Table Of Contenti
The Subhedar’s Son
ii
RELIGION IN TRANSLATION
Series Editor
John Nemec, University of Virginia
A Publication Series of The American Academy
of Religion and Oxford University Press
The Study of Stolen Love Place and Dialectic
Translated by David C. Buck and Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō
K. Paramasivam Translated by John W. M. Krummel and
Shigenori Nagatomo
The Daoist Monastic Manual
A Translation of the Fengdao Kejie The Prison Narratives of Jeanne Guyon
Livia Kohn Ronney Mourad and Dianne Guenin- Lelle
Sacred and Profane Beauty Disorienting Dharma
The Holy in Art Ethics and the Aesthetics of Suffering in the
Garardus van der Leeuw Mahābhārata
Preface by Mircea Eliade Emily T. Hudson
Translated by David E. Green
With a new introduction and bibliography by The Transmission of Sin
Diane Apostolos- Cappadona Augustine and the Pre- Augustinian
Sources
The History of The Buddha’s Relic Shrine Pier Franco Beatrice
A Translation of the Sinhala Thūpavamsa Translated by Adam Kamesar
Stephen C. Berkwitz
From Mother to Son
Damascius’ Problems & Solutions Concerning The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation
First Principles to Claude Martin
Translated with Introduction and Notes by Translated and with Introduction and Notes
Sara Ahbel- Rappe by Mary Dunn
The Secret Garland Drinking From Love’s Cup
Āṇṭāḷ's Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vārs of
Translated with Introduction and Bhai Gurdas
Commentary by Archana Venkatesan Selections and Translations with
Introduction and Commentary by
Prelude To The Modernist Crisis Rahuldeep Singh Gill
The “Firmin” Articles of Alfred Loisy
Edited, with an Introduction by C. J. T. Talar The America’s First Theologies
Translated by Christine Thirlway Early Sources of Post- Contact Indigenous
Religion
Debating The Dasam Granth Edited and translated by Garry Sparks,
Robin Rinehart with Sergio Romero and Frauke Sachse
The Fading Light of Advaita Ācārya Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors
Three Hagiographies An Interreligious Encounter in
Rebecca J. Manring Eighteenth- Century Vietnam
Anh Q. Tran
The Ubiquitous Śiva
Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi and His Tantric
Interlocutors
John Nemec
iii
The
Subhedar’s Son
A Narrative of Brahmin- Christian
Conversion from Nineteenth- century
Maharashtra
z
DEEPRA DANDEKAR
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dandekar, Deepra, author. | Savarkar, Dinkar Shankar, 1867–1952.
Subhedārāchā putra. English.
Title: The subhedar’s son : a narrative of Brahmin-Christian conversion from nineteenth-
century Maharashtra / Deepra Dandekar.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Series: AAR religion in translation | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021629 (print) | LCCN 2018044297 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190914059 (updf) | ISBN 9780190914066 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190919863 (online resource) | ISBN 9780190914042 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Marathi literature. | Marathi language—Texts. |
Conversion in literature.
Classification: LCC PK2418.S358 (ebook) | LCC PK2418.S358 S8313 2019 (print)
| DDC 891.4/634—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021629
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
Dedicated to the charismatic memory of my most beloved father
Dibyendu Kanti Bhattacharya.
vi
An Introduced and Annotated Translation of
The Subhedar’s Son (Subhedārāchā Putra),
originally written in Marathi by:
Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, 1895.
BomBay TracT and Book SocieTy,
D. B. Padmanji’s Victoria Printing Works, Bombay
vii
Preface
i waS parTially reared as a Christian. My mother’s family was among
the early upper- caste Christian convert families from Maharashtra,
with ancestors who converted in the first half of the nineteenth-
century, in the Anglican missions of Nasik. Typically, my mother’s family
also retained their Brahmin caste status despite conversion, and this re-
flected the family’s tradition of having exercised intellectual and religious/
church leadership— a position typically accorded upper- caste and Brahmin
converts within colonial missions. Accordingly, Brahmin leadership in
native mission churches assumed that upper castes who were viewed as
upholders of Hinduism, would provide other castes with an example of
breaking with ancestral religion. This fulfilled the larger missionary goal
of breaking Hinduism itself and making space for the missionary presence
in Indian society. Analysing conversion as part of missionary goals alone
is, however, a perspective that is internal to modern nationalism, a polit-
ical movement that is postdated to these earliest conversions by several
decades. Early converts pandered to no such missionary agenda especially
as they were racially segregated within the mission itself. Instead, they
converted for personal, emotional, and intellectual reasons that expressed
their individualism. Their vernacular writings strengthened a remodelled
emphasis on their Brahmin status and ancestry and strong vernacular na-
tivism that later became yoked to nationalism (especially among second-
generation converts). While converts became individualists, who selected
crosshatched aspects and facets of social identity to benefit themselves and
the Brahmin nationalist cause in Maharashtra, European and American
missions failed to enter upper-c aste Indian society, undercut by their own
racism and their entrenchment within the larger colonial discourse.
