RECENT WRITING ON DALIT THEOLOGY: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Abstract

Towards the end of 1986 over a hundred Indian Christians met in Madras under the auspices of the Liberation Movement and the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society to consider the relevance of Christian theology to the situation of the dalits. Several factors had led to this concern for the emergence of a specifically dalit One was the increasing reconversion of dalits to hinduism, caused partly in reaction to the paradoxical situation within the Indian church as a whole where dalits had consistently not been accorded their rightful place, and partly as a result of government policies that restricted opportunities and benefits to dalits who were formally Hindus. Another factor was the intensification of violence and atrocities against dalits by caste Hindus, which brought about a greater sense of solidarity and willingness to challenge the status quo. The rise of the Panther Movement in the 1970s was perhaps the most important example of this kind of active protest. The publication of the papers delivered at the Madras conference under the editorship of M.E. Prabhakar (Towards a Theology, ISPCK for CISRS, Delhi 1988) marked the beginning of serious theologizing by dalit Christians and the effective emergence of a uniquely Indian second generation liberation theology. Such was its impact that the book was immediately reprinted. Two other symposia followed, one focussing on the Kerala situation (The Desiyata, edited by Abraham Ayrookuzhiel, ISPCK for CISRS, Delhi 1990), the other resulting from ecumenical discussions between the Jesuit Theological Seminary in Madras and the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary at Madurai (Emerging Theology, edited by Xavier Irudayaraj, 1990). The Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, Madras, became the first Indian seminary to establish a distinct department of dalit theology, and subsequently made available the proceedings of its national seminars on dalit issues held there in 1989 (Towards a Common Ideology, edited by A. P. Nirmal, Madras, n.d.) and in Ooty in 1992 (Dalits and Women, Quest for Humanity). It has also, again under the editorship of Nirmal, produced an invaluable source book, A Reader in Theology (Madras, n.d.), which brings together a judicious selection of previously published papers on dalit There is thus burgeoning literature appearing in India on this peculiarly Indian theology of the oppressed. Regrettably, distribution of Indian Christian books in the west is at best erratic. This is a pity, for it means that western theologians are only scantily informed about one of the most exciting and important developments in third world theology for several years. Publishers of Indian Christian books have proceeded on the assumption that their task is to produce material that primarily serves the needs of the church and at prices that Christian readers can reasonably afford (and this is no doubt a lesson that theological publishers in the west should take more note of if they are not to become irrelevant to all but a few well-heeled intellectuals!). This principle well suits dalit theology, which is explicitly the theologizing of ordinary believers at the grassroots, and which manifests itself in hymn, song and story, as well as in the more sustained argumentation of trained theologians. It is appropriate then that several of the volumes discussed in this review include some moving examples of such oral-narrative Who are the dalits? The contributors to Prabhakar's book have provided us with the basic -- and shocking -- context of the dalit experience. Dalit derives from a Sanskrit word (significantly also similar to the Hebrew dal, which has an almost identical meaning) that may be translated as broken, downtrodden. It is the self-designation of those who are outside of the four Hindu castes, called in the Indian constitution Scheduled Castes, by Gandhi harijans, and also popularly known as avarna or outcastes. …