HEAVEN-SENT BLESSINGS, EARTHLY REWARDS

Protestant missionaries in South India in the mid-nineteenth century were faced with an apparently insurmountable difficulty: the stolid indifference of most Indians to the Christian message.Footnote ⁵ India, indeed, was renowned as a particularly barren mission field. While there were occasional instances of outrage against missionary evangelism at other times and places in colonial India, in rural Madras, there was little to be found.Footnote ⁶ For our purposes, what is most important is what missionaries identified as the basis of this indifference: a Methodist missionary voiced the consensus on this question in 1882 when he worried that it was a challenge to “awaken among Hindus a consciousness of sin” since “many … do not … believe in the freedom of moral action …[or in] personal responsibility.”Footnote ⁷ It was exceedingly difficult to preach to rural Indians of the soul's defilement and the need for its salvation, then, because among this population the requisite concern with spiritual well-being upon which such preaching depends appeared to missionaries unnervingly absent. The problem, it seemed, inhered in Indian languages themselves. As a fellow Methodist explained while reporting on preaching tours:

In short, Indians' marked lack of interest in matters of the soul was ascribed to a failure to recognize a distinction that was essential to nineteenth-century Protestantism: that between spiritual and material rewards.Footnote ⁹ “Higher” forms of blessedness promiscuously mingled with lower ones in the moral worlds of Indians, even Indian converts. And just as these obstacles to conversion inhered in language, they structured the very organization of the everyday: an additional source of missionary concern was that agrarian Indian life rarely afforded the privacy required for personal prayer and reflection, the surest method for the recognition of the ultimacy of the soul.

But these barriers to proper conversion were not the only ones. The other barrier—equally indicative of a failure to distinguish and hierarchically organize material and spiritual realms—was what missionaries viewed as the irrational native attachment to caste practices. For a manner of demurral they heard with mechanical regularity was, “Christianity sounds very good—what you're saying is indeed true—but becoming a Christian means becoming a Pariah.”Footnote ¹⁰ “Pariah” was here used in its most generic sense to mean despised outsider, a status it was believed would accrue from sharing food and socializing with missionaries, and even more with actual Pariahs, unfree laborers of the lowest castes, given that Pariahs were increasingly associated with Christianity in the popular mind, for reasons I will describe presently. A source of great frustration to missionaries, then, was that opposition to the acceptance of Christianity was not primarily to the truths it conveyed.Footnote ¹¹

From this very brief schema of evangelical experience in nineteenth-century South India I want to make two claims. First, South Indians did not imagine, as Protestant missionaries did, an essential distinction between the spiritual and material benefits that might accrue from worship.Footnote ¹² Second, the encounter between Hinduism and Christianity in the southern Indian bazaar did not, at least at this stage, primarily take the form of doctrinal argument, because the terms necessary for such a debate were not widely accepted by missionaries' Indian interlocutors. To statements of Christian truth, Indians responded not with alternative truths but with reference to forms of social propriety and obligation for which such arguments were irrelevant.

Missionaries interpreted these references by means of the category “caste,” for which, by the mid-nineteenth century, there were well-worked out and widely disseminated theories, all of which shared the premise that caste was indissociable from the Hindu religion; caste had been discovered as the necessary social matrix of Hinduism.Footnote ¹³ This interpretation, perhaps reassuringly, convinced the missionary that what he was struggling against was indeed another religion. If the members of so-called higher castes dominated and mistreated the Pariah, this was not fundamentally a feature of agrarian political economic arrangements, in which the Pariah served as hereditarily unfree laborer, but only an extreme form of the popish ritualism and irrational obsession with bodily purity which marked Hindu (caste) society. Yet, as I will argue, it is precisely the distinctive political-economic features of Pariah subordination—the status of the Pariah as something more than just the extreme pole of ritual prejudice—that make sense of the emergence and specific articulation of authenticity talk in South India.

