GENDERING MISSION, ENGENDERING MUTUALITY

                                      GENDERING MISSION, ENGENDERING MUTUALITY

                                                        (REVIEW 15) 

MODE OF MUTUALITY IN THE MARGINS OF MISSION: HERMANNSBURG WOMEN’S MISSIONS IN INDIA Gladson Jathanna (Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2015)

“The many glaring gaps, wounds, and omissions of encounters in mission call out to be minded, remembered, lamented, and transformed” (Marion Grau, 2011). Marion Grau identifies one of the manifestations of such ‘gap’ in the account of mission history is the absence of the stories of women as missionaries. Following Marion Grau, Gladson Jathanna de-archivize Hermannsburg mission documents and invokes us to listen to the stories of the native Bible Women. As he is explaining in the foreword, this search is nothing but his theological desire to speak with the dead. Of course, speaking to the dead is not an easy job! Listening to the dead ones, especially the subaltern dead ones is a disturbing experience since it is an invitation to re-live in the buried memories of marginalization and discrimination. Jathanna offers a counter-listening method in the theological research. Of course, theology is always hauntology—listening to the Holy Ghost!

Problematizing the ‘omission’ involved in the practices of the ‘Great Commission,’ Jathanna reclaims the spaces of women bodies and emotions in the ‘masculine’ act of mission. Gendering the mission is to problematize the unproblematized locations of historiography and missiology. Bringing native Bible women into the contemporary discourses of mission, Jathanna aims a counter-narration of history of church where the subalterns become the subjects not just the actors. In reclaiming the role of women in a historical paradigm, Jathanna makes a contribution to the unspoken gendered space of the mission history. By exploring the encounter between women missionaries and their native women co-workers in India, the researcher tries to attend the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the colonial narrations of mission and church history. 

Jathanna defines the site of the encounter between women missionaries and the native Bible women as the margins of mission where the ‘white subalterns’ meet Indian subalterns. Whatever it may be, it is a site of subalternity which is embodied in mutuality and hospitality. At this marginal site, the ‘other,’ ‘heathen’ is reconstructed and the ‘subjectivity’ of the subject (of mission) is re-negotiated. Modern mission was a ‘civilizing mission’ to redeem the ‘heathen,’ the dirt. The Zenana mission was also started as ‘redeeming programme’‘to reach out’ ‘the unreached Indian women (the gendered subaltern) who were enclosed in the dark rooms (Zenana means inner rooms). In contradiction to the narrations of the subaltern historians, Jathanna argues, there were some ‘intermediary spaces’ of negotiations between women missionaries and the native subaltern women in the Zenana mission through which both of them reconstituted their self-ness and the otherness and moved on to a mode of mutuality. 

Jathanna brings to us the multiple subjectivity locations within the women missionaries. There were wives of missionaries and single women missionaries involved in the mission programmes whose emotions and perceptions were neglected and misrepresented in the mission documents. Masculine mission discourses denied their subjectivities and envisioned them as ‘God chosen bodies’ for mission. Jathanna demonstrates this objectification of the bodies/ lives of women missionaries in the mission documents by highlighting the narration of a male missionary about his wife: “she is a very weak and sick woman. When she was lying on her bed during her first pregnancy, I shot a dog behind her window. And she was stricken with terror that she became slightly insane. Later she became a little better” (p. 60). It is their life ‘in between’ motherhood and mission, ‘wife’ and ‘missionary’, ‘home’ and ‘field’ reconstructed their subjectivity in association with the subalternity of the native Bible women. Thus, Jathanna argues that the site of the margins of faith is reclaimed as the threshold of fraternities in those mission paradigms which was never attended by the male historiographers. 

In line with the postcolonial theoretical framework, but affirming the multiple locations within the missional encounters, Jathanna offers a radical methodology of church historiography—the mode of mutuality. The mode of mutuality as research methodology denies the notion that the interplay between the women missionaries and the native Bible women was monolithic in constructing the self and the other. On the other hand, in the mode of mutuality the identities were constructed in fluidity and flexibility. ‘Mission field’ was the site of affirming their gendered subalterness; rather than a project of salvation or force of repression. Jathanna writes: “They stood, walked, sang, laughed, cried and lived in a mutual relationship where they negotiated a defined and designed subjectivity and demanded a mutual subjectivity” (p.136-7). Of course, mission is an invocation to live in this mode of mutuality through which we find our ‘own’ subjectivities as ‘inter-subjectivities’ and ourselves as ‘inter-beings.’

Jathanna offers us a tour—a theological journey, intruding into the mission archives to listen to the silenced (gendered) subalterns and to think about our own missiologies, church histories, theologies, Christianities and of course our ontologies. This book comes to us as a gift to re-articulate ourselves through the mode of mutuality in the world of distance, discrimination and destitution. Thank you my friend Jathanna for this incredible gift!

