Deconstructing Christ-Church Power Model:
Enhancing the Dignity of Dalit Women in India

Jayachitra L1

In India, casteism in bygone period was practiced as a ‘legitimate’ means of establishing an orderly state and for the welfare of its people. Today, the fall out of this ‘systematic’ groundwork is the systemic superiority of the dominant caste people while driving the weak and powerless oppressed caste to the margins of society. Ironically, Christianity with its revolutionary claims for new humanity succumbed to the social pressures of the prevailing caste structure. The resulting discriminated group of Christians, the Dalit Christians, faces the threat of being harrowed in the current scenario of growing religious fundamentalism in India. Once Dalits become Christians, they lose all benefits allotted for the scheduled caste groups by the Indian Constitution. Furthermore, they are not fully welcomed in the church as “one in the Lord.” They are forced to carry the stigma as Dalits or ‘outcastes’ in church and society. The recent mass movement among Indian Dalits to embrace Buddhism, in protest to Hinduism, is very notable for they have identified even Christianity as one among the “caste- religions.”

Majority of Dalits “live in sub-human social existence, abject poverty, economic exploitation, a sub-culture of submission and political powerlessness.”2 They suffer psycho-economic pressures from the dominant castes and live in constant fear anticipating violence any time. Worse for Dalit women, the unequal patriarchal power relations work more harm than anyone could expect. Teasing and sexually assault of Dalit women by dominant caste men have become regular features of media coverage. Again, the experiences of rural and urban Dalit women are different. Caste-based oppression is severe on the rural Dalit women rather than on the educated urban Dalit women, since there is space to interact with the dominant caste people in an urban setup.3 In such a socio-political context, I have always wondered how the Bible could be channeled to address the struggle of Dalit women in India. Aware of the limitations of the Bible in regard to Dalit women’s aspirations, my struggle will be to challenge the traditional power structures being patronized through the Bible down the ages.

Familial Setup in relation to Dalit Women in India

Like any woman in India, the position of Dalit women in family is subordinate. But the tragedy is that the majority of Dalit women in India are thrice alienated and oppressed as inferior in class, caste and gender levels of social life and thus form “dalit among dalits”. A Dalit woman is under male domination both in family and society. Even if she is earning, she is subject to the male members of the family. She has to face more inhuman sexual atrocities because of her caste inferiority. She is deprived of access to proper nutrition, health care and education. She has to protect and prove her “virginity” or “chastity” constantly. She is subjected to denial of land rights, civil liberties and decent living conditions. She has to experiment all the latest family planning methods against her own body. And the list goes on. The most shocking fact about Dalit women is that (except a minority of conscientised Dalit women) they are more rigid in implementing all the senseless customs and traditions mainly because of their lack of education. They never question the violence done to them by their husbands or other male members of the family. And they in fact think that the torture given by husbands is their inherent right, which cannot be violated. Therefore they remain as constant sufferers of the unjust socio-familial system and as the most exploited in society.4

As far as Indian women are concerned, there are many expectations to fulfill of which marriage as a social institution is, as experienced many a time, imposed upon women. An unmarried woman in a traditional Indian society is considered a liability to the parents, no matter how high her achievements are, and an object of lust to the preying eyes around her. What Manu5 determined for Indian society keeps a spinster under the power play of her father, the first epitome of power in her life. Especially after she attains puberty, the power play of the father becomes more severe as she now bears virginity. Until she surrenders her virginity to her husband, the father takes upon himself the custodianship of her virginity. And for the same reason, she feels vulnerable among the male folk of her society. She is never left with the freedom of choice of her husband, let alone marriage! Even on the decision of pregnancy her power is curbed. All these struggles come to light in the wake of the call for individuality, freedom of choice of life and profession as human rights.

In India, as elsewhere in many parts of South Asia, familial interests and familial dignity are mostly at the expense of individuality of women. In other words, women are non-individualistic. In such a context, marriage seems to be a contract of commodification of women where wife is the private property of her husband. The wife engages herself in household chores like cooking, cleaning, and bringing up children. Such an enterprising career, which would have otherwise fetched a large income in case of men, has left the women a non-economic entity with payless labour. If one had to attach economic value (as in the case of surrogate mothers!) to the ovum of the womb and the rich nourishing milk of the breasts, we would be astonished to see how the selfless labour of women has been conveniently neglected in our patriarchal setup. Women are not able to sell their labour power in a labour market for their kind of labour would not fetch them a decent living on their own. Only if we evaluated the contribution made through them to human power resources! Therefore, selflessness is a package that women are expected to be born and living with.

