Stories We Carry: Re-membering Early Christian Practice and Pluralism in India

About the Lecture

Long before the arrivals that dominate the popular account, Christianity had already taken root in the subcontinent and begun to evolve in conversation with everything around it. This lecture introduces that early history through the Southist Syrian Christians — also known as the Knanaya — and the folklore the community still practises and passes on today.

Those songs, customs and inherited stories turn out to be a kind of archive. Read closely, they point to the plural worlds in which early Indian Christianity grew: the cultural encounters, the borrowings, the many different ways of belonging that shaped it. Dr Ann Susan Aleyas uses them to move us past the singular narratives that dominate contemporary discourse, towards something considerably more tangled and more interesting.

The session explores:

• The early history of Christianity in the Indian subcontinent, and how much of it predates the familiar account
• Who the Southist Syrian (Knanaya) Christians are, and what their folklore preserves
• How living traditions carry history that written records often leave out
• What gets lost when a plural history is told as a single story

About the Speaker

Dr Ann Susan Aleyas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. She earned her PhD in English from Jamia Millia Islamia, where her research explored the intersections of Christianity in India and print modernity, and her interests also include women's studies and performance studies. With over nine years of teaching experience, she has taught at St. Stephen's College and at Jesus and Mary College, where she now holds a permanent faculty position.

She has presented at national and international forums including Soka University in Japan, the Ireland India Institute at Dublin City University, Jamia Millia Islamia and the University of Würzburg, and her publications include contributions to the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences and The Book Review. An avid reader, she has recently taken to sharing book reviews on Instagram, where she also showcases her love for sarees, and she is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer who hopes to return to her practice soon.

About unLecture

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