Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India
“This book is an ethnographic account of three Roman Catholic women in contemporary Tamil Nadu, south India, who claim to be possessed by Mary, the mother of Jesus. It follows their lives over more than a decade, describing their own, the researcher’s own, and devotees’ understandings of the women’s healing and possession practices along with questions about agency, gender roles, authenticity, and social power.” (see full abstract here).
by Kristin Bloomer
Possessed by the Virgin
Main Argument
Bloomer demonstrates the ways in which the categories of “universal” versus “local” religious practices can be problematic by looking at Tamil ideas of Mary and Marian possession. It argues that Marian possession both challenges and contributes to three sorts of power structures: Brahmanical Hinduism, Catholicism, and patriarchy. However, such practices allow women to cultivate a form of agency that helps them not only to survive economic, caste, and gender oppression but also to lead themselves and others out of suffering and toward embodied wholeness, or what she calls “this-worldly redemption” (Bloomer, 14).
The women who were possessed combined Roman Catholic versions of Mary with local, Tamil versions. As healers, they enjoyed an elevated status in society, “working with the limited tools they had to counter their own and others’ suffering” (Bloomer, 247). These possessions challenge European ideas about Mary, notions of caste, and patriarchal hierarchies.
The Social Function of Possession
The three Tamil women try to challenge both caste and patriarchy through a strategic use of the figure of Mary; instead of waiting for a heavenly reward/respite from suffering, they try to find what Bloomer calls “this-worldly redemption.” From a Marxist perspective, we could say that the women used “religion” to challenge the “status quo.”
Bloomer ultimately examines how everyday social life– in this case, women in the Tamil region of India — is governed and regulated. Just as Marx was interested in how social order was reflected and maintained, Bloomer looks at how something like possession by the Virgin Mary can, in some ways, improve social status and moderate social pressures (challenging the status quo), but also how the patriarchal concepts and symbolic systems still relegated them to a lower status than men (maintaining the status quo).
The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India
“The Saint in the Banyan Tree is a nuanced and historically persuasive exploration of Christianity’s remarkable trajectory as a social and cultural force in southern India. Starting in the seventeenth century, when the religion was integrated into Tamil institutions of caste and popular religiosity, this study moves into the twentieth century, when Christianity became an unexpected source of radical transformation for the country’s ‘untouchables’ (dalits).” See full summary here.
By David Mosse
The Saint in the Banyan Tree
Main Argument
Mosse describes the institutional contradictions that arise as villagers try to participate simultaneously in the Catholic religious realm and caste-based village society, and how the institutional friction leads to changes over time, e.g. in the way the Santiyakappar festival is celebrated.
By constructing and idea of “Christian truth” that was somehow outside of/beyond the social, Catholicism became “profoundly localized into existing social and representational structures” (like caste), while at the same time becoming “a source of distinctive forms of thought, action, and modes of signification that are potentially transformative” (p.28). He shows that, over time, the dalit Christians began to “dalitize” Christianity, in a type of reversal of the way in which the early Jesuits had “Brahmanized” their message. Several of the caste divisions have gradually been removed from the Catholic Mass, the Eucharist, festivals, cemeteries, and church buildings.
Functions of the Catholic Church in Tamil Nadu
This book examines both the maintenance AND contestation of caste within Tamil Catholicism. Ultimately Mosse shows how Christianity, over the centuries in India, worked to bolster and directly reproduce caste society while also introducing forms of thought and action that have undermined, even struggled directly against, caste society. Again, from a Marxist perspective, this shows how “religious” narratives both uphold and challenge oppressive class/caste systems.
The Saint in the Banyan Tree is not so much interested in explaining what “Christian culture in India” is, but rather in exploring what Christianity does — or how Catholicism functioned in this specific time and place.
The Exhibit
Taken together, these books provide a functionalist approach to the anthropology of Christianity in India; instead of judging whether Christianity has been “good” or “bad” for India, they show how certain Christian traditions function in particular ways. Instead of asking about the origins (Tylor) or psychological causes (Freud) of these traditions, or evaluating the truth claims (e.g., were they really possessed?), these authors looked at the social consequences of specific figures, narratives, spaces, and symbols. Most Christians in India are poor and lower caste, and these books unpack the social dynamics therein. These folks are able to draw on these narratives and images to carve out some space for themselves– they are both constrained by these images but also deploy them in challenging structures of power. Moreover, they show us how caste cannot be analyzed with taking into account other factors like gender, ethnicity, and colonial history.