Culture Religion and Home-making in and Beyond South Asia

By James Ponniah

Culture, Religion, and Home-making in and Beyond South Asia explores how the idea of the home is repurposed or re-envisioned in relation to experiences of modernity, urbanization, conflict, migration and displacement. It considers how these processes are reflected in rituals, beliefs and social practices. It explores the processes by which "home" may be constructed and how relocations often result in either the replication or rejection of traditional homes and identities. Ponniah examines the various contestations surrounding the categories of "home" and "religion," including interfaith families, urban spaces, and sacred places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781506439938

Book preview

Harishankar

Acknowledgments

One of the oldest, foundational, and ubiquitous human realities is home. Its longevity in spite of its transformations in relation to place, culture, religion, and shifting lifestyles, and across a range of geographical contexts and historical periods deserves scholarly attention. This book, entitled Culture, Religion, and Home-Making in and Beyond South Asia, is an outcome of such a scholarly endeavor that sought to take cognizance of the phenomenon of home-making through an international conference jointly organized by The Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, Elon University (USA) and The Department of Christian Studies, University of Madras (India) in Tamil Nadu’s capital city of Chennai from July 28–29, 2016.

The essays of the edited volume, except for the four (essays by Mundackal, Deborah, Abraham, and Ponniah), were presented as papers at the conference. I am very grateful to Prof. Brian Pennington, Director, The Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, for making available a grant from Elon University to support the conference, and to my longtime colleague and collaborator, Dr. Amy Allocco, Professor of Religious Studies, Elon University, for meticulously planning with me the conference and making it a dream come true. While I thank Elon University for the grant, I also stand indebted to the local host, The University of Madras, its honorable Vice-Chancellor, its Registrar, and the administrative staff for their timely help and the institutional facilities that were generously made available. The conference would not have materialized without the substantial support of Prof. Gnana Patrick, Head, Department of Christian Studies, and the staff and the students of the Department of Christian Studies whose cooperation I always rely on and remain ever grateful for. It is the academic success of the conference that has led to the publication of this volume.

Publishing an edited volume is a team work. It is the synergy of so many minds that have contributed to the volume. I am deeply indebted to all the contributors who delivered on their promises to write and revise the essays in keeping with the suggestions of the reviewers. I stand in admiration of and gratitude to Ms. Deeksha Sivakumar, Emory University, for her unfailing professional help in reviewing and copy-editing all the essays on time. Without her timely help, the book would not have seen the light of day. I extend my sincere gratitude to my colleague and dear friend, Dr. Amitha Santiago, Bishop Cotton Women’s Christian College, for co-authoring the introduction, who with her long involvement in Gender Studies has provided her insightful ideas to formulate this introduction. I would also like to thank Dr. Jesudas Athyal, the Acquiring Editor of Fortress Press, for his efficiency. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the publisher, Fortress Press, for bringing out this edited volume in time.

James Ponniah

Editor

Contributors

Amitha Santiago is Professor and Head, Post Graduate Department of English, Bishop Cotton Women’s Christian College, Bangalore. She began her research with her doctoral studies in Caribbean identity and religions and now engages questions pertaining to religion in Asia with a culturalist approach. She is currently a Research Fellow with the University of Hong Kong pursuing research amongst the transgender community in Saundatti, Karnataka. Her writing has been in the areas of religion, gender, and identity politics in Asia.

Bharathi Harishankar is Professor and Head, Department of Women’s Studies, University of Madras. Her research interests include gender studies, postcolonial studies, and translation. She has taught courses, guided research, and published extensively in these areas. She has successfully completed projects for UGC, IIT Madras, NCW, and IDRC Canada. At present, she is part of an EU project. She has won several awards and honors including the Humanities Research Centre fellowship, Shastri Indo-Canadian fellowship, and invitations as speaker at University of Cambridge and La Pietra dialogues at New York University, Florence.

Dilini Wijeweera is a researcher and writer, helping students develop creative questioning capacities to view interconnections and situations holistically. Her interests include technology adoption, innovation spaces, and knowledge networks. Before returning to Sri Lanka, Dilini worked at the Technology and Social Change Group, University of Washington. She is a Fulbright Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Dilini also holds an MBA degree and is a Chartered Architect.

Dimantha Weliange completed his architectural education at the Queensland University of Technology, graduating with Honours in 2002. He has been in private practice since 2009. Dimantha is a senior lecturer at the City School of Architecture, Colombo, serving as the Deputy Head for the Academic Session 2011–12. He promotes a holistic approach to design where the social, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of design are balanced with the client needs, financial viability, and environmental sustainability.

