployed to create a world of its own; giving control over language and
imagination. Their significance lies in that these people were slowly becoming
literate and able to use the modern language more competently. The text begins
with a song recounting the creation of the earth, followed by the story of Adam
and Eve drawing on the book of Genesis. The song further develops their life and
the eventual fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden
forever, introducing the concepts of sin, redemption and eternal salvation
(Poyikayil, 1940: 1). Because of its familiarity, this story has lost its esoteric
character. But what should have been the impact of such a story on the lower
caste Christians who came under missionary instruction? For the first time the
notions of sin and salvation percolated into their minds through such stories, so
that such notions became part of their life world and began to provide them a
measure to arrange their everyday life and social validation.26 This has a direct
bearing on the validation of the social selves of the people, evident in one of the
songs that they used to sing (Poyikayil, 1940: 3):
Oh! Lord in the High! You are Great!
Up on this earth I am small
You can do any thing on your own
I can not do any thing on my own.
Though the rest of the song is on creation, every stanza recalls the position of
men and women vis-a-vis the power of God. Significant for us is the category
13
with which the image of man is constructed in these lines. While it can be
generalized as the condition of man/woman as a whole, in the context of their
agency it can be suggested that it refracted the condition of the people who sang
such songs. While the might of God is narrated, the position of man is juxtaposed
as equivalent to the insignificance of Adams son. God is depicted in the song as
owner of the whole universe, the Holy Being without sins, eternal, the strongest,
whereas mans corresponding position is that of a slave, sinner, finite and finally
equivalent to earthly dust. There is no doubt that these songs were composed
using already circulating metaphors and metonyms prevailing in the songs current
among other Christian congregations and evidently provided some categories of
thought to the people, the fullest local extent of which became evident in course
of time.
One recurrent theme of the songs is the sufferings of Jesus Christ who died
for the sins of all human beings and the salvation offered by the risen Christ
(Poyikayil, 1940: 45). The songs celebrate the fact that even if people are
suffering in this world, there is space for them in heaven where they will enjoy
eternal happiness. The introduction of categories such as suffering and salvation
assumed deeper meaning in the vocabulary of the Sabha as well as in the project
of Yohannan. When describing the birth of Jesus Christ, the songs depict it as the
coming of the Lord in the garb of the wretched leaving behind the legion of
trumpet blowing angels. The garb of the wretched went on to assume
importance as an icon that evoked memories of slavery once the discourse of
slavery was introduced in the later phase of the Sabha, and then the phrase
transformed as the garb of the slave. The image of suffering human beings is
superimposed on Christ who suffered torture and died on the cross. Certain other
songs are concerned more with the eternal joy that accrues out of divine love as a
blessing of the Holy Spirit. Such songs characterize the eternal blessings that God
gives to the poor and lowly, widows and orphans, and they came to occupy a
central position in the Sabha discourses. The axiomatic representation of the
orphaned slave children and their sufferings as their parents were sold to different
landlords is foundational to the faith of the Sabha today, elevating the discourse of
sufferings to a higher plane. This concept has a surplus meaning when read in the
context of the social sufferings of Kerala Dalits. It is this particular aspect of
suffering that is deployed in the songs sung in the exclusive Dalit congregations
(Poyikayil, 1940: 68).
Some songs in the volume focus on salvation, offered by the son of salvation
who has opened the door of salvation for everyone and admits those who are
saved into it (Poyikayil, 1940: 11). Those who are saved experience the ecstasy of
joy and sing hallelujah. He brings together people from the four corners of the
world and in the abode of Trinity they will interdine. Death is not there anymore.
No more is sorrow and wailing and he would wipe out tears with his merciful
hands (Poyikayil, 1940: 12). The intertextuality of the lyrics quoted here indicates
that the theme is familiar; the reprieve that salvation offers to the despised Dalits
of Travancore becomes the key issue. They realize that happiness is denied to them
in the prevailing structure of the society and are hopeful of the interdining that
awaits them in heaven. Its political significance becomes clear when one recalls
14
that interdining was also a matter of much concern in the programme of

nationalists in the Gandhian phase. To the despised Dalits, songs woven around
the theme of salvation celebrate it as a grace of God. Only those who are saved
could know the true meaning of salvation. All those who are saved are made
members of the Sabha and they build it together with the Holy Spirit. The full
meaning of salvation is revealed only in the end and is preserved without being
tainted. The song reaffirms the faith in salvation and the patient waiting for it.
The final pronouncement is that they should not forget God.
Closely following the notion of salvation is the concept of cleanliness,27 one of
the central tropes deployed in the missionary discourse and subjected to social
scientific analysis in other contexts. In Kerala its significance lies in that cleanliness
takes on the unclean mind and body of the untouchable Dalits. The concept of
cleanliness is fundamental to the project of salvation. The Christian thought on
salvation is interwoven with the presumption of cleanliness. God is the embodiment of justice and purity; He is the one who purifies humans. Living in the
communion of the saints and being clean, one enters the communion of the
sacred saints. This is ultimately the great message of salvation that words fail to
explain. This song shows complete refuge in the divine project of salvation. There
is an inadvertent allusion to the cleanliness of mind and body in the song
(Poyikayil, 1940: 1315). The significance of these lines become clear when we
consider that in the course of the movement a lot of practices were devised to
keep the mind and body of the people clean.
Another song empathically proclaims that believers are saved when God
hears their tragic final cry. In the next stanza the question is raised what one
should pay as a price for the salvation that is offered, and if not a price, what
else one should offer? Then the realization dawns on the singer that s/he is saved
without being asked for payment. The song continues by proclaiming to the
Lord that they could never forget His love for them. The Lord took them in His
hands when everyone forsook them. And this love of God was unexpected
(Poyikayil, 1940: 14, 16). There is an imbrication of the spiritual quest and the
material everyday reality of the Dalits in Travancore in this song. This redeeming
love takes into account the despised as valuable human beings. For people who
realize the love of the Lord it has redeemed them from sin, eternal damnation
and death and gave them heaven. When one beholds the holy face of God and
of Jesus, ones foot does not sink to the ground and the burden of suffering is
reduced. The thought of the power of the Holy Spirit fills their heart with
tranquility (Poyikayil, 1940: 1718). Thinking of the Kingdom of God makes
them forget their life in this world. In these songs the theme of salvation
through Jesus Christ is endlessly repeated. The expectation is that whatever be
the condition on this earth, they would be resurrected like Christ, leaving this
earthly body to enter the eternal kingdom.
In another song there is explicit mention of the waning caste distinctions that
are leading to the merger of various castes, with reference to a purified caste from
which the clan of priests emerges. There is another song that validates this as a
practical necessity. This song, titled as Eternal Priesthood, begins by stating that
Jesus is the high priest and hence we all belong to the clan of priests. It further says
15
that with purity anybody could be in the lineage of priesthood (Poyikayil, 1940: 31).
In a different context, Hill (1986: 126) argued that the doctrine of priesthood for
all believers, of the sovereignty of informed consciences, became subversive when
taken over by groups normally excluded from political life. In the case of the
Sabha, this subversive element was present as soon as there was a body of Dalit
religious men and women engaged in propagating the truth of the founder,
Yohannan. In the later phase of the Sabha they were instrumental in transforming
it into a dialogic interpretive community. In such a context Dalits, otherwise
excluded from political life, began to construct alternative structures of power.
The following stanzas develop the contrast between the priesthood of the Old
and New Testament. It recalls the processes by which Christ liberated priesthood
from rituals of the Old Testament and proclaimed it as open to everyone who has
a pure saintly heart. This notion refers to the priesthood that must have been
developing from among the Dalits themselves as they remained a separate
congregation, despised as unclean. The validation of priesthood is sought in the
lineage and practices of Christ himself. The new priesthood can be authentic as
Christ had united them, and henceforth they do not require myrrh and
frankincense as their prayers bear fragrance and illuminate the world, making
lamps and olive oil unnecessary. In the later phase of the Sabha the legitimacy of
this new priesthood is sought in the Adi-Dravida past, as discussed further below.
In the context of affirming the faith, another stanza speaks of the decline of
caste differences and distinctions of groups, living united with great happiness in
one God. In a song titled Praise to Jesus the wretchedness of the lower caste self
is read in the image of Son of God, born in a stable in the garb of the wretched.
Describing the second coming of Christ, another song alludes to the Kingdom
with no caste distinction and group rivalry. They expect a place where there is no
sorrow and loud cry (Poyikayil, 1940: 39). The notion of cleanliness is carried
forward to the extent of equating it with the cleanliness of the soul that finds final
refuge in the communion of saints. The gender dimension is surprisingly worked
out in a song titled A Song of Christian Sisters, where the Christian sister of low
caste origin experiences spaces of equality in domains least thought about
(Poyikayil, 1940: 42):
Lucky, Lucky, I am lucky,
I am lucky
It is luck that heavenly King Jesus
Was born on this earth
Sin crept in through Eve
So salvation came through women
In this worldly reign the feminine figure
But in heaven equal to angels
The secrets of heaven without distinction
Luckily imprinted on my heart
16

