Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of “shuttling” as a hermeneutical tool to interpret New Testament texts. As the world moves toward regressive nationalism, persons embodying hybrid identities threaten an exclusive view of the nation from within its boundaries. In the Indian context, the term “Indo-Western” is used to describe persons shuttling between Indian and Western cultural values. The Indian Christian community, and in particular Indian Christian women, have found themselves oscillating between traditionalism and modernism, and shuttling between the East and the West in an attempt to define their Indian-ness while living in postcolonial India. This shuttling between cultures has rendered Indian Christian women perpetual outsiders both inside and outside of the nation. Thus, reading biblical texts through the lens of “shuttling,” while acknowledging their place as belonging “neither here nor there,” enables Indian Christian women to interpret texts as outsiders that never fully belong to either context.
Dhobi Ka Kutta Na Ghar Ka Ghat Ka! (This is a popular proverb/idiom in India. Its literal translation reads as follows, “The dog of a washer-man belongs neither in the home nor near the river side [i.e. the workplace of the washer-man].” In other words, it refers to a person who is split between two situations, jobs, or contexts and never fully commits or belongs to either context completely.)
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Notes
- 1.
Angela Dewan, “India the Most Dangerous Country to be a Woman, US Ranks 10th in Survey,” CNN, June 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/health/india-dangerous-country-women-survey-intl/index.html.
- 2.
Tat-Siong Benny Liew, What is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 34.
- 3.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 212.
- 4.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 34–35; See also Tina Chen, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 178–79.
- 5.
Deborah Grey, “The Stereotypes I Live with as an Indian Christian Woman,” Youth ki Awaaz, December 12, 2016, https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2016/12/stereotypes-about-indian-christian-women/.
- 6.
Michelle Voss Roberts, “Religious Belonging and the Multiple,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 no. 1 (2010): 44, cited in Peniel Jesudasan Rufus Rajkumar and Joseph Prabhakar Dayam, “Introduction,” in Many Yet One? Multiple Religious Belonging, ed. Peniel Jesudasan Rufus Rajkumar and Joseph Prabhakar Dayam (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2016), 1.
- 7.
Grace Ji-Sun Kim, “Foreign Women: Ezra, Intermarriage and Asian American Women’s Identity,” Feminist Theology 22, no. 3 (2014): 241–52.
- 8.
Joseph Cheah, Race and Religion in American Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 132, cited in Kim, “Foreign Women,” 241–42.
- 9.
Kim, “Foreign Women,” 242.
- 10.
Cheah, Race and Religion in American Buddhism, 132.
- 11.
Grey, “The Stereotypes I Live with.”
- 12.
Nivedita Mishra, “‘Sandra from Bandra’ to ‘Oh Fanny re’: The Changing Face of Christians in Films,” Hindustan Times, September 12, 2014, https://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/sandra-from-bandra-to-oh-fanny-re-the-changing-face-of-christians-in-films/story-wH9aE6IymtNFJkllEViSUJ.html.
- 13.
Simone Sinn, “Vulnerability and Agency in Multiple Religious Belonging: Or, Why God Matters,” in Many Yet One, ed. Rajkumar and Dayam, 1.
- 14.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 288. I draw on the imagery of shuttling from the work of Spivak who observes that Third World women shuttling between patriarchy and imperialism, subject and object, and tradition and modernization disappear into nothingness as she is displaced from her context.
- 15.
R. S. Sugirtharajah writes, “As a survey discipline, I can identify two traditional modes of biblical studies in India. These can be categorized as ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Anglicist’.” See “Biblical Studies in India: From Imperialistic Scholarship to Postcolonial Interpretation,” in Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 283.
- 16.
For more on Orientalism as a colonial policy and its impact on in Indian biblical hermeneutics, see Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies in India,” 283.
- 17.
For more on Anglicism, see Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies in India,” 286.
- 18.
The work of Tat-Siong Benny Liew and Monica Jyotsna Melancthon has been important in articulating the need for theological perspectives that resist reduction to a singular, universal message. See Liew, What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics?, 23; Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon, “Theological Education for Transformation: India,” Colloquium 47, no. 2 (2015): 242.
- 19.
Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies in India,” 293.
- 20.