Y.T. Vinayaraj                                                                                                               29.07.2016 

(REVIEW 14) ECUMENISM WITHOUT TRANSITION?

ECUMENISM WITHOUT TRANSITION?

A Light to the Nations: The Indian Presence in the Ecumenical Movement in the Twentieth Century, Jesudas Athyal (Ed) (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2016)

A Light to the Nations: The Indian Presence in the Ecumenical Movement in the Twentieth Century is a collection of articles that brings the evergreen memories of the Indian ecumenical pioneers into our present discourses of ecumenism. The life and witnesses of V.S. Azariah, Augustine Ralla Ram, Sarah Chakko, P.D. Devanandan, M.M. Thomas, Metropolitan Paulose Mar Gregorios, Stanley J. Samartha, Russel Chandran, Paulose Mar Paulose and Ninan Koshy are vividly narrated by the eminent scholars such as Roger E. Hedlund, Raj Bharat Patta, Aruna Gnanadason, David C. Scott, K.C Abraham, K. M. George, Wesley Ariarajah, Jayakiran Sebastian, George Zachariah, and Preman Niles. It is a historical piece of work that elucidates the Indian presence in the modern Ecumenical Movement. The significance of this volume is well-articulated by Michael Kinnamon in his foreword: “this volume reminds us that the ecumenical movement,, so often reduced to a study of texts or a listening of conferences, is actually embodied in persons who carry a vision of the church united and renewed” (p.xi).

In his historical analysis of the life of V.S. Azariah, Roger E. Hedlund portrays him as the forerunner of Indian ecumenism. It is inspiring to know that Azariah was a product of the mass conversion movement and spread the gospel among the indigenous people as a native missionary. Raj Bhrath Patta introduces Augustine Ralla Ram as the proponent of the theology of mission as political spirituality. Delineating his contribution in establishing Student Christian Movement of India as a student faith movement, Patta tries to redefine ecumenism as a program of building friendships. Aruna Gnadasan presents the story of Sarah Chakko as the testimony of “our foremother to whom the churches in India and the world over owe so much” (p.77). P.D Devanandan’s theology of religions and its relevance in the formation of ecumenical social thought are vividly discussed in David C. Scott’s essay. He argues that Devanandan’s theology of religions enriched ecumenical theology to relocate itself in pluralistic context. 

Portraying M.M. Thomas as a chief architect of the modern ecumenical movement, K.C Abraham explores the fecundity of Thomas’ theology of humanization in making ecumenical theology a revolutionary social thought. Placing Metropolitan Paulose Mar Gregorios in the process of theological dialogue between science and religion, K.M George argues that through this dialogue, Mar Gregorios was able to offer a radical perception of truth for humanity (p.119). Wesley Ariarajah, in his excellent article on the pioneering ministry of Stanley Samartha offers us the history of the emergence of the theology of inter-faith dialogue which later became one of the prominent focuses of the World Council of Churches. Russel Chandran’s liberative missiological strategies are gaudily explained in the article written by Kiran Sebastian. Kiran affirms that “the legacy of Chandran endures in the forward march of the ecumenical dreams and hopes in the 21st century” (p. 152). 

George Zachariah brings to us the ever living memory of the great humanist Paulose Mar Paulose, the architect of alternative ecumenism. Zachariah writes: “Bishop Paulose Mar Paulose’s life was short; but he still lives in the ecumenical youth student movements as they continue to remain out of control, challenging the ecumenical mafia and the pharisaic church” (p. 165). In the last chapter of this volume, the life and witness of Ninan Koshy is brilliantly narrated by Preman Niles. Elucidating his contributions in the international affairs commission of the World Council of Churches, Niles calls Ninan a great secular theologian in the household of ecumenism. In short, it is a text book of the ecumenical social thought as it was emerged from the Indian soil. The reviewer appreciates all the writers and the editor for initiating a meaningful discourse on the legacies of the ecumenical pioneers from India.

However, the inadequacy of applying methodological tools to re-present the memories archived in the written texts and the insufficiency to re-read them in the contemporary context of postcoloniality made the volume mere a historical reiteration. It would have been more meaningful if those texts could be re-read on the basis of some contemporary methodological tools like postcolonialism and post-feminism. Even though the editor claims his bail well in advance regarding the elimination of “ecumenical little narratives” in the contemporary world of “ecumenical metanarratives,” his defense becomes feeble before the question of the elimination of the stories of the people like James Massey and Kunchala Rajaratnam. Of course, this is not the error of the editor, Ecumenical Movement has always been elitist in content and practice and this legacy still continues without transition!

Y.T. Vinayaraj 

                                                                                                                                      Faridabad                                                                                                                    27.07.2016