What Numbers Never Revealed: Tracing Dalit Christian Modernity Through Malayalam Literature

Abstract

Kerala has a long-standing history of Christianity as well as conversions. Conversions can be dated back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which saw a large number of slave caste conversions. For the slave castes of Kerala—Pulayas and Parayas—Christianity offered a salvation from the circle of pollution. Scriptures provided the slave castes new vistas of knowledge which they encultured to form a counter discourse against the public sphere set up by the dominant castes. The public sphere of the Malayalee psyche was formed by the ideas of caste pollution, which restricted the slave castes from accessing the social space. A new Dalit perspective on the religious consciousness of the converted Christians will show the role of the Bible, Original Sin, and Repentance on their daily lives. Dalit Christian literature becomes the primary source where Christianity metamorphoses into an oppositional force in resisting oppression as well as in creating a social space with agency.