Indian Christianity *is* Eastern Christianity
On Easter, I tweeted the following: https://twitter.com/matt_k007/status/1644900771593588736?s=20
On previous Easters, I’ve tweeted the Greek phrase “Christ is risen” (Χριστός Ανέστη). But this time, I wanted to share the Resurrection joy using an expression from the Indian subcontinent.
Thus, I posted this image created by Dr. Jyoti Sahi.
Sahi is an Indian Christian artist who grew up in North India, born to a Punjabi father and a British mother. His mother became Catholic when he was 14.
Jyoti Sahi is a gifted artist. As a child he studied under Sudhir Khastigir, who taught art at a school founded by Rabindranath Tagore. Khastigir famously developed an artistic style that embraced the Indian culture, which was formative for Sahi who desired to reflect Christian art that complemented the form he learned from Khastigir. Moreover, Sahi utilizes art to facilitate interfaith and cross-cultural dialogue.
Dr. Sahi integrates his Catholic faith with his Indian identity:
The sacramental life of the Church has been central to my encounter with the sacred. The sacramental is to be found in the ordinary, and elemental. My favourite festival in India is the Festival of Light. I was deeply moved once by the sight of a little oil lamp, a deepa, placed beneath a great tree, which seemed to symbolise the folk beliefs of many different peoples.
Hence, Sahi is able to connect the beauty with Indian cultural activities, largely influenced by Hinduism, with his faith in Christ.
The resurrection painting shown above is The Sign of Jonas. Sahi aims to “bring together forms and colours related to the Cosmic Christ, drawing from images that are to be found in the Gospel of John.”
Victoria Emily Jones offers this interpretation of the image:
First I notice the outstretched arms of Christ — a pose that deliberately references the Crucifixion. Here, though, those extremities are not pinned down to a cross. They are utterly open and free, embracing the world in risen glory. It’s common for artists to hint at the Crucifixion in Resurrection images. There’s a theological reason for that: the Crucifixion and Resurrection are two sides of the same coin, one great unified event, neither of which can be understood in isolation from the other. Sahi strengthens this link by including a human figure on each side of Christ. In Crucifixion images, these spots are traditionally occupied by the Virgin Mary and the apostle John, but here the abstracted figures double as two of the Marys at the tomb. They look down to where they had laid the body two days ago but find only an empty stone bench. They have yet to encounter the enormous presence behind them.
Next I notice the trunk of a tree that runs vertically up the center of the picture plane, almost one with Christ, whose arms stretch out like branches. The Tree of Life is a common motif in Christian art, a reference to John’s vision of heaven (Revelation 22:1–4). It is often integrated into Crucifixion imagery to prophesy hope in an otherwise bleak scene, but here the tree shoots forth from the ground in full-fledged resurrection power.
Upon closer examination, one can see that the tree branches double as the skeletal structure and gaping mouth of a fish. Christ is being expelled from this giant sea creature, much in the manner of the prophet Jonah. Jonah disgorged is one of the earliest Christian images of the Resurrection. It can be found painted on the walls of the third-century catacombs of Rome, where Christians were buried, and carved onto marble sarcophagi, and later it found its way into illuminated manuscripts, both Western and Eastern. The association of the Old Testament story of Jonah with the New Testament story of Jesus is one that Jesus made himself. When the Pharisees asked him for a sign to prove his messiahship, he said that he would give them none except the sign of Jonah. “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish,” he said, “so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). As the apostle Paul later articulated, Jesus’s Resurrection, his bursting forth out of the belly of the earth on the third day, has implications on the afterlife of believers. Because Jesus has risen from death to live eternally with God, so shall we. That’s why the earliest images of Jonah were created in funerary contexts. They provided hope for the loved ones of the deceased.
One other emblem worthy of notice is the almond-shaped mandorla in the upper register. A manifestation of God’s glory, the mandorla is usually shown rotated another ninety degrees, enveloping Christ’s whole body. What Sahi has done with this unique positioning is make possible additional readings of the shape. At first I saw it as the all-seeing eye of God, with Christ’s head forming the pupil, and a halo the iris. But it could also be the opening of a womb, from which the reborn Christ is emerging.
Therefore, Sahi’s depiction of Jesus as the Sign of Jonah has deep Biblical and Christological significance.
While many mutuals appreciated this image, there were those random anon accounts who attacked this art as being modernist, representative of Novus Ordo, and even calling it “shite.”
How sad that on a holy day of Easter, so-called Catholics couldn’t simply utter “Happy Easter,” but resorted to such judgmental, supercilious negativity.
I responded to one that he hated Eastern Christianity. He tried to counter that this art was not representative of anything Eastern or Indian. A small band of anons joined in. Even some anon South Indian Catholics expressed not only their distaste for Sahi’s image, but asserted that this was not Syro-Malabar or Syro-Malankara art, and therefore I was wrong in calling it Eastern Christian. They exhorted that I could call it Indian modern art (or simply modern art) but that’s the extent of the descriptor.
