‘Being a New Christian:’ Dalit Resistance in Paul Chirakkarode’sPulayathara

Abstract

 In India, as Christian converts are reckoned to have moved out of the ambit of the caste system, untouchable Hindu castes – the Dalits – converted to Christianity to reap the fruits of a higher social status within the Christian fold. Paul Chirakkarode’s novel Pulayathara exposes the futility of the strategy of conversion to Christianity used by the Dalits to extricate themselves from the morass of casteism and to upgrade their social status, as the power structures of caste continue to operate within the church to discriminate against the neo-converts.  It brings to light the disjuncture between the promised sense of equality and the lived experience of discrimination that conversion to Christianity had in store for the downtrodden people. This paper attempts an exposition of the dialectics of proselytization foregrounded in Pulayathara as a strategy of resistance against the enslavement, ill treatment and exploitation of the Dalits, a motif that recurs in Chirakkarode’s oeuvre.