Looking Under the Religion–Family Nexus: Syrian Christian Articulations in India

Abstract

What does one learn about religion through a study of Syrian Christian family cultures? How do religion and family—both as historically shaped ideological frames and social classifiers—inflect each other in Syrian Christian articulations about their past and present? What do these inflections tell us about being Christian in Kerala and beyond? Does it offer a critique of religion and family as sui generis categories? Based on select examples of Syrian Christian articulations from digital family displays produced by family associations (or kudumbayogam), I will argue that the religion–family node (or more appropriately nexus) hovers over the muddle of social relations. On one hand, the triumph of religion as a state-cushioned, universal category separated from the realm of the social and the historical (or religion with a capital ‘R’) has meant a neat tucking away of Syrian Christian households under the rubric of a reified Christianity. Similarly, the invocation of the patrilineal, patriarchal family as a universal category bereft of specificities works in tandem with this ironed-out Christianity in Syrian Christian family cultures. On the other hand, beyond their function as easy explainers, the religion–family nexus includes particular details which complicate the universality of the categories. These details recover family and religion in their heterogeneous elements expressed in place-sensitive caste idioms. I argue that the ‘universal’ in family and religion is sustained by the ‘particular’. A dialectical process of differentiation and homogenisation is critical to the Syrian Christian embrace of the religion–family nexus.

1. Introduction

1.1. Religion and Family as a Nexus

Discerning sociologists and historians do not consider family (patriarchal and heteronormative) or religion (interiorized but neatly distinguishable) as ‘universal’ categories of analysis (e.g., Uberoi 1995, 1996, 2017; Asad 2013; Smith 1996; Baird 2016). They accept their multi-faceted nature and dialectical forms. Nevertheless, in the past century and a half (especially with the triumph of modern enumeration1), family and religion have assumed a ‘thing-like facticity’ (Berger and Pullberg 1965, p. 196), aiding transcultural and transhistorical comparisons in popular discourse. Borrowing from Bourdieu (1996, p. 19), they have become ‘realized categories’ which service a variety of easy (often erroneous) explanations. Thus, many believe that the head of a household is usually a man and heteronormative marriage is the cornerstone of family life. We also believe that genes/blood determine cultural attitudes and dispositions. Similarly, many Hindus in India believe that their Muslim neighbours are direct descendants of medieval Muslim rulers or their Christian neighbours are closeted missionaries. Or many Muslims or Christians in India believe that the practice of caste among them is so completely different from that of the Hindus that it cannot be called ‘caste’, since caste is a Hindu inheritance and of Hindu paternity. Beyond aiding misconceptions and prejudices among and within communities, family and religion as reified categories animate the convictions of postcolonial nation-states like India. As a result, it becomes almost impossible to envisage either multi-religious families or religions with multiple family forms.2 Within this logic, family (like the individual) belongs to a religion and religions are constituted by and socialized in patriarchal families and their many idealized extensions. Protecting one’s religion, as a consequence, is all about protecting one’s family since both are perceived as patrilineal inheritances. Furthermore, the essentialized family and religion join hands in obscuring the exploitative dynamics of social relations.

Asad (2013) points out that a universalized notion of religion with a focus on individual convictions and interiority can be traced to post-Enlightenment Europe. In the face of rapid socio-economic transformations, religion (here, western Christianity) was recrafted as a private affair that shaped mental dispositions. The socio-economic base of dispositions or questions of discipline, authority and power in realizing dispositions were irrelevant to such a view. On one hand, this view upheld the universality of religion (given its apparent ability to affirm life or its conditions irrespective of time or space), on the other hand, it enabled social evolutionists of the nineteenth century to develop an imperial hierarchy of faith systems (Masuzawa 2012). Within this hierarchy, practices and rituals in colonized societies (including those of colonized Christians3) were perceived as devoid of true religious essence. Thus, the notion of universal religion carried within its kernel the imperative to differentiate, hierarchize and racialize. Furthermore, the denial of socio-historical contexts in the universal notion of religion, often aided the native ruling classes (both as colonial or anti-colonial actors) to categorize and mobilize people (for or against each other) and thereby legitimize their own interests (e.g., Robb 1986; Islam 2012; Banerjee 2025). Scholars have highlighted the continued use of this logic to shore up systemic hatred against minority groups and misdirect the citizenry from social and economic troubles (e.g., A. Ahmad 2013). It goes without saying that the exciting modern theology of ideal ‘religion’ is based on bad sociology and distorted history.

