‘Christians are lowly, Hindus are superior’

My stories, my fam­ily’s stories, were not stories in India. They were just life. When I left and made new friends in a new country, only then did the things that happened to my family, the things we had done, become stories. Stories worth telling, sto­ries worth writing down.

I was born in south In­dia, in a town called Khazi­pet in the state of Andhra Pradesh. I was born into a lower-middle-class family. My parents were college lecturers.

I was born an untouch­able.

When people in this country ask me what it means to be an untouch­able, I explain that caste is like racism against blacks here. But then they ask, “How does anyone know what your caste is?” They know caste isn’t visible, like skin color.

I explain it like this. In In­dian villages and towns, ev­eryone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own spe­cial role and its own place to live... Every day in an Indian newspaper you can read of an untouchable beaten or killed for wearing sandals, for riding a bicycle...

No one informed me that I was untouchable. It is not the kind of thing that your mother would need to tell you. What I was told was that we were Christians.

Christians, untouch­ables—it came to the same thing. All Christians in In­dia were untouchable, as far as I knew (though only a small minority of all un­touchables are Christian).

I knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu. I knew no Hindu who did not look right through a Christian man standing in front of him as if he did not exist.

I accepted this. No ques­tions asked.

I knew a Christian boy who was pushed in front of a train for falling in love with an uppercaste girl.

Christians are lowly. Hindus are superior. Chris­tians are weak. Hindus are powerful.

I understood. I accepted. That was the natural way of things. The questions start­ed when I was fifteen and someone took me and my sister to see a movie. Then they came in a flood that would not stop for years. In a way, they still haven’t.

In the movie a rich girl falls in love with a poor boy. The girl’s powerful family intimidates the poor boy’s family into forcing him to stop seeing her. The girl, not knowing what her fam­ily has done, goes search­ing for the boy. When she can’t find him, she gives up and agrees to marry a nice, well-educated, wealthy man. No surprises here for an Indian moviegoer. The shock came at the wedding scene. The heroine wears a white gown. Not a sari like a Hindu bride. A white, Western-style gown with a veil, like they wear at Chris­tian weddings.

My blood froze. My brain went numb. I couldn’t breathe.

The rich girl was Chris­tian! And I recalled that in the scene where the poor boy’s family was threat­ened, his father had on his chest the cross-thread worn by all brahmin men.

This movie, in sheer defiance of the laws of nature, portrayed Chris­tians as rich and powerful and—most amazing of all— scornful of brahmins, the highest caste of all.

It is simply not possible to convey what this meant to a fifteen-year-old un­touchable Christian girl.

Were there really Chris­tians like this? Why had I never seen them?

Why had no one ever mentioned this before?

My questions found no outlet. It was too shameful to bring up the subject of our inferior status, even among my own folk. I nev­er thought to ask anyone. I wouldn’t have known how to put the words together.

Four years later, at nine­teen, I left home to enroll in a postgraduate program at the Regional Engineering College (REC) in Waran­gal. There were only fifteen RECs in the whole country. Students from other states and even other countries went there to study. That was the first time in my life I saw people from outside my home state of Andhra.

Being a small-town girl, I was afraid of betraying my curiosity about all the strange and modern things I saw at the college. I saw girls with short hair. I saw girls in sleeveless blouses. I even saw some girls wear­ing pants. Some wore lip­stick and tweezed their eye­brows. I saw girls secretly smoking. I learned the con­cept of boyfriend-girlfriend. And of course all of these girls could speak English. It was here that I first saw in real life what I had seen in that movie: Christians who looked down on even high-caste Hindus.

But what could I ask them? I was ashamed to bring up the subject. I fin­ished my program without ever finding out what the difference was between them and me.

After Regional Engi­neering College I went to yet another citadel of engi­neering education. I went to Madras to attend the Indi­an Institute of Technology. IITs are the most elite, most cosmopolitan technical in­stitutions in India, the Indi­an equivalents of MIT and Caltech. I was a research associate in the department of applied physics working on a project funded by the Indian Space Research Or­ganisation.

In the ladies’ hostel, my eyes were dazzled by the sight of the other girls. They were all so beauti­ful, rich, happy, charming, high-class. I felt as if I were surrounded by movie hero­ines, but with brains. And in the hostel I saw many more of those elusive supe­rior Christians.

One thing I noticed quickly: they all came from the southern state of Kera­la. That movie I had seen, I found out later, had been made in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala, and dubbed into my own na­tive language of Telugu.

These Kerala Christian girls lived in the same wing of the hostel as me. Jessie’s beauty was otherworldly. She was always flanked by two brahmin girls, her loyal sidekicks...

The brahmin boys who fawned over these Chris­tian girls would look at me in disgust. In my town, Christian girls were called crows, pigs, scavengers. One boy in my neighbour­hood used to call me and my sister “shit lilies.”

I wanted to make friends with these Keralites. Wasn’t I a Christian like them? But they shunned me just as any Hindu would... But I was determined to find out why I was different. Jessie was kind, one of the only girls who would talk to me. Her room and my room were on the same floor. I tagged along with her to church even though by then I already didn’t give a damn about God.

I asked to see photos of Jessie’s family. They were obviously wealthy. I started probing, asking questions. Jessie explained, “We are brahmins.”

She told me her family came from a brahmin caste in Kerala called Nambudi­ris. Nambudiris are so high in rank that they look down on all other brahmins.

“Why did you become Christian?”

She explained that among the Nambudiris, in ancient times, the eldest son inherited all the proper­ty, and only he was allowed to marry. The rest of the sons inherited nothing and had to find lower-caste mis­tresses or remain celibate.

When Jesus’ disciple Thomas travelled to Kerala, some disgruntled younger Nambudiri sons left Hin­duism altogether and were baptised by Thomas. “So we are brahmin Christians,” Jessie told me.

But I refused to believe her. Is that all it took? Some Christians decide to claim brahmin heritage and ev­eryone believes it? It was too far-fetched.

When I came to Amer­ica, I met more Kerala Christians. By this time I was brazen. Every time I met one, my first question would be “How come you have high social status whereas we don’t?”

They all told me the same story: they were brah­mins converted by Saint Thomas.

“When?”

“Fifty-two a.d.”

So what is the rela­tion between religion and caste? Between caste and social status? Between so­cial status and wealth? Be­tween wealth and caste? I thought about these things incessantly.