James Ponniah is Assistant Professor of the Department of Christian Studies at the University of Madras, Chennai, where he earned his PhD. He has authored a book, The Dynamics of Folk Religion in Society: Pericentralisation as Deconstruction of Sanskritisation (2011) and has co-edited many books. His areas of research include folk religious practices of India, ritual power, popular Catholicism, Dalit Christianity, Inter-faith religious practices, religious violence, and Christian responses in India and Sri Lanka. He was awarded a Collaborative International Research Grant by American Academy of Religions in 2015.

Kochurani Abraham is a feminist theologian, gender researcher, and trainer from Kerala, India, with a PhD in Christian Studies from the University of Madras, India. She teaches feminist theology in some institutes of formation and is the regional coordinator of the Indian Christian Women’s Movement in Kerala. Her research interests include gender, ecology, spirituality, and transformative education, and she is passionate about bridging the academia and the grassroots for a liberative praxis.

L. DeAne Lagerquist is the Harold H. Ditmanson Distinguished Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College (Northfied, Minnesota), where she joined the faculty in 1988. She earned the PhD in the History of Christianity from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In addition to her scholarship about American religion and Lutheranism around the world, she teaches a course on Christianity in India and takes students to Greece and Turkey studying sacred places.

Lisa John Mundackal works as an Assistant Professor of English at Vimala College (Autonomous), Thrissur, Kerala. Her teaching career is nearly a decade old. She holds an MA in English Language and Literature from Stella Maris College (Autonomous), Chennai, and is currently pursuing her research in food narratives, particularly recipe fiction. She has presented research papers at various national and international conferences and has several publications to her credit.

Midori Horiuchi is Professor of the Oyasato Institute for the Study of Religion, Tenri University in Japan. She was a research scholar by invitation of the Indian Government at Banaras Hindu University (1984-88) and studied the comparative study of interpretations of Bhgavad-Gita in modern India, and was conferred a PhD in Philosophy. Her fields of interests are religious studies, especially modern Hinduism, new religions in Japan, gender studies in religion, and Tenrikyo studies.

Rituparna Ray Chowdhury is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Rishi Bankim Chandra Evening College, West Bengal State University. She is an alumnus of Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research interests are socio-cultural history of British colonial era, gender, and labor studies. She had participated and presented papers in quite a few national and international seminars.

S. Susan Deborah, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, M.E.S. College of Arts & Commerce, Goa. She is one of the editors of Ecocultural Ethics: Critical Essays (2018), Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays (2016), and Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations (2014). She is the recipient (along with Rayson K. Alex) of ASLE-USA Media Subvention Grant, for creating an interactive video space for ecocinema scholarship. Her interests lie in ecocriticism, ecomedia, gender studies, and food studies.

Surangi Gunawardena, obtained BSc (BE) and a MSc (Architecture) degrees in Sri Lanka. A Chartered Architect with 16 years of experience, she is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of School at the City School of Architecture, Sri Lanka. Her vision as a senior academic, with her interests being environment, sustainability, and conservation of heritage, is to encourage the teaching and practice of responsible humanitarian architecture that is wholeheartedly conscious of people, society, and the environment.

Trayee Sinha is Assistant Professor of English at Bidhan Chandra College, Asansol. She has done her MPhil and PhD from Women’s Studies Research Centre, University of Calcutta. She has presented papers at national and international seminars and has published articles in peer reviewed journals and books. Her area of research includes gender studies, Indian writing in English, and postcolonial literature.

Usha R. Vijailakshmi is Associate Professor of History at Patkar-Varde College, University of Mumbai. Her passion is to research on the Migration of Historical Communities in India. Her doctoral research was on Migration of Tamilians to Karnataka from 850-1350: Study of Political and Socio-Economic Aspects. She undertook a post-doctoral research on The Migration of Marathas to Tamil Nadu and its Impact on the Maratha Diaspora. She recently completed a project on Tracing the Intra-City Migration in the City of Mumbai through the study of Hindu Temples. She is a member of the Management Council of the Asiatic Society; and the Chairperson of Mumbai Research Centre, Mumbai.

Foreword

What makes a space a home? How does a particular site, whether it is a built structure, a network of dwellings, a region, or a nation, come to evoke the memories, emotions, persons, and physical features that we associate with the richly evocative but perhaps undefinable idea of home? These are among the questions this volume invites us to ask. By identifying its scope as in and beyond South Asia, the book reminds us that conceptions of home will vary from place to place but that it is a concept we can identify and recognize across cultural registers. By reflecting on the process of home-making, it reminds us that homes are not naturally occurring entities, but rather they must be fashioned through human processes and that they are produced and reproduced within political contexts, social systems, and economic flows. Home-making is a fundamentally human act, and homes are building blocks of human culture. As these chapters will show, religion offers a powerful set of resources for the work of forging homes and our ideas and feelings about them.

