Abstract
In Kerala State, South India, approximately one quarter of the population is Christian, many of whom claim a religious heritage nearly two thousand years old. The A. focuses on a tradition, prevalent in the highly Christianized Kottayam district in Kerala, in which local lore and festivals associate Hindu patron deities and Christian patron saints as siblings. The relationships of these interreligious sacred sibling pairs, described alternately as contrary and cooperative, provide an apt metaphor for the complex communal relations between their Christian and Hindu devotee communities. This relational ambivalence is challenged, however, by unambiguous religious rhetoric that argues for an irreparable disparity between Christianity and Hinduism, or else for the negation of the boundaries that distinguish them. As this genre of sacred sibling associations presently appears to be on the wane, the A. also explore the tensions inherent in ethnographic enthusiasm for, versus native dismissal of, such traditions.
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