chartandwaters

The famous Church of Vailankanni (pronounced Velanganni). This area was hit very very hard by the tsunami and several thousand people were lost. We went here to see if we should do the workshop here, but the school, although agreeable, did not seem enthusiastic. This may be due to the lack of popularity of art as a serious endeavor throughout India, but we were looking for enthusiastic teachers because we wanted them to keep being supportive of the kids' art efforts after we left.

The children at the school looked well-tended to, though we also visited one orphanage that was one of the saddest things to be seen: One longish narrow room, maybe 17x8, for forty underclothed bedraggled kids from preschool up.

Michele, religion guru, can you comment on what I say next? The most powerful aspect of witnessing religion in India, for me, is how everyone's religion is perfectly obvious from their dress and names, and how much cooperation there IS between religions (a concurrent history of oppression and subjugation is of course also there and makes more press). When I asked a Christian monk in Delhi whether his monastery's social work was always well-received by people of other religions, he said, painting a perhaps overly rosy but not impossible picture, of course, India is a pluralist society, people are used to working together. He said his Muslim friends send him gifts for Christmas, etc.

At the same time, nearly every Christian symbol I've seen in India has an emphasis on conversion; there's a lot of use of the word "only" as in Christ is the "only" way, which makes sense if you believe you have an obligation to try to convert. It's in interesting contrast to Hindu iconography, full of sensual pictures of bejewelled gods with gleaming skin and human bodies, and which by its sheer omnipotence seems to assert its authority but *does not permit conversion*. So if you want to join the true religion--sorry too bad. It's not your fault; you were just born into the wrong caste. The dominant political party in India is Hindu and in various ways asserts the authority of Hinduism and thus of caste politics.

If you can convert to Hinduism, the party wants also, naturally, to prevent you from converting FROM it. In 2002 the party succeeded in passing an "anti-conversion" law in Tamil Nadu; the BJP claimed that the law was to discourage "forced or induced" conversions--such as financial incentives to convert--but many people believe it's intended to preserve Hindu ranks, and that it's designed to discourage conversion generally. I don't know what follow-up research has been done on it: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=26392233
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=26191721

Yet there was a long period of a kind of mass conversion. Over centuries Brahmin priests (Brahmins are the highest Hindu caste; their "hegemony" supposedly spawned casteless Buddhism) have gone to various villages persuading them that their local religions were in fact part of Hinduism, their local gods Hindu gods. Many of the priests did this because there was money in establishing a shrine to these deities and promoting them. This is one reason Hinduism has thousands of gods.

Many Hindu people also worship Christian and Muslim gods. A friend tells me that when he was growing up many mothers he knew spent Sundays taking their children from temple to church to mosque to express their complete devotion. Tamil Nadu's ancient religions focus on goddess-, rather than god-, worship, so early Christian missionaries modeled a version of Mary on a popular local goddess and popularized the infant Jesus. Today Mary and the infant Jesus are very popular among Hindu people.

This is a fascinating but unreservedly anti-Hindu article on the role of conversion in helping lower castes escape oppression: http://www.sammaditthi.com/DIALOGUE/dialogue_prempati.asp. He recommends lowest castes convert to Islam as a purely tactical move.

We didn't have time to go inside the church, hence all the signs. Note if you can see it the beauty of the Tamil script.