Honour, caste and conflict.

Abstract

From the late 17 th century, Christian cult shrines and church centres established under the Jesuit mission in Tamil South India, were incorporated into local systems of political patronage and religious gifting. In particular, through systems of festival of honours, they served the same purpose as local Hindu temples in extending and legitimating the authority of rulers and village headmen, and in integrating the highly diffuse domains of political control which characterised the pre-colonial state in the Southern Tamil country. This paper describes the detailed structure of one such cult, that of St. James (Cantiyakappa) in the village of Alapuram. As well as articulating local political dominance, the festival honours at this shrine provided the chief idiom of caste rank and precedence in a religiously plural community. Moreover, being at the centre of the local discourse of caste and power, the festival honours equally became the most important institutional context for contesting and negotiating caste rank and social position. The shifting pattern of such conflicts is traced during the 19th and 20th centuries. During this time the position of the missionary priests changed. Under colonial government, Jesuit missionaries acquired a new authority, they ceased to be renouncer-teachers and became “rulers” of a Catholic religious domain newly separate from caste society. The paper explores the social significance of assertions of church authority as well as the intersection of conflicts between competing missionary organisations with local status disputes and low caste social mobility. It suggests that these provide a window through which to observe fundamental changes in popular religion and caste society in colonial and post colonial times.