According to Ebe Sundar Raj, Christian [subalterns] form sixty per cent of the total number of Christians in India, and eight per cent of the subaltern population. 21 This means that Christians form a very small percentage of the outcaste communities, but outcaste communities form a majority of church members in India. This being the case, Christianity in India should expect to be an important representative of outcaste communities in their struggle against casteism. However, caste prejudice within churches, and the failure to address the psychological oppression of the outcastes, prevent outcaste Christians from motivating the church towards a subaltern perspective.
Throughout the history of Christian missionary activity in India, the task has been compounded by the belief that converting the high-caste Brahmins would be the key to evangelising the country. This policy has resulted in the retention of a caste perspective within Indian theology. Such a caste-oriented mission has produced very little in terms of numbers of new believers especially in comparison to the subaltern responses to mission who have often actively sought out Christian missionaries and converted en mass as entire communities. 22 The late-nineteenth and early twentieth centureis saw numerous mass movements of conversion of outcastes to Christianity.
Roberto de Nobili, for example, chose to adopt the lifestyle of a Hindu ascetic (Sanyasi), moved to a high caste area and studied Hindu scriptures. By doing so, he sought to bring the Brahmins living in Madurai to faith in Christ. De Nobili was careful not to try to convert, culturally, his disciples; when they asked for baptism he would allow them to maintain those customs and symbols that he considered appropriate. Among the customs that De Nobili allowed these Brahmins to retain was caste status. This indicates that, for De Nobili, and others who followed his missionary paradigm, there are non social implications that are essential to the Christian faith. Thus Christianity is reduced to a matter of only private spirituality.
Many high caste Hindus have accused the missionaries of abusing the poverty of the subalterns by using social welfare as an enticement towards conversion. However, such critics would be hard pressed to find a Christian church or Christian non-governmental organisation, that is not indiscriminate as to whom it offers aid. In other words, conversion to Christianity has no bearing on whether a person receives aid, therefore the possibility of welfare for the outcastes is no motivation for conversion. Walter Fernandes notes that many untouchable Christians suffered persecution from the caste landlords, and were even deprived of their livelihoods during this period of mass conversion. Consequently they suffered greater poverty, and even starvation, despite, or because, of their choosing Christianity. 23
It would be more accurate to say that many subalterns have chosen Christianity with the hope of psychological and social upliftment, and not for economic gain. Mass conversion, as a phenomenon, presented a pastoral dilemma for most Protestant missionaries, who took an evangelical approach, focusing on the individual's salvation. This suggests that the missionaries, as well as their critics, were suspicious of the motivation of the converted outcaste communities. Being largely from North European countries, they were influenced by egalitarian ideologies and considered the hierarchical caste system to contradict the aims of their Christian mission. In contrast, the Roman Catholic tendency to avoid confronting pastoral issues, concentrating rather on numbers of converts, saw no need to challenge the case system at all. Most Roman Catholic missionaries came from traditional South European countries and believed the caste system to be the natural social order for Indian society corresponding to the feudal systems of their own lands. 24
Whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, many of the Christian missions failed to deal with the practical implications of bringing Indians of various castes into Christian faith. Many churches retained separate seating, or even partitions, in order to maintain a separation of caste Christians from outcaste Christians. Often untouchables must enter through a separate door, or receive communion at a separate altar rail. In some churches the untouchable Christians were made to sit at the back of the church, in order not to contaminate the communion chalice until all the caste Christians had partaken. Many of the prejudices continue to this day in rural India. While the majority of Indian Christians are subalterns, Church leadership hails almost exclusively from a high-caste background. In Christian villages the Dalits are often refused access to the caste Christians' cemeteries, provoking riots when attempts are made to gain access. Emotions often run high when the status quo is challenged, and rioting has become increasingly violent, leading to many deaths. 25 When a Dalit priest from Eraiyur, a Catholic village in South India, requested permission for his father's funeral procession to pass along a public road, caste Christians from the area, including a priest, rioted and used physical violence to stop him (February 15, 1999). In this case, as in others, neither church nor state protested against the discrimination. 26 Such examples of casteism within the churches illustrate the theological significance of internal discrimination among Christians. Caste Christians cannot be considered Dalit Christians since they are also oppressors, actively opposing the outcaste Christian struggle for liberation.
