"The Power of Conversion and the Foreignness of Belonging: Domination and Moral Community in a Paraiyar Slum" by Nathaniel Pemberton Roberts

Nathaniel Pemberton Roberts

Deposited 2008

Abstract
A long-simmering tension in India over the conversion of tribals and Dalits ("untouchables") to Christianity emerged as a full-blown scandal in the late 1990s, dominating print media for months at a time. And in 2002 an "emergency" ordinance was passed in the state of Tamil Nadu, banning certain forms of religious conversion and explicitly targeting the conversion of Dalits and women. This dissertation, based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork among Paraiyar (Dalit) slum dwellers in Tamil Nadu's capital city, Chennai, investigates an ongoing conversion movement in which roughly half the slum's female population have become Pentecostal Christians. Beginning with an account of the material and moral forces that shape slum life—both internally and in relation to the dominant (non-slum) society—the dissertation progressively narrows its focus to consider, first, the meaning of religion as such in the world of the slum, then the particular claims and practices of slum Christianity. For it is only by understanding the total context of slum life, and the problems which such a life throws up, that the innovations of slum Christianity can be grasped, and that the decision of so many slum women to convert, explained.
In the course of the dissertation, an incommensurability is revealed between religious conversion as imagined by Indian elites and what is actually occurring in the slum, thus calling into question some of the most basic assumptions upon which anti-conversion legislation is based. For in the slum Hinduism and Christianity do not appear as distinct "moral systems," nor is the choice between religions a morally loaded one, as elites frequently suggest it ought to be; religion has little to do with "community" in the slum, and movements from one religion to another therefore have none of the disruptive effects elite discourse predicts; finally, the people of the slum do not treat the gods they worship as a badge of identity (either collective or personal), thus rejecting one of the most fundamental precepts of Indian law.