SERVITUDE, REAL AND IMAGINED

Though entirely erased from popular memory today, the names for particular “untouchable” caste groups in South India, like Pariah and Palla, were used interchangeably by Tamils with the terms āḷ and aṭimai, meaning slave.Footnote ¹⁴ Slavery was officially abolished in British India in 1843, over the strong objections of India hands, who argued that agrarian servitude was so integral to the functioning of the economy that its summary abolition would be impracticable.Footnote ¹⁵ An effective compromise was made whereby the export and import of slaves was largely halted, while local forms of agrarian servitude were not. Use of the word “slavery” by officials would invoke reprimands from higher-ups, but the actual conditions officials described with respect to Pariahs remained the same.Footnote ¹⁶ Landowners, too, eventually learned to avoid speaking of their Pariahs as slaves in dealings with the state, preferring the tropes of “debt” and “contract.” No doubt a gradual transformation was underway in agrarian labor relations in the nineteenth century, but it did not follow a linear trajectory from status to contract.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus as late as 1918, eighty-odd years after the official abolition of slavery, we find landowners still referring to their Pariahs as aṭimaiyāḷ, slaves, and unselfconsciously explaining to government officials that, yes, these aṭimais were indebted, but that they were most definitely not free to leave even if they did, in some unlikely event, manage to pay off their debts and thereby terminate the putative contract.Footnote ¹⁸

The latter half of the nineteenth century, when mass conversions of Pariahs to Protestant Christianity reached great proportions, was a period in which market-related transformations placed extreme stress on the agrarian economy, with famine a frequent occurrence. This period leaves us with records that vividly disclose what traditional forms of servitude entailed, and what they did not. While colonial officials alleged that traditional servitude in India came with the silver lining of support for laborers during slack seasons, this reassuring assumption has little basis in fact. Indeed there is a wealth of largely ignored evidence against the familiar depiction of Indian servitude as a relatively benign institution, tempered by cultural mores in which masters recognized their own responsibilities to the welfare of their dependents.Footnote ¹⁹ Pariahs were the first to suffer the effects of famine, since they never earned enough to build up their own stores of grain, and their lack of savings was compounded by the loss of employment. The Methodist missionary William Goudie, stationed in Chengalpattu district just north of Madras city, described this situation in a letter home in 1898:

Observations like these call into question the notion that Indian masters and slaves were bound together by a tradition of mutual duties and obligations. This was an idea articulated in its modern form and popularized by British officials with a vested interest, initially, in portraying Indian slavery as exceptional and therefore exempt from empire-wide abolition, and later justifying colonial negligence of laborers in favor of protecting the interests of their elite Indian tax-payers. Recent histories of labor in India follow the colonial archive in contending, with remarkably little evidence, that the transition to capitalist agriculture severed a once mutualistic relation between laborer and master.Footnote ²² Yet the representations of “mutual duties and obligations” no more straightforwardly disclosed social reality than did that of “labor contracts.”

If Indian servitude did not entail a system of mutual duties and obligations, what were its distinguishing features? I restrict myself to those germane to this paper, namely those that became arenas of struggle in the late-nineteenth-century period of mass conversion. A number of practices secured the delimitation of the Pariah as outside of society proper. Linguistically, the term tamiḻaṉ itself, “Tamilian,” referred only to caste Tamils, and not to Tamil-speaking untouchable castes (a fact that, like the erstwhile interchangeability of “slave” and untouchable caste names, is nearly forgotten today).Footnote ²³ They dwelt in enforced segregation in ghettos (cēri) outside the main village, and marks of positive social status were forbidden them. These included such things as wearing shoes or shirts, building a solid house or other permanent structures, and any other signs of wealth or privilege—signs that were at once marks of dignity and blessedness, as the missionary analysis of the Kannada word bhagyawantanu, meaning both blessed and rich, reminds us. And while others might fall into the state of landless laborer in colonial Madras, only Pariahs were actively prevented from owning land.Footnote ²⁴

Pariah indiscipline was prevented and punished by an equally variegated arsenal. Tactics used by landowners extended from routine physical punishment and intimidation to gentler methods like the financial sponsorship of Pariah lifecycle rituals. But among the most essential of the landed caste master's techniques was his control over the sites on which his Pariah bondsmen lived as well as the land surrounding them on all sides. Insubordinate laborers could find their own small gardens flooded or trampled by a master's herds, and they themselves threatened with eviction and unemployment, a devastating sanction given that Pariah families had no independent means of livelihood. It was in the context of a threat to these forms of servitude that authenticity talk first came to be employed by Indian elites against challenges presented by Pariah conversion.