These faceless, nameless cowards were completely missing the mark.
Firstly, for the anonymous camp that limited Eastern Christianity to the Syrian-based rites (I will charitably allow that while they did not state explicitly, the Syrian Orthodox Churches are also under the umbrella of Eastern Christianity), they need a history lesson.
Saint Thomas the Apostle arrived in South India in AD 72, after establishing a community in Mesopotamia. Following the martyrdom of Thomas, Christianity persisted in India, albeit dwindling, without any clergy or hierarchy.
In AD 345, my ancestors arrived in Kerala from Mesopotamia with a bishop and clergy. They came to strengthen the dwindling Christian community in South India. Thus began the Syrian Christian community that some of these anons limited the definition of Eastern Christianity in India to be.
The reader will note, however, that there was nearly 300 years of Christianity without the Syrian rites.
There is some historical basis that the early Saint Thomas Christians merged some of the teachings from the apostle with their Hindu beliefs. But what is more significant is that this represented the earliest development of Christianity in India. Hence, Christianity in the East, which includes India, is incomplete without the inculturated expression of the faith as lived by the early Saint Thomas Christians and sought to be rekindled by theologians such as Dr. Sahi.
Pope Francis emphasizes in Evangelii Gaudium, “Grace supposes culture, and God’s gift becomes flesh in the culture of those who receive it” (115). Dr. Sahi’s art seeks to reveal how the Trinity is present in Indian culture and among the Indian people. This is a repudiation of the European interpretation and imposition of Christianity, or more specifically, white Jesus.
The pope further comments,
We would not do justice to the logic of the incarnation if we thought of Christianity as monocultural and monotonous. While it is true that some cultures have been closely associated with the preaching of the Gospel and the development of Christian thought, the revealed message is not identified with any of them; its content is transcultural. Hence in the evangelization of new cultures, or cultures which have not received the Christian message, it is not essential to impose a specific cultural form, no matter how beautiful or ancient it may be, together with the Gospel. The message that we proclaim always has a certain cultural dress, but we in the Church can sometimes fall into a needless hallowing of our own culture, and thus show more fanaticism than true evangelizing zeal (117).
Unfortunately, many of the same people who expressed displeasure at Sahi’s resurrection image also reject Pope Francis’ call to inculturation and universality. The vocal minority who objected to the Amazonian inculturated image of Mary alone depicts this.
As for the Syrian Catholics from India who objected to Sahi’s Sign of Jonah, there is a further reckoning they must undergo.
India’s caste system has given favoritism to Syrian Christians since some from this community have trading and foreign ties.
In Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Post-Colonial India, Sonja Thomas explains that the
“Syrian Christian community was rewarded by the landowning upper-class Hindus with land and caste privileges. Their privileged status is documented especially in the eighth-century Syrian Christian Copper Plates, which granted the community particular rights, including freedom from certain taxes, rights to trade, and land rights."
However, many Indian Catholics converted through European efforts came from poorer villages and fishing regions, and thus many converts were from the lowest-caste Dalit community. These Catholics were members of the Latin Rite, and still deemed Dalits in India’s caste system.
While Dr. Sahi himself is not considered among the Dalit Christians, neither is he among the Syrian Christians. But his art does aim to uplift the Dalit community, such as his Dalit Madonna.
I uphold that the Syrian Catholic objectors are wrong in deeming Sahi’s art as non-Eastern from two different standpoints:
- They limit Eastern Christianity to their privileged Syrian Christian background without appreciating that the indigenous, inculturated expression of Christianity by Indians (a country in the East) is an Eastern Christian expression.
- They fail to recognize their caste privilege and embrace their authentic Christian call to advocate for the marginalized, including their Dalit sisters and brothers.
As I expressed in NCR,
Casteism is incongruent with the Catholic faith. The catechism teaches that all persons are equal and created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore have dignity.
The Syro-Malabar Church cannot truly walk together with all of God’s people without renouncing any and all caste privileges and supporting those who are among the lower caste.
This includes the anon Syrian Catholic naysayers.
Hence, rooted in the rejection of Sahi’s resurrection image that I encountered online is a combination of privilege and a failure to realize the Church’s inherent call to universality. If they cannot recognize and reverence Christ depicted by an Indian artist seeking to express him using indigenous imagery, they simply do not see or know Christ.
Their rejection of Sahi’s Christ is a direct rejection of God raised from the dead that they claim to believe. Their faith is not rooted in the true Christ, for if so their knee-jerk reaction would be to proclaim, “Happy Easter” or “Christ is Risen,” not tear into the indigenous Indian Christ.
Therefore I continue to maintain that a rejection of Indian Christian art equals a rejection of Eastern Christianity expressed by the inculturated Indian experience. No one who sides with this rejection sides with Christ or his universal Church.
