Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900.

• Author: Davis, Richard H.

In this wide-reaching study, Susan Bayly describes the varied historical experience of converts to two west Asian monotheisms, Islam and Christianity, in predominantly Hindu India. She focuses on the two southernmost states, Kerala and Tamilnadu, where significant and varied groups of both religious persuasions make their homes. Among the Tamil Muslim communities Bayly describes in the first half of her book are the elite Sunni Muslim trading families descended from Arab merchants who set up shop on the Tamil coast over a thousand years ago, the non-Tamil-speaking Muslim warrior groups who migrated south when the Mughals overran the Deccani sultanates in the late seventeenth century, and the low-status Tamil converts who practice a variety of occupations like weaving, fish-selling, and leather-making. Among south Indian Christians she discusses in the second half are the Syrian Christians who have lived in Kerala at least since the sixth century, the pearl-diving Paravas of the Coromandel coast converted by the Portuguese and Jesuits in the sixteenth century, and low-caste converts of a later period in the Tamil hinterland.

While describing in admirable detail the diverse histories of these different communities, Bayly also traces out an underlying collective narrative of conversion, integration, disruption, and communal rigidification. She begins with a depiction of pre-colonial south Indian society, characterizing it as a world of contending warrior-chieftains and little kingdoms, where temple and ceremonial displays of ritual prerogatives and honors acted to integrate social groups into formative polities and establish hierarchies of status among them. This portrait reflects the now-dominant school of south Indian historiography, drawing on the work of Burton Stein, Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, Nicholas Dirks, and others. However, this historiography has often focused solely on Hindu groups and practices as constitutive of south Indian society. Bayly emphasizes what that focus has marginalized or excluded: the presence and significant activity of non-Hindu groups in this order.

In the pre-colonial period, Bayly shows, Muslim and Christian convert groups participated fully within the shared moral order of their larger society. The Syrian Christians, for instance, conducted military activities on behalf of their rulers, and those Hindu kings, in return, patronized the construction of their churches. Syrian Christians displayed and...