MASS CONVERSION, MORAL TUTELAGE, MENDACITY

Dramatically altering the painfully slow addition of names to the baptismal register that characterizes the mid-nineteenth century, the indifference of Indians to Christianity described above became a thing of the past by the 1890s. While missionaries had not sought out the lowest strata of society, hoping instead to secure the masses by first capturing those they saw as social leadersFootnote ²⁵—Brahmins and other elites—missionaries unexpectedly found themselves besieged by Pariahs. Although many missionaries suspected hunger alone drove these conversions since several spectacular instances occurred around the great famine of 1876–1878, in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South India overall, mass conversions of Pariahs correlate very poorly with times of distress such as famines or epidemics.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the period between 1889 and 1895, which saw a great number of mass conversions in South IndiaFootnote ²⁷ as well as the birth of authenticity talk, was not markedly more disaster-prone than the years that succeeded or preceded it.

What is a “mass” conversion? As the adjective suggests, Pariah conversions were distinctive both in the vast numbers who converted, and in that missionaries were approached, and baptism demanded, by groups or representatives of groups rather than single individuals. Conversions were initiated, to reiterate, by Pariahs themselves, not by missionaries—contra popular perceptions then as now—and in fact most Pariahs who approached a local missionary had never before had any personal contact with him.

In striking contrast to high caste converts, who were individually won after months or even years of careful tutelage and argumentation, or who were often products of mission schools in urban centers, Pariah converts did not come with any prior knowledge of Christian doctrine. As the Report of the Free Church of Scotland's Madras Mission explained to its readers at home:

Evident here are several missionary preoccupations critical to the story we are tracing. The Pariah cannot undergo “what we call conversion.” By virtue of the very fact that they occur en masse, Pariah conversions cannot be the “individual personal matters” with which the missionary and his readers are familiar, and which constitute authentic conversion. The search for a solution to the problem of the Pariah's incapacity to undergo a genuine spiritual transformation—one that might lead him to “freely” choose Christ—was a frequent topic of missionary debate, and the gulf between the vast numbers of nominal Christians as against the “true converts” who spiritually lived a life in Christ was unceasingly lamented.

But it was not simply the social as opposed to individual nature of these acts of conversion that rendered them deviations from the proper form. The primary reason missionaries gave for the Pariah's incapacity to convert spiritually was that Pariahs' very poverty made it impossible for them to convert for reasons of conscience alone: “[In the Pariah,] bodily and spiritual misery are so closely connected that they can scarcely be separated.…”Footnote ³⁰ In short, the Pariah posed a challenge to the dichotomous analysis of the world into spirit and matter, and in so doing became the very paradigm of inauthentic conversion. For this reason their inner state was to be scrupulously examined and reexamined for harboring “temporal interests.” And yet, since such interests were virtually ineliminable, missionaries needed to attend to them: as one missionary explained, the threat of temporal interest underlying Pariah conversions to Christianity meant, “[The Pariah] feels his external [i.e., material] distress at first much more than his spiritual, and if we wish to help him only in his spiritual need … there may be the risk of his turning away from us as merciless hypocrites.”Footnote ³¹ Thus if missionaries feared holding out the worldly temptations that might produce “rice Christians,” they also envisioned themselves as without choice in the matter.Footnote ³² The seemingly intractable problem of Pariah materiality, itself rooted in a de facto enslavement missionaries along with colonizers were loath to acknowledge, resulted in a proliferation of discourse on the dualism between spirit and matter, and how to manage cases where it appeared to be absent.Footnote ³³ The Pariah thus brought into much sharper relief the more general consensus that prevailed regarding the fabled absence of such distinctions in Hindu society, and it became common to identify Pariah poverty with an inability to make choices based solely on spiritual considerations.

