MISSION SCHOOLS, SECULARISM, AND HINDUTVA

A month ago, news broke in the national press that Lata Dhavalikar, the wife of Dipak Dhavalikar, State Factories and Boilers Minister, had exhorted all Hindus in the name of Indian culture to not send their wards to convent schools. As many would remember, boycotting Christian educational institutions was part of a longer list that Mrs. Dhavalikar urged Hindus to adopt, including sporting tilaks and bindis, and greeting each other with ‘namaskar’. Mrs. Dhavalikar’s comments, or rather hate speech, only seemed to fuel the already existing suspicion about Christian educational institutions as promoting Western culture and even of forcible conversion amongst a large number of Indians, not necessarily confined to those who support the Hindu Right. However, by mid-April, a video also started circulating of Piyush Goyal, Minster for State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal, and New and Renewable Energy. This was a video of a keynote address delivered on 6 November, 2014 on the occasion of the 3^rd National Education Conference of Don Bosco Schools, at his alma mater, Don Bosco’s, Matunga, Bombay.

The said keynote address has been available for viewing on YouTube since 7 November, 2014. In brief, Goyal’s keynote address can be seen as a testimony of the good intentions of Christian mission schools, and hence it can be suggested that the video was circulated from April 2015 as a counter to the wild allegations that were rampant on social media against Christian educational institutions.

What is interesting about this keynote address by Goyal is that it was largely a recollection of his school days some forty years ago. He seemed to be transported back in time to the days when he was a school boy and, as such, was giddy with excitement. In a sense it was like homecoming for him. While Goyal’s keynote address raises many issues that are problematic, it is also closest to a testimony by a person in the current government in favor of Christian schools, asserting that they did not have an agenda limited to forcibly converting Hindus and imposing Western culture on them.

Goyal first credited the immense role that his teachers and the Salesian priests played in shaping his personality. He stressed the values of forgiveness and patience that his teachers practiced. Narrating an incident of indiscipline he was involved in, Goyal said that he should have been rightly suspended or rusticated for a misdemeanor during a school picnic. However, the principal of the school, Fr. Bonnie, did no such thing. Rather, Fr. Bonnie told him where he went wrong, and “held his hand”. Goyal, not being able to hold back his emotions, suggested that if he was not given an opportunity to reform and was not counseled, then his life could have gone down a different path altogether.

Another important point that Goyal made in his keynote address is the values of secularism that are nourished in an institution like Don Bosco’s. Goyal recollected that never in all the years that he spent at Don Bosco’s was he or any other non-Christian student made to “compulsorily” attend church. In fact, Goyal emphatically said that he had attended church several times, but always “voluntarily”. It is this experience that forms the basis of Goyal’s assertion that he learned true secularism in the course of his schooling at Don Bosco’s from the Salesian priests.

The problem with Goyal’s assertion is that although he may have experienced secularism in flesh and blood in his school, the party that he belongs to has consistently made sure that the rights of the minoritized groups in India are denied. The problem lies not so much in the fact that a person who learnt secular ideals is part of a government that came to power on the basis of Hindu majoritarianism, but that secularism in India has always meant that the wishes and whims of the majority become the ‘national’ norm that everybody must follow. Isn’t it rather disturbing to note that those non-Christians who have been educated through Christian institutions never openly protest when Christians or their property – religious and other – are attacked? November-December 2014 was also about the time when the attacks on churches and the threats of ‘ghar wapasi’ had intensified, and any condemnation of such acts from those within the present government came after a lot of delay. Such are the limits of Goyal’s Don Bosco-created secularism. What this anecdote thus actually indicates is not how Christian schools have boosted Indian secularism, but how they have actually compromised with dominant norms of Indian nationalism that produces the hegemony of the majority.

This is so because if one looks at some of the top Christian schools and colleges in India, one realizes that these institutions have been supremely elitist spaces, dedicated to nurturing the children of the rich and the mighty. Though it is also true that a large number of children from the marginalized sections have been served by Christian educational institutions, such educational institutions have not managed to change the oppressive power relations in India. Which is why when Goyal talks about his school upholding “merit”, “fairness”, and “equal opportunity for all”, one wonders if the ideal of charity and service or caritas embodied by Christian educational institutions is really responding to the social reality in India.

Goyal said that if Don Bosco’s took education to the poorest of the poor, it was because it came from the heart and was not out of “compulsion”. What he meant by it was that one could not be coerced into reaching out to the poor and marginalized in the society. But the truth is that in India, resources like education need to be compulsorily made available to the marginalized and the oppressed, whether one likes it or not; whether it comes from the heart or not.

This is an area, I think, where Christian educational institutions need to give out of “compulsion”. In other words Christian educational institutions have to specifically reach out to groups that are oppressed due to caste, gender, and religion. I admit that this is happening in many parts of India, but one does not see a systematic policy and its implementation emerging from the Church leadership in India. Of late Christian institutions have been needlessly demonized. If at all they need to be criticized, it is because they have failed in their Christian duty to reach out to the poorest of the poor. Christian institutions have not always worked against oppressive structures, but oftentimes have compromised with them.

So while Goyal’s testimony and his heartfelt recollection of his schooling days need to be welcomed, it also should make us ask what role Christian educational institutions played in past and what role they should play in the future.