However, nineteenth-c entury Protestant missions (British, Scottish,
and American) dominated the religious and cultural scene for Marathi
Christians until independence. Christianity in rural and semiurban
viii
viii Preface
Maharashtra has only recently moved towards Pentecostal evangelism
and charismatic praying that mingles evangelism together with Marathi
local religious practices to produce a consolidated modern native Marathi
Christianity, characterized by trance and healing. But apart from Mukti
Mission that promulgated Pentecostal Evangelism imported by American
missionaries (Suarsana 2013) in the early twentieth century (Minnie
F. Abrams imported Pentecostal evangelism to Mukti Mission in 1905,
introducing Paṇḍitā Ramabai and the other inmates of Mukti to ‘revival’),
modern Pentecostal evangelism in Maharashtra today, with its social base
in mostly rural, semiurban, and lower-c aste fellowship, does not follow
from a history of nineteenth- century missions.
While it was Europeans who headed nineteenth-c entury missions,
Brahmins and other upper-c aste converts dominated leadership within
native missionary churches, counterbalancing accusations of perpetu-
ating colonialism levied against them in Indian society by expressing
deep nationalism and Marathi nativism. The Dalit accusation of Brahmin
Christians propagating upper- caste nationalism cannot be challenged, but
perhaps, and naturally so, it lacks empathy for Brahmin converts, who suf-
fered from double-e dged ostracism. While missionaries elicited Brahmin
and upper-c aste conversion, they discriminated against ‘native’ converts
as lesser Christians. This allowed Hindu Brahmins more latitude in dis-
criminating against Brahmin converts as lesser Brahmins. The separation
between Christian devotion and anticolonialism combined with pas-
sionate Marathi belonging and a penchant for vernacular literature pro-
duced Brahmin Christians as an interstitial social group that was subject
to multiple fragmentation. I grew up being influenced by an extremely de-
vout, Christian mother, who spoke movingly about the family’s Chitpāvan
(Konkani Brahmin) identity, and her deep loyalty and love for Indian na-
tionalism, as we read endlessly together about the revolt of 1857 and Rani
of Jhansi, the Maratha warrior. My mother taught me to recite chapters
from the Bhagavat Gita learned by heart, and it was also my mother who
taught me the Lord’s Prayer in Marathi.
This book emerges from my personal experiences of fragmentation be-
tween religious and ethnic identities, and this fragmentation accords the
writing of this book with a subject position that I explore in the following
few pages with the help of somewhat interconnected themes. First, there
is an alleged ‘rupture’, brevity, or truncation of family history that convert
families (such as mine) were accused of causing, and connected with this
is the vicariously lived momentous nature of conversion or rupture that is
ix
Preface ix
sought to be consumed as a new experience. Further associated with the
ostracism are questions of why Marathi Brahmin families needed to con-
vert and whether they were in fact Marathi or Brahmins at all, if they had
converted. While convert families such as mine have always battled social
discrimination, ‘academic’ interrogations of Brahmin conversion is a foil
that perpetuates the same discrimination, since assumptions underlying
such questions remain as hegemonic as notions held by those who per-
petuate discrimination on the grounds of normalising the Hindu Marathi
and Brahmin body, and assigning the proper belonging of religion to race.
I outline some of the personal reasons for Brahmin conversion in this book
by positing nineteenth-c entury vernacular Christian literature as the basis
of conversion hermeneutics, which demonstrates the nonmomentous and
personal nature of conversion in contrast to voyeuristic interests that seek
to consume it as outside the ordinary.
This historical analysis of conversion also constitutes self- evaluation.
Can a person from a convert family write academically about conversion?
Personal association with the subject of research is a question that haunts
postcolonial researchers, even though this question has an internal catch.
It is obvious that research from without and above cannot replace a history
of experience written from within and below; as advocates who are critical
of the latter could hardly be supporting the cause of inadequate research.
Though I do not seek leadership in any academic domain that researches
conversion, the current translation provides a valuable insider’s view to
the subject, since its author, Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar (DS; 1867– 1952), is
my great- grandfather. DS wrote The Subhedar’s Son in 1895 as a novelized
biography of his father Shankar Balwant’s conversion to Christianity in
1849 based on the latter’s Christian witness, personal family anecdotes,
and other Marathi Christian literature. My subsequent research interest
in the convert Shankar Nana (DS’s father) was born out of empathy for
his social isolation. His words leaped out at me from archival records,
from old and withered papers written with faded ink, comforting me with
his meticulous recounting of small and everyday tasks in the mission.
It is not as if I did not find DS’s political views (on religion and caste)
problematic. His views are indeed unacceptable in 2018. However, DS and
his views that were rather common in nineteenth-c entury Maharashtra do
not detract from the historical significance of Brahmin conversion. Many
‘liberal’ publishers who rejected this translation were afraid that I was per-
petuating Savarkar- ite ideology. Not only is this untrue, but the bias to-
wards reading and writing history originating from a postdated judgement
