By
DALE LUIS
MENEZES and AMITA KANEKAR
With the BJP
coming to power in the last Lok Sabha elections, we have witnessed increasing
violence against religious minorities and their places of worship. There has been
no action to curb the violence, nor even a statement of condemnation from the
Centre. Instead, in the last few months, we have a new campaign: ‘ghar wapsi’,
again targeted at the religious minorities: Christians and Muslims are being
asked to ‘return’ to Hinduism. How is one to understand this new movement,
right in the middle of all the violence? What are its origins? And what is its
agenda? To answer these questions, we think it would be useful to focus on a
few events of the past.
***
The first event is
that of 1 January, 1818. On this day, the armies of the Peshwa and the British
confronted each other in the third and final Anglo-Maratha War, in which the
Peshwa was defeated. It was a heroic victory, since the British army comprised
only a small regiment of 250 cavalry and 500 infantry, both dominated by men of
the Mahar community, while the Peshwa had about 20,000 cavalry and 5000
infantry. Yet, on this day, in the village of Bhima Koregaon near Pune, the
Peshwa army was routed.
The important thing to note is that this
British victory was also a Mahar victory; it was the Mahars who ended Peshwa
rule. This critical fact is, of course, never mentioned in our history books.
Our school textbooks ignore the Mahars and write of the fall of the Peshwas as
a tragedy; such is the nationalist version of events. But for the Mahars, and
others oppressed and enslaved as untouchables under the Peshwai, the 1818
battle was a successful war of liberation.
For the dominant castes the colonial
period was all about humiliation and loss of power, but for many others it was
about the beginnings of liberation and justice. For instance, Vasco da Gama’s
arrival in the Malabar in 1498 is considered by many Dalits to be a milestone
event in the story of their liberation (Nigam, 2006, p. 182). Our nationalist histories ignore this.
***
The Movement Initiated by the Arya Samaj
The second event
we would like to recall is the birth of the Arya Samaj, sometime in the
1880s. According to its founder, Swami
Dayanand Saraswati, Hinduism had been corrupted and needed reform. That is,
Hinduism had strayed away from its supposed Vedic origins and had to be brought
back to its former purity and glory. Reform was also required, said the Arya
Samaj, to exorcise casteism from the Hindu religion, though as the movement
developed its anti-caste claims were seen to be limited. According to Maria
Misra (2008, pp. 70-3) however, this reform was a reaction to many untouchable
and lower-caste communities embracing Christianity, as well as to the demand
from certain sections of Muslims for a greater representation in politics.
The real problem
was that the British had introduced electoral politics in India, in which
representation was provided for on the basis of religious community. As Misra
points out, that the leaders of the Arya Samaj had realized that, “Christian
conversion among low caste, untouchable and poor Muslim groups would weaken the
power of Hindus in north India”. In other words, if the flow of conversions to
Christianity and Islam had to be stopped, the blatant violence of caste-based
discrimination had to be attacked. The critique of caste by caste Hindus,
therefore, was a strategic act to perpetuate upper-caste dominance.
What was this
reform that the Arya Samaj brought about? One of the main components of it was
the programme of shuddhi, an old ritual
re-invented by the Arya Samajists. Shuddhi had
been used earlier to purify caste Hindus after coming in contact with supposed
agents of defilement or pollution. But the Arya Samajists gave it a new form
and the shuddhi ritual became the
tool of conversion, ‘purifying’ the former Christians or Muslims to make them
Hindus, and thus also making a statement about the ‘pollution’ inherent in the
non-Hindu religions.
Learning from
Christian missionaries, the Arya Samaj also set up public health and
educational facilities, and encouraged a modicum of social mobility and social
respect within the four-fold varna system. As a result they were quite
successful in their campaign of conversion, especially in the Punjab.
***
‘Ghar wapsi’ does not mean ‘re-conversion’ but
‘conversion’
Although there
does not seem to be a direct link between the Mahar victory at Bhima Koregaon
and the activities of the Arya Samaj, there is an important connection which
tie them also to the ‘ghar wapsi’ campaign. The connection is the mass
rejection of the so-called ‘ghar’. While the Mahars of Bhima Koregaon had
greater affinity for the aims and culture of the British than those of the
Peshwas, the Arya Samaj campaign of yesteryears, just like the ‘ghar wapsi’ one
of today, is a recognition of a mass desire to reject Hinduism.
But the truth is
that many of the people who underwent shuddhi
in the past, or ‘ghar wapsi’ today, were never in the Hindu fold in the
first place. So there is no question of ‘wapsi’. The Dalitbahujan communities
of the subcontinent have always followed their own unique religious traditions,
many of which, as Kancha Ilaiah (1996) has argued, do not have a link with
those of caste Hindus. This difference may be eroding today, thanks to the
growth in Hindutva propaganda and the widespread Hinduizing of the polity, but
it is certainly erroneous to refer to Dalitbahujans of the past as ‘Hindu’.
This identification of Dalitbahujans as Hindus happens not because of religious
reasons, but political ones.