It is luck to sing in ecstasy
In heaven in front of the saviour
To have kept thus far alive
Upon this earth, is my luck.
It was blissful for her to have experienced the heavenly blessings as she rejoices in
the Lord. While she continues to be a woman living the ordinary life of the lower
caste social world, she is hopeful of achieving the status of angel once she reaches
heaven. She was equally endowed with the heavenly secrets that would have given
her insights into the ways of the Lord. God willed this without any consideration
of gender distinctions. It may be considered here that this new religious
subjectivity provided some kind of agency to Dalit women in Kerala.
The significant theme of last judgment and the second coming of Christ
assume canonical status in the later history of the Sabha, when this notion is
adapted to the image of Yohannan as Sree Kumara Gurudevan, as constructed by
the Sabha. He comes to offer salvation to the souls of the descendants of slaves
who escaped from the thralldom of slavery and suffering. That is a time when all
the powers of the worlds shall be shaken. But what remains without being shaken
will be the plan kettidam (properly planned building) that is built according to
the plan of Yohannan (Joseph, 1994: 64). Its importance lies in that Yohannan
himself was claiming a certain kind of revelation for his own people, combining
elements of prophetic revelation with pragmatic social intervention. While this
contradicted some of the Bible teachings, it squarely reworked the Biblical notions
to stake his claim over the minds of his people. In all these songs we hear the
voice of the saviour who calls upon his people. Yohannan was deploying prophetic
power to transform the peoples self-perception and the way they perceived him
(Poyikayil, 1940: 545):
The God who has great knowledge
Gave great knowledge and consciousness
Removed ignorance completely
And thus came knowledge in me
The Holy Spirit resides in me
This is the abode of the saviour
In this earth we are bought and sold like animals
The owner had willed
Removed slavery entirely for us
Let us never forget the love of the owner
We were accused as wretched
On the earth by the elite
The God from the heavens willed
To nurture and remove the wretchedness.
17
It is extremely important to see why and how the above song is different from the
genre of songs discussed so far. Here we find the theme of slavery introduced as
part of the Dalit experience in Kerala, textualized along with other themes. The
distinction is sharply brought out when the song laments that they were bought
and sold like cattle until the owner willed to remove slavery out of his love for
them (Poyikayil, 1940: 545). While many of the sources cited in previous
sections of the article provide clues that the notion of slavery as the lived
experience of Kerala Dalits was present, such themes were not clearly articulated
in the early songs. But the oral tradition of the Sabha, as well as testimonies given
by a number of informants, refers to the prevalence of the theme of slavery in the
discourses of Yohannan (Vijayakumar interview, 2001). The central question here
is the foundational character that the discourse of slavery achieves in the later
phase of the Sabha, reinscribing itself onto the foundational categories of the
discourses and songs that dominated till the 1950s. It is at this point in time that
the social memory of slavery was actively reconstituted to serve a different
purpose. This phase stands out uniquely as the phase of narrativizing the history
of slave suffering.
Narrativizing the History of Slave Suffering

This part of the article analyses in more detail the processes and discourses by
which slavery was theorized by the followers of the Sabha. Insights drawn from
contemporary social theory that explores similar contexts provide us a vantage
point in understanding the constructions of the Sabha. Gilroy (1993) theorizes
slavery and slave sufferings in the contexts of ethnicity and resistance movements.
He situates slavery in relation to modernity and foregrounds it as a problem that
modern social theory has to deal with, suggesting a radical recasting of the
modernity debate and the project of cultural studies to engage with the question
of slavery. Gilroy argues that Black slavery and resistance to it produced distinctive
countercultures to modernity that could evolve a critique also of capitalist social
relations. Black musical culture is identified as one of the prominent artefacts that
was libertarian and at the same time offering a great deal of courage required to
go on living in the present (Gilroy, 1993: 36). The philosophical inner dynamic
of the counterculture is identified and the connection between its normative
character and its utopian aspirations of a politics of fulfilment which is
simultaneously cultural, political and economic is visualized. It puts forward a
notion that a future society will be able to realize the social political promise that
present society has left unfinished (Gilroy, 1993: 37). Reflecting on the
foundational semantic position of the Bible, this is a discursive mode of
communication. Though by no means literal, it can be grasped through what is
said, shouted, screamed or sung (Gilroy, 1993: 37).
Equally significant is the notion of a politics of transfiguration. This refers to
the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations and modes of
association within racial communities of interpretation and resistance and between
a particular group and its erstwhile oppressors. This politics, according to Gilroy,
exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced and acted, as well as sung
18
and sung about; it would express the conspicuous power of the slave sublime. The
failures or fulfilment of promises are located in the bourgeois civil society that has
to live up to its promises (Gilroy, 1993: 37). This particular interpretation is
significant for understanding the shouts, screams and songs that have been uttered
and sung by followers of the Sabha in Travancore. Evidence of the politics of
transfiguration is expressed in willfully damaged signs that transcend modernity
and construct both an imaginary anti-modern past and the postmodern yet-tocome. Gilroy (1993) considers this as a counterculture and not just a counterdiscourse that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual and moral
genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere.
It would be difficult to argue that such politics of fulfilment and politics of
transfiguration are fully discernible in Kerala. My contention is that we certainly
come across new desires, social relations and modes of association of Dalit
political and social articulation in Travancore, occurring in the religious and social
spheres and bearing the markings of fulfilment and transfiguration. According to
Gilroy the politics of fulfilment plays occidental rationality at its own game,
necessitating a hermeneutic orientation that can assimilate the semiotic, verbal and
textual. The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling
to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different
hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative
(Gilroy, 1993: 38). It is in this context that, according to Gilroy, the memory of
slavery is actively preserved as a living intellectual resource in an expressive
political culture by Blacks, helping them to search for answers to problems they
face in western modernity. It is at this level that Gilroys theorization is helpful in
unpacking the agenda of social transformation in Kerala in relation to the history
of the Sabha. Slavery itself and its memory helped to enter the domain of
enquiries on the foundational aspects of modern social thought and to critically
engage with it (Gilroy, 1993: 39). Even though not comparable to the refined
intellectual production of Black critical thinking, the Sabha experienced a critical
engagement with slavery, while mainstream social sciences and literature downplay
such themes in Kerala.
Gilroy also argues that Black critical thinking is above all other critical
theories on society, particularly Marxism, because of the primacy given to lived
crisis, even when the choice is between lived crisis and systemic crisis. It is due to
the fact that the process of self-creation is accomplished not exclusively through
labour. For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery and
subordination. This theoretical position is appropriate in understanding the social
situatedness of the lower caste slave labourers of Kerala in the 19th century and
their descendants in the first half of the 20th century. As far as lived crisis is
concerned, the memory of slavery was later available to the erstwhile slaves only to
a limited extent. There was initially no recalling of the slave memory to make it a
resource for resistance. This does not mean that the collective memory of slavery
was not present even during the early decades of the 20th century. We find the
rendering of the memory of slavery in the discourses of the Sabha, rendered on
countless occasions, so that it enters the minds of the descendants of slaves and
creates somatic effects.
19
Similarly, the nature of work in relation to lower caste slaves also underwent
transformation. Given the civilizational dislike shown by dominant castes towards
manual labour, when the modern proletariat emerged, it was structured on the
basis of caste and related notions of work and leisure. The narrativization of
oppression is accomplished through the deployment of chronotopes used in the
construction of the past.28 The notion of slavery as chronotope emerges in the
songs and discourses of the Sabha as singular and decisive; through it we can read
significant moments in the Dalit history of Kerala. It appears that the notion of
slavery and sufferings emanating from it constitutes a unit of analysis for studying
texts according to the rational nature of the temporal and spatial categories
represented (Bakhtin, 1981: 425). The notion of chronotope is used here as a
means of studying the relation between any text and its times, and thus a
fundamental tool for a broader social and historical analysis (Bakhtin, 1981: 425).
The texts analysed below clearly identify slavery as the central organizing
theme. This particular feature reaches the realm of performative ritual and
religious discourses in the practices of the Sabha. The rituals were instrumental in
defining the social world of the religious community by providing organizational
myths. Following Barthes (1989), we consider myth as a semiotic system that
generates its own language.29 This particular insight helps in decoding the
semiotic language that the ritual discourses and practices introduced.
In the Indian context, Aloysius (1998) examined the significance of religious
discourses among Dalits in the colonial period; focusing on the emancipatory
potentials of lower caste religious ideology. The process of narrativizing history is
accomplished by invoking memories of oppression in a dramatic manner that
touches upon the inner space of people. To the oppressed, the oppression itself
becomes central to the cognitive-volitional life of the excluded and nonprivileged
sections of the society (Aloysius, 1998: 7). The consciousness of oppression first
of all leads to an epistemological shift. All things social appear to be oppressed
under a new light; they themselves become a homogenous collectivity, unjustly
subordinated and subjugated; the various social phenomena hitherto accepted as
neutral, given or having thing-like quality, now appear as emanations of
exploitative social relations. Society itself is viewed as constitutive of two groups,
the oppressed and the oppressor, locked in conflicts (Aloysius, 1998: 7).
Consciousness of oppression develops a different social praxis that enables a
critique of historical and contemporary experiences. This finds further articulation
in the formation of the religion of the oppressed, contingent upon the overall life
situation, as a new interpretation, or selective appropriation or modification, or
even total rejection of old beliefs (Aloysius, 1998: 7). The notion of oppression is
stretched further to include problems that fall beyond the pale of social classes and
economic sphere, extended imaginatively to include conflicts arising out of
language, territory, ethnicity, race and religion, so that economic oppression
sometimes manifests itself in certain cultural forms (Aloysius, 1998: 7).
We can build here on such insights in analysing the notion of oppression and
sufferings that certain forms of Dalit religiosity tried to develop in colonial and
post-colonial Kerala.30 Oppression in a larger context includes oppressions in the
non-economic sphere, particularly in the realm of cultural practices. This does not
20
mean that cultural practices are uncontaminated by the economy. The mutuality
of the economic and the cultural are taken care of by arguments on oppression
that foray into the cultural field. Growing consciousness of oppression leads to
realization of the existence of cultural, religious and other cleavages in society. It
has been observed that such cleavages surge forth in society particularly in times
of substantial socio-economic change. In the present analysis, this process is
observed to be necessarily non-linear, sporadic and even haphazard, leading to the
non-uniform and uneven nature of the consciousness of oppression at a given
historical time (Kleinman et al., 1997: 9).
Memories of oppression necessarily build on the notion of the suffering body
of the untouchable, contrary to pre-colonial notions of the untouchable body as
the site of evil and pollution. By the time such discourses became prominent, the
idea of the suffering body had gained acceptance. It is evident in the writings of
the missionaries that in the process of salvation they required a sanitized body of
the untouchable or that the process of salvation itself sanitizes the untouchable
body. This appears from the elaborate treatment of the living conditions of lower
caste untouchables that were undergoing transformation.31 Another important
source of theorizing the notion of the suffering body and oppression is found in
oral tradition, talking of observable social contradictions in an intimate manner.32
Ong (1988: 74) observed that in most religions the spoken word functions
integrally in ceremonial and devotional life. This holds true for the practice of the
Sabha, too, as over decades it evolved emotionally charged discourses of slavery
and similar themes. In some of the songs sung in Travancore we find the elaborate
rendering of the sufferings and pains of the untouchable agricultural labourers
(John, 1998: 334):
Yoked with buffaloes and bulls
We plough the fields
Plough the fields
Father is sold . . . thinthara!
We all wept . . . thinthara!
Mother is sold. . . . thinthara!
We wept disconsolately . . . thinthara!
The elder one is caught . . . thinthara!
Plantain was dug out
He was thrown in the pit
Covered with dried leaves and set on fire . . . thinthara!
The children who saw these cruelties ran into the forest. They asked the goddesses
of the forests about their parents, but no answer was forthcoming. When the
young suckling child cried out for milk, the elder children sang (John, 1998:
334):
We have nobody
To feed breast milk
21
To give shelter in a corner

