East Syriac language and ethnicity amongst St. Thomas Catholic Christians of Kerala

Abstract This article explores how East Syriac, the religious language of St. Thomas Catholic Christians in what today is the state of Kerala (India), became a key ethnic marker during the 16th and 17th centuries. It tracks the tensions sparked off by European missionaries, who tried to impose Latin as the principal language of religious services, leading the local clergy to develop a new relationship with the language their rite and deploy it as a marker of their religious, class and caste distinction. To make sense of how East Syriac went from being an irrelevant factor in the ethnic politics of these Christians to the key marker of difference, we develop a typology of religious languages, inspired by Peter Auer’s typology of standard languages. Our principal theoretical claim is that an exoglossic religious language, even when competence in it is not widespread amongst the congregation or even the clergy, can still function as a strong marker of ethnic distinction. We explore how East Syriac was used – relatively successfully – to maintain the caste privilege of the clergy, as well as the status and the autonomy of the indigenous Indian Christian church.