In a similar vein, family as a sui-generis category is based on notions of unbridled love, care and cooperation. Like the idealized religion, the idealized family also stands outside the contingencies of the ‘social’ and the ‘historical’. It is perceived as the fundamental building block of a harmonious and functional social order, especially within religious familism and neoliberal capitalism (Cooper 2017). Feminist scholars, in India and elsewhere, have outlined the salience of family as an ideological frame in regulating societies (Arunima 1996; Uberoi 1996; Devika 2008; Agrawal 2021). Bernardes (1985) defines family ideology ‘as a multi-layered system of ideas and practices’ which holds a certain kind of family as ‘natural’ and universal. This notional family is often stronger and more efficient than the empirical institution (Barrett and McIntosh 2015). Irrespective of differences in specific domestic or household arrangements, we may still hold on to an ideal-typical construction of ‘the family’. However, neither all families nor all family members are equal. The ability of elite families to perpetuate their lineage and wealth depends upon the historical exploitation and expropriation of working-class/underclass families. The latter are not often identified as ‘families’ (Zaretsky 1986). Thus, like the universal religion, the family also holds within its kernel an imperative to differentiate and hierarchize, both within and without.

Yet, ideal-typical notions of religion and family may occasionally provide a political ground for the marginalized to make claims and appeals. This counter-use, against the logic of the ruling elites, make both religion and family active grounds of creative contestations. For example, Dalit Christians intellectuals in India (especially those with a theological bend), have time and again used the professed essence of Christianity (a direct descendent of the idealized religion discussed above) to civilize their ‘co-religionist’ elites.4 In recent times, the children’s press conference in Gaza invoked the notion of universal family and childhood to call attention to the genocidal violence inflicted on them (Queally 2023). Such counter-uses, which momentarily offer a radical expansion of family or religion, also bring to the fore the emptiness of the categories. The emptiness is evident from the fact that neither an appeal to the Christian essence nor an appeal to the right to childhood mitigate prejudice or oppression in the preceding examples. In other words, universality melts in thin air when it meets the solidity of complicated, unsettling realities. Yet, the uses and counter-uses of family and religion continue to punctuate our socio-psychological and political worlds, causing a troublesome conundrum—a conundrum which vetoes either a complete rejection or complete acceptance of the categories. Perhaps, as sociologists, one ought to settle for a constipated but critical middle, grounded in the socio-economic formation of a given time and place.

1.2. Tracing the Shadow of the Religion–Family Nexus

How do we make sense of the linkages between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’ in the context of family and religion? And when do they operate as a nexus? In this paper, I propose that if one follows the shadow of ideal-typical formulations of religion and family (or what in Indian Sociology would be called the ‘book view’ of religion and family) in a specific socio-spatial context, one may perhaps understand what, why, when and how do actors make use of the reified religion–family node or nexus to service their articulations. The shadow of the religion–family nexus can be understood as the ‘dark area’ between the groundless ideal and the solid surface of socio-historical complexities.

I argue that the realm of kin-authored family cultural productions (especially histories), in their public display and performance, are potent fields to unravel the religion–family nexus. My research, over the past nine years, has focused on Syrian Christian5 family associations and their digital and non-digital cultural productions in the form of text, talk and images. These productions (which include objects ranging from videos, ringtones, photographs to family trees) are usually compiled within or in consonance with kin-authored family histories or kudumbacharitram. At the altar of modern family historiography, religion and family fold into each other and form something like an ideological alloy. But this alloy is never foolproof and always leaves space for doubts, surprises and contradictions, a point I circuitously explore in the following sections. The family history also anchors the kudumbayogam websites. As part of my MPhil and PhD work, I studied 45 printed family histories (from early 20th century to early 21st century) and over 100 active family websites and their YouTube channels. I have conceptualized this entire gamut of identity works as ‘family displays’ which usually expect an audience within and/or without the empirical family (Finch 2007). These identity works are self-authored or kin-authored. They are documented, archived and updated by the in-group making them examples of community archives. The study has not included any documents or data objects produced by professional historians. Drawing from Vatuk (1990), I also approach family cultures as documents that index individual and collective responses to social change.