(First published in  O Heraldo, dt: 13 May, 2015)

NATION AND SALVATION: THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE CHRISTIAN IN INDIA

The gruesome murder of Mohsin Shaikh, a Muslim techie from Pune has shocked many. One of them is Nidhin Shobhana, based at the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, Dnyanjyoti Savitribai Phule University, Pune. Reflecting on the horrific incident in an article published in Round Table India (www.roundtableindia.co.in) from a Christian subjective position, he tried to shift the focus beyond the obvious rhetoric found in mainstream press. He dwelt on the manner in which ‘minorities’ perceive and understand each other and suggested that while on the one hand the Christians of India feel safe because they believe that they are not like the Muslim other, on the other hand they have to deal with the threat of being a minority themselves in a clearly Hindu majoritarian order. One could suggest that this is a case of Christians trying to fit themselves in pre-given nationalist moulds. While this may certainly be true, the flip side of the issue is that the politics of nation and nationalism may also exert pressures on the Christians to be nationally-compliant. A Christian thus, is pressured to construct a self that is Christian while simultaneously imbibe Indian (read as Sanskritic) cultural values.

The Christian in India, according to Shobhana, has to manage a “juggling act to exist in a ‘caste-bitten’ society, [and to that extent] …Christians often dress up in uniforms approved by ‘Caste Hindus’. The almost saffron colour sarees of Catholic nuns is a worthwhile literal example”. Indian Christians create a difference for themselves by claiming – indeed demonstrating – their usefulness towards strengthening and enriching the Indian nation. The schools run by Christian missionaries across cities and villages in India patronized largely by the urban Indian elites, can be a case in point. But these claims to national usefulness encounter problems or “contradictions”.  I believe that these problems have something to do with the fraught relationship that the history of Christianity (and thereby Christians) have with the Indian nation.

I would like to take-off from Shobhana’s astute observation and argue that for the Christians, participation as full citizens is also dependent on their compliance to “adhere to the dominant ideology”.  The Christian has to jump through many hoops to negotiate his/her survival within the politics and understandings of the nation.

It must be pointed out that it is not just the present or contemporary usefulness that the Christian has to repeatedly assert, but he has to also account for the perceived violent past during Christianization, starting from the sixteenth-century. Indeed, the Christian of today has to apologize for it. To substantiate this claim, I would like to focus on a text titled The Christianisation of the Goa Islands, 1510-1567 (1965) that the Jesuit historian Anthony D’Costa wrote in response to A. K. Priolkar’s The Goa Inquisition (1961).  Marked by greater methodological rigor than Priolkar’s work, Fr. D’Costa drew on the voluminous Jesuit epistolary archive to argue for a history of conversion/Christianization that was not always marked with violence and mayhem. And yet, despite making bold assertions, Fr. D’Costa was still operating within the ‘nationally useful’ paradigm that we have acquainted ourselves with.

Fr. D’Costa had suggested that “as a requisite of social equality, national cohesion, and international fellowship” India had accepted many of the ideals that the missionaries propagated way back in the sixteenth-century. Yet, Fr. D’Costa could not escape the established understanding of widespread destruction during Christianization, arguing that although there may have been some misunderstandings between the missionaries and the natives, yet there were some “Hindus” who recognized the merits in the ideals that the missionaries stood for. Indeed, there was friendship between some Hindus and the missionaries, “which in the course of time characterised the relations between the Hindus and Christians”. Thus, the ‘usefulness’ (or in other words the success) of the missionary endeavours is judged by the yardstick of the contemporary nationalist understandings, ideals, and values. Similar “contradiction” also emerges when one is confronted with an understanding that stresses the absolute brutality of the Inquisition. Fr. D’Costa saw a way out: he sought refuge in the ancient brahmanical texts of Indian civilization. Concerning the executions by burning at the stake by the Holy Inquisition, he said, “And coming to death by fire, that, too, was admitted in the Dharmashastras…”

In other words, Fr. D’Costa made Christianization as a process intelligible within the understandings of Indian nationalism. Clever and innovative though the strategy may seem, Fr. D’Costa was not the first one to use it. Even during the course of the Indian national movement many Christian leaders tried to contextualize the contemporary missionary enterprises, such as providing good schools, healthcare, and women’s empowerment in the language of Indian nationalism.

Therefore, it is no easy task to be a nationally-useful and -compliant minority. While it is certainly true that the Christians – consciously or not – buy into nationalist understandings, one can also turn this formulation on its head to suggest that it is the pressures that are exerted by the dominant, nationalist ideology or ideologies that necessitate the production of a Christian identity that is essentially nationalist. These conflicting and contradictory pressures can be observed in Fr. D’Costa’s views discussed above. From a reading of The Christianisation of the Goa Islands, one can suggest that, on the one hand Fr. D’Costa wanted to be a part of the nation but on the other, he was unable as the history of Christianization (understood to be violent and destructive) was heavily bearing on him.

While I am in solidarity with Shobhana’s critical assessment of the Christians in India, the case needs a sensitive approach so that one can understand the various oppressive pressures that are placed on the minorities of India. The fraught relationship that the religious minorities – along with their history and culture – share with the nation may have a lot to do with many of the problems that face the Christians of India today.

Read Nidhin Shobhana’s essay here.

(First published in  O Heraldo, dt: 25 June, 2014)