To give a spoonful of gruel
We have nobody . . . thinthara!
We have nobody . . . thinthara!
Here we find the interplay of two distinct streams of theorizing oppression. The
first draws upon the missionary worldview of equality, while the latter is precolonial and draws upon common sense or the traditional conception of the
world held by the oppressed masses (Gramsci, 1971). Missionaries noted in detail
the living conditions of the lower caste masses that perpetuated their sufferings,
highlighting the lack of adequate food, dress, shelter and their emaciated body
vulnerable to diseases, making their everyday living and survival a great problem.33
The missionaries tried to cultivate a strong sense of hygiene among the lower
castes. Their initiatives in health care, referred to as medical mission show the
importance attached to modern medical practices. The narrativization of oppressions by Dalits goes further back in time. At a later stage the representatives of
Dalits in the Sree Mulam Praja Sabha (Travancore Popular Assembly), placing
before the government the problems of their people, sometimes provided
graphic representations of everyday sufferings of their communities.34 These span
from the particular role of the untouchable labourer in the processes of
production to the use of public space, and the consumption of food items that are
considered unclean.
The present study seeks to understand how social experiences were articulated
in different contexts. The most emotionally recalled experience happens to be
oppressions inflicted on the person of the slaves and their sufferings due to the
harsh practices of slavery. The preachers of the Sabha create a real life effect of
such past oppressions through the imaginative use of particular tropes in their
representations of slavery. Imaginative and performative ritual renderings of slavery
during occasions such as Rakshanirnayam,35 the death anniversary and the annual
feast of the founder emphatically proclaim the significance of the concept of
slavery in the worldview of the Sabha. Here the centrality of the body and soul of
the untouchable slave becomes explicit and we encounter gendered untouchable
bodies undergoing severe pain. The following narrative presents extreme forms of
physical torture that the female body had to undergo in the traditional castecentric agrarian society.36
Slave women are forced to work for many hours without any respite even
immediately after childbirth. Within a day or two of giving birth to a child, the
landlord comes to the hut of the untouchable labourer and asks the woman to go
to the field for transplanting of paddy or weeding; a work that involves severe
physical strain. The woman labourer will have to keep herself bent for long hours
in knee-deep mud and water without proper rest. She bleeds, as she is not allowed
to take rest after delivering the child. A days hard labour exhausts her and she
hears at a distance the loud cry of her newborn child that gradually becomes a
faint sobbing. She looks at the touting breasts suffering pain from the pressure of
milk not being fed to her child. The strain on the body and mind and the
traumatic experience become unbearable. Picking up a bunch of paddy for
22
transplanting, she feeds her breast milk to the tender mossy roots of paddy. In the
evening when she returns to the child kept in a cradle hanging from the branch of
a nearby tree, what was left of her beloved child were ant-eaten mortal remains.
When she returns home, the elder children are anxiously waiting to see their
younger sibling and ask for the child to be carried and fondled. The mother
breaks down and gives the dead body of the infant to the siblings. This leads to
complete emotional breakdown of those who recount the story as well as those
who partake in the ritual rendering and hearing it.37
Such ritual re-memory thus invoked creates a total identification with those
who were oppressed in the past. It is significant to see what kind of transformation the ritual community passes through during such renderings. As soon as they
hear the narrative of suffering and oppression, people break into tears and intense
grief overtakes the ritual community. Equally important is the recollection of cruel
punishments meted out to slaves. There are occasions when erred lower caste
slaves were taken out to the wilderness and were implanted neck deep in pits
covered with soil, only the head propping up. The slave cries aloud to his master
to show him mercy. His wife and children plead with the master to set their father
and husband free. But the landlord is determined to take revenge upon the erring
slave and a cruel death awaits him. After implanting him, coconut oil was poured
over his head, inviting a colony of black ants that will eventually eat up the slave.
Other forms of punishment meted out involved being taken in country boats to
the deeper recess of rivers or backwaters and being drowned by hanging stones
around their necks, so that they never came up. Here again the wife and children
follow to witness the murderous orgy in vain; unable to take revenge upon the
landlords and their men.38
Another occasion of suffering and oppression is related to harsh work in the
fields, recalled in a touching manner so as to create intense emotional unsettlement, sometimes by enacting scenes of harsh labour through verbal constructions,
if not actual performance. There are songs depicting the harsh labour of lower
caste slave men being forced to plough fields yoked along with oxen. Narrating
the physical strain of the person thus forced to the yoke creates a mood of grief.
He is unable to draw the plough keeping apace with the bullock in the splashing
muddy field and he falls down and then hears the whiplashes that leave mortal
pains on his body. This pain is well recognized in the collective memory; it also
finds mention in folksongs and eventually in the songs of the Sabha.39
Collective memory also recalls the harsh labour involved in reclamation of the
backwaters; akin to an agrarian revolution in colonial Travancore.40 This reclamation required tremendous labour power and large numbers of labourers. In the
absence of modern hydraulic management, untouchable labour became indispensable for various works related to water management, even before the
reclamation of the backwaters. With reclamation the already entrenched dependence on untouchable labour power became more engrained and labour was made
available through both coercion and consent. The soil for reclamation work was
mined from the depths of the backwaters and transported to the work sites on
country boats. Pulaya and Paraya labourers did much of this work. This particular
work and its harshness find elaborate treatment in the discourses of the Sabha.
23
Songs depict the everyday aspects of continuous labour such as diving into the
bed of the backwaters for blocks of mud.41
Sometimes flood barriers or embankments are destroyed during the monsoon
and require the round-the-clock work of several people laying fresh materials to
rebuild them continuously and prevent them getting washed away by the swift
currents of the monsoon waters swirling into the backwaters. This particular work
sometimes lasts for days and occasionally the movement of water will be so strong
that no effort will succeed in repairing a breach. Such instances have been
considered in popular belief as handiwork of evil sprits that will not be satisfied
unless they are properly propitiated.
During one such occasion of breach of embankments a Pulaya/Paraya labourer
came to the household of a relative who worked for an upper caste landlord. He
was supposed to join for work the next day. It was then that a breach of the
embankment took place. The entire workforce was alerted, but even continuous
work for hours could not salvage the fields from the floods. The landlord
approached the local soothsayer who diagnosed the problem to be the wrath of
spirits who are to be propitiated. Fully aware of the plans of the landlord, the host
labourer asked his guest to join the work. The guest was given the most arduous
job of filling the breached banks with mud blocks by diving down into the space
for the embankment. As soon as this labourer dived into the water, there came
down upon him loads of mud blocks and other mixtures that fortified the
embankment along with the live body of this untouchable worker. The days work
was over and the labourers returned home. The next day they saw the floating
body of the elder of the workers, who had killed himself due to grief and feelings
of guilt.42
Apart from the structural features of oppression, certain aspects of everyday
life are depicted in the songs sung during important ritual occasions of the Sabha.
One such song graphically describes the details of everyday work of untouchable
labourers who were the real force behind the clearing of forests without caring for
heavy rain, biting cold and scorching heat; it was their labour that turned forests
into agricultural lands. The song repeatedly intimates that no one else would have
done that work. Their condition is narrated as a people clad in worn-out clothes
working with a sickle hanging around the waist and the puttile (a container to
store grain made of the folds of areca leaves) and pala (areca leaf ) to eat from.
They are engaged in collecting grass, green manure, fodder, firewood and twigs
and carry bundles of them on their heads and then go from house to house to
supply it for practically nothing. Describing the kind of food they eat, the song
reminds the hearers of the sometimes fermenting gruel of the previous night,
mixed with curry made of leaves that is neither tasty nor nutritious. Further they
eat tender leaves of chembu (colacasia), thakara, a leafy vegetable that grows in the
wild, manthal or madanthal, wild roots eaten by dalits, nooron, chakon, nathu
(varieties of birds), crab and fishes like kari or koori and champu, the refuses of
meat. They alone are the people on earth who use it much against their will
(Poyikayil, 1996: 73). Reflecting on themselves, the songs recall the degrading
names by which they were known. The most common names were Azhakan,
24
Poovan, Malan, Mailan, Chathan, Chadayan, Lechi, Maani, Thaali, Kuliri, Neeli,
and Poliya.43
It is difficult to make a distinction between the narratives of oppression and
narratives of suffering, as both feed on each other. In the experiences of Dalits,
sufferings and direct oppression have a long history. The specific idea of the
suffering body becomes prominent only when the idea of human body in the
modern sense of the term emerges and we can speak of sufferings as a major
experience. In 20th-century narratives we come across definite recollections of
sufferings as a result of structural constraints of society as well as problems that
affect everyday life. It is theoretically significant to understand how social
memories of slave sufferings were available for the lower castes in the early 20th
century when these discourses evolved. We should not lose sight of the fact that
even after the formal abolition of slavery in Travancore in 1855, the slave
experience remained alive in peoples minds. Slavery was still very much part of
the social memory of lower caste people when the movement of Yohannan began
in 190910. For instance, the Travancore and Cochin Diocesan Record for the
month of May 1905, the official journal of the Anglican Diocese, carried
testimonies given by people who were slaves, in the report of the Jubilee
Celebration at Chelakkompu, held on December 13, 1904:44
The first to speak was the oldest man in the Mettathumavoo congregation who
had himself experienced the oppression. He said he was a slave of a rich landlord.
He had to work from early morning to very late in the evening under strict
supervision and could not be absent a single day without being punished. He had
seen men yoked with a bullock or buffalo to draw the plough and afterwards
chained so that they might not escape.
Then an old man from Ayroor recounted his experiences.