Given the centrality of ‘display’, these cultural productions make possessive investments in normative and idealized notions of family and religion. Let me illustrate. Family histories in their public display are identity projects which attempt to put together what I call ‘hyperpalatable’ historical narratives. The Syrian Christian version of such family histories stands on two broad assertions. The first assertion deals with the Apostolic beginnings of the community in the first century CE. It is said that the community grew out of the conversion of a few noble Brahmin families by Thomas, the Apostle. This assertion, in various shapes and sizes, comfortably places the community in a global map of early Christianity.6 The second assertion deals with ‘pre-Christian’ Brahmin lineage which places the community within a local and national map of ‘native’ elites. It also works within the logic of patrilineal inheritance, since Brahmins in Keralan society were patrilineal as opposed to the Nairs.7 As far as Syrian Christian amateur historians are concerned, the second assertion settles the question of ‘lineage’, without the need to inquire into the genealogy of the elusive foremother. Based on these fundamental assertions, Syrian Christians craft specific histories of their families and kin-networks in modern times. Cultural discourses derived from this origin story strengthen the assertions further.

Clearly, particular details—historical or mythical—ground the concepts of family/lineage and religion in the origin story. The realization of the idealized notions of family and religion, I argue, is possible only within a field prepared by particular details and social change. Moreover, communities like the Syrian Christians, engage the ‘universal’, to protect and perpetuate the ‘particular’. While it is a fact that Christianity has a long precolonial history in the Malabar coast, shaped by trade, migration and miscegenation, the hyperpalatable histories produced by families assume a continuous, unbroken and pure line of genesis and growth. The focus on an unbroken story is a consequence of how religion vis a vis family were being propped up as idealized categories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Religious conversion, now seen as an irretrievable break, a severing of one’s roots, meant that ‘non-Hindus’ were supposed to explain the conditions of their paternity and past faith choices. Thus, many Syrian Christians (in sync with their neighbours) time-traveled to claim their nativity via the native patrilineal Brahmin and tied the ‘Thoma’ in their collective memory with Thomas the Apostle. The story, which fits within Eric Hobsbawm’s formulation of ‘invention of tradition’, also sought to explain the economic and social prowess of the community over the marginalized castes in Kerala. This was done more specifically by tying together laurels, titles, privileges from early and late medieval Kerala in their historical narratives.

In the following sections, I will demonstrate how a sociological exercise in tracing the religion–family nexus in Syrian Christian family displays can shed light on what lies underneath that sustains the nexus. Furthermore, it will elucidate the dialectical give and take between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’ which in turn produces a complex cultural discourse. I have picked episodes or snippets of Syrian Christian articulations from three different digital sites—a family meeting, a family memoir and a ‘skit’ performed as part of a family association celebration. Examples in the next section are drawn from the introductory proceedings of a family meeting with a focus on clergymen. The section that follows deals with a vignette from a digital family memoir published on a family website and the penultimate section analyses the cultural work of family members. These documents/data objects were picked for the following reasons: one, they capture the diversity of digital displays in the form of text, talk and image; two, they give a glimpse of articulations by invited outsiders and family members; three, they effectively illustrate the duality of differentiation and homogenization that plays out under the garb of the family-religion nexus. I approach the digital sources of Syrian Christian family displays as ‘publicly private’ (Lange 2007), multi-sensory, ‘abundant archives’ (Orsini 2022) which ought to be analyzed in their own right. Digital videos aid researchers ‘to inspect, zoom in, juxtapose, annotate and slow down audio-visual records’ providing a variety of opportunities to study how communities wish to be seen and shown (Hindmarsh and Dylan 2012, p. 57). This paper is an attempt to understand such depictions and what they might tell us about family and religion as categories and sites of inquiry. My reading and analysis of printed Syrian Christian family histories and other cultural productions, conversations with economically cushioned, middle-class Syrian Christian family association office-bearers/family historians and in-person observations from online and offline family meetings also influence the analysis in the following sections.8

2. A Bishop’s Clarification

I am a Panickan, not a Kola Panickan or a Thattan Panickan. Then who am I?