Violence against women is expediently set aside as “a socialized sanction of the right which men arrogate to themselves over women which have caused further sexual constraints on women…”6 In Indian context, patriarchy controls sexuality, fertility and labour of women without having any respect for their bodily integrity. Because of sterilization of women, female infanticide and female foeticide, the female sex ratio has declined sharply “from a high of 1011 females per 1000 male children in 1951 to abysmal 923 in 2001”.7

Strange for us, a harsh reality among the Dalit women is that caste plays an important role in assessing the current trend in female-male sex ratio (FMR). The drastic fall in the FMRs in recent years owes a lot to the prevailing caste system. The FMR in 1961 was significantly higher among scheduled castes than the rest of the population. However, the period 1961-91 witnessed a gory decline in the FMRs of scheduled castes. Out of 7million females who faced extinction in 1961-1991, 38% belonged to the scheduled castes which is a mind-boggling number compared to their percentage in the total population i.e., 16%.8 This alarming fall is due to the growing trend among scheduled castes to follow the patterns of discriminatory sex determinations. The notion of women as liability, which was in fact foreign to Dalit culture in earlier times, has now gradually infiltrated into their very belief systems. In this connection, it should be noted that even the dowry system, which is so prominent among Dalits today was once unknown to them.

As regards sterilization, in a survey conducted by Minna Saavala among women in Andhra Pradesh state of India, it was found that the reasons for choosing sterilization are concerned with the well-being of their existing children, their nourishment, clothing, education and, in the case of girls, their future dowry.9 Here, one should know that sterilization is forced upon wives when they had given birth to at least one male child without much compulsion for a female child, though not vice versa.

Doctors are advertising aggressively, ‘Invest Rs. 500 now, Save Rs. 50,000 later’ i.e., ‘If you get rid of your daughter now, you will not have to spend money on dowry’. As girls under five years of age, women in India face neglect in terms of medical care and education, sexual abuse and physical. As adolescent and adult women in the reproductive age group, they face early marriage, early pregnancy, sexual violence, domestic violence, dowry-harassment, and torture in case of infertility. If they fail to produce son they face desertion/witch-hunt. The end result is a high maternal mortality.10

It becomes evident that not every woman has equal rights and entitlements to food or health or any other kind of safety resources compared to her male counterparts. All these demonstrate the unequal gendered distribution of critical resources, an inequality that is weighed against women. “When gender is combined with caste (in the case of Dalit women), then the question of entitlements and deprivation becomes part of a politics of distribution, a relational politics shaped and sustained by cultures of deprivation.”11 In fact, there are cultures of power and deprivation that function in every power-oriented structures and systems in which violence is executed to maintain the power and deprivation. Radhika Chopra suggests a dynamic need to redress the unequal access to resources. “This redressal is part of a politics that seeks to ‘enter’ households and rework inequality and gender imbalances through what has been termed gender intervention and gender sensitization.”12 This is the point of departure for me to enter the biblical realm to expand the scope of including Dalit women in household headship challenging the exclusive authority of men and husbands in particular within the familial set-up.

Deconstructing Traditional Biblical Interpretation of the
Familial Power-Relationship

The wife-husband and woman-man relationships are biblically presented on hierarchical norms. The scriptural base for such an interpretation is derived from the hierarchical model of God-Christ-church relationship. 1 Cor. 11:3 and Eph. 5:23 form the foundational biblical bases for creating such a hierarchy. God is the head of Christ; Christ is the head of church; in 1 Cor. 11:3, church is dichotomized into men and women. Strangely, Christ is projected as the head of men, and men in turn are the head of women (cf. Eph. 5:23). Is it not illogical that Christ is the head only of men, when Christ is supposed to be heading an inclusive church? However, this strange and illogical comprehension has become the scriptural support to patronize an unequal power relation between women and men, which in turn has narrowed down to wife-husband relationship as well. Therefore, one should not be surprised to see this seeped into the worship and familial norms in relation to women.

