Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora

Abjected Identities, Evangelical Relations, and Pentecostal Visions

Robbie B. H. Goh

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438469423, 9781438469430
• eBook ISBN: 9781438469447
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This is the first comprehensive study of Protestant Christian religious identities in the Indian diaspora. Using qualitative interview methods, Robbie B. H. Goh captures the experiences of Indian Protestants in ten different countries and regions, describing how Indian communal Christian identities are negotiated and transformed in a variety of diasporic contexts ranging from Canada to Qatar. Goh argues that Christianity in India, developed within discrete and varied "ecologies, " translates in the diaspora into a model of small communal churches that struggle with issues of community maintenance, evangelical growth, and Pentecostal influences. He looks at the significance of Christianity's "abject" position in India, the interplay and tension between evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, Pentecostalism's insistence on religious endogamy (particularly among women), intrareligious differences along generational lines, the actions of Hindutva hard-line elements, and other factors, in the construction and transformation of diasporic religious identities and affective attachments to India.

1

The Christians of India

Religious Identities, Communal Feeling, and the Dialectics of (Dis)Engagement

Christianity in India has had a long and complex history—in its own way, one of the longest and richest histories among the countries of South, Southeast, and East Asia. While it is beyond the scope and purposes of the present volume to describe that history in detail—a job, at any rate, ably performed by a number of other scholars—a brief account of the sociopolitical contours of Christianity in India would be useful to help explain and contextualize the patterns of Christianity in the Indian diaspora. Indian Christianity’s uneven development in different parts of the nation and amongst different people-groups, predicts some of the heterogeneity that is seen amongst varieties of Christianity in the Indian diaspora, and the dialectics of identity related to this. More particularly, differentiated attitudes to India—and to being in the diaspora versus being in India—on the part of different segments of the diasporic population, can be more easily understood as part of the complex ambivalence that Christians have toward the homeland.

Religious Identities and the Cultural Politics of Religion in India: A Brief Background

India’s constitution forbids discrimination against anyone on the basis of “religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth,” protects freedom of access to places or employment to all religions and castes, abolishes the doctrine of “untouchability” (the apartheid associated with older practices of the Hindu caste system), and provides for “equality of opportunity” for those of all religions (Government of India 2007: 7). Freedom of religion is guaranteed under article 25 (1):

Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.

Religious groups are also guaranteed the right to maintain their own educational institutions (Government of India 2007: 13, 14). It is also unconstitutional to bar anyone from an electoral roll on the basis of religion or caste. These clauses do not preclude various affirmative actions which might favor “any backward class of citizens,” “scheduled castes,” and “scheduled tribes”—provisions through which the Government reserves some appointments, educational places, and other such benefits to groups which were traditionally discriminated against within the Hindu caste hierarchy (Government of India 2007: 8).

These basic constitutional guarantees do not, of course, prevent political practices from exploiting deep religious feeling, nor the religious politics of everyday life from impacting society in profound and often disturbingly violent ways. Indian politics is heavily influenced by religious considerations, and indeed the 1947 partition itself was governed primarily by religious considerations, with the state of Pakistan created to provide a homeland for Muslim Indians; partition also saw a subsequent “politics of the religious fanatic” that saw more than a million dead and millions displaced from their homes (Fernandes 2007: xv). Separatist politics on religious lines have also characterized India’s subsequent domestic politics, centered on states like Jammu and Kashmir (predominantly Muslim), Punjab (predominantly Sikh), Nagaland (predominantly Christian), and elsewhere. A number of Indian political parties are organized on more-or-less explicit religious principles, with probably the best-known example of a large national party being the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). There are also numerous smaller state parties like the Indian Union Muslim League, the Shiromani Akali Dal (Sikh), the Shiv Sena (Hindu), and many other parties which campaign locally on religious platforms.

A number of major incidents in India’s social and political arena in the past three decades or so indicate the extent to which religious identities and communalism are often implicated in irruptions of factional politics and violence. The main religious-political tension has been between Hindu and Muslim groups, primarily catalyzed by the social and political agitation of religious parties, including in some areas separatist tensions as well. The Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s Hindu Nationalist party, is overt in its appeal to the “cultural and civilisational greatness” of India’s tradition—a tradition explicitly linked with “Hindu thought” (BJP “Manifesto”). In much of its public discourse, the BJP version of Hinduism stresses its “ennobling” truths, the emphasis on the “essential unity of mankind,” the doctrine of “spiritual co-existence” and “unity in diversity,” and similarly values (BJP “Manifesto”).

