Transnational Identities and Religious Traditions: A Case of Religious Double Belonging in India

This article addresses the emerging subject of religious “double belonging”: what does it mean to belong to two religious traditions? The lives of two French Roman Catholic priests, who moved to India for spiritual search and mission, work as a prism to deepen understanding of the subject, specifically regarding the relationships among identity, religious tradition, and faith. While these priests had their identities transformed as a mutable construct of negotiations in India, a more complex process occurred at the level of religious tradition. If Monchanin’s perfect and undefiled faith manifested itself in insulating the original Christian tradition from Indian influences, then the recipients of le Saux’s writings were invited to embrace the imperatives of faith as pure “being” over hybrid religious tradition. This article argues that if religious tradition is relegated to the level of the cultural, a religious double belonging emerges as a possibility