As noted above, Pariahs were not usually the targets of evangelism. Rather than hearing of Christianity from a missionary, Pariahs most often heard of its benefits from a relative or friend in a neighboring village, which indeed would have been plain to see: a school house for the children, and a small but solid whitewashed church building in the midst of thatched huts. The leader of a Pariah cēri, the segregated area of the village in which Pariahs lived, would then approach the missionary with a request, often for a school, and a teacher to live in their midst. These conversations could take on a distinctly strategic, even legalistic, quality: thus the Reverend E. C. Scudder, of the Reformed Church of America, in reporting on the evangelistic work undertaken in northern Madras in 1898, wrote: “Several villages [of Pariahs] have offered to come over … [in exchange for] two buildings and a helper per village.…”Footnote ³⁴ Missionaries, for their part, viewed schooling as pertaining to the soul, and hence a legitimate part of missionary work, rather than as providing a form of material advantage. With respect to the Pariah, we must recall that a ubiquitous feature of domination was the prohibition on bearing signs of status: a built structure was a particular privilege, and in the late nineteenth century, a school would be anomalous anywhere—even most caste children did not yet attend school. A whitewashed schoolhouse or chapel (one-room and thatch-roofed though they were) in a cēri of huts built of tatties and twigs dramatically altered a landscape otherwise dominated by the built structures of the caste people's quarters, and unsettled a system of subordination in which the denial of status symbols to the Pariah was central.

Once a schoolhouse had been established, a mission helper would encourage careful attention to hygiene and promote new habits of dress among Pariah converts. As with the architecture of the Pariah ghetto, new dress was a significant challenge to the distinction normally maintained between Pariahs and their caste superiors—it did not simply, as missionaries believed, express universal norms of cleanliness and decency. In mission schools, Pariah children might be given simple uniforms, and the fortunate graduates of such schools who became “native helpers” of missions would also be provided with clothing. More generally, converts were instructed to bathe frequently, given haircuts, and required to maintain utmost modesty in dress. For missionaries, neat and modest clothing was an outward sign of inner discipline. The improvements they effected in this regard were described by them only as marking the inculcation of proper personal habits, unmindful as they were of the fact that hierarchical relations stipulated that the Pariah laborer appear abject relative to his master—that personal habits are also essentially social. Pariahs' threadbare clothing was an essential component of their subjugation: Pariah men were expected to wear only a loincloth while working, and, when wearing a waistcloth, it generally had to be worn above the knees; similarly, a Pariah woman's sari had to be worn high enough to expose her calves and even, sometimes, her knees. “High” caste men and women, by contrast, wore waistcloths or saris that fell past the ankles and covered most of their feet.Footnote ³⁵

A Pariah wearing a caste man's clothing or the westernized attire of urban elites was treated as an insurgent, and often with violence. And yet missionaries, it is important to emphasize, never intended to encourage Pariah insubordination; to the contrary, they cautioned each other, and their converts, against upsetting Pariahs' masters. They simply hoped, as one missionary nicely put it, to “raise [the Pariah] in his social state, and not out of it.”Footnote ³⁶ Their intention was not to eradicate the heathenish practices of caste, but to strip them of their Hindu excrescence and cull their rational core: a class hierarchy.Footnote ³⁷ And time and again they found themselves having to reprove Pariah converts for contumacy.

