Write short note: Caste among Indian Christians. (2000)
Christianity in India was often embraced as an escape from caste, yet converts carried their caste with them. The great majority of Indian Christians descend from Dalit and tribal converts, and the hierarchy dividing them from older Christian elites is among the clearest proofs that caste is a social structure rather than a Hindu doctrine.
Conversion without dissolution
Conversion in India was typically group conversion: an entire jati moved, taking its endogamous boundary, its occupation and its rank with it. Duncan Forrester (Caste and Christianity, 1980) showed that missions themselves often accommodated caste to win high-caste converts, while Rowena Robinson (Christians of India, 2003) documented how caste organises marriage, ritual and church office across Christian India.
The Kerala pattern
- Syrian Christians claim descent from Namboodiri Brahmins converted by St Thomas, and function as a landed, educated elite; Susan Visvanathan’s The Christians of Kerala (1993) shows rank written into ritual, kinship and inheritance.
- Latin Catholics, largely fishing communities converted under Portuguese influence, and Dalit Christian converts from Pulaya and Paraya backgrounds, stand below them. Marriage across these lines remains rare.
- The rite distinction — Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara and Latin — overlays ritual difference on what is substantially a status order.
Caste inside the church
Outside Kerala, Paraya, Madiga and Mala converts report separate seating in the nave, walled-off sections of cemeteries, separate hearses, exclusion from parish councils and restrictions on festival processions. Clergy are drawn disproportionately from dominant-caste Christian families. The Supreme Court issued notice in 2025 on a plea by Dalit Catholics of a Tamil Nadu parish alleging denial of burial in the common cemetery, of the common funeral cart and of representation on the parish council — an ordinary catalogue of untouchability inside a church.
The constitutional exclusion
Paragraph 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 restricts Scheduled Caste status to Hindus, extended to Sikhs (1956) and Buddhists (1990). Dalit Christians therefore lose reservation and the protection of atrocity law while retaining the stigma. In March 2026 the Supreme Court reaffirmed that conversion to Christianity extinguishes Scheduled Caste status, and dismissed the review later that year; the commission appointed in 2022 to examine the exclusion has yet to report. Dalit theology, developed by Arvind P. Nirmal and others, is the internal response — a reading of the faith from the position of the excluded.
Conclusion
Caste among Indian Christians survives without scriptural sanction and without legal recognition, which leaves Dalit Christians doubly placed — discriminated against as Dalits, and counted as a minority rather than as a Scheduled Caste. The case shows that endogamy and stigma, not theology, are the load-bearing elements of caste.