‘Declaration of Faith’ and Dissenting Dalit Voices

Abstract This essay attempts to critically examine the idea of ‘declaration of faith’ in the contemporary South Indian social context, primarily to analyze and bring forth new patterns of social conflict between ‘believed religion’ and ‘lived religion’ in the process of raising Christian testimony by students on University/College campuses. Furthermore, it looks at how the State-declared religious identity could effectively undermine the personal religious convictions of individuals and social groups, in this particular case, the Dalit Christians, when minority religious institutions and organizations transform themselves into subordinate bureaucratic structures of the State. This paper also explores how the essentializing aspects of identity tend to suppress the social aspirations of individuals/social groups by transforming the imposed boundaries of identity, identity politics, and associated stereotypical perceptions into active sources of internal social conflict. The central arguments of this paper are primarily informed and guided by empirical field data collected from the coastal region of Andhra Pradesh, India.