On Caste.

As I mentioned in my last post, while we were in Hyderabad we had a talk with a man named H.L. Richard, who is a specialist on contextualization and syncretism especially in India. I wanted to take the time to delve a bit into a few of the points he made during this lecture because there were some really interesting things that he commented on that I found helpful for reflecting on my semester abroad.

Much of the conversation about contextualization and syncretism went over my head. (Or maybe I just wasn't that interested in it? I probably should have been, but sometimes it's hard to make yourself pay attention to things. Especially when the people talking about them are experts in the field being discussed...conversation tends to get pretty deep/complicated pretty fast in those situations.) He did talk about one thing in this area that was really interesting though; at what level do we have to denounce our own culture and subscribe to the culture that the Bible seems to call us to? Now, Jesus was counter-cultural in many ways during the first century. He called us to follow his teachings even when they are considered abnormal by societal standards of the times. In many ways what we view as part of Christian tradition is really just part of Westernized tradition. There is no reason that worship has to be hymns played with an organ, yet when Christianity came to India, that is what the missionaries taught. That's not necessarily fair; there are plenty of parts of our culture that we incorporate into our religion.

Now Christian Indian women will often refuse to wear a bindi (the red forehead dot) because they consider it to be a third eye, a gateway to the soul in the Hindu tradition and they refuse to take part in the practices of a non-Christian religion. If they're not comfortable, then that's fine, but as Mr. Richard pointed out, there are few if any Hindu women who will claim that's the reason they're wearing it. For them, it's a part of fashion, a part of cultural tradition and not spiritual at all. In situations like this, Indian Christians feel compelled to renounce practices that really aren't an issue for their spirituality.

During our discussion, H. L. Richard explained the only two matters that he feels are imperative for Christians to conform to (particularly in an Indian context). They are abstaining from idol worship and loving your neighbor.

Idolatry is an important topic because it is such an ingrained part of Indian culture through Hinduism. Many people who practice Hinduism don't have any problem adding Jesus to the shelf of idols (also known as "dolls"...creepy) that they are already worshiping. But according to Jesus himself, there is only one way to God and it is through him. Worshiping Jesus and Shiva and Brahma and a thousand other gods isn't devoting your entire heart and soul to Jesus, and it's just not going to cut it. Clinging to the idols of one's childhood religion, like in the story of Jakob's wives, isn't honoring to God.

Loving your neighbor is a pretty standard response to what it means to be a Christian. But in the Indian context, it means something pretty different than in America; it means that they need to get rid of the caste system. When it was created, the caste system was about everyone fulfilling a role in society that they were born into. Apparently the original intent was to simplify and people didn't have a problem with it. Over thousands of years, however, the caste system has become a way for people who are logistically no different and definitely no better than other people to have and maintain control over other people. There are the different levels of caste, and then there are even the "outcastes," also known as dalits. These are the people whose role is completely below the caste system. They are the people who sweep the streets, who pick up people's trash, who live in slums, who can't even eat in the same restaurants. These are the neighbors that India needs to learn to love in order to embrace the message of Jesus Christ.

For some Indian Christians, caste isn't really a thing anymore. One of our closest non-American friends in Coimbatore told us early on when we inquired about his caste that he's a Christian. To him, that means that he no longer belongs to a caste system that finds its roots in Hinduism. But for many other Christians I spoke to (all less directly than with that one friend), caste system still factors greatly into the decisions of their everyday life. The girls in the hostel told me that when they are about twenty-five, their parents will round up a selection of five men from the same religion, caste, and socioeconomic class as they are and from those five options the girl will choose one that she wants to marry. Okay, there are a few reasons other than the caste factor that I don't like this situation, but that is beside the point. What really matters is the fact that caste even comes up in the marriage search. These girls were going to a Christian college and were all really involved in churches and youth group things, yet their families were still subscribing to the caste system.

This sort of attitude is the problem Dr. Richard was talking about when he said that the contextualization that needs to happen is for Indians to renounce the caste system. As Christians, we should view everyone as an equal child of God without discriminating against certain people because of a made-up role they are "supposed" to fulfill in society. It was hard for us to learn about this totally foreign phenomenon that had little to do with socioeconomic class and was completely beyond the people's ability to change.


I feel like I have more to say about this but I'm not sure how to articulate it. The caste system is such a huge problem in India in terms of equality and living out Christian values for those who profess to be Christian. But it's also become this integral part of society, which is just really really sad.