Abstract
The Tamil Dalit Pentecostal conversion movement that has been active in Chennai’s slums and low-income settlements for the last four decades is also a political movement. It is, moreover, a women’s political movement. Normally both Dalits and women are ignored in India, they are considered people of no importance and irrelevant to the issues that grab the headlines. But it is important for us to recognize both the political nature and the importance of this Dalit women’s conversion movement, because we are at a time of great peril in India, where, as elsewhere, populist nationalism has swept an authoritarian leader to power and the fascist tendencies of an overbearing state are becoming increasingly obvious. In such a context Gramsci’s theorizations provide important suggestions for how to understand religio-cultural movements as political movements and how to evaluate both their importance and what they can teach us about the possibilities for religio-cultural-political resistance to authoritarian populism, and the crucial importance of low-income, low-status women in political processes of grassroots resistance.
Highlights
This essay has a simple thesis: the Tamil Dalit Pentecostal conversion movement that has been very active in Chennai’s slums and low-income settlements for the last three to four decades is a political movement
I suggest that is important for us to recognize both the political nature and the emancipatory importance of this Dalit women’s movement, because we are at a time of great peril in India, when the Left parties have lost their way and ‘lack all conviction,’
Dalit women have been central to the rapid spread of the Dalit Pentecostal churches in Chennai
Summary
This essay has a simple thesis: the Tamil Dalit Pentecostal conversion movement that has been very active in Chennai’s slums and low-income settlements for the last three to four decades is a political movement. Even in 2019, it was striking how few non-Dalits ever entered the Dalit streets that I visited These churches revealed to them the large numbers of Dalit women who, like them, were turning to Pentecostalism for mental and spiritual solace and, above all, for female moral support. These largely female churches built well-organized networks of neighborhood-based women’s support-groups, that provided psychological healing, and imparted the ‘good news’ that the Christian ‘Son of God’, Jesus, suffered like them, and “gave his blood on the cross” for their salvation. The Dalit Pentecostal movement in Chennai’s slums was under way
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