[Reader-list] Of Christ and egg parathas

[NUAIMAN]

Of Christ and Egg Parathas



*Sailen Routray*





If you are traveling from Bhubaneswar to Puri on national highway number
203, after you are nearly one-third of the way through, you'll pass through
a small town that seems to be shrouded in appliqué work, and this craft is
now its only claim to fame. The town's name is Pipili, and it was the
capital of an important kingdom for a few years many centuries back. But
those days are long past. In fact the day does not seem far when it will
soon be reduced to being a mere suburb of the exploding twin cities of
Bhubaneswar-Cuttack. But the town has an important place in my personal
history. My youngest sister was born there, and my earliest memories of
childhood go back to this place.

            I was wrong when I said that its appliqué work is its only claim
to fame. It has an additional claim to infamy; it is one of the most
'communally' sensitive of all the assembly constituencies of Orissa. But my
memories of the place are idyllic. Happily there was nothing like pre-school
those days, and I learnt my alphabet from a woman we all used to call
Guruma. She used to teach in batches of seven to eight children, and my
earliest memories are of sitting in her lap, and repeatedly moving my chalk
on the round Oriya letters drawn by her on the slate. These days organic
learning is all the rage, and rote learning is passé, but I remember loving
the feel of my fingers going round and round on the slate till the time my
nails grazed it.

She used to take fifteen rupees per month from all of us as tuition fees.
But on looking back I think she must have made a 'loss' on me because on
most months. She'll make me stay back after the lessons, and feed me goodies
that must have cost her more than the measly tuition fees that my parents
paid her. Once in a while she used to make a lovely egg paratha with the
whole yolk staring at me like the setting sun from the center of a perfectly
formed isosceles triangle. All the egg parathas I have had after we moved
out of Pipili (my father had a transferable job) never quite come to the
mark; nostalgia is after all the secret ingredient of most successful
recipes.

My mother of course was mad at me for eating at Guruma's place all the time.
The fact that Guruma was a Christian had nothing to do with it. What really
offended her was the mere fact that I ate regular meals at another home, as
if it were beyond her ability to feed me adequately. Whereas on looking back
I could easily give a 'communal' tinge to the incident, and offer an
explanation that what really offended my mother was the fact that I was
eating at a Christian household. But I know that it's not true. What I want
to foreground here is how easy it is to over-read a certain social
situation, behaviour, or phenomena, and give it a label which distorts its
significance and occludes understanding.

The recent, so-called, 'communal' violence in the Kandhamal district in
Orissa is a case in point. Over the last few years the violence between the
Kondhs and the Panas in the district has generated two parallel sets of
narratives. These narratives have a certain consistency not merely in terms
of their form and structure, but also in their geographical habitation. The
first set of narratives is generated by local newspapers, other local media
organisations and local academics, and seems to set forth the dictum that
Orissa is a 'peaceful' (*santipurna*) state and Oriyas are a 'peace-loving'
(*santi*-*priya*) people, and that the present run of 'communal' violence
are an aberration.

The second set of narratives generally resides outside the state, and is
generated by the usual suspects of national media and human rights
organisations, and academics based outside the state (some of them Oriya).
This set of narratives sees Orissa as the 'next Gujarat,' and sees the
recent violence in Kandhamal not as an aberration but as a symptom of a
thorough communalization of Oriya Society, and a trailer of things to come.
As is the case with most such dichotomies the truth is neither close to any
of them nor is it even in the middle. The possibility of even starting to
understand such violence in the state is available to us only when we cease
asking the questions that lead to such dichotomous logjam.

Such a dichotomy as observed in the case of Kandhamal and Orissa mirrors the
broader rules of writing narratives generated at the national level around
the issue of 'communalism.' The first set of narratives in this case is
merely the inverse of the first set of the couple mentioned earlier. Instead
of positing a 'history of peaceable coexistence' it posits a history of
millennium long communal conflicts, especially between the 'Hindus' and the
Muslims. The Muslim league in the pre-independence era was able to create
Pakistan (albeit 'moth-eaten') by the successful deployment of such a set of
narratives; the sangh parivar are the ideological progeny of the Muslim
league in this regard as they also use the same set of narratives, albeit
with a different political axe to grind.

The second set of narratives of this dichotomy may be loosely defined as a
left-liberal one that posits that communalism was essentially a result of
cynical manipulation by powers that be (be it some Muslim rulers in times of
political crisis or the British in the post-Sepoy Mutiny period) to enable a
policy of divide and rule. Most left-leaning commentators allow for the
presence of the 'communal virus' in Indian society over a longer period of
history (since we all know "'religion' IS the opium of the masses"). Most of
the commentators of a more 'liberal,' poco/pomo (post-colonial/post-modern)
persuasion will tend to argue that 'communalism' (like other categories such
as 'caste', and 'tribe') is a 'colonial invention.'