The chapters in this book reflect on the cultural and ideological dynamics that transform the spaces in which people reside, whether they be neutral, welcoming, or hostile, into homes. The techniques and technologies that home-makers employ are various. These authors examine how food, ritual, and art bind people to places and forge affective bonds between them. They also examine how, in a globalizing era of mass migration, transnational organizations with their origins in the homeland can ease the transition for those settling in new lands.

Collectively, these pieces reveal that shifting circumstances routinely demand the utilization of home-making processes. War, conquest, and economic disruption give rise to the demands for new homes. We observe, moreover, very different processes when migrants come as foreign occupiers than we do when they are refugees. Many of these essays are about movement as a result of such events. Migrants bring with them a set of cultural practices to their destinations that help make alien space familiar and that, in turn, transform the new places they come to call home. In addition, however, their new surroundings present both challenges and resources that are also novel, and those factors also influence their home-making strategies.

Homes are gendered spaces, and home-making is gendered activity. Although the home is often figured as feminine or female space, those who identify as male or trans* often find themselves in circumstances that call on them to develop their own strategies. Nevertheless, as many of these essays underscore, the burden of home-making very often rests on women, even as they may need to traverse physical and emotional boundaries and geographies to make these processes possible. Several essays in this collection raise the issue of women’s agency in establishing domestic space, and practice and trace patterns of negotiation, contestation, and conflict between and among family members.

The present collection grows out of the international conference, To Take Place: Culture, Religion, and Home-Making in and Beyond South Asia that was organized by James Ponniah (University of Madras) and Amy L. Allocco (Elon University) and held at the University of Madras in Chennai, India, in July 2016. As a first outgrowth of their recently inaugurated Memorandum of Understanding, the conference was jointly sponsored by the Department of Christian Studies at the University of Madras and the Elon University Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, located in Elon, North Carolina. Following a keynote address presented by Brian K. Pennington (Director of the Elon University Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society), some twenty papers were presented by scholars from across India, the United States, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Canada. Several of these papers are included in the present volume, along with others that were solicited subsequently. Together they comprise a unique and provocative collection on home-making in diverse contexts related to South Asia and its diasporas. At a historical moment when competing claims about what constitutes home, and contestations about the values and ideologies that undergird the notion of home are increasingly strident, this volume illuminates some of the particular histories of homemaking and their intersections with religious traditions and communities.

Brian K. Pennington and Amy L. Allocco

Elon University

Introduction: Homes and Spaces under Transformation

James Ponniah and Amitha Santiago

In order to make it possible to think through and live [sexual] difference, we must reconsider the whole problematic of space and time…. The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places and of containers, or envelopes of identity.

Luce Irigaray[1]

Irigaray’s formulations leave a trial of implications for this book that as its starting point focuses on the home as place, which has often enough been transformed into space by the identities that have traversed it. The home has been rigorously tied to the woman as the prime inhabitant and regulator of the home as a place of belonging, nurturing, and the place of return or belongingness. The home as place has been accommodated in the imagination as the point of origin, the beginning of journeys, and the first syntax of the narrative of becoming. The home is a place that has been tied normatively to the woman, the female sex and that which is feminine. She has been assigned the role of a home-maker across time and space. And so, a range of sexist stereotyping in terms of the functions, she is meant to serve as home-maker accompanies this assigning of roles. It also overtly sanctions the distinctions made between private and public space. It is to this maneuver that this book at one level seeks to respond.

The home as a place/space has a long history of relevance to the understanding of sexual difference. The construct of home as an architectural space, an emotional habitus, a chora[2] of origins, a perpetrator and sustainer of being and becoming gathers around itself a many splendored thing: a politics of experiencing the world and representing those experiences in a narrative that is clamoring for identity. The home has long walked hand in hand with the spatial politics of preserving the division of the home from the world such that the performativity of female and male identities is assigned space to the one and the other respectively and irrevocably. Both home and space also need to be explored as a larger reality that transcends the subjectivities of women and is inscribed by other global phenomena such as colonialism, migration, displacement, and globalization and inter-faith marriages, which also inflect religious subjects.