Thus, ‘ghar wapsi’
is not about ‘re-conversion’ to Hinduism, but ‘conversion’. This will of course
be contested by all the new ‘anti-conversion’ laws which have been in demand of
late, some of which explicitly declare that conversion to Hinduism is fine
because it is actually re-conversion. Along with shuddhi and ‘ghar wapsi’, these laws form part of the arsenal to
maintain the demographic of caste Hindus in politics.
The RSS’ ‘ghar wapsi’
project especially targets the Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC population, says Ilaiah
(Asian
Age, 4 January, 2015), who today
are embracing ‘evangelical Christianity’ and ‘prayer groups’ in large numbers.
He makes the important point that, although many Dalitbahujans today are
attracted to evangelical Christianity rather than the Buddhism embraced by Dr.
B. R. Ambedkar, the fact is that ever since the day when Ambedkar converted to
Buddhism in Nagpur, conversion became a spiritual and democratic right for the
Dalitbahujan people. And this is what all these Hindutva movements –
anti-conversion, shuddhi, ‘ghar wapsi’
– recognize, that thousands are just waiting to leave the ‘ghar’.
The reason is not difficult to fathom. Conversions to Christianity and
Islam create an opportunity to escape caste. Jaffrelot
(2011, p. 205) makes a similar argument: before the coming of the British many
artisanal castes had embraced Islam to escape caste-based discrimination. We do
not by any means claim that there is no casteism to be found among Christian
and Muslim communities of South Asia. But both Christianity and Islam, in
principle or theologically, uphold the equality of believers, providing scope
for fighting casteism within the faith.
***
All Conversions are not Forced
One of the
arguments made in favour of ‘ghar wapsi’, is that all conversions to
Christianity and Islam were ‘forced’. In the context of Goa, this is of course
a reference particularly to the Christianization of its populace during
Portuguese rule. Within Goa, meanwhile, we have been fed on stories about how all of us were converted to Christianity
by the Portuguese in one fell swoop, and also how ‘forced
conversions’ to Christianity were effected by throwing cooked rice into the
wells of Hindus, polluting them and forcing their owners to become Christian.
Although claiming to be about Goa, it is clear that this latter story is only
about brahmins and other brahmanized castes of Goa, given the references to
private wells and pollution. Even so, does this story really speak of
conversions that were forced, or rather excommunication from Hinduism enforced by the caste
authorities? In such conditions,
what was Christianity but a refuge to the excommunicated? It
would not be the first time that brahmanical traditions of caste pollution and
untouchability resulted in people leaving for more humane belief systems; they
have been doing it right from the time of the Buddha, 2500 years ago.
There is now copious documentation to attest to a history of
voluntary conversions that resulted from caste-based conflicts. Ângela Barreto Xavier, for example, finds in her study of sixteenth-century
Chorão that voluntary conversions took place most commonly among the most
depressed sections of society, for whom it was a form of political dissent.
Among the middle castes, however, the privileges and facilities offered to Christians
were a great attraction, while among the elites – who had the most advantages
in the old order – conversions were mostly either forced, or portrayed as
forced so that their old positions in the village hierarchy remained unchanged
(Xavier,
2007: pp. 269–95).
Fr. Anthony D’Costa had meanwhile argued as early as 1965, through archival
work on Jesuit letters, for genuine spiritual conviction in converting to
Christianity in sixteenth-century Goa (see D’Costa, S.J., 1965, p. 50). The millions
(both Catholic as well as non-Catholic) who flock to venerate the mortal
remains of St. Francis Xavier, said to have been one of the leading
proselytizers of his time, might argue that,
for a multitude of people across castes and religion today, the history of
Christianity is not marked by a memory of violence. But popular memory aside, historical evidence
shows conversions took place in Goa for a variety of reasons – from state
pressure and incentives, to caste oppression and spiritual search.
***
The ‘ghar wapsi’
campaign thus exposes a longer history of caste-based and anti-minority
violence that is both physical and intellectual. The launch of the present
campaign is of course linked to the rise of Hindutva politics, and more
recently to the coming of the BJP to power, but limiting it to these recent
events negates both the history of violence and the consolidation of upper
caste power in the subcontinent that has been going on for at least a century.
(A version of
this essay was originally published in Gulab
[February, 2015] in Romi Konkani. The authors wish to thank the editor of Gulab, Fausto V. da Costa, for allowing
this translation and re-publication with some modifications, also Gaurav
Somwanshi, whose Facebook status update is borrowed for the title, and finally our
friends at the Al-Zulaij
Collective, for reading the
essay and offering important suggestions).
References
D’Costa, S.J., Anthony, The
Christianisation of the Goa Islands, 1510-1567, 1965.
Ilaiah, Kancha, Why I am not a Hindu, 1996.
Jaffrelot, Christophe, “India:
The Politics of (Re)Conversion to Hinduism of Christian Aboriginals”, in Annual
Review of the Sociology of Religion, 2011.
Misra, Maria, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion, 2008.
Nigam,
Aditya, The Insurrection of Little Selves, 2006.
Xavier,
Ângela Barreto, “Disquiet on the Island: Conversion, Conflicts and Conformity
in Sixteenth-Century Goa.” Indian Economic & Social History Review
vol. 44, no. 3 (2007): 269–95.
(Published on Round Table India, here).