I am a Panicker of the Kollam Panicker Kudumbayogam.9

Yuhanon Mar Diascoros, a senior bishop or metropolitan of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, was speaking at a Syrian Christian Family Meeting in 2020. Family meetings organized by family associations are quite fashionable among Syrian Christians of all hues. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Syrian Christians have been mobilizing themselves in modern kinship, caste and religion-based associations. I have explained elsewhere (Donald 2024) how such modern associational politics, at its inception, were a consequence of shifts in productive forces and social relations; modern state formation; nationalism-induced anxieties; and disquieting encounters with Western Christianity. The rise in family associations (kudumbayogam) was coterminous with and complementary to caste/religious community associations (samudaya sanghatana) among Syrian Christians. A class of new and old elites from among the prominent families of Syrian Christians led/lead these associational forms. In the postcolonial period, progressive economic migration (first in the 1970s and later in the 1990s) in Kerala ensured the proliferation of family associations.

The metropolitan, as a special guest, was addressing one such association in Kottayam, Kerala. Like other invited speakers in the gathering, he began with a self-introduction or rather a social self-identification—a complex process of placing oneself (and one’s family) in a mutually familiar matrix of social and economic hierarchy, often communicated in a place-sensitive, caste-idiom. From the quote above, it is clear that the clergy is a member of the Kollam Panicker Family, a fairly well-known Syrian Christian lineage. However, Panicker is a title/titular name used by many castes/communities in South India, including marginalised groups such as blacksmiths (kolan) and goldsmiths (thattan).10 This is a problem for the metropolitan. A problem he swiftly overcomes by distinguishing himself from the so called ‘lower-caste’ Panickers. Why does the metropolitan, a man of God, identify his particular family name and insist on a caste clarification? Why does he distinguish himself not only from ‘Non-Christians’ but also from Christians of nondescript families? Or to use a Malayalam expression, why does he insist on identifying himself as a ‘tharavadi’, an individual from a superior family/lineage/caste? How is the reified religion–family nexus operationalised in such social self-identification?

Historically, the higher-ups in the Syrian Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy were never just men of God. From their ceremonial headgears to their hideous land deals11 these men represent/ed the political and economic power of the communal collective. They were/are usually drawn from important, well-placed families or kin-networks. Church functionaries, in the Keralan context, also bridge religious institutions and families. Family associations (which include religious actors12) characterise the family as a ‘domestic parish’—an object of veneration in its idealised form. With aphorisms such as, society is made up of families or family is the building block of the church, the generic relevance of the associational form is highlighted. Pandering to the shared fiction of family legitimises the public presence of kudumbayogams, making it somehow look less ‘communal’ or ‘parochial’ and more ‘cultural’.13 Nevertheless, the shared fiction also prepares the ground to reproduce narratives of filial distinctions—distinctions which need to be protected from an ‘unkind’ world. In other words, the family needs to be protected from other families, especially those which are unequal and not even ‘proper’ families. Bernardes (1985) identifies differentiation as a significant element of family ideology. Familism of this variety differentiates human beings and thereby underpins the very possibility of social stratification.

Thus, both family and religion are realized as ideals within a differentiated space. For example, Fr. Puthenpurackal14, a Syro-Malabar priest, community intellectual and the main speaker at the family meeting alongside the metropolitan, lamented how the functions of the porch (or the veranda) of the Syrian Christian household has changed over the years, revealing the corrosion of family and religious values.15 According to him, until a generation ago, the porch was an ideal place where family elders taught their children stories and verses from the bible and narrated their family history. The porch was a place for large family gatherings. It was also a place where beggars and agricultural workers were fed. However, the porch is today fenced with grills, bereft of its past roles. Evidently, Puthenpurackal imagines a landed, agrarian, multi-generational joint family household as an ideal which has now been replaced with dispersed and anonymized domestic units. The reproduction of the idealized family and religion and pursuant processes of value identification is placed within a socially differentiated household that can buy labour and extend charity. What one needs to note is that Fr. Puthenpurackal and other community speakers like him, do not expect an absolute return to the old. In fact, he places a lot of emphasis on conjugal life and the display of romantic love as essential for strong families in the remainder of his speech. Furthermore, these speakers reconcile the family values discourse with individual aspirations of neoliberal consumerism and entrepreneurship. Such a reconciliation is not imposed upon the Church or its spokespersons. Rather, a happy collusion, a comfortable tethering of individual aspirations and family obligations is crucial for the political economy of religious organizations. The imperative to distinguish is also a method to construct an inner realm of similarity (a point I take up later in some more detail). Thus, the metropolitan highlights his family name to ensure identification with an equally distinguished audience. The perpetuation of a pure, exclusive lineage is cushioned by religious familism. Waters (2007, p. 205), defines family as a ‘witness to God’s providential ordering of creation, a human association comprised of biological and social affinities which provide a place of mutual and timely belonging for its members’. Not having a family is denying the ‘order of creation’. Family situates its members within the creation’s unfolding history. It encapsulates an ordering of both natural and social affinities (ibid., pp. 193–95). Religious familism plays a critical role in Syrian Christian associational form and its articulations. The family association and its productions are imagined as an ideological bridge and fortification between the family and the larger society.

