Evangelical Intrusions by Sandhya Jain
Dr MK Teng
The
study undertaken by Sandhya Jain , published by Rupa-co, New Delhi, in an
attractively designed volume, titled “ Evangelical Intrusions- Tripura, a case
study” is the first systematic and in-depth inquiry into the evangelical
intervention in the religious cultures of the tribal societies and indigenous
peoples of India to “ coerce the entire tribal populace to convert to a
millenarian tradition.” The study is a bold attempt to investigate into
“concerted efforts by several western evangelical denominations to achieve
their objective of complete conversion” of the tribal peoples and the
inability of the Indian state to support the tribal and the indigenous people
to preserve their religious cultural tradition. The state of Tripura, situated
in the north-east of India, where the evangelical intrusion has been
widespread, forms the universe of the field-study. Tripura, the author notes
“was chosen as the subject of the study because its large tribal population is
resisting organized armed assault upon its native faith and way of life”.
The problem of evangelical intrusions in India is a part of the larger
problem of Semitisation of the Indian Society, which has a longer history in
India, and forms an important aspect of the political sociology of the Indian
people. The promise of redemption basic to all religious expressions of the
Semitic civilization, has been widely used during last several hundred years,
more specifically, after the Peace of Westphiallia in 1648, as a portent
instrument of state policy for the expansion of the political power and in the
consolidation of imperial authority over the peoples subject to colonial
dominance. India, a nation of the former colonial peoples, ruled by the
British for centuries, was freed from the bondage, two years after the end of
Second World War, which brought the era of colonialism to its close. The
ideological commitment of the colonial powers to spread the promise of
redemption assumed blatantly crude expression in India, where the boundaries
of the Sanskrit civilization were remotely visible and less resistant to
evangelical intervention.
Sandhya Jain makes a departure from the generally accepted methodological
paradigms followed in the study of social change in India. Her work makes the
beginning of a new academic effort, which may in the years to come, provide an
alternative methodological framework, and which may delink the study of social
change in India from its reformist trappings. Sandhya Jain underlines a
methodological format which is not confined to the investigation into the
structure and function of a fixed-set, which the Semitic methodological
paradigms underline. Her work has a normative dimension. The frame of
reference she has adopted for evaluation is not located in liberal- reformism
and its abstract derivatives of logical positivism. It is located in the
history of the Sanskrit Civilization of India. She takes pains to relate the
evolution of tribal traditions and ritual cultures of the indigenous peoples
of India to the continuity of the Indian History.
The work is a bold attempt to unravel data and facts to establish that the
Semitisation, as a part of the political process of the colonial era,
continues to be followed uninterruptedly in the independent India. The survey,
Sandhya notes, is “aimed to test the hypothesis that over the past few years
an increasing number of tribal hamlets and households have been directly or
indirectly ‘invited’ to embrace a monotheistic religion.” She notes further:
“The questionnaires were designed to learn if inducements were made, if there
was any violent incident in the village or its vicinity, if there was an
atmosphere of fear due to incidents in the neighboring areas, if there was
native resentment against the attempts of proseletisation, and tribal leaders
were contacted to understand if change of faith disrupted family or community
life and culture and the resultant cultural alienation.” The revelations she
has made are startling. “The conversions do not appear suomoto, but by
deliberate interventions of other actors, usually organized groups, with the
objective of expanding their influence in the life of a community, state and
nation. Conversions by external faiths are inherently political, which is why
they are backed by foreign funds, foreign evangelists and political support
from foreign countries. In the contemporary world conversions are portent
political and emotional issues as changes in religious demography have been
intimately linked to secessionist movements and partitions. Besides being
deeply divisive of natal societies, conversions (and partitions) are usually
achieved with violence and foreign interventions.”
Sandhya Jain admits that the inspiration to undertake the study came from
the persistent reports of religious political violence in the north-eastern
states of India, in some of which proseletisation and religious conversion was
accompanied by the growth of separatist and secessionist movements. Her
investigations have yielded facts, which establish that the political
objectives of the separatists and secessionist movements are “linked to an
agenda of religious conversion which is rupturing the cultural and
civilisational unity of the native faith and culture”. Evangelical
intervention in the traditional social culture of India, she states, is a
deliberately planned political campaign to bring about change in the tribal
belief-systems and cultural mores which, “involves the rejection of the natal
socio-economic tradition and community and transferring allegiance to the
faith originating outside the national boundaries.” The objectives, She
stresses are evident. With foreign governments, “ playing a pro-active role in
funding evangelism and promoting it through a foreign policy and the intrusive
activism of human rights groups”, proseletisation assumes the form of a
religious campaign for political objectives- a form of neo-colonial expansion
under the cover of religious freedom.
A large part of the study is devoted to an in-depth investigation into the
religious cultures of tribal peoples of
Tripura.
The inferences she has drawn from the facts and data, her investigation has
yielded, has demolished many myths such as: (a) that the tribal cultures in
India are an expression of a historical disconnect in the evolution of the
Indian civilization and therefore the religious cultures of the tribal and
indigenous people of India form a separate universe of spiritual experience;
(b) that the tribal people follow religious practices which form a part of the
pagan past of India; (c) that the tribal communities need to be insulated from
their environment which is predominantly Hindu to preserve their autochthonous
identity; and (d) the tribal people must be assured the right to religious
freedom, to accept the promise of redemption that the Semitisation offers, to
salvage them from their pagan past.
The study has brought to surface evidence of interlocking processes of
social change in India, which relate the belief-systems and the ritual
structures of the tribal peoples to the Sanskrit religious culture of India.