Andy Clark provides a useful insight when he says, The mind is just less and less in the head, and it enters deep and complex relationships with non-biological constructs, props, and aids (Natural 4–5).[3] Thus it is that the topoi[4] is perhaps one of those info-material[5] sources out of which and upon which initiating schema of human behaviors are deployed. The idea of the chora in philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural feminism has overlapped with the idea of topoi to bring about a place/space of initiation that resonates with the rhetorical discursive protocol. Effectively, these info-material sources of initiation are involved in a producing of spaces and are in turn produced by the identities that are inscribed by the evidential/contextual, so that, the contextual and the rhetorical brings to the surface the potential of the topoi and the chora to breathe as text.

Titled, Culture, Religion, and Home-Making in and Beyond South Asia, this book gathers together essays that revolve around the notion of home/space across various cultures and nations in different contexts and historical periods. The different sites of home/space examined and described in this book emerge as topoi/chora and text/context. In this regard, this book takes cognizance of the production of home as conceived, performed and materialized by the people of South Asia and beyond. While some writers in the book produce the home as text/context through ethnographic means, others employ the descriptive mode and still others, the textual analytical method. These essays read the efforts of home/space makers as agential acts that deliver the promise of transformation, negotiation and re-visitations of the household, homeland, states of homelessness, and trajectories of being and becoming. Across the essays, the sites selected for scrutiny attempt to characterize the home as given and some produce the home as a politics of becoming, engendering experiential effects of positionality and empowerment.

The book has been divided into three parts thematically. Part I is titled as Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Migrants, and Home-Making. In the first essay of this part titled as "The Memsahib and Her Home in the Indian Colony: A Shadow of the Political Realm in the Domestic Sphere," the author, Rituparna Ray Chowdhury, looks at how colonial rule necessitated the memsahibs to structure their homes as micro British empires. Drawing upon household manual guides, contemporary journals, travelogues, and memoirs, this paper examines the efforts of English women in managing their domestic household as an opportunity to fulfill their mission as producers of a parallel imperialism. They developed an interesting way to promote and nurture a model of domestic life befitting the ruling race, drawing upon norms provided by early generations of British residents both male and female. This essay proposes that the process of home-making and domesticity, as spelled out in the household compendiums, was a political domesticity that reinforced ideologies of race, empire, and gender. It examines the role of the English memsahib in creating, running, and sustaining this political domesticity in the British households during the Raj and investigates if it actually empowered the English women, as the manuals claimed.

The second essay titled, Home and Sacred Place in the Letters of Gertrude Sovik: A Norwegian-American in China, is written by DeAne Lagerquist who, through an instance of third culture kids, explores the life of Gertrude Sovik as a text as lived out in the USA, China, and in post-war Europe. She derived her identity from her birth in China, American citizenship, Norwegian heritage, and Lutheran community. Her expressions of affection and longing for home in hundreds of letters referred less to stable location than to continuing relationships. Home began with her parents and brothers, encompassed the missionary community and Chinese Christians, and extended to relatives and church members in Europe and the USA. In varying degrees, they were linked by language, ethnicity, nationality, theology, and religious practices. Common experiences and institutions, notably the American School Kikungshan (ASK), China nurtured these connections. Sovik taught at ASK and St. Olaf College, worked for the Red Cross in American military hospitals, and administered resettlement programs in Europe and for Vietnamese refugees. In spite of her several experiences of dislocation and the dislocated, her Pietist Lutheran beliefs and practices allowed her to be at home on three continents, viz., America, Europe, and Asia. Her firm sense of being at home in her family and transnational, religious community informed her efforts to make a home for her students, injured soldiers, and refugees. This essay unpacks the potentiality of religious faith to form a durable, and yet portable, understanding of home that allows participation in multiple cultures and provides orientation during periods of geographic dislocation. The author describes in this essay, the possibilities that religion offers to transform the topos of China and Hong Kong into the chora through acts of hospitality, educational service, and social engagement.

Dwelling upon the spatial and linear context of regional migration within India, the third paper by Usha Vijailakshmi, entitled ‘Old Identities in a New Space: The Role of Hindu Priests in Making Diasporic Communities Feel at Home in Mumbai, not only describes how the temple-construction in the colonial city of Mumbai made it possible for the working class Hindu migrant communities to call Mumbai their home, but also probes into the struggles of home-making by the priests employed to serve in these temples. In doing so, it narrates the process of home-making among migrants from different parts of India. It records migrants’ efforts to feel at home in the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai by relocating their rural religious universe through constructing temples and performing their temple-based, home-based religious practices with the help of the priests. Just as these priests help the migrants to experience a sense of home in an alien land, the monetary compensations given to them by these migrants are not enough to support their own homes left behind in their villages. This loss for the home is partially compensated by the priests some of whom live with their families in the temple premises, while others live together as a religious community where they care for one another, making a home among the priestly fraternity.