Under the shadow of the religion–family nexus lies the conundrum of social relations. One realises that identity formation and identification are historically contingent, contextual processes and can only exist in plurality. Thus, it is empirically impossible to obtain just a ‘Christian’ (or for that matter a Muslim or a Hindu) in aforementioned context. One is always something else and also perhaps a Christian. Or in this case, one is a ‘good’ Christian because one is essentially something else. And one is a tharavadi Christian because there are Christians who are not.

3. An Immigrant Doctor’s Memoir

There was a strong bond between the pulaya workers and our family. One of the surviving members of the pulaya clan that served my family is Kochukunju. Even now when I return to India, he comes and stays with us. He has told me that his great-great-great-grandfather was a bonded worker bought by my great-great-great-grandfather. Slavery was abolished in Kerala in 1812. Still Kochukunj’s family took care of our farmlands and stayed with us. There was a lot of poverty and hunger around us. But our family treated our workers well and provided them food and shelter at all seasons. Kochukunju is a converted Christian. Still, we did not allow him and his people to join our churches as ours was strictly for the Syrian Christians following the St. Thomas tradition. But we supported the churches of pulayas. Even after coming to America, my brothers and I used to financially help Kochukunju. Now Kochukunju is nicknamed American Kochukunju by his neighbours. [Italics mine]

The preceding excerpt is from an online memoir of a Syrian Christian family spread across two continents.16 The author is a family member, a professional doctor who immigrated to the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The family was one of the core recipients of the commercial agriculture boom in the reclaimed lands of Kuttanad in the mid twentieth century. The memoir, part of the kudumbayogam website17, spends several paragraphs detailing the family’s landed wealth. The evolution of affluent middle-class Syrian Christians from ‘kind’ landlords to ‘philanthropic’ global professionals, is lucidly typified in this account. The Pulaya18 agricultural slave-turned-servant plays a crucial role in consolidating this transition for the doctor. The transition is seemingly clean without any taste of conflict. Good but normative (hierarchical) relations with the Pulaya workers (and not necessarily families) sheds light on how the memoirist places his own family in a long history of caste-class relations. A history of change and continuity, of commissions and omissions.

It is pertinent to note that Syrian Christians were among the biggest slave-owners and traders of 19th century Kerala (Paul 2021). The image of the obedient, congenial, sacrificing servant (as opposed to the assertive, unionized worker of the 20th century) is found among other landed communities as well. In 2015, The Hindu carried a story on a Nair Kudumbayogam which built a temple for a Pulaya agricultural worker, Palan Pulayan, who ‘got a treasure while working on the fields one day and handed it over to the head of this Nair family, later he was attacked by a tiger and in the fight that followed both he and the animal were killed.’ (Kuttoor 2015). The doctor’s narrative, for obvious reasons, sidesteps radical movements of agricultural workers in Kuttanad. The legend of a pristine, touristy backwater village, with sweet memories of a mid-20th century childhood would surely go challenged if images of lower-caste landless peasants come marching in. Tharamangalam (2011, pp. 35–36), in his book on the agrarian class conflict in Kuttanad, argues how ‘neo-christian’ agricultural workers (like the Kochukunju mentioned above) stood ‘solidly with their non-christian class allies’ in opposition to the chief landowning class of Syrian Christians. Interestingly, the Kuttanad of 1950s and 60s which form the backdrop for the doctor’s nostalgia, were the most militant years of confrontation between agricultural workers and landowners. Tharamangalam (2011, p. 77) notes that worker’s unions intensified their struggles with the coming of the first Communist government in late 1950s. This led to counter-mobilizations among landowning Syrian Christians in the form of para-military sanghams (muck like the caste armies in Bihar from 1970s onward) who organized attacks on agricultural workers.

