From the outside it is hard to tell. The glory of Kerala’s mighty Catholic Church, it appears, has weathered many a tsunami. The communists tried in 1958; they tried in 2006-07 too. Each time, the Church brushed off the challenge, transmogrifying itself, almost miraculously, into a murderous majoritarian tsunami in defense of theism that swept away the Unbelievers into the depths of hell. Again, the Church proved that the malicious schemes of Syrian Christian dissenters, puny individuals, Education Ministers in communist-led ministries — Joseph Mundassery then, M.A.Baby now — shall be foiled by the hand of God. Thus in 2006-07 too, the power of Faith burgeoned, once again, into a tremendous cyclone which swept the Unbelievers’ dastardly designs off the face of our Fair and Promised Land,  Kerala.

Strange, though. In this tsunami of Faith, the Holy Catholic Church enters into close communion with die-hard believers in God of all varieties. That includes the descendents of V. D. Savarkar who in 1942 presided over the ‘Hindu Conference’ of the Nair Service Society’s Annual Conference and reassured the ‘Hindus’ present that the Syrian Christians in Travancore (southern Kerala) may be a considerable minority (30 per cent of the total population), but they can soon be brought to line once India became a Hindu Nation. Generally in India, he remarked, Christians are a puny and powerless minority; only in Travancore and Cochin were they a problem. He further cheered them up by promising that once independent, Hindu India became reality, we will proceed to check the Syrian Christians. In 2007, as in 1958, the Tsunami of Faith rolled out with the force of their combined strengths. It worked, though the communists are no more atheists, or freethinkers, though some of them profess rationalism weakly. True, much of the anxiety of Syrian Christians, especially Syrian Catholics, about the threats of takeover of their network of schools first from the Hindu State of Travancore and then from the ‘Hindu-secular’ state in post-independence Kerala were not unwarranted. But the sad truth we have seen too often is that responses to threats are rarely in the direction of internal democracy.

For those of us who grew up in the shade of Kerala’s convents it is hard to believe that the soothing calm and the peaceful everyday hum of life in those places were deceptive.  People born closer to the Church have been more cynical. Of course, who can forget the chilling scene with which Jose Rizal’s harrowing indictment of the Catholic Church in Philippines, Noli Me Tangere, ends: the young nun Maria Clara, who made a daring escape from the convent to report to secular authorities the terrible things that happened in the convent, being dragged back into the depths of that cold, silent Hell-of-no-return, screaming that she spoke the truth. I remember reading a translation of the novel some years back and thinking that such a thing may not happen in our Catholic Church. In the school-girl section of my memory, nuns loomed too large as powerful women who were agents of the Church’s moral surveillance — and somehow immune from such surveillance themselves.

Recent events force reality on my face. In less than a year, a series of sensational cases involving nuns have shaken Kerala. A young nun has been accused of being complicit in the murder of her sister-nun, who, it is surmised, may have stumbled upon her having sex with priests; another young nun committed suicide and her family claim that she was subjected; to torture in the convent, and made to do “things she found abhorrent”; the State Women’s Commission claims that it has been receiving a steady stream of letters from nuns complaining of severe abuse, including sexual abuse, in convents; a recent video clip that circulated in mobile phones showed a young nun having sex with a male employee of a Church establishment where she worked; a sensational autobiography by a nun who decided to leave the convent after thirty years revealed how vulnerable they were in a system in which men occupied — as a matter of Godly decision — all the powerful positions. In all these irruptions, nuns have figured either as the active bearers of ‘evil’ and ‘depravity’, or passive and long-suffering victims. Feminists in the State and the Women’s Commission have supported these women to different degrees; this of course only provokes greater horror among the faithful.

Even a cursory glance at the history of this vocation would show us that times have changed. Autobiographical accounts of Malayali nuns from the early twentieth century are full of the joy of escaping the narrow confines of domesticity and unending rounds of childbearing to join the evergreen ‘divine lover’; many women found the spiritual to be a domain in which they could be unabashedly ambitious. The most successful among the latter were of course, the present St. Alphonsa of Bharananganam and the Blessed Mariam Thresia. These two women chose paths that diverged in remarkable ways; yet for each, taking the veil was not disappearing into a hazy world of novenas; it was a way of actively gaining visibility, in a system in women had few other paths to recognition within the temporal domain of the community. Being wedded to the Lord brought considerable mobility as well, though the union with the ‘divine lover’ did not reverse the unequal terms of marriage: only that it was the Church that received the dowry.

