In the second part of this series (‘Construction of identities’, IE, November 6) on the anti-Dharmic origins and journey of the Dravidian Movement, drawing from scholarly literature, I had stated that “caste” and “tribe” as we understand them today, are ethnocentric categories created by the Christian European coloniser based on ethnographies of Bharat’s society and social organisation prepared by Christian missionaries. I had ended the piece with the following questions: One, what were the motivations of the colonial-missionary combine in seeking to understand and document the ethnography of Bharat? Two, how did they go about this exercise? How much of a role did European Christian theology and ethnocentrism play in framing the purpose and methodology of the exercise? Three, what was the role played by the “native” in aid of the exercise? Did the “native” understand colonial intentions and evangelical motives? If yes, why did he continue to cooperate and collaborate with the colonial exercise to the detriment of Bharat?

The first question may give the impression that documentation of Bharat’s “ethnography” was undertaken for the first time during the British colonial period. However, literature reveals that the interest of Christian European missionaries in Bharat’s social organisation predates the formal establishment of the British Raj. In this piece, I will present a broad snapshot of early missionary work in Bharat which birthed both “caste” and the “Dravidian” identity.

In his seminal work, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001), Nicholas B Dirks demonstrates factually that the use of “caste” to understand Bharat’s society is a modern phenomenon attributable to the colonial period. He points out that the word “casta” was first used in relation to Bharat’s social order by the Portuguese official Duarte Barbosa in the sixteenth century. After all, the first European nation to establish a colony in Bharat was Portugal, a few years after Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut in 1498. Barbosa’s observations on casta were based on his stay in the Vijayanagara Empire.

Perhaps the next important milestone was the founding of the Tranquebar (Tharangambadi in present-day Tamil Nadu) Mission or the Royal Danish Mission in 1706 by the German Lutheran missionary Bartholomeus Ziegenbalg under the directions of the then King of Denmark, Frederick IV. The Danish king, like any good Christian ruler, sent 48 missionaries (most of whom were German Lutherans) to spread the Protestant version of the Christian faith in Tranquebar. As Will Sweetman explains in detail in his article ‘The Dravidian Idea in Missionary Accounts of South Indian Religion’, the Danish Protestant Missions led by German Lutherans “pioneered what became integral parts of Protestant missionary strategy, including translation of the Bible into Indian languages, dissemination of printed tracts, and running schools”.

In fact, Sweetman states that the Danish Protestant Mission tolerated continued “caste distinctions” among converts to Christianity from Hinduism. This toleration of caste distinctions among converts from the Hindu fold was common to Protestant Missions operating in the North and South of Bharat until the 1820s.

Coming back to the founder of the Tranquebar Mission, Ziegenbalg, his primary contribution, critical to the topic at hand, was his understanding of the religion in the South, because for him it was the religion of the South. He captured his views on the subject in his two works, Malabarian Heathenism (1711) and The Geneaology of Malabarian Gods (1713). Both these works, especially the latter, would go on to contribute to the creation of a Dravidian identity and its cleaving from the identity of the “Aryan North”. Sweetman points out that despite being aware of Sanskrit and Sanatan Dharma, since Ziegenbalg was primarily exposed to the collection of Tamil religious texts in the libraries of non-Brahmin Saivaite adheenams (religious institutions), he formed the view that the “Tamil Religion” was distinct from the “Brahminical”/Vedic religion of North.

This is, perhaps, the earliest expression of the missionary position that Tamil Saivism has nothing to do with Sanatan Dharma. It should not come as a surprise that this line continues to be parroted by Dravidianists of today, the latest occasion being the release of Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan when Dravidianists such as Thirumavalavan, Seeman, Kamal Haasan and Karunas (the last two are actors) claimed that Cholas were not Hindus since Saivism had nothing to do with the Vedic religion.

Between Ziegenbalg’s premature death at the age of 37 in 1719 and the arrival of Lutheran Missionaries of Leipzig Missionary Society such as Karl Graul as Mission Director in Tranquebar in 1844 (who I will discuss in the next piece), the other missionary who contributed significantly to the scholarship on “caste” was the French Catholic Missionary Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois. According to Nicholas Dirks, Dubois’ work, Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India, and of Their Institutions, Religious and Civil, was “the first extensive, and in the early years of the nineteenth century the most influential, European account of caste united textual formulations with empirical observation”. However, Dirks states that Dubois’ work was largely based on an earlier work of a Pondicherry-based French Jesuit Missionary, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (also known as Père Coeurdoux), who is known for his Telugu-French-Sanskrit dictionary. Coeurdoux’s correspondence in the 1760s with other French Indologists on the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German and Russian, was passed off by Abbé Dubois as his work to the British Resident in Mysore, Mark Wilks, in 1806. When Wilks shared the manuscript with the then Madras Government, the latter bought the copyright in the work for 2,000 star pagodas, the standard coin of the British East India Company until 1816. Dubois’ work was then translated from French to English and formally published in 1816.

William Bentinck, the then Governor of Madras, acknowledged the importance of Dubois’ work to understand the “customs and manners of the Hindus” so that government servants may conduct themselves “more in unison with the customs of the natives”. Commenting on the significance of Dubois’ work to the British colonial apparatus, Nicholas Dirks says: “Dubois performed an anthropological service to the British rulers of India, doing so in part because as a French Jesuit Missionary he was thought to be able to cross social worlds far more readily than the imperial British themselves. But, as was true with all missionary perspectives, social worlds were crossed in order to convert souls, a social fact that led to very strong views on the subject of caste”.

As the literature will further reveal, “Indology”, as we know it today, has its foundations in Christian evangelical motives since it was important for the missionaries to understand the social lay of the land of Bharat to harvest souls and convert the “natives” to the “one true faith”. Unfortunately, stating this indisputable documented fact invites ad hominem labels. Pertinently, the heavy concentration of missionaries in Southern Bharat and the rise of Dravidianism cannot be dismissed as being unrelated developments. Despite this history, it is somehow deemed “anti-secular” to draw attention to the continuity of thought, speech and action between missionaries of the past, and present-day Dravidianists and their benefactors (whoever they may be). This is not surprising, considering that one of the expected requirements of “independent” India’s brand of secularism is that it must trump and prevail over truth. So much for “Satyameva Jayate”.

In the next piece, I will cover more ground on the “anthropological service” provided by Christian missionaries to the colonial rulers of Bharat and the motivations behind the same.

The writer is a commercial and constitutional litigator who practises as a counsel before the Supreme Court of India, the High Court ofDelhi, the NCLAT and the CCI

Originally written in Indian Express on Jan 15th , 2024 and all credit goes to them.