While Kochukunju and his family are Christians like the doctor and his family, they find themselves in separate churches. The doctor emphasises how his family did not allow Kochukunju and ‘his people’ into the Syrian Christian Church but ‘supported’ them in setting up a separate church. This separation is not a problem for either the universal notion of religion or family. Since religion is about immaterial, interiorised belief in the modern epoch and family a crucible of love and cooperation that stays faithful to tradition, differentiation and distinction is critical for their realisation. Thus, the immigrant doctor’s family could only embrace the ‘universal’ through the protection of their particular identity against mixing and miscegenation with the ‘converted Christian’. The word ‘converted’ in the excerpt requires special attention. The word ‘converted’ has historically represented a fall, a denigration, a disinheritance (Banerjee 2025). Curiously enough, elite Christians like the doctor, with precolonial histories, use the term to differentiate themselves from those who embraced Christianity more recently. While a certain section of the nationalist elite may perceive all Christians as opportunist converts, elite Christians in Kerala may use the term to somehow emphasise their originality and ancientness. It is not without a reason that many family historians, during my interaction with them, use acronyms such as APKK or Athi Purathana Katholika Kudumbam (or, Exceptionally Ancient Catholic Family) to characterise their social identity.

Furthermore, the patronage or tutelage of the doctor’s family is such that Kochukunju is apparently referred to as ‘American Kochukunju’ by his neighbours. The doctor alludes to the value accrued to Kochukunju by his continued hierarchical relationship with the Syrian Christian family. The coinage ‘American Kochukunju’ is an excellent example of how feudal remnants are symbolically remobilised even after significant shifts in production relations. In his attempt to build connections with an irretrievable past, the memoirist steps into the shoes of his ancestors. And this connection requires Kochukunju, the working-class, Christian other.

4. Finding One’s Own Kind

Syrian Christian Family Associations often have branches and/or chapters across the globe. Such chapters are usually named after the migration destination of its members. During the annual family meeting, the itinerary of cultural programmes may include performances (ranging from cinematic dance to family history/family identification quizzes) curated and produced by individual chapters. The Chennai Chapter of the Kandathil family19 had put together a ‘skit’ as part of the 126th family meeting. I chanced upon their performance on a YouTube channel named ‘Kandathil Chennai Chapter’.20

The skit, performed by middle-aged white-collar migrants settled in Chennai, imagines an interesting roadside conversation between two family members who do not know each other. One of them is a non-resident Indian (or NRI) with a travel bag and a touristy look and the other is a young resident of Kerala. The former has travelled to Kerala to attend the annual family meeting but has lost his way. He asks the young man (whom he meets on the road) the way to the tourist resort where the annual meeting is being held. The NRI apparently can speak only in English. Thus, he posed his question in English. Unfortunately, the young local is not well-versed in English and finds it difficult to explain the route. Nevertheless, he tries his luck in broken English and this leads to a chaotic but funny sequence of conversation. The NRI is ultimately taken to his destination by the local. On reaching the resort, to their surprise, both realize that they are members of the same family. In other words, family association meetings, bring total strangers to realize their filial connections. Language is apparently not a barrier.

In another skit21 by the Tiruvilla Chapter in the 125th family meeting of the Kandathils, a character reminds his co-character the following: ‘to write a good ‘kudumbayogam’ skit, one should know what is a kudumbayogam. And to know one’s kudumbayogam one should know what is a kudumbam. To know one’s kudumbam one should read the ‘kudumbacharitram’—to read the charitram one ought to know English!’ The link between the family association (kudumbayogam), the family (kudumbam), and family history (kudumbacharitram) is relevant to our discussion. As argued in the introductory section, kin-authored family histories form the bedrock of Syrian Christian family displays. The ideal-typical family is planned and actualised through active mobilisation of family members and their histories—an essentially material process shaped by historical shifts. For example, the historical shift from Malayalam to English in the everyday lives of many affluent family members in the case of the Kandathils. With successive tides of gainful migration within India and abroad, the descendants of the Kandathil family moved away from Malayalam. As a consequence, the family has brought out an English edition of its family history. This trend is common across well-resourced Syrian Christian family associations in Kerala.