Every morning people would be led out to work and would not be allowed to
bury their dead, even their father or mother, till the days work was over. They
were sold, the father to one man, the mother to another and the children to
several separate persons and would not be allowed to see one another afterwards
and under such cruel treatments some have entered the forests preferring to be
eaten up by wild beasts than to lead such miserable lives.
The fourth speaker on the occasion was a teacher who had collected vital information
on the ill-treatment of people and their wretched condition 50 years ago:
The masters had power of life and death over their slaves. He had heard of one
mans head being cut off for stealing a yam, another burnt alive for running away
and a third being drowned for some trifling cause. They could not walk along the
roads but only through jungles. They worshipped Gods made with wood, stone or
metal placed in groves, near which no women or child could approach. They were
not allowed to wear clothes but only leaves and barks of trees, much less carry an
umbrella or put on anything on their heads.
The sufferings were part of the overall structure of stratification in the pre-colonial
period and continued in different forms well into postcolonial times when new
narratives created new objects of theorization in the form of narratives of
sufferings. The ultimate cause for the sufferings of Dalits, according to narratives
25
of the Sabha, has been their fall from the higher position that they once possessed.
The fall was instrumental in their loss of all past achievements. In the narratives of
the Sabha this has a gender dimension, as the fall of their mothers to the
machinations of the Aryans eventually led to their being enslaved by the
marauding Aryans or dominant castes, leading to the beginning of the Dalits
journey into the abysmal world of sufferings. Looking at the family as a unit, the
Sabha works out the notion of sufferings. The slave trade that separated children
and parents has been the root cause of the sufferings that destabilized family life
and brought anomie and alienation to people (Poyikayil, 1996: 29):
Those who bought our parents
Chained and dragged them away
Orphaned children roamed
In wilderness without anyone to help.
They didnt see anyone.
Infants died starving for milk
Time the eternal witness alone was pained.
These lines are of fundamental significance as they refer to the central precept of
the Sabha and provide its essential theoretical moorings. It forms an essential part
of the notion of history that the Sabha wants the contemporary generation to
recollect as the authentic experience of Dalits. The sufferings as slaves were to last
for millennia together, which is something that cannot be forgotten. The slave
transaction was comparable to the transaction of cows and oxen, proclaiming the
authority of masters to sell off slaves (Poyikayil, 1996: 29):
If sold it is salable again
If to be killed could be transferred for it again
Sold as absolute property
How could we forget it?
Paired with oxen and buffaloes
Forced to plough the fields
Oh! God how do we forget the intense grief?
These experiences should be considered as figuring out the social being of the
untouchable labourers. In the discourses of the Sabha, they assume canonical
status as several other conceptions of slavery derive out of it, adding to the
centrality that the discourse of slavery possesses in the scheme of the Sabha.45
Transformation of Slavery as Imagery

We have so far seen that slavery as a social experience undergoes tremendous
transformation in the Sabha discourses and becomes an axiomatic foundationalist
category. The notion of the past thus constructed enables analysis and explanation
26
of past, present and future. When slavery is recalled as a historical experience,

what we encounter is past. When the slave memory is recalled to negotiate the
inner realm of the people, the project is oriented to the present. The linearity of
the narrative posits liberation in future and critical engagement with a possible
future. This transformation is facilitated by the invention of categories that
produce specific emotional effects on the people who recall the historical memory
of slavery.
The invented categories with which the emotional effects are created include
adimakkanneer (slave tears), adima yugam (age of slavery), adima shariram (the
slave body), adima nukam (yoke of slaves), adimachangala (chain of slaves),
adimayola (palm leaf document on slave trade) and adima bhavanam (slave
family). Similar categories have been employed in creating the emotional
transformation like adimamakkal (children of slaves), adima vargam (slave caste),
and adima rakshakan (emancipator of slaves) and adima vimochanam (emancipation of slaves). Categories of people who bear the marks of the above-mentioned
constructs are often referred to as Adi-Dravidas/Adiyar, meaning original inhabitants. Of late, there are other objective signs that have come to achieve
significance like adima sthambham, the image of a column of slaves that reminds
people of the sufferings of historical slavery.
Probing further what the notion of adimakkannir (tears of slaves) communicates, we find that it refers to the tears of ancestors who experienced the
harshness of slavery and the tears that rolled down from their sunken eyes.
Similarly it recalls the image of orphaned children wandering in the wilderness
after their parents were sold. While this is an often repeated imagery in Sabha
discourses, during fieldwork we were able to hear it from Yaramyavu who was 105
years old at the time we met him. He was an untouchable labourer sold to a
European planter by his father when he was a boy. He spent more than fifteen
years in a tea plantation in Cheenthalar in the high ranges of Travancore.
Yaramyavu and his parents were in the CMS church and had been receiving the
catechism of the church. He recalled with intense emotions the experiences of
children who became orphans due to slave transactions and how they were sold.
He recalled the songs sung by the slaves who looked back to the low lying lands
from where they came when they climbed the rocky terrain to the high ranges,
the last point from where they could have a glimpse of the low lying countryside.
One song narrates the tragic story of slave labourers who look back to their
own village from afar and cry. Obviously nobody consoles them.46 The notion of
the tears of slaves in other contexts is powerful enough to create feeling of intense
sufferings and pain as observed in the context of ritually significant occasions like
the Rakshanirnayam. This recounting of slave experiences reminds people of the
sufferings of their ancestors under historical slavery.
This particular experience is part of the untold miseries that the oppressed
Dalits had to suffer through five millennia. It is at this point that discussion on
the age of slavery or adima yugam is introduced. When they recollect the history
of the indigenous communities, it is located in an imaginary homeland, the Indus
Valley or ancient Tamilakam, and the people are referred to as Adi-Dravidas or
Adiyar. Certain songs identify the land they had ruled as the geographical territory
27
of Kerala. It is a nagging memory that Adi-Dravidas had among their ancestors