The man-woman hierarchy seems to have originated from the second creation account where woman is said to have been created from man. Also, the apparent hierarchy of God-Christ-church (man-woman), where each preceding member seems to exercise authority over the latter as ‘head’ or ‘source’ has led to andro-centric speculations. Some scholars like F. F. Bruce prefer to understand that the author "recognizes a divinely ordained hierarchy in the order of creation, and in this order the wife has a place next after her husband."13 Consenting to such a thought is the one by William of Auxerre who advocates that man has a clearer intellect and woman must be subject to him in accordance with ‘natural’ order.14 Such comments call for strong suspicion as they reflect the male predisposed interpretation of the text. Passages like 1 Cor. 11:3 have been used by such interpreters as strong arguments for substantiating the hierarchical structure, for it presents Christ not as a liberator of women, but someone who fits into the order of hierarchy.15

P. K. Jewett identifies the above-mentioned Pauline statement as “the first expression of an uneasy conscience on the part of a Christian theologian who argues for the subordination of the female to the male”.16 The male-interpreted “submission” norm has evoked an inferior position of women and thus a superior attitude of men in a patriarchal society like in India. The very norm of “submission” has been the very reality of the existence of Dalit women in India: submission to the demands of the dominant caste people, submission to the patriarchal norms of their husbands, submission to the unjust and unequal socio-economic parameters, and the list goes on. The Bible further legitimizes such oppressive norms of submission that have been projected as supreme virtues by the culture. The exhortation to women in Eph. 5:22ff indicates that nothing but only submission is expected of an ‘ideal’ wife.

Reconstructing a Functional Christ-Church Model

My attempt at this point is to raise voice of protest against traditional and hierarchical power relationship projected by the Christ-church (man-woman) model. If this model projects a superior-inferior status, how can 1 Cor. 11:11 (“In the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman”) be interpreted? Is not a mutual dependence explicitly demanded here? However, the assigned roles of Christ and church are to be identified in this model, which makes each component distinct with respective functional roles. This is true with man-woman relationship. But the difficulty is, how will one understand to appropriate the functional, inter-dependent relationship of Christ and church? Eph. 5:21 reads, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” How then in the following verses is subjection limited only to wives? This entitles us with the liberty of reconstructing the traditional and hierarchical Christ-church model, derived from these two passages.

The Christ-church relationship, where Christ is the head and church the body, in Ephesians is well supported by the earlier use of this imagery in 1:22, 23 and 4:15, 16 (cf. also 2:16; 3:6). Eph. 4:15-16 and 5:30 deal with the role of church as body of the Christ, which calls for an individual functional role to play for the unity of the church. It is interesting to note that Christ’s unity with his church is called a “mystery” (v 32). Is this “mystery” a patriarchal disposition? Has this temperament safeguarded patriarchal norms? The depiction of Christ’s love and self-giving for the church (v 25) has already been echoed in 5:2. This love results in the church’s sanctification (1:4 - “that we should be holy and blameless,” and of 1:18 and 3:21), which in turn involves the glory in God’s possession of his people and in the church.17 How can the legitimized man-woman discriminatory power relationship be justified by such a noble purpose of sanctifying the church?

The specific roles of loving headship of Christ and voluntary submission of church are functional roles and they do not characterize an authoritarian relation where only one exerts uncontested power over the other. Schüssler Fiorenza emphatically affirms, “The patriarchal-societal code is theologically modified in the exhortation to the husband… Patriarchal domination is thus radically questioned with reference to the paradigmatic love relationship of Christ to the church.”18 The love of Christ is supremely manifested in his sacrificial death, which reveals his willingness to submit himself to the will of God for the benefit of the church. Here, the sacrificial death of Christ brings benefit for the church, which otherwise could have been neglected due to the authoritarian formula. Rather, Jesus prioritizes his mission in his sacrificial death for making the church “holy and blameless”. Here we are not witness to a selfish authoritarian Christ who takes pride in exercising the hegemonic power over the church. How can such an egalitarian image of Christ-church be used to support an unequal power distribution between husband-wife in a family? How justifiable is Paul using such an imagery to bring out the familial norms of wife as ‘submissive’ and that of husbands as ‘loving’?

The Indian context from which I reconstruct this one-sided love and submission demands a shift in such an age-old paradigm, which had in fact done more harm than good! What we need is a mutual relationship, where the individuality of woman is not suppressed. It is a relationship in which the dignity of woman is not taken for granted; a relationship in which man realizes his dependence on his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 11:11).

Very often, the Christ-church model is presented in a patriarchal set-up by the custodians of patriarchy as a hierarchical one, where benefactors are powerful. The Bible never attributes Christ-church model to an autocratic hegemony. Jesus as head of the church did not exercise tyrannical power over the seemingly powerless/inferior church. In fact, Jesus used his ‘headship’ over the church in order to make salvation accessible to everyone. He carried out his functional role as the savior promptly without having the least intention of dominating over the ‘sinful world’. This affirms Christ’s functional role in relation to the church.