And it is also clear that the substantial content of the vocation itself changed in the course of the twentieth century. As the Church’s temporal concerns expanded so did the numbers of nun- recruits. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a massive expansion of the Church’s biopolitical network — schools, hospitals, charities, training centres, prayer homes, orphanages, refuges for the sick and the elderly, small-scale industrial establishments, informal learning centres– that covered the length and breadth of Kerala. Between the 1960s and 70s, according to an internal review, the number of nun-recruits grew at a rate of twenty percent per year. In other words, nuns were a significant part of the cheap labour that toiled in this network. This period coincides with the remarkable migration of Syrian Christian peasants to the Malabar region of Kerala — a period when dowries became high and/or indispensible and hence worldly bridegrooms became increasingly harder to get, for the poorer sections, at reasonable rates. That the nuns were largely the providers of unpaid labour seems evident from that fact that this remarkable jump in entry brought them few other gains — they were still lower down in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. A short-lived rebellion did occur in the70s and 80s when nuns enthused by radical Liberation theology took up the cause of the highly exploited fishworkers of Kerala, organising them against the fish businesses and indeed, against the clergy who aided and abetted their exploiters. The heroine of such struggle, Sister Alice, was swiftly dealt with. She now leads a quiet life running harmless microfinance and self-help groups for poor women.

The nuns’ labour, unlike that of the housewife (do ardently discussed in the domestic labour debate) was not invisible: they laboured in public institutions, after all. However, their labour clearly resembles a version on of what Hannah Papenek called ‘family status production’, which highlights the manner in which women ensure social status and acceptability to their families through participation in social and religious events and activities. Nuns’ contribution as status-producers for the Church was tied to their adherence to the Church’s project of moral and sexual discipline .

Indeed there is a perfect parallel with other Malayali women here. Malayali women escape Kerala to lead exciting and creative lives elsewhere; likewise, nuns from Kerala do remarkably courageous things once outside this society. I have heard friends recount how their middle-aged aunts who are nuns do things unthinkable for nun or non-nun over here. One friend tells me of her 50-year-old sister-in-law stationed in Africa who drives a truck  — some 350 kilometres every week over almost non-existent roads to pick up food and medicines; another recounted how twelve Malayali nuns in another African nation torn by violence and strife refused the UN authorities’ offers of transfer to safety  and initiated non-violent protests until  the latter agreed to extend the offer to all the orphans in their care. A leading Malayali literary author traveling in South America was stunned when he was greeted cheerfully by three young Malayali nuns at Macchu Picchu. These women worked as healthcare providers in a small hospital among the most deprived people in the area. Exciting stories are recounted by the relatives of women who had gone to Italy as nuns in the 70s, who ran away from convents unable to bear the racist torture that was inflicted on them. This was the infamous episode which the Hindu right-wing labelled ‘nun-running’. These women escaped into a society with which they had no linguistic or cultural familiarity; they possessed no significant educational qualifications; often suffered poor health; and of course were of the wrong complexion –and survived. Finally the Vatican apologised and rehabilitated them. In Kerala however, at least from the 1950s, the spiritual promise in taking the veil seems to have diminished, and in contrast to their sisters who battled huge challenged bravely elsewhere, in the vastly extended temporal concerns of Kerala’s Catholic Church, nuns have increasingly  led tame, minor-professional lives as teachers or nurses, and produced ‘status’ and ‘respectability’.

Recent events however bode ill even for this tame existence: the recent revelations seem to indicate that far from being the agents of (highly oppressive) sexual morality, nuns are labourers in yet another sense — it appears that forced sexual labour is being extracted from them, and by men in the ecclesiastical   authority. But more crucially it appears that they now seek out bodily manifestations of the pleasures of the Divine Union. In either case the wrath of the Church has the same effect. The fate of the nun in the video clip frighteningly resembles Maria Clara’s in Noli Me Tangare : she has been defrocked and banished; no one wants to talk about where she is; her dowry is still unreturned. The same fate probably awaits the nun who has been accused, along with two much-respected clergymen, in the much-discussed-and investigated murder of the young nun Abhaya in a convent in Kottayam in the early 90s. While the Church is defending its soldiers, male and female, it is not at all clear whether they will be treated the same way later.

However both incidents have led to minor rebellions all over — the Women’s Commission has received numerous complaints and Sister Jesmi’s autobiography is apparently going into the third edition. Unlike the public response to the autobiography of the sexworker  Nalini Jameela in which all people with literary pretensions sat down to pontificate about the social evils let loose by Nalini, this work has been greeted with public condemnation but secret admissions that these and ‘worse’ things are happening in Churches. When women marginalised by both Church and community raised the question of Syrian Christian women’s property rights in the 1980s the Church hit back by labeling them ‘frustrated failures’ and ‘greedy and grasping’ women out to ruin their families. Such a response may not work here. The nuns’ vulnerability is certainly higher than their lay sisters — but that the Church will have to pay a huge price if it ignores their protests is clear. A young nun whose pleas to be freed from “acts she did not like” were ignored took her own life; her family and parish are embittered and as good Catholics they expect the Church to deliver justice.

Thus however much the male clergy may smirk at the rumblings below, the danger is real.  The Rock of the Faith seems to be slowly sinking into a wet, silent swamp. Familiar repressive solutions may not stem its rise. Perhaps the first step would be to non-violently acknowledge the reality of rising waters. Maybe non-violence and openness will work where repression hasn’t.  If I were the Church’s friend, I would alert it, quoting, in the spirit of non-violence, David Ray’s wonderful lines, written in the wake of the tsunami:

…Tread gently, my friends, for the earth is almost all air
and the air is fire and the waters may yet

astound those who fear only hell fire and the gods.
(Tsunami Triptych)