people who were proficient in arts and crafts, science, political administration and
statecraft, poets and philosophers who could make rich civilizational achievements
before they were enslaved. In the discourses of the Sabha there is room for a
popular history of Ancient India with invariable references to scholars like
Mortimer Wheeler and Sir John Marshall who conducted early archaeological
studies on the Indus Valley Civilization. It has been widely believed and recalled
in ritual renderings that the founder of the Sabha had prophesied the existence
and eventual eclipse of Dravidian civilization much ahead of the latter day
researchers who unearthed the Indus sites. This is foregrounded as an example of
the cultural achievement of the Adi-Dravidas, from which position of historical
glory they declined due to the cunning of the invading Aryans, reduced to the
status of slaves.
The other part of the story is built around the popular history of ancient
Tamilakam, otherwise known as the Sangam Age, when the predecessors of the
Adi-Dravidas led a highly developed social life without class and caste stratification and the condition of women, too, was appreciable as there were no gender
divisions as found in later centuries. But then this idyllic society underwent
catastrophic effects as the invading Aryans destroyed all their achievements by
subjugating their women who were as radiant as the sun. In certain songs they
refer to the particular fate of their women being infatuated by the Aryans and
giving birth to what they call evil descendants. That is how the eventual fall took
place. This fall leads to the age of slavery, lasting for millennia. This chain of
representations provides a clear case of decline brought about by womens sexuality
and the need to control it. The idea of a sharp decline of Adi-Dravidas provides
room for their eventual salvation from the horrors of slavery. From the heights of
glory they were all banished to the wilderness, if not, they were forced to work for
the aliens. Many songs lament that there was nobody to write down the history of
these experiences. This reference to a lack of history forms a major epistemological
concern of the Sabha.
The slave body (adima shariram) is a powerful construction that is imaginatively deployed by the Sabha and interpreted by its religious men (upadeshtakkals)
who conduct prayers and perform rituals during their discourses. First, it refers to
the body of the slave-caste women, men and children who had to undergo severe
sufferings. In that sense it is a genre introduced to convey the trauma of suffering
that slavery inflicted on the body, sometimes gendered. Second, it refers to the
body of the founder of the Sabha, Yohannan or Kumara Guru Devan, who had to
undergo severe suffering to redeem the descendants of slaves. In the later phase of
the Sabha, the notion of his taking human form in the garb of a slave becomes
prominent and thus the notion of slave body achieved the centrality of an
essentialized core severed from the here and now (Poyikayil, 1996: 71). The
process of deification of the slave body is visible in the semiotic practices of the
Sabha today. The active moments of such a practice include the adoration of the
column of slaves as a site of memory, the veneration of the embalmed body of
Yohannan/Kumaraguruderam as Acharya Guru and also the appearance of the
religious men of the Sabha in the dress of slave agricultural labourers.47 Moreover
28
in the songs of the Sabha, there are references to the suffering slave body across
time and space, creating a case for a particular theorization of the somatic slave
body. At this point the slave body becomes transhistorical, but with its own
particular history and sociology of construction.
Images like the slaves chain (adima changala), yoke of slaves (adima nukam)
and adimayola, the palm leaf document of slave transactions, are powerful icons
that symbolize the dreadful practices of slavery. The chain of slaves found
expression in the logo of the Sabha that depicts the hands of the slaves with
broken chains. In descriptions of the conditions of slavery, the chained parents of
orphaned children act as a powerful metaphor. Similarly, when the image of God
is recalled, He is construed as the one who had undergone sufferings as He was
chained as a slave.
The yoke of slaves (adima nukam) has a peculiar significance as it refers to
Dalit labourers being forced to plough the fields harnessed to the yoke along with
draught animals, as discussed above. During the ritual performance of discourses
by religious men of the Sabha, Dalit labourers ploughing the fields are depicted
and/or narrated in detail to invoke memories of hard labour. The entire scene is
graphically recreated in all its gravity. The artefact of labour is gradually
transformed into something capable of invoking historical memories, creating a
different icon of history. Similarly on the annual feast of the founder, theatric
performances enact scenes of slave labour. Various aspects of slave sufferings are
thus represented in theatrical mode.
The category of adimayola, documents of slave trade, also achieves a potential
that is comparable to the semiotic potential of other icons. The Sabha in its
publications quote from certain historical documents that describe slave transactions or documents containing details of slaves held by landlord families or the
state familiar to academic historians. The function of such writings is to
foreground the fact that, historically, slavery existed in Kerala and they are bent
upon providing powerful documentary proof for it. Adimayola is a much-repeated
phrase that is able to provide a rational justification for the critique of caste and
slavery that the Sabha indulges in. Another important aspect of such documentation is that Dalit labourers entered the domain of representation mainly due to
the violence of the system, both physically and epistemologically. Physical violence
is easily understood, as the practice of slavery mentioned in the documents
frequently refers to separation of families and groups. Epistemic violence refers to
the fact that the events pertaining to the lives of lower caste Dalit labourers enter
the recording machinery as something that helps the violent transmutation of the
knowledge they constitute as a social unit. Why did they find entry into the
documents? It is mainly to affirm that such individual slaves were the property of
this or that landlord and that the ownership right has been transferred to another
landlord. We may not obtain further information from such documents, but they
are relied upon in an altered context to highlight the violence that the system
perpetrated. This emphasis on the documents of slavery provides the necessary
ground for the theorization of history for the subaltern Dalits. Documents on
slave transactions are used here to evolve a powerful critique of slavery itself,
thereby radically rephrasing a possible history.
29
It is difficult to argue here that such a project of history is emancipatory, as

the categories and modes of thinking of such histories are not entirely free from
the dominant conceptions of history. The notion of adimabhavanam (slave home)
is used to mean three distinct, but related identities. As a category constructed in
ritual usage, at a primary level it refers to a slave family with father, mother and
children. Such a family is then dismembered due to the sale of family members.
Secondly it refers to the macro-identity of all Dalits who had undergone the slave
experience and more specifically it refers to the congregation of the Sabha or the
people who have been able to experience the truth of Yohannan or Gurudevan in
the course of the Rakshanirnayam. It is through the ritually significant practice of
the Rakshanirnayam that an individual becomes a member of the Sabha. Those
who have received the truth of the Sabha and Gurudevan eventually merge in the
larger family of the faithful that may be referred to as adimabhavanam in a
transformed form. At this point, the term no longer refers to the dismembered
family under slavery, but the merging of liberated souls who have come together
in a ritual community. Third, it refers to the family of the founder of the Sabha,
including himself, his wife and two sons, referred to as the sons of the era of
reign. This is the promised family that metaphorically stands for the reinstallation
of all the families erased from memory due to slavery.
The categories of adimamakkal (children of slaves) and adimavargam (slave
class) are usually employed to refer to Dalit communities that experienced slavery.
The former stands for the macro-identity of all descendants of slaves. Similarly
adimavargam is a collectivity constructed out of the emancipatory discourse of the
Sabha. Both categories are rooted in social and political praxis. The former refers
in Christian terminology to acceptance of the hitherto neglected Dalits as the
children of the incarnate, who has come with a special message to redeem them
from slavery. In both these invented categories, the prefix adima is later
reinterpreted in a radical manner. Similarly the notion of agency bestowed upon
the founder of the Sabha as adimavimochakan or adimarakshakan (saviour of
slaves) draws upon multiple meanings. This discursive domain opens up possibilities for developing and using categories like Adi-Dravida and the derivative
Adiyar, which necessarily poses possibilities of bringing together the separated and
dismembered jatis of Dalits.
Slavery as a Foundationalist Category