Traditional denominations, on the whole, have not stressed the need for equality in Christian fellowship, leaving the promise of a new identity in Christ unfulfilled. More recent charismatic and evangelical denominations, 27 have seen the most numerical growth among subalterns, and equality, with the greatest number of subaltern pastors. However, one of the five apostles of a denomination in northern India, with around seventy congregations, found that subaltern Christians made good church leaders, in terms of pastoring and teaching, but lacked the confidence to take the initiative (in both rural and urban settings). 28 This reflects a greater openness on the part of new church movements to leadership from among the outcaste communities. Furthermore, the ecclesiology of new church movements welcomes broader lay involvement generally, in contrast with the traditional denominations such as the Church of South India and the Church of North India, and the Roman Catholic Church which are more autocratic and centred on the leadership of the priests. The priesthood is largely made up of converts from the Brahmin castes and therefore mirrors the Hindu religious structure in respect of leadership.
It appears then that conversion to Christianity, on either a cultural or personal level, is not enough to liberate the outcaste communities from the oppression of caste identity. Even a new awareness of their identity in Christ does not liberate the outcaste who is perceived as 'untouchable in Christ'. Clearly further transformation of the situation and of Indian theology, highlighting the social significance of the Christian identity in Christ, is needed.
B R Ambedkar was the leader of the largest mass movement of Dalits which converted from Hinduism as a means of rejecting casteism. However, rather than converting to Christianity, Ambedkar, and his followers chose Buddhism instead. After a lifetime of struggling against the caste system, Ambedkar finally converted to Buddhism in 1956. 29 Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism, followed serious consideration of the possibility of conversion to Christianity. However since the Church had failed to uproot the caste system, both among its members and in the wider society, he finally rejected this option as unhelpful to the Dalit cause. Alongside criticism of both Protestant and Catholic churches (particularly the Jesuit missionaries and their culturally passive methodology) he also berated the subalterns who had converted to Christianity for their failure to support liberation of the non-Christian subalterns.
They don't care a snap of their finger what becomes of their former caste associates ...indeed their chief concern with reference to their old caste associates is to hide the fact that they were in the same community. I don't want to add to the number of such Christians. 30
Ambedkar's criticism of subalterns Christians for denying their identity as members of outcaste communities, emphasised by his conversion to Buddhism, needs to be taken seriously. If subaltern Christians are to exemplify a liberationist model of Christ's mission, that is, solidarity with the Dalits, then they should also be in solidarity with all other subalterns, not rejecting them along with their caste status. It is not enough that subaltern Christians transform their own situation, and show by example that their conversion has been the means of their liberation. In fact, if Christian Dalits choose to try to find liberation by hiding their identiy then they are only misleading themselves as to the situration. Christ has become a Dalits because he identified with the oppressed by being crucified and the Dalit has become Christ in the sense of the believer being 'in Christ' and therefore as Christ to the world (theosis), but also as illustrated in Matt. 25: 40, being worshipped through the service to the poor, as is often emphasised in liberation theology. What matters is that Christ has become a Dalit and the Dalit has become Christ.
The subaltern Christians must work to alleviate the suffering of all outcaste communities whether they are Christian or not. If the gospel is inclusive, that is for all people, then the Church needs to be in solidarity with, and at the service of, the Dalits who have not chosen to follow Christ, but who are made in God's image and who God came to save (Jn. 3:16). Ambedkar was not only choosing a new faith for his own conscience, but one which would be truly a religion of and for India, which would liberate the subalterns and preserve India's deeply religious character. Hinduism, according to Ambedkar's reading of history, should never have been considered the patriotic religion of India. As a system it had justified the oppression of a large proportion of India's population and thus betrayed India's national pride. Buddhism, on the other hand, is a religion that denounces private property and materialism and does not acknowledge caste differences, all of which was attractive to Ambedkar. At the same time, it is an historic Indian religion which maintains the importance of dharma.
Ambedkar went on [...] to argue that Buddhism, [...] abolished private property more thoroughly and without bloodshed and was therefore superior to Marxism. 31
Today hundreds of thousands of Dalits, who joined Ambedkar in his conversion to Buddhism, continue to struggle against the stigma of caste. As well as being an inspiring leader of the Dalits he has become a garlanded icon, whose picture is often seen at railway stations such as Howrah in Calcutta and Chennai Central Chennai and CST in Mumbai, as well as in the Dalit slums. These Dalit communities that joined Ambedkar in converting to Buddhism have been called 'Neo Buddhist' by external commentators, illustrative of the fact that their conversion from Hinduism is not accepted by caste Indians who trivialise their conversion by giving it the permanent epithet of 'neo'. These Dalit communities remain, by and large, in a situation of poverty and continue to experience caste discrimination. Conversion to Christianity, Buddhism, or any other non-Hindu religion, has not lead to the liberation of the subalterns from caste oppression. Even though caste has non meaning in any religion other than Hinduism it remains a part of society and of the psyche of those who convert. Therefore in most instances of conversion it is the caste system that has affected the religions that accomodate it, rather than the religion affecting the caste system.