To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum, by Nathaniel Roberts

Abstract

What does it mean for Dalits living in India’s urban slums to convert to Pentecostal Christianity today? The literature on Dalit conversions generally ranges from vicious denunciation from majoritarian nationalists to an ambivalent disapproving tolerance from elite secular and even scholarly circles. Whether religious conversions are understood to be a result of dangerous foreign influence or as violent irreparable rupture from an authentic cultural selfhood, the realities and perspectives of the converts themselves, who are overwhelmingly from among the poorest in Indian society, are often ignored. Eschewing these dominant representations of conversions as external agency or internal rupture and exposing the common assumptions that undergird them, Nathaniel Roberts argues in this timely, Chennai-based ethnography that the main draw of Christianity in the slum was its “ability to mediate endogenous moral contradictions . . . that covertly pitted slum dwellers against one another.” As such, “slum Christianity integrated the slum community as a whole irrespective of religious affiliation” (11).The main moral contradiction internal to the slum that Roberts focuses on involves an idealized moral discourse on belonging and those excluded from it. For the slum residents, being human and belonging meant mutuality: to care for others and to be cared for (78). The social difference between the “rich” outsiders and the “poor” residents—the preferred vocabulary of difference by the residents of the nearly homogenous Dalit slum—results from the consistent lack of care shown by the outsiders. Roberts argues that this deliberate usage of class idiom “is not merely a euphemism for caste [but] a theoretical challenge to it” (63). This explanation of the predicament of those suffering was, however, not extended to women in the slum who either faced marital strife or were debt ridden—both devastating situations for the women who were dependent economically on their husbands and socially on networks of lending/borrowing with other women (109). It was these women isolated from care who primarily converted to Pentecostal Christianity, whose god Jesus was known in Anbu Nagar to specialize in issues faced by women. Moving through the concentric circles of dispossession, from the dalit slum to its women residents, Roberts sets the frame to draw out the micropolitical significance of conversion and turns his attention to the assumptions—scholarly and popular—that make it otherwise invisible.Roberts argues that a standard view that conversion involving mutually exclusive identities leads to violent social conflict—the bedrock view behind India’s anticonversion laws fiercely advocated by Hindu nationalists and upheld by the Supreme court—ultimately rests on “secular modern understanding of religion as culture” with its functionalist Durkheimian echoes (9, 116). The residents of Anbu Nagar understood religion not in this reified sense of cultural identity or social function but in terms of the reality of deities and their ability to provide this-worldly benefits. It is this difference between the theological realism of slum residents—Christian and Hindu—and the nominalism of the anthropologist, Roberts argues, that explains the discrepancy between the expected communal strife of the elite national imagination and the lack thereof in Anbu Nagar (160).For the women of Anbu Nagar caught in its moral fault lines, Pentecostalism provided two sources of power, one in the form of pastoral care sensitized to their concerns, and a new social network of their own making, a prayer network. With this account of slum Christianity suturing internal moral contradictions on its own terms Roberts challenges existing accounts of Pentecostalism, arguing that in this context it was marked not by discontinuity but rather a message that “intensified slum dwellers’ existing moral understanding and radicalized it” (243). The final chapter identifies elements in the slum that are unique to its Christian residents: a rhetoric of future millennial revolutionary justice for all humanity that was seamlessly connected to a discourse of divine alleviation of everyday suffering. These two sections stand in an interesting contrast next to each other. Counterintuitively, Roberts notes that the uniquely Christian elements do not feature in the converts’ own accounts as to what drew them to Christianity, and he warns against “resorting to the explanatory deus exmachina of ‘hidden motives’” (241). A fair warning, but some readers might find the tension between these continuities and discontinuities unresolved. Positively, this can lead the reader to reflect on other possibilities left unexplored in the book.To Be Cared For is a brilliant synthesis that will challenge scholars on religion and culture and caste. It makes visible the thought, hopes, and actions of the dispossessed among the dispossessed while simultaneously mounting a devastating critique of the hopelessly stale yet hegemonic assumptions that have served to obscure and reproduce caste/class inequalities.