Functional Christ-Church Model in Relation to Struggles of Dalit Women

First, the functional Christ-church model persuades us to establish an egalitarian realm in which Dalit women will be able to cherish the dignity of womanhood by having rightful access to the resources like food, education, health, equal wages, safety, etc. The love of Christ for the church, which led to Christ’s sacrificial death, challenges us to sacrifice our own safe zones of comfortable and luxurious ideologies to raise our voices for the voiceless.

Second, the religious ideology behind caste system permeates the image of body as a hierarchy, which perpetuates the origin of different castes from different parts of the body of Brahma (the creator God of Hinduism), leaving out the Dalits from such an imagery. Hence, the very act of body discourse even in connection with church may sound oppressive to Dalits. The Christ-church functional model emits glimpses of hope, where we find the inclusion of all irrespective of their socio-cultural constraints and assures inter-dependence among one another. Such a critique of hierarchical body imagery could be extended to the wider inclusion of Dalit women.

Third, the dividing parameters like caste, gender and class need to be criticized thoroughly with the strong intervention and sensitization of victims. This calls for powerful movements among victims along with the whole Christian community. Castesim and patriarchy must be addressed as common enemies to the Indian church. By rejecting caste and patriarchal traditions and practices, the Indian church can become advocates of Dalit and feminist aspirations. If Christ’s laying aside power was for the benefit of the church, the community of believers needs to follow the same model in uniting to speak for the rights of the oppressed. This widens the horizon of the mission of the church, which Christ initiated.

And finally, the beneficiary of the love and salvation of Christ, i.e. the church, has to extend the scope of the same benefit to all the people even beyond the religious impediments. As Dalit concerns are further than Christian faith alone, defying religious fundamentalism is the greatest challenge of the Indian church, which has been the patron of caste, gender, and class discriminations. Against the backdrop of the clash for power by dominant castes and the struggle for identity by the oppressed, the church cannot be dispassionate anymore. The need of the hour is to wake up from its sinful slumber to work as supportive partners to stand along with the suffering Dalit women.

NOTES:

1 Jayachitra L teaches New Testament at Leonard Theological College, in Jabalpur, India.
2 Rebati Ballav Tripathy, Dalits: A Sub-human Society (New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House, 1994), 207.
3 S. T. Shirke, “A Study of the Status of Dalit Women,” in Indian Woman, ed. C. M. Agarwal (Delhi: Indian Distributors Publishers, 2001), 29.
4 See Ruth Manorama, “Dalit Women: Downtrodden Among the Downtrodden,” in Dalit Solidarity, ed. Bhagwan Das and James Massey (Delhi: ISPCK, 1995), 162.
5 Manu is the author of ‘Manu Smriti’, considered to be the fundamental resource of socio-religious and ethical life in India. He says that a woman has to be under the control of father/husband/son at different stages of her life to save her from being called ‘immoral’.
6 Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1995), 198.
7 Vibhuti Patel, “Locating the Context of Declining Sex Ratio and New Reproductive Technologies”, in Vikalp: Alternatives (Mumbai, Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 2003), 30.
8 P.N. Mari Bhat, “On the trail of ‘missing’ Indian Females” in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVII, No. 51, 5118.
9 See Minna Saavala: Fertility and Familial Power Relations; Procreation in South India, (Richmond, Curzon Press, 2001).
10 “As unborn children, women face covert violence in terms of sex-selection and overt violence in terms of female foeticide after the use of amniocentesis, chorion villai biopsy, sonography, ultrasound and imaging techniques. IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) clinics for assisted reproduction are approached by infertile couples to produce sons.” V. Patel, 32.
11 Radhika Chopra, “From Violence to Supportive Practice. Family, Gender and Masculinities”, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXVIII, No.7, p. 1650.
12 Ibid., p. 1651.
13 F.F.Bruce, The Epistle to the Ephesians (London: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1961), 114.
14 William of Auxerre quoted by Elisabeth Gossmann: “The Construction of Women’s Difference in the Christian Theological Tradition”, in Concilium 6 (1996), 51.
15 Wanda Deifelt, “Can Christology be Freed from Patriarchy?” in Feminist Theology: Perspectives and Praxis, ed. Prasanna Kumari (Chennai: Gurukul Summer Institute, 1999), 232.
16 Paul King Jewett quoted by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation (Texas, Word Books, 1975), 28.
17 Andrew T. Lincoln, “Ephesians”, Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 42 (Texas: Word Books, 1990), 358.
18 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York; Crossroad, 1986), 269–70.