The fourth paper in Part I, written by Midori Horiuchi, draws the reader’s attention to the context of another diasporic phenomenon in Japan. It presents the Japanese Ramakrishna movement as a new religious site in Japan, which on the one hand through meditation, hymns, devotional songs, and discourses help Japan’s Indian diaspora to nurture their native religious roots just as it makes available to the native Japanese the philosophical/religious heritage of India. On the other hand, the philosophy of practical Vedanta helps them to extend humanitarian works to the Japanese society wherein they become part of the Japanese civil society, thereby entering mainstream Japanese social spaces even as they reconnect with their homeland.

"Reconfiguring Home: Cuisinic Negotiations of Religion, Culture, and Identity in Marsha Mehran’s Pomegranate Soup" by Lisa John Mundackal attempts to investigate how the Aminpour sisters survive hostilities and reprobations at home and outside, with food. The essay explores how their cuisinic marvels redefine edibility, and transgress the geographical, political, and religious demarcations and distances between Iran and Ireland. The reconstructive and transformative abilities of food are studied in the light of a re-territorialization, which it effects in the wake of a cross-cultural encounter between an obstinate West and a tantalizingly exotic Orient. The arduous traversal from homelessness to home is made less bitter by food. Recipe fiction like Pomegranate Soup fuses the domestic kitchenscape and the politico-religious landscape to formulate a new rubric to read lives. The essay analyzes the novelist’s attempts to subvert the cult of cooking into a transformative act, and the space of kitchen into a locus of power, constructing an expansive circle that encompasses the public and the private histories of women, thereby enabling reconfigurations through cuisine. Efforts are made to study food as a facilitator in Mehran’s narrative of alienation, personal struggle, reconciliation, and growth, and to prove that besides a war or revolution, food too can sometimes be polemical.

Part II entitled, Traditions, Female Agency, and Domestic Space, takes into consideration traditions, female agency, and domestic space as intersecting with one another to produce spaces for negotiation, creative conformity, and reconstruction of one’s identity. It describes the processes that are enabled by the performatives of tradition and female agency within the spatial text of domesticity. The essays deal with the creative agential acts of the female as found in the case of brata rituals, inter-faith marriages, transgender home-making, and Syrian Christian domestic spaces, that suggest that the performatives stand in for the initiating space of the chora. These essays source info-material evidence to organize a rereading of place/space that underwrites questions of identity and agency.

Searching for the Quintessential Home: Home-Making and Trans-identity by Susan Deborah focuses on a group of six aravāṇikal (In Tamil, aravāṇikal is the plural form of aravāṇi referring to a male-to-female transgender) namely, Pandiammal, Sasikala, Shailaja, Amala, Vasuki, and Mythili who have left their natal homes (hereafter, NH), or the homes of their birth in and around Madurai district, and have established a new home in T. Kallupatti, in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu. The identity of an aravāṇi is usually seen as a blend of all the homes she has lived in—the cultural memory is that of her NH while that of her present-day living is that of the transgender culture. It could be seen that every aspect of an aravāṇi’s home-making and life is an ongoing conflict between the akam (interior) and the puram (exterior). It is the dream of the six aravāṇikal to lead a normal life, retaining their gender identity, without the conflicting akam and puram that is discussed in the essay. In the narratives, it was often mentioned by either one of the aravāṇikal that they would have loved to remain in their NH if their akam was left in peace. Hence, it can be concluded that a harmonious home in an aravāṇi’s life is to be ideally found within the purview of their ancestral home where the nature-culture-sacred nexus is balanced.

Kochurani Abraham’s essay titled, Pushing Boundaries: Negotiations of Power in the Domestic Space, examines the question of how the women of the Catholic Syrian Christian community of Kerala negotiate power in order to push the boundaries of the restricting family spaces allotted to them. Employing the feminist standpoint for analyzing women’s experiences, the essay seeks to identify the nuances of the real struggle of the Catholic Syrian Christian (CSC) women in their negotiation of power against their particular socio-economic and religious contexts. The political underpinnings of patriarchy and the negotiations by the Keralite CSC women are examined from three angles: the gendered ordering of family relationships; sexual relations within the framework of marriage; and the political economy of the household. It argues that, even though the gendered boundaries are apparently well defined, particularly in the domestic space that is labeled as home, pushing these boundaries becomes imperative in the negotiation of power.

James Ponniah’s essay titled, Women Make it Work: The Story of Inter-Religious Marriages in Urban India, documents the