So vexing was the sight of a Pariah in anything other than a loin cloth that as late as 1923—by which time the cause of reforming caste was well-established on the nationalist agenda—the nationalist newspaper Swadharma published a poem ridiculing a Pariah's adoption of Western dress as a species of imposture. (This was, nota bene, the very same style in which the elite Madras nationalists who ran the paper were themselves dressed.) This instructive poem, entitled “Ramaswamy becomes Ramsay” read in part as follows:

This newspaper styled itself a leader on issues of social reform—its masthead loudly proclaimed its commitment to “the Labour Movement” and “Social Re-construction”—and did in fact often write eloquently on the travails of the poor Pariah. That this scorn nonetheless appeared in it reveals how Indian elites, even those committed to caste reform, remained unselfconsciously, subtly committed to a vision of Pariahs as best suited to agrarian servitude, and of the missionary as their corrupter.Footnote ³⁹ Yet while Pariahs in Western dress were on one hand the dupe of a “zealous cleric,” they were equally dishonest pretenders, ignoring the “parcherry set” from which they sprang, and using education only for the thievery proper to Pariahs as a caste. And while the cultivated urbanite's response to the dressed-up Pariah might be the penning of acerbic verse, other, more violent reactions illustrate the sense in which new dress was construed as insurrectionary. It was common for well-dressed Pariahs to be attacked and beaten; in one village in 1910, for example, a Pariah was assaulted for carrying a parasol, his clothes and umbrella wrested from him. When the victim went to report this violation in a court, the Tamil magistrate dismissed it with brutal candor: Nī vaḻakkattiṟku virōtamākak kuṭaippiṭittucceṉṟatu tappitameṉṟu kēcaittaḷiviṭṭārām (“Your holding an umbrella, by going against custom, is itself a violation: case dismissed”).Footnote ⁴⁰

I have used these examples of building and dress to underscore how compliance with missionary directives cannot be understood as only conformity with Christian law on the part of converts. That is to say, the practices of Pariah converts were not only attempts to “internalize,” with more or less success, Christian ideals. To assume so would leave unanswered why some forms of Christian practice were adopted with enthusiasm, while others were not. Let me turn to a final example in order to emphasize this point, an example of a Christian ideal that, unlike personal hygiene and school-going, missionaries had little success in instituting: truthfulness.

With the kind of inwardness missionaries endorsed came a concern with sincerity, for the inner citadel in which one was expected to regularly commune with God was deeply obscured from the view of others, and must therefore be brought to light and shown to be in alignment with the faith that one expressed in social forms of worship.Footnote ⁴¹ A sine qua non of their duty as far as missionaries were concerned, therefore, was to train converts to value the truth and to regard lying as a serious sin. New Pariah converts, for their part, doubted that this was a valid or necessary component of Christianity, as depictions like the following make clear:

These converts argued that it was impossible either to forsake the world (and thereby embrace a life directed only at the perfection of the spirit as missionaries would want) or to refrain from lying.

But this was not simply because converts were unable to accept that lying was sin. Rather, for Pariah converts, there were serious obstacles in the way of reconciling Christianity's moral teachings with the demands made upon the Pariah laborer by the master-cum-creditor. Morals, after all, are expressed only in social relations, and the moral code of the missionary had consequences in the social world of the Pariahs and their masters. Thus one Pariah woman came to the Reverend William Goudie in tears, torn between the opposed expectations of the missionary and an angry creditor: “I cannot enter the Christian church. I cannot keep your law. You forbid lying and we cannot live without lying. We are in debt and we have constantly to promise to pay ‘to-morrow’ when we know we cannot do it.”Footnote ⁴³ Goudie rejoiced at these tears, for to him they signaled “the dawn of a new moral sense” in the heart of the recent convert. Yet if, when lies were expected of an indebted Pariah—“Yes, swami [lord], the money will be in your hands tomorrow”—she chose instead to speak plainly—“In truth, I cannot say when I will repay you”—this would signal not only the “dawn of a new moral sense,” but a mutinous violation of expected patterns of deference.

