Kandhamal-a Lesson for our Christian Mission
Introduction
Mission Studies is an emerging area of theological research integrating the insights achieved from our rereading of texts and contexts and re-imagining of the methodologies. It strives for a meaningful Christian witness in a time of complex entanglement of social, political, economic and communal developments. There were a number of variables which defined ones sense of belongingness in a specific time-space continuum, like caste, tribe, religion, gender, ethnicity etc. But what happens in today’s world is that these variables are getting mixed up to form rare lethal combinations to define ones right to live or not live in a particular community or geography. In the post independent India
The Socio-Economic Milieu of Kandhamal
The National Sample Survey of 1999-2000 put Orissa as the poorest state in the Indian union with overall poverty for the districts like Kandhamal and Kalahandi marked as an alarming 87%. Most of the people of the region are marginal or subsistence farmers with the collection of non-timber forest products (NTFP) as the alternate source of income for the poor. The place is inhabited mostly by dalits and tribals, that is, almost 75% of the total population is the combined number of these two groups. But they are socially, culturally and economically marginal and bear the age old stigma of social outcasts. The average landholding for the dalit communities is less than half of that of the state average. Most of the Adivasi lands are marginal and non-irrigated. The literacy levels in this region are still around 30-35% with an abysmal 25% for the females. Census India 2001 website records that only a scant 21.4% in the whole Kandhamal district have permanent houses.[1] The quality of life of the people is seriously affected by the lackluster performance of the schools, PHCs and other social welfare programmes.
Kandhamal riots a brief description
Kandhamal had witnessed two phases of violence in the 2007 and 2008 in a gap of 8 months. When the first time it was initiated, it was because of the unwanted interference of a group of Hindu fundamentalists with the X’mas celebrations of a Christian group in a typical Kandhamal village namely Brahmanigaon. Violence lasted for almost 4-5days, a few people were killed (less than five) both in the clash of two ethnic communities as well as in the resultant police firing. Almost 40 churches were burned to ashes. Priests and nuns and the families of the Christian converts were targeted. Christians were not allowed to celebrate X’mas anywhere in Kandhamal in 2007. It was followed by a greater violence against the lives and property of the Christians in the month of August in 2008. This was triggered by the assassination of Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati who was spearheading the anti-Christian movements in the kuyi linguistic belt. From August 23 the day of swami’s murder, the rioting and killing prolonged to a full month time and more taking the lives of scores of people, much more than the figures published by the government. The casualties were much more than that of the previous violence. There were more than 20 relief camps set up to accommodate more than 25000 people displaced from their villages. Most of them moved over to different towns in the state instead of returning to their volatile villages.[2] This was followed by further violence into the constitutional and ethical rights of the people a large number of Christian families were made to forcibly convert into Hinduism.
The riots got international attention for many reasons like: the government apathy and in some cases the administrative antipathy towards the tortured, use of the agency of the adivasis in inciting the violence, the targeting of the means of livelihood of the victims, which was unprecedented and aimed at denying the remote chances of survival of the victims. It also manipulated the rivalry existing between two communities contesting on their Scheduled Tribe status to further instigate the spread of violence. The main reason for violence projected by the Hindutva ideologists was the abounding conversions to Christianity initiated by the Christian missionaries with “foreign support.”
Many different analyses from very many perspectives to describe the nuances of the violence were done. The historical wedge between the two communities called the pana and the kandha, the economic advances made by the Christian panas intimidating the Hindu Kandhas, the increasing number of Christian converts and Christian churches in the area, the politicization of the historical wedge between the two communities on the access to reserved opportunities, instigation through ideological brain wash etc are cited as the causes of the riots.
