2026 Theses Doctoral

Practices of Belonging: Pilgrimage, Speech, and Recognition in Hyderabad

Komanapalli, Kripanand R.

This dissertation examines how Telugu-speaking Dalit Christians in contemporary Hyderabad practice belonging within the terms and limits of state recognition. It asks how belonging is made and rendered perceptible through religious practice and forms of public presence when available categories of recognition fail to account for lived experience and social life.

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork across multiple sites in Hyderabad, the dissertation draws on church services, sermons, pilgrimage practices, public processions, and conversations about caste, Christianity, and recognition. It argues that belonging takes shape through shared religious practices and selective forms of publicity. Belonging and publicity, in this sense, emerge together, even as state categories treat Dalitness and Christianity as incompatible.

The dissertation traces these practices across Hyderabad’s sacred and urban geography, pilgrimage and vows across Christian and non-Christian sites, Church Telugu as a sermonic register, and astitvam as a vernacular category of identity and recognition. Across these sites, the dissertation shows that Dalit Christian belonging is neither simply hidden nor openly asserted. It is carefully practiced in ways that allow people to inhabit Dalit, Christian, and non-Christian worlds together while also engaging the state’s language of recognition.