What I have emphasized in this section is that Pariahs' alliances with missionaries produced Christians who may be equally described as striving to meet the demands of Christianity that missionaries had laid out, but also as engaged in distinct projects involving the transformation of labor relations, in which the selective adoption of Christian practices was an essential component. At the same time, missionaries increasingly offered novel forms of support to the Pariahs, such as ensuring that law courts and the police would not unfairly target them at the behest of their masters. And perhaps most important of all, though falling outside the purview of the present argument, missionaries took the concerns of the Pariah to state officials, thereby inaugurating a welfare regime that in many respects is still in effect today.Footnote ⁴⁴ The most potentially revolutionary aspect of state intervention in Pariah servitude was the suggestion, mooted by officials and missionaries, to settle Pariahs on mission-managed farms outside the control of their erstwhile masters. It is no surprise, given all that I have described, that landowning castes came to view Christian missionaries with increasing animosity; what I will focus on below is the language they used to cross swords.

AUTHENTICITY AND STATUS: LANGUAGES OF OPPOSITION TO CONVERSION

The problems missionaries posed to the caste elites who employed Pariah labor had begun to command the attention of the native press by the end of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth. They brought with them novel ways of publicly talking about the religion of Pariahs and their conversion to Christianity. The single most important innovation in this regard was the adoption and dissemination by Tamil publicists of the Christian idea that religion should be rooted in an autonomous spiritual realm, and that conversion was only legitimate when motivated by the spirit. It was in this context that the trope of the “authentically spiritual conversion” first assumed the place that it enjoys today in the parlance of anti-conversion polemicists and legislators.

First consider an example of what objections to missionary-Pariah alliances looked like prior to the emergence of this new language. In the early 1890s, the Hindujanasamskarini, a Madras monthly, commented thus on missionaries' suggestions to government that Pariahs be settled on their own lands: “[Regarding] the proposal of the Christian missionaries for Pariah colonization … [we believe] the object of the missionaries is to deprive the high-caste people of their privileges and lower their status and rank and [we regret] to observe that.… collectors are aiding them in this matter. [We also] warn … the high-caste people to be on the alert and watch with jealous attention the attempts of the missionaries.”Footnote ⁴⁵

While the paper cautioned readers as to the dangers of Pariah-missionary alliances, there was, significantly, no talk at this time of Christianity being a menace to Hinduism—no talk, that is, of a conflictive encounter between religions—but only of missionaries posing a threat to caste. Caste was here figured as the “privileges,” “status,” and “rank” that high castes enjoyed, and which, as we have seen, specific practices of Pariah converts directly challenged. Conversion, and the relationship of a specific kind of selfhood to the legitimacy of religion, had not yet become an element of remonstrance against missionary activity.

But when, beginning around 1895, the state began to entertain the idea of founding Pariah agricultural settlements under missionary management, The Hindu, Madras' leading daily, protested in a decidedly different vein. Now it inveighed against what it described as the shameless “purchase” of converts, the beguilement of Pariahs for whom the offer of land was so tempting that they could not be said to be exercising real choice: “We cannot understand how Government is justified in giving up large tracts of land to Christian missionaries for being used as bait to draw Pariahs into the Christian fold.… [H]is object is to inveigle the Pariahs into the Christian fold.… [The] Christian missionary dangles before [the Pariah] worldly temptations of a kind he cannot resist.”Footnote ⁴⁶The Hindu's editorial had taken on, as if it were a matter of universal concern, a Protestant theological norm—ironically, while opposing Christian proselytism—and Tamil newsmen pronounced the search for social or material betterment, and authentic religious conversion, to be fundamentally incompatible. The Hindu likewise accepted the conception of individual autonomy that underwrote Protestant concern with genuinely spiritual conversion and motive, explaining that Pariah conversions were illegitimate because they were compelled from without by “temptations” rather than originating authentically from within: “[The] movement [amongst Pariahs] comes, not as a reform movement from within, but as a social revolt initiated on purpose from without.… The Missionary … knows that where Christ fails to draw, the temptations of the world can be powerful.… [He] thus offers to the hitherto resolute Pariah … temptations.…”Footnote ⁴⁷