As Raj Bharat Patta put the things in a perspective in his book “A Violent Sight in a Silent Night”, the occasion of violence was not a time for the church to be too defensive on its missiological, theological and ideological positions, but it is a time to contemporarise its mission and witness.[3] The riots made us think about the way people are formed in a mission context. Each and every mission programmes have certain formative impacts on the people. To realize the nuances of this formation, I would like to see Christian missional engagements with the people of the geography in three different planes namely, historiographic, ideological and hermeneutical or theological. As learning is unlearning I would say the present crises the Kandhamal Church
Historiographic deconstructions
Kandhamal is a place, which had come to a number of cross-cultural contacts in its complex history of existence. These cultural contacts were also experiences of them being described by the subjectivity of their visitors. The first such contact in the modern period was the arrival of the British colonialists. The colonial accession of this region to the British Raj happened in the year 1835.[4] They were attracted by the vast forest resources like timber. The relationship was very much conflictual. Their attempt was to normalize the uncultured or uncivilized forest-dwellers and in that attempt they described them through their historiography. These historiographies in turn had represented the people in different categories. These categories got consolidated when they started using them for administrative advantages. Later on when the Christian missions made inroads into the area they appropriated the same colonial understanding of the people and thereby inherited their civilizing mission of the forest dwellers in the latter part of the 19th century CE. The whole attempts of representation and categorisation were part of a programme to tame or domesticate the people of the area to suit their purposes.
Here we can think of a macro level of historiography and a micro level of historiography?[5] At the macro level the history of Christian mission always concentrates on the agency of the missioniser and the role of the local Christian community in defining their future course is seldom acknowledged. The self construction of the converts as an independent and self determining process was never acknowledged in the mission historiographies written in the European colonial subjectivity. Instead they were always picturised as patronised selves with emphasis on the benevolence of the European masters.
Whereas in the micro level of historiography one needs to acknowledge the role played by the converts in furthering the faith as well as the subjective self construction. Here we come across stories of people acting as free persons with definite subjective positions; taking the initiative to interact with the symbolic world of the new faith. It resulted in the renewal of their understanding of the self differently from what they were used to believe as something fixed, rigid and without the possibility of any change. Their openness to the Christian symbolic world enabled them with a new vision of their self as something always undergoing transformation that God wills.
But normally this micro approach is considered irrelevant and was never given an adequate place in the traditional mission historiographies. Mission historiographies were attempts to defend the goodwill and magnanimity of the missioniser and the quality of change imparted on the people by them. Therefore ultimately the problem was with the lack of acknowledgement of the agency of the missionised. It went in the line of argument of the people who opposed conversions saying that the conversions were result of material allurements and the agency of the converts were never in play in religious conversions.
Ideological deconstructions
Each and every mission projects in the history of the people were riding over varying ideologies.[6] The first religious mission of the area was the Hinduising mission of the adivasis and dalits. Their primal religious life, their gods and their beliefs were appropriated into the Hindu way of life, worship and social order, but by ascribing a low ritual status to both the dalits and adivasis. The imposition of the new social order was also an act of ideological distribution of power in that network of relationships to have control over the defined, appropriated and fixed categories of the people. Dongar and kutia were terminologies used along with kandha and pana in order to refer to such cultural categories of people reflecting the stigma they historically carry and also the socio-economic and cultural disempowerment.
The early missions initiated by the missionaries under-girded by the pietistic ideologies of appropriating the people into homogenous and exclusive category of Christian. Where, the Christian categories are put as standing diametrically opposite to the values of the local culture. It paved way for the development of an exclusive self concept in the converts. The local people misread these exclusive claims of the converts as their foreignness that they appropriated from their foreign masters. Thus the Christian identity for the converts has become a matter of their further alienation from the local community.
When other sectarian ideologies like Hindutva took root in the place, they could take advantage on this situation of alienation and resulted in further intensification of it. Christian is represented as the foreign other expected to be displaced by the ‘culturally Indian self.” Indianness is here equated with Hinduness. But the question we must ask at this juncture is what happened to the mission ideology. The mission ideology has got transformed to a defensive ideology that defended its alienation from the local social and cultural realities.
The Christian identity of the people are always depicted and described from the subjective positions of the external agencies of the missionaries and opponents of missionaries and never a voice of the converts was enabled to be vocal in the public space of discourses on mission.
The ideologies focused on the quantitative increase of the church were also aimed at having control over the converts to shape them or to absorb them to their subjectivity. Therefore one could say that it retained the triumphal and colonial values of the modern European missionary enterprises. Here I would say that the riots were also an occasion which exposed the ideologies of mission or the theological premises underlying our missionary endeavors.