The question of distinction and differentiation, as explored in the previous sections, underpin the religion–family nexus. The process of differentiation is also marked by a simultaneous process of fusing ‘inner’ uniformity. Often the cultural productions of kudumbayogams negotiate the internal differences of class (expressed in terms of occupation or language), mostly at a symbolic level, to ascertain the irreducible unity of the lineage. Skits and other dramatic performances, as glanced above, are examples of such cultural discourses. Through collective repetitions, a family’s distinction is socialized irrespective of differences within.

There is more to the process of fusing unity than what meets the eye. In family cultures we encounter discursive practices which are overt and observable. On one hand, they are practices, and on the other they enable specific forms of practices and transmission. In Bourdieu’s (1990) terms, they are practices which reproduce practices. They assume and enable certain ‘patterned dispositions’ when it comes to family, relationships, intimacy, community, ancestry and the like. They constitute the habitus of the member. Turner (1994) differentiates observable practices from the ‘unconscious’ processes of learning. He calls the former phenotypes and the latter genotypes. Skits, songs, websites, printed histories are phenotypic facts. They are explicit, intelligible, and discernible. However, they do not exhaust the possibilities of familial practices rather they form an outer ring of family display. In fact, they are several degrees separated from the muddle of everyday domesticity. They are public, made to be seen and shown. What these facts do in shaping the internal, cognitive structures of an individual is largely unknown to this study. But what one does find is an open appeal to the ‘tacit’. We can simply call them appeals to blood. There is a broad consensus, among families, that blood can and will identify blood (raktham rakthatte thirichariyum) forming the vital condition for differentiation. A belief deeply rooted and creatively verbalized in cultural productions.

Nevertheless, this ‘magic of blood’ requires formal introduction. The inability to recognize blood relatives is a fundamental problem/crisis for Syrian Chrisitan family associations. In the absence of introduction—mediated by families and their institutional forms—members are strangers. In the Chennai chapter’s skit, the family members are strangers and unintelligible to each other, given their language barriers. Once the introduction is done, at the door of the family meeting venue, the family members can start with ‘tacit’ assumptions about the bloodline. Intrinsic, inalienable, irreducible qualities can then be assigned to each other. These projections are oriented towards absolute values of family and religion, even when they stand knee-deep on particular contexts shaped by migration-induced economic mobility and cultural shifts.

5. Conclusions: What Lies Under the Religion–Family Nexus?

Mosse (2012) discusses the tensions between Christian universalism and the particular nature of local contexts and customs. Commenting on the Tamil country, Mosse observes how caste was ‘secularized’ as a matter of culture by social actors and thus unimportant to reified religion. He observes that religion, as understood today, is a modern Christian notion. The colonized adapted this idea, often as a response to Christian interventions in the public sphere. According to him, two dominant perspectives within the anthropology of Christianity in India grew out of the negotiations with reified notions of religion. The first view holds that Christians are alienated and marginalized in India due to a history of missionary paternalism. For the proponents of this view, inculturation—a set of strategies to make Christianity relevant to the local context, is key to alleviate this state of affairs. The second view holds that Christianity should not be reduced to a dependent variable of the local situation. It should be viewed as an independent force which modifies both the individual and society. Mosse does not think of Christianity in India as an external conceptual structure, imposed upon a people. Rather, he approaches it as a complex set of practices and debates which emerged through compromise and ‘contingent actions in a variety of areas’ (Mosse 2012, p. 29). In a way, Mosse imagines religion as a ‘site’ and not a category—a site sustained, nurtured and shaped by social and economic relations in specific contexts. One can extend this analysis to the concept of family as well. The interaction between family and religion, in everyday practices including family displays, is a story of contingent actions and compromises. Thus, what lies under the religion–family nexus is the ground that sustains the reification of the concepts.