Like missionaries who feared Pariahs' material misery threatened their ability to make authentically free religious choices, this organ of native opinion contended that poverty made Pariahs uniquely susceptible to worldly temptation, and that it was this (and not any legitimate desire for a better life) that was leading to a “social revolt” against landed interests. What is important to observe is that, at this moment when authenticity talk first emerged, the native press's critiques of missionary proselytism freely ranged from the problems it caused for landowners to its alleged production of inauthentic converts. For it was still perfectly acceptable, in a way that it is not today, to treat the former as valid grounds for complaint. The leap from one to the other—from complaints about inauthentic religion to criticism of the proposed Pariah settlements as a threat to the agrarian order—was made with what today appears as disarming frankness:

Reverends Adam Andrew and William Goudie, the most prominent missionary advocates of the Pariah's cause in Madras—for by the mid-1890s the Pariah had attained the status of a public problem—wrote responses to the editorial which were published in the missionary-friendly Madras Mail. Andrew pointed out that the amount of land given to missionaries for the purpose of Pariah settlements was tiny, hardly the makings of a revolution, and that it was given not to induce non-Christian Pariahs to convert, but to allow those that were already Christian to provide for their own livelihood: “Indeed, it was because the [Pariahs] had become Christians, and were under our pastoral care, before ever we thought of beginning a Settlement scheme for them, that induced us to do something to improve their condition.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Andrew also pointed out that the majority of missionary educational institutions, the costliest of missionary endeavors, in fact primarily benefited caste Hindus. “It surely shows a narrow contracting of mind to criticize the little that is being done for the poor [Pariahs], when Missionaries are doing so much for the moral and intellectual uplifting of the higher classes of Hindus!”Footnote ⁵⁰ Andrew and Goudie thus contested every charge The Hindu brought forth save one: while denying that missionaries offered worldly inducements to Pariahs, Andrew admitted, “Those who do come over have often mixed motives, no doubt.…”

Not surprisingly, then, the rejoinder that appeared in The Hindu concentrated, above all, on the importance of motive to true religious conversion, even as it echoed missionaries' own judgment that Pariahs' poverty rendered them virtually incapable of the pure spiritual motives required for their conversions to be authentic. References to the importance of the Pariah to the agrarian order had all but disappeared:

The objection was not to conversion per se, The Hindu henceforth insisted, but only to inauthentic conversion.

Elites in Madras city, many of whom were absentee landlords, thus developed a new way of speaking, protesting missionary evangelism of the Pariah on the basis of a conception of true religious belief as one characterized by the movement of an individual soul. This conception was a staple of nineteenth-century Protestant missiology, although perspicuous missionaries in India had begun to question this paradigm of conversion on the basis of their Indian experiences. They preferred to hope Pariahs, eminently docile, could be taught the right motives subsequent to baptism. High caste Indians, for their part, had not hitherto concerned themselves with Pariahs' motives, let alone with assessing whether they were sufficiently “spiritual.” Yet, beginning around 1903, Madras' elite became scrupulous inspectors of the inner world of Pariah converts, their apparent lack of “spiritual conviction,” and their subsequent vulnerability to worldly “temptation.”

This concern, importantly, was not confined to English-language papers like The Hindu. The Telugu Sasilekha (published in Madras city) wrote, “Missionaries obtain large tracts of land on darkhasts [leases] and distribute them for cultivation only among those who, imbibing their teaching, become converts.… [This] will induce Panchamas [Pariahs] and others to become converts.”Footnote ⁵² The largest circulating Tamil daily in Madras, Swadesamitran, questioned for its part “the propriety of Government assigning lands on darkhast [lease] to European missionaries.… [Missionaries] only let them to such of the poor natives as are willing to embrace Christianity, and thus seek to propagate their own religion in this country.”Footnote ⁵³ While vernacular accounts such as these perhaps did not have the same urbane fluency as The Hindu in speaking of authentic conversion, the high-minded charge of buying converts had abruptly become a cause célèbre throughout the native press.