The study uncovers the Sanskrit sub-stratum of the religious culture of the
tribal people. “In India,” Sandhya notes, “natal faith traditions are viewed
as a part of the civilisational continuum, and tribes are embedded in this
larger civilization. Movement across the spectrum is neither threatening nor
objectionable because there is an intrinsic unity of the civilization as a
whole.” Cutting through the conventional approaches to the understanding of
the tribal cultures and the cultures of the indigenous people in India,
Sandhya Jain formulates a new set of theoretical propositions for a more
objective inquiry into the traditions, belief-systems and ritual structures of
the tribal people in India. Sandhya notes, “Tripura’s ancient tribes represent
the coherence and the continuity of a living civilization, which embraces,
absorbs, exchanges values, with peoples and cultures that have arisen from the
same socio-geographic matrix”. In her search for a frame of reference, she
turns to the history of the Hindu India and writes, “Hindus appreciate
diversity as they accept similarity; and the absence of homogeneity does not
inculcate fear, loathing or intolerance, much less the desire to enforce
uniformity by eradicating cultural distinctiveness A shared universe is
quickly established with the threads of unity and multiplicity, and this is
the most striking aspect of the description above. The religious beliefs,
traditions and rituals of Tripura tribes reveal the integrated matrix upon
which their culture and civilization is founded and a cohesiveness that
embraces their non-tribal neighbors, whose beliefs, prayers and practices have
been joyously embraced by the regions autochthones.”
The study reveals that the traditions and rituals of the tribal communities
and indigenous people in India are not pagan practices. The Sanskrit
civilization does not have a pagan past. Pagan history is a part of the
Semitic civilization. “ Nor can we countenance academic distortion of the
spiritual beliefs of vulnerable communities through the use of terminology
such as ‘animism’, ‘spirit worship’, ‘ghosts’, or ‘pagan’, which have no basis
in the idiom of the tradition being discussed, but are a part of verbal abuse
by those seeking to exterminate an ancient way of life”.
The promise of redemption cannot salvage people who do not have a pagan
past. No Right to freedom of religion can entitle the tribal communities and
indigenous people in India to opt for salvation by accepting the promise of
redemption. Sandhya Jain rightly notes, “Dharma is primarily a matter of
family, clan, social, religious and cultural inheritance. All human beings are
born into a spiritual tradition and initiated into beliefs, customs,
philosophy, tenants and taboos from an early period of life, just as they are
provided with a family name, Jati and Kula at birth. Ordinarily a human being
does not grow without a faith and then choose a dharma on intellectual merit
or emotional appeal on achieving adulthood. The argument that an individual,
born embedded in a faith has the right to arbitrarily uproot himself and cause
hurt and injury to his natal family, clan, tradition and community is faulty
and subversive of ancient societies.” The Evangelical Intrusions exposes the
perfidy. She records, “the contention that religion is a matter of individual
choice is not borne out by the experience of human society anywhere in the
world. This specious plea is in fact a legal subterfuge by those seeking to
earn adherents to a particular religious ideology by atomizing human society
in order to break and undermine traditions”.
Evangelical interv-ention to induce change in the indigenous social forms,
from outside their systemic boundaries, poses a threat to the existence of the
indigenous peoples and tribal communities in India. It poses a greater threat
to the Sanskrit substratum of their tribal traditions and cultures. The
fundamental issue, evangelical intervention underlines, is not whether India
recognizes the freedom of choice of the Indian people to accept the promise of
redemption for their salvation. The fundamental issue, evangelical
intervention in India involves, is whether India recognizes the promise of
redemption as the objective of social change. The acceptance of the promise of
redemption as an objective of social change by the Indian people, tantamounts
to the abandonment of the continuity of the Indian history. The recognition of
the continuity of the history of the Indian civilization forms the bedrock of
the unity of the Indian people and their national identity.
Sandhya Jain has sounded a warning, “Our study revealed that there is merit
in the conviction of Tripura’s tribal communities that there exists a grand
coordination between the evangelical and insurgent groups operating in the
state. Equally their misgivings that the drive to win converts is powered by a
political agenda, viz, to carve out a separate Christian state(s) in the
North-east, cannot be dismissed as utterly baseless, particularly after the
carving out of an oil rich Christian East Timor from Muslim Indonesia in 2002.
Evangelism in the sensitive North-East can thus pose a serious threat to
India’s territorial integrity, cultural diversity and civilisational unity.”
The study is expected to be of help to the common reader as well as the
researcher. To the former the study is expected to help in the understanding
of the issues involved in the various processes of evangelical intervention in
the tribal cultures and traditions of the indigenous peoples in the North-East
of India. To the latter, the study is expected to provide an alternate
methodological model for the study of social change in India as well as
furnish him valuable data and facts in respect of the “religio-cultural
traditions” and demographic configuration of the indigenous peoples in India.
To the scholar the study is also expected to give an insight into the
processes of Semitisation of the Indian society, which has been going on this
country, almost unnoticed, throughout the years of its freedom. In India, the
secularization of government and society is tilted in favour of the, “right to
freedom of faith”, more than committed to the secular integration of the
Indian people on the basis of the fundamental right to equality. Both, the
right to freedom of faith and the right to equality are enshrined in the
Constitution of India. The cleavage between the right to freedom of faith and
the right to equality as the basis for the secular integration of the Indian
people, irrespective of creed and religion, is brought to surface by this
study. A new beginning needs to be made to investigate into the political
ramifications of the ideological conflict, evangelical intrusion in India
underlines.