Syrian Christianity is also a field of practice developed through several social and political compromises in Kerala (and increasingly in migration destinations). Mosse is of the opinion that as scholars we should pay equal and combined attention to contextual factors and cultural dynamics of world religions. He calls for the need to move beyond the ‘continuity–rupture’ debate which colours studies on Christianity. He, rightly, holds that religious thought per se has no agency beyond the social conditions of its expressions. Social conditions of religious and filial expressions, as explored in the previous sections, are shaped by a dialectical process of simultaneously seeking difference and homogeneity within a specific time–space configuration. The bishop or the doctor place themselves in the company of similarly stationed Thomas Christians by differentiating their kind from the goldsmith, blacksmith or Dalit caretaker. As Mosse observes, this process may be dubbed as ‘ways of the world’ or what one calls nattunadapu in Malayalam, with no real consequence on ideal-typical notions of family or religion. Thus, the doctor and Kochukunju can continue as Christians and members of unequal but discrete family units and churches. I argue against such conceptual separation. The doctor and the bishop, as modern actors, arrive at religion and family via social differentiation and homogenisation in a changing Syrian Christian milieu. Therefore, they cannot invariably walk with Kochukunju to achieve an imagined Christian universalism. The reason lies in the fact that the so-called aphorisms of religion and family stand on social and economic conditions that are unequal and hierarchical. The ruling classes have historically used religion and family to discipline the rest, notwithstanding the moral challenges mounted by the latter. Again, such moral challenges, couched in religious or filial terms, emanate from an interpretation of social and economic relations and their immanent contradictions.

Critiquing the sociology of religion in India, Robinson (2004, p. 22) observes that religious minorities such as Christians were ‘brought within the boundaries of study by viewing them through the lens of caste, the essence of Indian social structure.’ However, in this paper, caste is not approached as a received framework, rather as an integral part of Syrian Christian articulations and lives in Kerala. While Indian Sociology has largely viewed caste as essentially ‘Hindu’ and caste among Christians and Muslims as residues of a Hindu past, my approach departs from such a perception. It is important to historicise and contextualize caste within a Christian milieu. The social reproduction of caste may have certain distinctively place-sensitive ‘Christian’ qualities to it. Semitic traditions of lineage and genealogy can be put to the service of class and caste stratifications, as evident in the Syrian Christian example. Notions of status, rank, heritage and the like can be harnessed within Christian familism. Thus, caste is something integral to Syrian Christians in Kerala and not simply a ‘Hindu’ inheritance. Moreover, Syrian Christians—as a land-owning, elite group—have historically schooled their relationship with lower-caste, working-classes as caste relations. Here, religion plays second fiddle to the consolidation of caste–class structures and the endogamous family becomes its major recruiting ground. The dialectics between religion and social context expressed in a filial, caste-idiom, determines the tenor of Syrian Christianity in Kerala. Such a dialectics is visible among Muslims and Christians in other parts of India, albeit in divergent contexts, with or without elaborate family-centric cultural displays (e.g., Caplan 1980; I. Ahmad 2015; Ahmed 2023).

Drawing from Asad (2013), I argue that the everyday articulations of Christians are not shaped by a permanent set of abstract religious dispositions that hang without the support of social, political and economic institutions. Rather, religion, at any given juncture, can only be retrieved in tandem with the ‘social’ and the ‘historical’. Thus, the metropolitan’s clarification on the titular name Panicker is not an act against or in abeyance of the essence of Christianity (which apparently militates against caste). Rather, his self-identification, quite inadvertently, questions the ahistoricity of the ‘essence’ argument, notwithstanding his possible fidelity to the argument as a ‘man of god’ in other contexts.

Finally, the process of fusing cohesion and unity within, lies at the heart of the Syrian Christian family crisis. The strangers-turned-family members in the skit have to return to their disparate English and Malayalam lives after the family meeting. How do they stay in touch? What would protect their distinction from an unruly world? Family associations believe that the complex matrix of caste-valorising status production along with everyday modes of social reproduction, would ward off the anxieties of family crisis till the next kudumbayogam. The idealised religion–family nexus, like freshly bloomed lotuses in the muddy waters of the ‘particular’, would help the strangers find their way home once again.