            But these two positions are not as divergent as they seem. They
seem to agree that there exists such a phenomena called 'communalism' in
India, that it is characterised by violence between the followers of
different 'religions,' and that such violence has a 'history'. In fact they
implicitly seem to argue that the historical mode of apprehension of social
reality (as opposed to say fiction, or *vamsavalis*) is the only valid and
effective one for apprehending such social phenomena.

            These descriptions are a bad fit especially in an area such as
the Kandhamal district in central Orissa. At first sight the 'problem' is a
straightforward one of 'communal' conflict. Over the last couple of decades
there have been increasingly intense conflicts between the 'Hindu' Kondhs
(classified as a scheduled tribe by the Government of India) and the Pana
(an ex-untouchable *jati* group) Christians. As put forward by the dominant
narratives surrounding the conflict, the last three to four decades have
seen an increasing penetration of the district by the Hindutva brigade
resulting in an increasing polarization between the 'religious' communities
that takes the form of organised violence periodically.

            Let's see what this means in practical terms; such a narrative
suggests that the Kondhs are a simple, gullible community that are amenable
to manipulation by a few outsiders. Nothing can be further from the truth.
They are one of the most resilient tribal groups of peninsular India, and
rose again and again in revolt against British infractions on their
traditional rights and privileges. They have been traditionally a dominant,
landowning community in the Kandhamal district, and until a couple of
generations back, had close patron-client relationships with the mostly
landless Panas. In fact as the saying went those days – 'Kandha raja, Pana
mantri', to translate - 'The Kondh is the king and the Pana is his
minister'. The earliest colonial accounts in fact point at the structural
closeness between the two communities, some officials in fact went so far as
to record myths of origins of Panas that described them as the progeny of
marriages between Kondh men and the women of other castes. In those days,
the Kondhs and the Panas also seemed to share similar *devas*, rituals, and
ceremonies, and it was not unusual for the Pana clients to attend the
meetings of the Kondhs patrons, albeit as mere observers.

            The adoption of the pan-Indian deities by the Kondhs of
Kandhamal is hardly a couple of generations old; in fact the first 'Hindu'
temple in the district headquarters of Phulbani has been constructed within
living memory. So has been the growth of Christianity in the area. The
Kandhamal district has seen sustained missionary activity from the time the
British extended their control over these highlands; Christianisation, like
in many other colonial regions, was seen as a part of the process of
pacification of these so-called wild tribes. It is an irony of history that
it is the Panas that have been increasingly Christianised and not the
Kondhs. In fact, over the last four decades or so, the so-called
Hinduisation of the Kondhs in the district (spearheaded by the recently
murdered VHP politician Laxamanananda) has been concurrent with the
Christianisation of the Panas.

Orissa has a really small Christian population; out of a population of over
36 million in 2001, less than a million are Christians. But nearly a seventh
of the total population of Christians of the state live in the district of
Kandhamal, and constitute around a fifth of its population. This
Christanisation must have happened along with the loss of their traditions
as a people. The effects of the so-called Hinduisation must have also been
similar. The Panas and the Kondhs no longer seem to worship the same/similar
*devas* and *devis*, they no longer practice similar rituals, and they no
longer seem to share communal spaces.

            I have never set feet in the district. I have never done
'fieldwork' there; so my statements do not have the validity of ethnographic
science. They do not even have the validity of reportage. I do not 'know'
the reasons behind the violence in Kandhamal, nor do I have any clues about
the ways out of these cycles of violence in Kandhamal and elsewhere in
India. But one thing I am sure about; asking the wrong questions is the
surest way of getting the wrong answers. And one of the ways of starting to
ask the right questions is by looking at our own experiences unflinchingly,
and by using these experiences to interrogate the narratives offered as
explanations of our social realities. Some of the questions that one needs
to ask in this context are: what is it that makes a conflict 'communal,'
does such a thing called Hinduism exist and what does Hinduisation mean in
practical terms, is there a way out from these cycles of violence, and
lastly but not the least, how is the current state of affairs in terms of
theorizing in Indian social science implicated in this violence.

            One of the earliest memories that constitute my 'personal
present' is that of Guruma bent in prayer below a photograph of Christ on
the Cross, and of me falling in love with him. I fast for Shiva on Mondays,
chant the Hanuman Chalisa thrice a day, and sporadically practice vipassana;
but a part of my heart still belongs to Christ as he is perhaps the only
form of divinity that seems to have experienced and known real human
suffering. And I know that he has enough mercy in his heart to forgive the
likes of Laxamanananda and his followers as well as the proselytizing
missionaries in Kandhamal, for quite a few of whom increasing the size of
the flock seems to be a bigger and better challenge than making the peace of
Christ a reality.





(*Sailen Routray **is a research scholar at National Institute of Advance
Studies, Bangalore. His research areas include *Sociology of development and
environment in Orissa)