This part analyses further how slavery became a foundationalist axiomatic category
in the discourses of the Sabha. The basic argument is that the everyday discourses
of slavery facilitated its transformation as a foundationalist category. Similarly, it
was introduced as an essentialist category when there was a gradual break from the
earlier Christian cosmology that the Sabha had been sharing. The process of
displacement and erasure of the Christian worldview led to the introduction of
the category of slavery as foundational. This foundational status offers strategies
that were not otherwise available to agents in the field. For instance, even during
the lifetime of the founder of the Sabha, notions like Adi-Dravidas and early
30
problems of slavery were referred to in the songs sung during Sabha congregations. But the image of slavery was marooned in the enveloping Christian themes,
as the songs of that time testify. After the break with the Christian cosmology, it
still required powerful substitute concepts that would hold people together,
offering them a possibility of rationalizing the past, engaging with the present and
visualizing a possible future.
Slavery becomes a foundationalist category through the ritual rendition of the
history of slavery, which, as a result of peculiar investments made in the
composition and rendition of songs, achieved canonical status in the theology of
the Sabha. The notion of ritual stands here for the thoughts and actions that
constitute the whole. Through the practice of peculiar rituals in an everyday
manner a particular historical validation is created and in turn helps the
reinforcement of articulated notions of slavery. This perspective offers a slightly
more elaborate analysis of the environment that gave rise to the new rituals.
In the post-Christian phase the Sabha took to the resources of the community
itself instead of the Christian theological resources. This particular phase was
marred by many tensions and internal struggles on the fundamental tenets of the
Sabha. Under such circumstances the reinvention of categories took place. Here
we may concentrate first of all on the central rituals of the Sabha, without which
initiation into the congregation never takes place. The central indispensable ritual
for membership in the Sabha was and is the Rakshanirnayam. It used to last for
months during the early phase of the Sabha and in course of time was reduced to
a week. The faith and teachings of the Sabha are intensely communicated to
young people in this period of initiation. During the Christian phase of the
Sabha, the Rakshanirnayam was akin to confirmation of ones faith in the
resurrected Christ. In the later phase, Christian spirituality and practices were
erased. As the new conception of the founder of the Sabha himself as God who
has come to redeem the orphaned children of the enslaved parents emerged, the
central precept of the Sabha also underwent transformation. During this period
Rakshanirnayam began to proclaim the theme of slavery as an essential marker of
identity. While during the early phase of the Sabha the prayers and preaching were
mainly centered on biblical themes and were open, later meetings used to be held
in secluded places lest they should be attacked by the upper castes. In such
meetings, leading to the initiation of large numbers of people into the Sabha, the
founder used to give expositions that sometimes contradicted Church teachings.
As some of our informants told us, he used to connect Biblical events with the
lives of the Dalit people in Travancore. This curious mixture of Christian
teachings with the perceptions of Dalits became a major element of the prayers of
Rakshanirnayam. In the period after the death of the founder, the Rakshanirnayam
was further changed radically by introducing new themes in the weeklong prayers
and preaching. During this time the notion of re-memorizing slavery enters the
discourse as a major theme.
Today it has undergone further changes due to the refinements that the
discursive notion of slavery seems to have achieved. On the ritual occasion of
Rakshanirnayam the history of the Adi-Dravidas is now recounted in the form of
prayers.48 The construction of slave experience and the linguistic skills that make
31
it possible have a pounding effect on the selves of the audience. During such
theological discourses slavery is identified as the central problem of Dalit
communities. From this primarily historical slavery the Sabha derives seven types
of slavery and five types of original sins. The seven types of slavery include slavery
of caste, spirit cults, nation, slavery in the name of God, slavery of other religious
paths and religion, slavery that denies freedom to soul and body, and slavery of
the power of maya. The concept of five types of sin includes original sin, sin of
Karma, advice (by which the secrets of the society were lost), sin of worshipping
the Gods of the Other (Aryans) and the sin of desire for other men (which AdiDravida women felt).
We intend to analyse here the two dimensions of the process by which slavery
becomes a foundationalist category. The ritual enactment of slavery at the time of
Rakshanirnayam is the most decisive moment that informs believers of the slave
past. From this it follows that the ritual enactment of slavery in everyday life
creates the necessary conditions for the re-memory of the slave experience. It is
through these twin processes that the reified concept of slavery is articulated as
part of the ideology of the Sabha. After detailing the historical achievements of
the forefathers and mothers of Adi-Dravidas, we hear the recounting of their
eventual decline due to the fall of their mothers to the influence of Aryans. This
theme is endlessly reproduced to remind the people of their own history.
The re-enactment of the slave trade, leading to the transaction of parents to
different landlords and the separation of their children, creates a highly charged
emotional environment recalling the horrors of slavery. The Upadeshshtavu who
conducts the ceremony holds an infant close to his body in the course of the
sermon. This is the infant who became orphaned as the parents were sold. From
the ritual community a male and female come forward to act as father and
mother, along with them come children who are to act their respective roles. Two
elderly people take the role of landlords who have come to purchase slaves and
there will be another person to enact the role of the original slave owner. The
tragedy is of course that the father and mother are sold to different landlords who
eventually take them to two different directions.
As the moment of separation becomes a reality, the father gives his children
the last handful of rice that he could feed them. He does so by saying that
henceforth he will not be able to give them any more balls of rice and tells his
children that the gods alone will be there to take care of them. He entrusts to
the elder son the task of looking after the younger ones and especially the
infant. Father and mother hug each other and the fatal parting cry is cried
aloud. Then the mother feeds breastmilk to the infant telling him or her to suck
out the last drop of milk as there will not be any more breastmilk for the child.
Then she leaves the infant under the care of the eldest child. Crying aloud she
stands motionless to be dragged away by the landlord who bought her. The
parting of the parents made the children weep and wail. They spend the night
in the wilderness beneath a huge tree praying to the goddesses of the forests to
guard them and also to the wild animals to spare them. At last, hearing their cry
a female hawk flying afar in the sky descended on the ground. She consoled the
young children and promised to redeem them. The believers of the Sabha
32
consider this to be Yohannan, the founder of the Sabha, who has achieved divine
status and came to redeem them. In the course of the Rakshanirnayam, it may
be observed that much of this is re-enacted along with singing of thematic songs
that make the community of believers undergo tremendous mental stress and
strain leading to total breakdown. On one such occasion in the course of
fieldwork we could observe the loud cry of women. One of them swooned as if
in fits, continued to make loud cries and then became unconscious. Evidently,
the recounting and rememory of the slave experience is still a powerful and
potential theme that transforms people and their perceptions radically and makes
it a most active moment. When slavery is articulated as a foundationalist
category, the entire validation of the selves of the community and the individuals
are firmly grounded on it.
The other important context when the notion of slave past is imaginatively
reworked is the innumerable occasions of every day life ranging from day-to-day
conversations to important occasions like marriage and ceremonies in connection
with birth and death. Also in the course of prayers the memory of slavery is
invoked to provide sufficient energies to people to resist the powers of
oppression and dominance in their present social structure. It has been observed
in other contexts that it is necessary to place the essence thus created in the
context of strategies of resistance. It has been observed that prayers play a crucial
role in shaping the ideology of the religion of the oppressed. The critical reading
of the prayers and songs of the Sabha shows that most of these songs and
prayers allude to the slave experience. For instance even during funeral services
the community of believers recounts the slave experience along with the
hardships that their forefathers had to endure. These recountings of extreme
forms of sufferings were necessary to the predetermined design of redemption
that the Sabha proposes for its oppressed people. Though there is no explicit
commitment to life after death, these prayers and songs assure the faithful of the
promised salvation. Similarly, in ceremonies connected with marriage the message
of slave past is conveyed so that the spouses pass on this perception to their
offspring, making the theme of slavery part of the embodied history of the
oppressed from which they could search for liberationist potential.
Essentializing Slavery in the Context of Religion and Jati

Here we may bring in briefly the notion of religion as a means by which people
rationalize the external world. This is more so in the case of the religiosity of the
oppressed. In the context of colonial Kerala, for the oppressed Dalits it was
religion that opened up an early site of social and political praxis that helped
negotiate the structures of dominance. For Dalits who joined the Christian
missions from the mid-19th century onwards, the slave experiences were a
powerful memory for recollection, corroborated by missionary sources that speak
of the popularity of the story of the Egyptian captivity of the Israelites under the
dispensation of the Pharaohs. The stories of the Exodus provided the most
suitable examples to compare the condition of enslaved Dalit labourers in
33
Travancore. Similarly the activities of missionaries in certain cases amounted to

