Untouchable Bodies, Resistance, and Liberation: A Comparative Theology of Divine Possessions, by Joshua Samuel

Abstract

In Untouchable Bodies, Joshua Samuel asks the reader to reenvision embodied Dalit lives differently through a Hindu-Christian interreligious comparison. It is a scholar’s journey in his corporeal self and collectively in the bodies of the Paraiyar people of South India. From the disciplined and subdued bodies of Paraiyars, Samuel offers an insider perspective of how resistance and subversion get envisaged. The book is both a search and a statement for Dalit embodied being against constant denial of their existence. It is a multi-sited ethnographic study that aims at a comparative interreligious reading of spirit possessions in the Paraiyar community of Tamil Nadu.In part 1, the author intersects comparative theology with Dalit theology to ideate a comparative theology of liberation that is embodied, people-centered, nonidentitarian and interreligious. Samuel adopts a theological framework for this task based on Dalit bodies and their sacramentality. He offers a shift in “theologizing liberationist and post-colonial sensitivity,”emphasizing consciousness about silenced voices and experiences of religious communities. In other words, he engages in a highly anticipated paradigm change of decentering theology based on text and instead focusing on embodied experiences. Furthermore, Dalit sacramentality, as Samuel proposes, is performatively expressed in embodied divine experiences or “possessions,” which form the foundation of a comparative liberative theology. We could note the emphasis on the oppressed Dalit body being the prime locus of enunciation for liberation. In chapter 4, Samuel interweaves Dalit and non-Dalit possession narratives to signify the institutionalization of divine possession that becomes a critical hermeneutical swerve in this text. He claims that even though “possessions may not be always seen as explicit acts of resistance, they do embody creative subversion, at least in some contexts” (126).Samuel turns his gaze toward Dalit Christian divine possessions in chapters 5 and 6. He affirms the colonial iterations of Dalit Christianity and acclaims the social emancipation the gospel message envisages. He painfully notes that Dalits were treated as subjects of suspicion and contempt by high-caste converts and Christian missionaries alike. Protestant missionaries perceived the caste system as a political and religious problem but omitted its social impact. In other words, they were instrumental in maintaining the hierarchy of the caste system among Dalit converts. Samuel counterposes mass movements among Paraiyars as subversion against these caste hierarchies. In his words, “the conversions of Dalits in mass movements were neither uncritical nor forced but were a conscious and deliberate expression of Dalit agency” (135). Samuel foregrounds the issue of Dalit conversion in India as a critical node of discourse. Dalit conversion to Christianity becomes problematic to Hindutva nationalism due to its subversive nature and resistant agency. As a preamble to his discussion of Dalit divine possessions, Samuel makes critical remarks about the “God of Dalits.” Breaking from traditional Dalit theological imagination of a victor God or a suffering God, he emphasizes the redemptive suffering of Dalit lives. “In Dalit theological imagination,” Samuel writes, “God in Jesus the Christ is a co-sufferer with the Dalits, who is truly in solidarity with them, partaking in their Dalit experience(s), challenging, encouraging, supporting, and fighting with/for them to resist the oppressive structures that dehumanize them while offering redemptive messianic value to their suffering to liberate their oppressors” (144). In chapter 6, Samuel appraises Dalit divine possession through this liberative and redemptive prism. This possession is a radical centering of bodily experiences in relation to the divine (163)—a disruption of modern dualistic conceptualizations of the human as body and mind/soul and of the denigration of the body.Chapter 8 is an interesting tryst of events. Samuel makes some revolutionary theological assertions about, for example, a Dalit Kairos. The most beautiful rendition of Dalit embodied spirituality is uncovered in the cosmotheandric space of Kairos—a traditional Tillichian espousal. Dalit kairoi are the meeting point of Theos and Andros in the Kosmos (body-space) of Dalit bodies. Though I am not sure why Kairos becomes the central theological validation for his comparative interreligious reflection, it is a surreptitious encore of the text’s liberative tones. Kairos—a decisive or opportune time, or Christic event—corresponds to an unprecedented historic reference point. That said, one improvement to Samuel’s text would be to enlighten us further about how Kairos, as a recurring event, adjudicates a resistant and subversive existence in quotidian Dalit lives.