Introduction
The Indian Christian today does not face a debate. He faces a correction.
A mob outside a prayer hall in Chhattisgarh, a survey notice to old church in Mumbai calling it an encroachment, an anti-conversion FIR in Uttar Pradesh against a pastor praying for the sick, a social media campaign calling Goan Catholics “rice bags” – these are not random law and order problems. They are pedagogical acts. They teach the Christian where his home is not.
The word used to justify this pedagogy is Hindutva – not Hinduism as faith, but Hindutva as a project that defines Indian as Hindu and Hindu as belonging to this soil alone.
What does this do to the psyche of the Christian who was born in this soil, whose DNA is Indian, whose ancestors are buried in this soil for hundredr of years?
Abraham and Maria Torok give us a precise tool to read this: anasemia.
Part I: The Method in Brief
Anasemia reads a word backward to the bodily wound it hides. It distinguishes two responses to loss:
Introjection – an empty mouth learns to speak loss and grows.
Incorporation – a full mouth swallows the lost object whole, keeps it preserved alive inside as a crypt, and becomes a cryptophore, carrying a phantom that does not belong to his own life.
A crypt is formed when a shameful, unspeakable loss cannot be put into words.
Part II: Application – Three Words That Have Become Crypts
1. Aggression: From Ad-gredi to Pedagogu
Aggression comes from ad-gredi – to step toward, to approach.
Anasemic reversal: the step toward is also a step on. Hindutva aggression does not approach the Christian to argue. It approaches to correct his/ her address. “You are not from here.”
The Christian hears: go back to where you came from. But where? England/Portugal he/ she has never seen? His own village now calls him/her alien?
This creates the first crypt: the Christian incorporates the accusation.
He,/she begins to carry inside himself/ her a Englidh/ Portuguese dead he/she never mourned. When he/she is called “convert,” “rice bag,” “foreigner,” he/she does not reply with history. He/She swallows the insult whole. He/She starts to explain himself/herself: “We were here before, we preserved culture , we did not convert by force.” Each explanation is a sign that he/she has incorporated the other’s definition of him.
The phantom here is not his/her own. It is the phantom of the Hindutva imagination – a Christian who is always a convert, never a native. The Indian Christian suffers symptoms that belong to that phantom: hyper-nationalism, flag-hoisting on churches, putting “I am Indian first” in bio, proving loyalty. This is classic cryptophore behaviour – carrying someone else’s dead image of you inside you.
2. Hindutva: The Word That Buries Hindu
Hindutva comes from Hindu + tattva, essence. It claims to name the essence of being Hindu.
Anasemic reading: essence is what remains when everything accidental is removed. Hindutva’s method is to remove the accidental – the Muslim, the Christian,the dalit,the tribal – to find the essence.
But what it removes was never accidental to Hinduism. Hinduism as lived in India , was always porous, sharing festivals, music, food, processions. The Christian who carries the cross and the Hindu who carries the palanquin shared the same street.
Hindutva cannot mourn the loss of that porous Hinduism, because mourning it would mean admitting that Hinduism was never pure. So it incorporates it. It swallows the syncretic Hindu dead whole and keeps it preserved alive inside as “tolerant Hinduism” in speeches, while on the ground it practices purification.
For the Christian, this creates a double bind:
He/She is told: Hinduism is tolerant, so you must have been forcefully converted, so your present faith is false.
And he/she is told: Hindutva is assertive, so your present faith is foreign, so your citizenship is conditional.
The Christian therefore carries inside himself/herself a dead tolerant Hindu he/she cannot talk to, and faces outside a living assertive Hindutva he/she cannot argue with. Both are unmourned. Both become phantoms.
3. (Un)Homed: The Mouth That Cannot Say Home
Home comes from ham – hearth. Homed means having a hearth that knows your return.
The (Un)Homed Christian facing Hindutva aggression lives with a mouth that is full.
He cannot introject home because home keeps being redefined.
If home is Goa, his/her church is called encroachment on a temple.
If home is India, his/her faith is called foreign.
If home is Christianity, his/her liturgy is told to be more western.
So he does what Abraham and Torok describe as incorporation of home itself. He/She swallows three homes whole without digesting:
He/She swallows a alleged Portuguese/foreign home he/she never lived in, kept in his/her surname.
He/She swallows a Hindu home he/she told to have left five centuries ago, kept in his/her folk songs.
He/She swallows a secular Indian home that promised equality in 1950, kept in the Constitution he/she quotes but which no longer protects his/her prayer hall.
All three homes are preserved alive inside him/her, undead. His mouth is full of homes. So he/she cannot say: “I am at home.”
That is why his response to aggression is often silence, invisibility, or excessive politeness. The cryptophore does not shout. He/She hides the crypt. He/She makes his Christianity less visible – no loudspeaker for carols, no procession without permission, no healing prayer without police NOC.
The aggression succeeds not when a church is burnt, but when a Christian learns to pre-burn his own visibility.
Conclusion: How to Empty the Mouth
Abraham and Torok say a crypt is not opened by counter-aggression. It is opened by excription – putting the crypt into words, giving the dead a proper burial through language.
The (Un)Homed Christian facing Hindutva must stop incorporating and start introjecting:
1. To name aloud: “I am not a convert. I am a Goan who is Christian. Conversion is my ancestry, not my conspiracy.”
2. To name aloud: “I do not carry Portuguese dead as shame. I carry them as history that must be mourned, not worshipped.”
3. To name aloud: “I do not need to prove I am Indian. The burden of proof is on the one who defines Indian as only Hindu.”
This is not anti-Hindu. This is pro-mourning. It allows the Hindu to mourn his own syncretic past that Hindutva has made him lose, and allows the Christian to mourn his own need to be invisible.
Until then, the Christian will remain (Un)Homed – not because he has no home, but because he has been asked to carry the unmourned homes of everyone else inside his mouth, while being told he has no right to a hearth of his own.
For Christias , the theological note is this: Christ himself was (Un)Homed – “Foxes have holes, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” – and faced religious aggression that called him foreign to the Temple. His response was not to prove his lineage, but to empty his mouth on the Cross: “Father, forgive them.”
To be (Un)Homed in Christ is not a sociological failure. It can be a spiritual location – the place from which one reminds the nation that home was never one hearth, but many hearths learning to mourn together.
