“Bringing conversion down to earth”

Abstract

There is a striking moment that is described late on in Nathaniel Roberts’ illuminating ethnography of conversion in a Dalit slum, situated a little way out from Chennai’s city center. Roberts is sitting in the house of his informant Celvi, one of many local women who have converted to Christianity, and she tells him, with some passion: “There are no good pastors—only Jesus is good!” (2016: 202). Celvi’s sentiment is revealing in a number of ways, not all of them obvious. To be sure, her proclamation of Jesus’ power makes her sound like Pentecostals the world over, and her mistrust of all-too-human pastors is not so unusual. But Celvi does not use her religion to insulate herself from non-Christian others, or to view them as morally compromised. In fact, religion in the slum seems to have very little to do with questions of identity or boundary-making, whether personal or collective. It does not lead to violent communal conflicts between Christians and Hindus, or to heated theological arguments. Nor does it pose unsettling questions about free will, autonomy, or cultural authenticity, as one might expect from other contexts where Pentecostal churches attempt to attract followers. Rather, in Roberts’ analysis, it helps to “suture” some of the moral fault lines that might otherwise divide slum dwellers, so that “The conversion of some residents to a different religion, instead of dividing the slum community, in fact serve[s] to unite it” (11). To Be Cared For is a book that uses closely observed ethnography to argue for what often appear to be counter-intuitive ways of thinking about religion, moral commitment, and belonging. The focus is ostensibly on conversion, but this theme is not highlighted until Chapter 5, and even then we do not read accounts of aggressive proselytizing or missionizing. By the time conversion comes to the fore, we have learned much about what it means to belong to Anbu Nagar, the slum neighborhood, as well as about how slum dwellers, including Hindus, reject caste ideologies in favor of twin ideals of deserving and giving care, and “being human.” To act and be recognized as human, indeed, is a powerful form of belonging: not merely to the slum, but also to an imagined and overarching humanity that exists in foreign realms beyond the national framework that surrounds, and oppresses, Dalit life. Of course, despite such ideals, practice is more complicated, as cooperation and sharing are threatened by tensions over spendthrift husbands, competitive pastors, and