liberative acts to the exploited masses.
The religious sphere was considered as the major site where negotiations had
to take place and it is not relegated as a site of tradition, as generally thought of.
We therefore consider religion as one of the sites in which the question of
modernity and social agency was considered in Kerala particularly in the context
of Dalits. It holds good for the missions in general, but when we come to the case
of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha we find new elements emerging as they carve
out an autonomous space. It is this process that led to the creation of new ideas
and discourses.
This section further explores the potential of the essentializing aspect of the
notion of slavery as propounded by the Sabha, tagging an essential Dalitness onto
slavery. Here we can draw upon contemporary debates on essentialism, which
focus on its dual nature. The first one revolves around the question of the
essential in the context of social movements. It refers sometimes to a fixed
ahistorical essence such as woman-ness, blackness, lesbian-ness or gayness. The
demand in this context is to focus on liberation and restoration of these essences,
all of which had been suppressed and colonized by diverse forces of domination
(Smith, 1994: 172). Similarly in the discourses of the Sabha, the essential aspect
of Dalit identity was initially suppressed and colonized by the oppressors who
subjugated them. The essential identity therefore had to be rephrased so that it
became available to the collective imagination of the ritual community. The
introduction of categories such as Adi-Dravidas is to be considered in this light.
The second aspect of the essentializing feature of identity is the possibility of
the existence of multiple identities beneath an apparent overarching singular
identity. It is possible to break open the categories to bring to the fore the multilayered nature of the identity being constituted. In the empirical example analysed
here, a notion like Adi-Dravida is constituted by bringing under control all other
contending identities in terms of the further micro-categories such as jatis.
Mobilizations that take care of a category like Adi-Dravida will always have to face
the onslaught of jati identities. The significant question that emerges here is the
problem of the irresistible potentials of micro-identities, such as Pulayar or
Parayar, to mobilize people around caste identities while projecting the shared
memory of Adi-Dravida that intends to bring together subordinated categories. It
is analytically important to see that these categories were able to create lots of
contradictions as they were trying to negotiate with one another. These are
identities with divisive potentials, given the history of the Dalit movements in the
first half of the 20th century.
In this context we consider the possibilities that an essentialized notion of
slavery offers. The discourses around this category constitute the Sabha as a
dialogic religious community that conveys a new meaning to its people. It
attempts to recast their history as well as their self-perception through a liberative
praxis. It is impossible to have a pure and complete essence, and essence can be
located only in the terrain of contingency rather than necessity (Smith, 1994:
173). Privileging slave experience as an essential marker of identity can be
contextualized in the terrain of contingency brought in by social movements
34
under colonialism that initiated the discourse of slavery. It is valid in the context
of the Sabha to follow the argument that essence should always be placed in
terms of their particular context of particular strategies, such as the struggle
against domination, rather than be considered in abstraction (Smith, 1994: 174).
Slave experience is deployed as a resource to resist domination and to situate the
history of the people without history in Kerala. It provides definiteness,
concreteness and boundaries to the social groups that claim the essentialized
identity. The essentialized notion of slavery helps the heterogeneous experiences of
oppression to be strategically reinterpreted as a singular phenomenon. The
circulation of these concepts and the ideas generated by them make the Sabha and
the people following it what Paul Gilroy (1993: 181) calls an interpretive
community.
Conclusion
Among Dalits in Travancore, the experience of slavery eventually became through
various strategies a foundationalist category used to legitimize new claims on the
resources of the state as well as to contest reigning power structures within society
and the Church. Through the process of rememorizing slavery and its sufferings,
an essential identity of the historical slave is made out and the invented category
of slavery and several other derivatives are overplayed to evoke memories of the
social experience that slavery was.
It is appropriate at this juncture to put forward certain observations on the
experiences of the Sabha in order to obtain a larger picture of the resistance
movements that problematized issues beyond the concerns of the nationalist
discourse. It is important to understand such movements without privileging the
nationalist constructions so that we are informed of the complexities of colonial
modernity. The Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha in Kerala tried to carry forward
the agenda of colonial modernity in Travancore without the support of missionaries by creating alternative structures. For example, there were efforts to acquire
land and other resources, modern education, and also to create their own
congregations or community of believers. Yohannan, the founder of the Sabha,
himself coordinated this community of believers during his lifetime with his
associates and pastors. This aspect of the movement provided historically
oppressed and powerless people with new structures and political agency capable
of creating new discourses on such vital issues as social transformation.
The politics of fulfilment and transfiguration had a decisive effect on the people
who were and are part of the ritual community of the Sabha. Such a ritual
community and community of sentiments are constituted by the public ritual
rendering of history. Slavery and the sufferings it generated and the constant
reminder of being in pain are the resources with which the community of sentiments
is being made. Here one may find some broad parallels with the situations to which
Gilroy (1993: 197203) refers. In the discourses of the Sabha we find a new
worldview emerging, however ephemeral, by making recourse to the history of
slavery and its imaginative recovery through expressive cultural practices.
35
This happened in the context of modernity when a people who were hitherto
enslaved resorted to rise on the scales of civilization by acquiring education and
articulating their social visions. This is an unfinished journey, the history of which
is in a double bind. In fact the whole project itself was characterized by
doubleness. This is one of the dominant features of the Dalit liberation
endeavours in the context of colonial modernity. There were trends within the
Sabha to go beyond the teachings of the missionaries, but they remained within a
fuzzy world by critically engaging with Biblical teachings and creatively interpreting them. At least till the 1950s, this situation continued and never demanded
their explicit avowal as either Hindu or Christian in the conventional sense or
they knew where they were located. In fact it was this hybrid rootedness that
provided a critical space for the Sabha that was no longer there in the same way
when a predominant section declared themselves as Hindus in 1950. The
foundational categories that were resorted to since then have transformed the
perceptions of the people. But this opened up another terrain of enquiry by
problematizing the slave experience that remained dormant or unconscious and
was brought to the active present due to new discourses.
The liberative potentials of these transformations were never absolute, as it
had many internal constraints. Nonetheless, the experiences of the Sabha show the
possibilities of returning to the sources of the community and redeploying the
past in such a manner that historical experiences, however despicable they are,
become a resource for imaging a social praxis of liberation.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the Charles Wallace Trust for selecting me as Visiting Fellow in History,
giving me the opportunity to collect valuable materials in libraries in the UK, some of
which were used to develop the arguments presented in this article. An earlier version of
this essay was presented at SOAS in early 2002. I thankfully acknowledge the scholars who
gave me insightful comments, particularly Avril Powell, Rachel Dwyer, Peter Robb and
James Chiriyan Kandath. Some of the ideas presented here have been drawn from my
presentation in the internal faculty seminar of the Cultural Studies Group at CSSS
Calcutta. I have benefitted from the comments of Gautam Bhadra, Anjan Ghosh, Partha
Chatterjee, Raziuddin Aquil, Dawaipayan Bhattacharya, Janaki Nair, Rosinka Chaudhuri,
Lakshmi Subramanyam, Joyati Gupta and Tapati Guha Takurta. A stimulating discussion
with Saurabh Dube helped me to rethink some of the larger issues. I also acknowledge my
discussions with Nizar Ahmed and T.M. Yesudasan. However, I am alone responsible for
any shortcomings in the article.
Notes
1 The leader was a Paraya convert whose forebears were slaves of a Syrian Christian
family, still, I believe, served by this mans relations, a family to which one of the Syrian
bishops belongs. Some time after his conversion he attracted the attention of the
Brethren; he joined that body and soon became known as a successful preacher. After
some years Yohannan left the Brethren either because of moral lapses on his part, or
through pique at not being put on a level with men of higher origin (both reasons have
been assigned). He was next heard of as drawing large numbers of people to night
36
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