It may be because of the anchorage over the colonial ideologies of the mission that the mission engagements of the place could not cross the safe and convenient boundaries of the traditional areas of mission like running the hostels, dispensaries, child development centers etc. it never touched the political aspirations of the people or to link its programmes in a meaningful way with the wider struggles of the dalit and adivasi communities for the revival of their moral agency to determine themselves.
Hermeneutical deconstructions
What is the hermeneutics of the so called mission fields?
Are the hermeneutics or the theologies of the place really informed by the culture and political aspirations of the people? Hermeneutics deals with the symbolic resources available for the people in constructing meanings. The riots revealed the fact that the construction of meanings in a communally and ideologically polarized socio-cultural milieu cannot be taken for granted. Empowering the people with a hermeneutical tool to interpret such historic junctures of Herculean impediments in their ecclesial existence is also a grave responsibility of the present day Christian missions. What we could notice amid the cacophony of responses to the violence in Kandhamal was the absence of the voice of the victims. To a greater extend the hermeneutical tools available for the people are that of a sanskritising mission, whether it is the Christian or Hindu missions. What is meant here is the approach to appropriate the dalitness and adivasiness (not as essential qualities, but as cultural and historical distinctiveness) into a general category of Christian or Hindu defined by the cultural elites of the society. Thus such religious missions to the people were violating the episteme of the adivasi and dalit communities.[7] Their knowledge systems were often regarded as falsities and a new episteme is superimposed.
Here I would like to invite our attention to the way the church has become visible to the world outside. The visibility of the church has become a threatening presence for the communities of other faiths and that visibility did not take into consideration the dalit and adivasi epistemic framework.[8] The visibility was an imparted visibility on the people from outside. Or it was not an outcome of free and imaginative expression of the faith, worldview and life of the people of the geography.
By concluding the paper due to the brevity of time I would say the future course of the mission of the Church in India
Bibliography
Akkara, Anto. Shining Faith in Kandhamal. Bangalore
________. Kandhamal: A Blot on Indian Secularism. Delhi
Clarke, Sathianathan. Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation
Theology in India New Delhi : Oxford
Copley, Antony Oxford
Ibarra-Colado, Eduardo. “Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America : Thinking Otherness from the Margins.” Organization 13/4 (July, 2006): 465.
Longchar, Wati. “After 23rd Attack on Christians in Orissa: Implications for Tribals
and Dalits.” NCCR 128/9 (October, 2008): 459-475.
Kirk, Andrew J. and Vanhoozer, Kevin, eds. To Stake a Claim: Mission
Nayak, Bhagyabati. “Our Journey Glimpses of Church in Kond Hills.” Souvenir on
the Occasion of Inauguration of Phulbani CNI Diocese. G. Udayagiri:
Phulbani Diocese Ad-hoc Committee, 1997.
Sarkar, Sumit. “Hindutva and the Question of Conversions.” In The Concerned
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Accessed on 21 0ctober, 2009.
[1] Census India 2001, Basic data sheet, District Kandhamal, Orissa, http://www.censusindia.gov.in/
Dist_File/ datasheet-2121.pdf
(January 11. 2011).
Accessed on 21 0ctober, 2009.
[3] Raj Bharat Patta, A Violent Sight on a Silent Night: Missiological Discourses in the Context of Violence against Christians, Delhi
[4] Bhagyabati Nayak, “Our Journey Glimpses of Church in Kond Hills,” Souvenir on the Occasion of
Inauguration of Phulbani CNI Diocese, (G. Udayagiri: Phulbani Diocese Ad-hoc Committee, 1997),
35.
[5] The terminologies, “macro” and “micro” histories are used by the author to differentiate
between the history in the subjectivity of the colonial other or its reproduction and history narrated by
the people from their own subjectivity. The macro history recorded here is a history of the Christian
conversions written by a missionary namely Barbara Boals, a missionary who was sent to this place
and later reproduced by Bhagyabati Nayak. But the micro histories are narrated histories of the place
by the people of the place.
[6] Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact and Conversion in Late-Colonial Era, Oxford
[7] Eduardo Ibarra-Colado, “Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America : Thinking Otherness from the Margins”, Organization, 13/4 (July, 2006), 465.
[8] Sumit Sarkar, “Hindutva and the Question of Conversions.” In The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism, Edited by K. N. Panikkar, New Delhi
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