ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Pentecostal conversion allows upwardly mobile/lower-middle-class urban Dalit women to at least begin to recuperate the oppositional identity and relative autonomy that rural Dalit women held prior to their urbanization and attendant subordination to nagarikam through hegemonic gender codes. Author's research focuses on members of one large Dalit Pentecostal church called 'Mercy DJ'. Dalit women have become the religious teachers and moral guides of their own families and their new Pentecostal communities, demonstrating through their own lives what it means to be exemplary Christians. The Gramscian category of 'improper politics' can be understood in yet another way, not in terms of philosophy, but in terms of propriety. In this sense too 'improper politics' is an apt term for the politics of these women, because their politicized behaviour, their preaching and teaching, their nuanced resistance to domestic tyranny and their exuberant religious forms are very distant from what is deemed appropriate for women by Chennai's hegemonic upper-caste-led norms.