Mary F. Foskett, “The Accidents of Being and the Politics of Identity: Biblical Images of Adoption and Asian Adoptees in America,” Semeia 90–91 (2002): 142.
- 21.
Sharon Jacob, Reading Mary alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers: Violent Love, Oppressive Liberation and Infancy Narratives (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 18–19. My hyphenated identity and my ability to live and navigate between the lines of religion, gender, caste, and my status as an immigrant form my hermeneutical lens through which I interpret the character of Mary in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In my monograph, I argue that by drawing on my own experience shuttling between the cultural norms of the East and the West and never fully committing and/or fully belonging to either of the two places enables me to reinterpret Mary to reflect the ambivalences present in the lives of Indian women living and working in an increasingly globalized economy.
- 22.
Seung Ai Yang, “Challenges and Opportunities in Current Feminist Biblical Studies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 2 (2009): 111.
- 23.
Gale A. Yee, “An Autobiographical Approach to Feminist Biblical Scholarship,” Encounter 67, no. 4 (2006): 385; See also Gale A. Yee, “‘She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 45–65.
- 24.
Melancthon, “Theological Education for Transformation,” 242.
- 25.
Kwok Pui-lan, “Jesus/the Native: Biblical Studies from a Postcolonial Perspective,” in Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 80. Kwok draws the notion of “parallel processing” from the field of computer science, where the term denotes the integration and expansion of databases, which serves to create novel means of problem-solving and greater powers of data storage. In the context of postcolonial biblical hermeneutics, it speaks to the need to teach about both biblical texts and the indigenous tools which various communities bring to bear on the texts.
- 26.
In her essay “An Autobiographical Approach to Feminist Biblical Scholarship,” 384, Yee recounts a painful but poignant experience that speaks to the issue of race in the United States, noting the exclusion of Asian American women from the discussions of racial issues among feminists, which at the time had been focused primarily on the binary between black and white women.
- 27.
Melanchthon, “Theological Education for Transformation: India,” 239.
- 28.
Leeza Mangaldas, “India’s Got Beef with Beef: What You Need to Know about the Country’s Controversial ‘Beef Ban’,” Forbes, June 5, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/06/05/indias-got-beef-with-beef-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-countrys-controversial-beef-ban/#1c34694c53c2.
- 29.
Amy B. Wang, “Indian Politicians Cause Outrage after Blaming Alleged Groping on Women’s ‘Western’ Clothes,” Washington Post, January 4, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/04/indian-politicians-cause-outrage-after-blaming-alleged-groping-on-womens-western-clothes/?utm_term=.6387b4c0c792.
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Cheah, Joseph. Race and Religion in American Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Foskett, Mary F. “The Accidents of Being and the Politics of Identity: Biblical Images of Adoption and Asian Adoptees in America,” Semeia 90–91 (2002): 135–44.
Grey, Deborah. “The Stereotypes I Live with as an Indian Christian Woman.” Youth ki Awaaz, December 12, 2016. https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2016/12/stereotypes-about-indian-christian-women/.
Jacob, Sharon. Reading Mary alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers: Violent Love, Oppressive Liberation and Infancy Narratives. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Kim, Grace Ji-Sun. “Foreign Women: Ezra, Intermarriage and Asian American Women’s Identity.” Feminist Theology 22, no. 3 (2014): 241–52.
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Liew, Tat-Siong Benny. What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.
Mangaldas, Leeza. “India’s Got Beef with Beef: What You Need to Know about the Country’s Controversial ‘Beef Ban’.” Forbes, June 5, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/06/05/indias-got-beef-with-beef-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-countrys-controversial-beef-ban/#1c34694c53c2.
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Roberts, Michelle Voss. “Religious Belonging and the Multiple.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 no. 1 (2010): 43–62.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Sugirtharajah, R. S. “Biblical Studies in India: From Imperialistic Scholarship to Postcolonial Interpretation.” in Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, edited by Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, 283–96. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009.
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———. “‘She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority.” In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, edited by Rita Nakashima Brock, Jun Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan, and Seumg Ai Yang, 45–65. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
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Jacob, S. (2020). Neither Here nor There! A Hermeneutics of Shuttling: Reflections of an Indian Postcolonial Feminist Biblical Critic. In: Kwok, Pl. (eds) Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_9
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