| The dissertation, an historical ethnography, critically assesses the encounter of a sectarian dalit (untouchable) Hindu community, the Satnamis, with evangelical Christianity in the late colonial period, and puts forth the argument that in this dialogic interaction a Satnami-Christian identity emerged, distinct from both that of the Satnamis and their evangelical interlocutors. On the one hand, the transformations wrought in the Satnami-Christian community were overwhelmingly the result of contact with a heterogenetic religion (Christianity), a religion made attractive by, among other things, its putative association with colonial structures of power and wealth, and with the aura of novel and potent sources of authority (e.g., "reason," science, and literacy). On the other hand, the trajectory of these transformations was orthogenetically altered; that is, the transformations were conditioned in appreciable and significant ways by pre-existing Satnami structures of thought, belief, and behavior, by the community's unique set of hopes and dreams, by its methods of determining "truth" and "falsity," and by its "history" and "tradition."; The interdisciplinary study relies most heavily on the methods and theories of anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and subaltern studies. It also builds upon emerging scholarship on identity, power, and gender. In order to analyze and describe the development of a distinct Satnami-Christian communal consciousness, the dissertation draws from British and missionary sources (both published and archival), texts translated from Hindi and Chhattisgarhi, and oral histories collected from residents of the region during an intense period of fieldwork. The study attempts to honor all perspectives by focusing not on history, but on the perception of history, and strives to hear the voices of the subaltern above the din of western voices which framed, filtered, and interpreted them. |