revival meetings (Hunt, 1919). The aspect of protest within the religious domain is
spectacular when the history of the movement is considered.
Rememory is something which possesses (or haunts) one, rather than something which
one possesses (Lidinsky, 1994: 193). In the context of the Sabha this rememory of
slavery is invoked in ritually significant contexts, gradually acquiring a significance far
exceeding all other constructs of the Sabha.
Travancore and Cochin Missions Progress and Policy Report for the Year 1913, in The
Travancore and Cochin Diocesan Report Vol XXIV, No. 3 (June 1914), p. 59.
For a critique of conventional historiography see Dube (2002: 8067) and Keane
(1997).
Rev. Koshi Koshis Journal for the Quarter Ending 30 September 1856. Entry for 22
July in Church Missionary Records No. 5 (May 1857) Vol. XXIV, pp. 13841.
See Appendix IV in Baby and Baburajan (1994: 1567).
O.S.No.34/1952, in Appendix IX of Baby and Baburajan (1994: 16970).
A.S No.583/1962, in Appendix X of Baby and Baburajan (1994:171).
Political Department, Confidential File, Residents Office Trivandrum, 1915. IOR R/
2/882/117 India Office Library and Records, p. 3 (emphasis added).
Address to Diwan Bahadur M. Krishnan Nair Diwan of Travancore Vol.1 Trivandrum,
1920, p. 127.
Memorandum submitted to Morris Watts, quoted in Baby and Baburajan (1994: 612,
emphasis added).
Minutes of the Travancore and Cochin CMS Missionary Conference. Held in the
Diocesan Room Kottayam, 2628 February, 1915. In Travancore and Cochin Mission
Progress Report for 1914.
Travancore and Cochin Mission Progress Report 1915, p. 14.
The Travancore and Cochin Mission Annual Report 1916. Evangelization, p. 4 (typed).
Found in the CMS Archives, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.
The CMS faced similar movements in the Niger Mission in Western Equatorial Africa
and the Uganda Missions. In Nigeria one of the members of the Church, Garrick
Braid, claimed to be Prophet Elijah the Second, and in the Uganda Mission a person
named Malaki claimed to be a prophet. Malaki also prohibited the use of medicine and
the movement was confined to the least educated members of the community.
The Travancore and Cochin Mission Annual Report 1916. Evangelization, p. 4 (typed).
Found in the CMS Archives, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.
The Travancore and Cochin Diocesan Record Vol. XXVII, No.1 (January 1918), p.19
(hereafter TCDR).
TCDR Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (January 1918), p. 23.
Venkotta Yohannan is a person about whom we were not able to collect any
information, except what is found in the Church Missionary Society Record mentioned
here, so at present it is impossible to ascertain his ideas and the nature of his following.
Beyond doubt he was a person with some kind of radical ideas that challenged the ideas
of the missionaries.
TCDR Vol. XXIX No. 6 (December 1919), p. 95.
TCDR Vol. XXIX No. 6 (December 1919), p. 95.
Address to Diwan Bahadur M. Krishnan Nair Diwan of Travancore Vol. 1 Trivandrum,
1920, p. 128 (emphasis added).
In the discourses on the occasion of Rakshanirnayam the religious men of the Sabha
introduce this theme particularly to prove that Israelites became slaves of Egyptians as
they chose to go and live there. This, according to them, is totally against the
experiences of Dalits in Kerala who became slaves in their own land.
37
24 It was also noted that whereas the Christian missionaries demanded subscription offers
and fees in order to enrich the Syrians, which means upper-class Christians, Yohannan
asked for nothing but got a great deal. At harvest time and similar seasons, his people
gave with great liberality and seldom went to him empty handed (Hunt, 1919).
25 This is a much-contested problem in the history of the Sabha, particularly in the
context of internal fissures after the founders death. The rationalist critique of changes
in the theme of the songs was articulated most forcefully by Vijaya Kumar (Baby), son
of P. John Paul popularly known as Chengalam Achayan in the community, in the
course of extended interviews in September 2001. This particular problem is raised in
the book on the history of the Sabha after the death of the founder. For details see
Baby and Baburajan (1994). In a similar vein, the history of the early phase of the
Sabha was rendered by J. John, son of Njaliyakuzhi Simon Yohannan, who was second
in command of the Sabha during the lifetime of Yohannan himself (interviews in
September 2001). Their arguments point to the problem of the deliberate changes that
were introduced in the themes of the songs, leading to the decline of Christian themes.
26 In the context of 17th-century England, Christopher Hill (1986) speaks of the
significance of the notions of sin, hell, salvation and other concepts across social groups
and how they perceived it differently. In the days of revolutionary millenarianism, the
notion of sin was rejected by popular classes and was considered a delimiting category,
but was used to keep the subordinate classes in obedience. In the era of restoration
there was a revival of the concept of sin as millenarian expectations slowly faded and it
became part of the faith of the Anglican Church. The Church Missionaries in
Travancore introduced the notions of sin, redemption, salvation, original sin and similar
concepts among slave Christians that made them understand their actions in a new
ethical way with its own inherent problems. There are innumerable instances when
lower caste Christians understand their actions in terms of sin and salvation from it.
27 It is important to see that in the context of Kerala the movements of Dalits during the
early 20th century raised the question of cleanliness as a major social project. Elsewhere
I have argued that cleanliness itself was modernity to them (Mohan, 1994: 8). See also
Burke (1996), in particular Chapters 1 and 2.
28 Bakhtin (1981). Chronotope has been defined as the total matrix that is comprised by
both the story and the plot of any particular narrative (Holquist, 1990: 113).
29 The insights given by Barthes (1989) help to unpack the worldview generated by the
ritual discourses referred to below. See particularly Barthes (1989: 11774) in the
chapter on Myth today.
30 For a detailed study on the theoretical problems of suffering see Kleinman et al. (1997).
31 The Slaves of Travancore. Their Pitiable Condition, The Church Missionary Intelligencer. A Monthly Journal of Missionary Information. 1855, pp. 223. Also see
Trivandrum District Report of London Mission Society. Council of World Mission
Archives, SOAS, University of London, Journal of Rev. George Matthan for the Quarter
Ending 31 December 1849. CMS Archives, University of Birmingham. Native
missionaries like Rev. George Matthan made extensive reports on the conditions of the
Dalits. These are rich in ethnographic information and their exploration forms part of
my ongoing research programme.
32 An important recent volume (John, 1998) has brought together the oral compositions
drawn from the repertoire of the social memory of Dalits in Travancore.
33 George Matthan, as in n. 31 above. See also the Missionary Journals of Rev. Koshy Koshy,
Rev. Oomman Maman for 1850s to 1870s. CMS Archives, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham.
38
34 For details, see the speeches of the representatives of Dalits such as Pulayas and Parayas
throughout the 1920s to 1940s forcefully presenting their problems, found in the Sree
Mulam Praja Sabha Proceedings for various years. Trivandrum: Travancore Government
Publications.
35 Rakshanirnayam is the crucial ritual by which children are formally initiated into the
Sabha. Today the ritual lasts for a week and includes discourses on the history of Dalits
in which the slave experience remains central. Similarly, on the day of the annual feast
(17 February) and the death anniversary (29 June) of Yohannan or Kumara Guru
Devan, discourses on the theme of slavery and the history of Dalits are delivered. On
the death anniversary of the founder the discourses last for the entire night till 5.30 am,
the time of the bodily departure (sharira mattam) of the founder.
36 Information generated through participant observation of Rakshanirnayam and other
ritual occasions like the death anniversary of the founder on 29 June 2001 in
Eraviperoor, the Sabha headquarters.
37 Ibid.
38 Participant observation of Rakshanirnayam discourses at Amara, September, 2001.
39 Ibid.
40 For a sociological treatise on social memory, see Halbwachs (1992).
41 Halbwachs (1992) and discussion with Illithara Krishnakumar Gurukula Upadeshtavu
of Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha at his residence in Chengalam, August 2001.
42 Ibid.
43 Poyikayil (1996: 73). Also participant observation of ritual renderings on 29 June 2001
in Eraviperoor. These names are considered derogatory and in the context of reforms
they have been discarded for the new generation.
44 TCDR Vol. XV No. 3 (May 1905), pp. 423.
45 The teachings of the Sabha today refer to seven types of slavery as derivatives of the
foundational concept of slavery.
46 Oral testimony given by Yeramyavu on 13 April 2001 at his residence in Puthuppalli,
Kottayam.
47 The elder son of Yohannan was named P.J. Baby and was supposed to take care of the
spiritual life of the followers of the movement. For the morning prayer services on the
death anniversary of the founder the religious men of the Sabha appear in the dress of
the traditional agricultural labourers sporting the cap made of tender areca leaf and a
kachathorthu, the small bath towel type of cloth popular in Kerala.
48 Long sermons are given on the historical past of the Adi-Dravidas that cut across time
and space to provide a neat picture of their cultural achievement as either the Indus
Valley Civilization or the culture of the ancient Tamils. This is the pre-enslavement
phase with unrestrained cultural achievement when the Adi-Dravidas possessed everything that they were denied in subsequent historical periods, subjected to the despicable
social experience of slavery.
References
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and M. Holquist). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Barthes, Roland (1989) Mythologies. London: Paladin Grafton Books.
39
Burke, Timothy (1996) Lifebuoy Men Lux Women. Commodification, Consumption &
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Mateer, Samuel (1991) Native Life in Travancore. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
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Sanal Mohan is Senior Lecturer in Ethnography, School of Social Sciences,

Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala, India. He was formerly a Fellow
in History, CSSS Calcutta, Kolkata, India, Charles Wallace India Fellow in
40
History, SOAS, University of London and Honorary Research Associate, Anthropology Programme of Massey University, New Zealand.
Address: School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Malloosserey
PO, Kottayam 686 041, India. [email: sanalmohan@rediffmail.com and sanal.
mohan@gmail.com]

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SOUTH ASIA

NARRATIVIZING OPPRESSION AND

This article analyses the particular process by which

KEYWORDS: Adi-Dravidas, Dalits, identity, Indian Christianity,

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context of emerging colonial modernity among Dalits as a result of protestant

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Mohan: Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering

attempt to create a casteless society.8 This particular verdict was decisive,

Religious Ideologies and Social Critique

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In another memorandum submitted to Morris Watts, the Diwan of Travancore in

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disperses or is given an orthodox character. As far as can be ascertained it distorted

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and others, but contained no messages addressed to the Parayas of Travancore.

The Ideological World as Reflected in Songs

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observed that the deployment of holy tongues, especially perhaps transcendental

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that interdining was also a matter of much concern in the programme of

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Mohan: Narrativizing Oppression and Suffering

Narrativizing the History of Slave Suffering

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To give shelter in a corner

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Then an old man from Ayroor recounted his experiences.

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Transformation of Slavery as Imagery

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of past, present and future. When slavery is recalled as a historical experience,

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of Kerala. It is a nagging memory that Adi-Dravidas had among their ancestors

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