Ariyappadatha Christhavam

Christianity in Tamil Nadu is usually told from the pulpit or the mission archive. Ariyappadatha Christhavam tells it from the field: from village feasts and graveyards, from songs and plays, from the very stones of the churches, carrying the reader straight into faith as it is lived.

It records performing traditions that are vanishing even as they are written down: koothu dramas that run five nights, kummi songs sung to clapping hands, oppari laments for the dead. It follows the veneration of “local saints” at their graves, the communal feasts called asanams, the jallikattu bull-runs of Christian villages, and reads Tamil church architecture for its Islamic and European inheritances.

Above all it attends to subaltern Christianity, long passed over by Orientalist scholarship, and does not flinch from showing how deeply Church custom remains bound to caste. An English sample, translated by Rhoda Alex, is available.