In practice, however, the BJP has been linked to a number of episodes of civil unrest pitting Hindu mobs against Muslims. On December 6, 1992, the BJP organized a rally at the site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The mosque, one of the most significant holy sites for the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh, was on a disputed site which Hindus believe to have once held a temple commemorating the birth of Rama. The December 1992 rally, at which there were reportedly around 150,000 supporters, featured speeches by leaders of the BJP and its parent Hindu organizations, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (Fernandes 2007: 8); it was meant to symbolically commemorate the start of temple building, but with an undertaking not to damage the mosque. Several people broke through the police cordon and climbed onto the dome of the mosque, after which things rapidly got out of hand as the mob stormed the mosque, scattering the police and beating up journalists and anyone else in their way, before totally demolishing the mosque (Tully 2002). Present at the rally was Lal Krishna Advani, a BJP stalwart who later became party president and leader of the opposition in India’s lower house (Lok Sabha).

Another BJP leader, Narendra Modi (then Chief Minister of Gujarat, and who became Prime Minister of India in May 2014), was also implicated in the February 2002 communal violence in the state of Gujarat—what has come to be known as the “Godhra incident.” The violence broke out after a group of Muslims were alleged to have set a train carrying Hindu pilgrims on fire, killing fifty-nine of the pilgrims; retaliatory attacks by Hindus on Muslim shops and houses left hundreds of Hindus and Muslims dead. Modi was variously accused of not enforcing civil order, and even of helping to instigate the violence.

Political analysts have seen this appeal—explicit or implicit—to “Hindutva” (“Hindu-ness,” and the championing of a Hindu identity and the politics thereof) as a characteristic and necessary strategy for the BJP, its unifying ideology in the absence of a clear and distinctive platform or a charismatic leader (Overdorf 2008: 41). While this view may not sufficiently acknowledge the economic and infrastructural improvements that Modi was credited with in his long tenure as Gujarat Chief Minister, it does highlight the role that Hindutva has played in his leadership of the BJP. This overt alignment with Hindutva has continued after Modi’s ascension to the office of prime minister, with accusations that he has implicitly or explicitly condoned the work of the RSS in “re-converting” Muslims and Christians to Hinduism (Srivastava 2014; Das 2014).

Islam has also been the rallying point for separatist politics, most notably in the Muslim stronghold-state of Jammu and Kashmir. From 1989, a violent campaign has been conducted to drive minority Hindus out of Jammu and Kashmir; the insurgency has seen tens of thousands of casualties from bombings, assassinations, and even “collateral damage” from military efforts (Fernandes 2007: 27−29, 46). The politics of Islam in post-partition India have continued to be complicated by the frequently tense relations between India and Pakistan, not only in the matter of border relations and the fate of contested states like Jammu and Kashmir, but also because of India’s continued suspicions of Pakistan’s role in terrorist activities in India, particularly after 9/11. Episodes like the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, which the Indian government saw as supported by Pakistan, have sustained the association, in the eyes of the Indian government and many of its people, between Islam and political destabilization in India. If Hindu organizations such as the RSS and VHP have had a history of involvement in communal causes often leading to violence, so likewise have Muslim organizations such as the Indian Union Muslim League, Muslim Majlis, Jamat-e-Islami, and others (Krishna 2005: 176). Hindu-Muslim communal violence continues to erupt occasionally, particularly since Hindu fundamentalist actions have increased under the BJP government since 2014. Many of the Muslim acts of violence have been justified by that community as mere defensive actions or retaliations against Hindu provocations, in the face of the state often turning a blind eye to the Muslim situation (Alam 1993: 157).

Although it is the tension between the two largest religious communities, the Hindus and Muslims, which dominates the religious politics of India, other religious groups are also involved in religious conflicts, sometimes of a strikingly violent nature. Sikh separatism in the state of Punjab goes at least as far back as the 1920s along the work of the Akali Dal party to give Sikhism a larger voice and presence in the government of the state. This eventually became a demand for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan. In the 1970s, violence escalated the volatile situation as Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his group of conservative Sikhs resorted to the murder of their political and doctrinal opponents (Judge 2011: 41). Bhindranwale and his extremists sought refuge in the Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar, prompting the Indian government to mount the military strike named “Operation Blue Star.” The strike not only destroyed the Sikh group led by Bhindranwale, but also killed pilgrim bystanders and caused considerable damage to the Sikh holy site. It also led to the retaliatory assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Although the militant manifestations of Sikhism generally died down after the 1990s, the grievances about the Indian government’s treatment of the Sikhs, and the Sikh “crisis of identity” that spurs a constant assertion of that religious identity in the face of the threat of Hindu assimilation, persist (Fernandes 2007: 193, 218).

Although Christianity has a much less militant role and history in Indian politics, it has received significant attention because of its association with separatist movements in the state of Nagaland in Northeast India. Nagas, like many of the tribal peoples in the small states in Northeast India, are predominantly Christian (and largely Baptist), and the phrase “Nagaland for Christ” became a rallying cry in the Naga armed struggle for autonomy (Fernandes 2007: 164). Although part of the insurgency was as much a matter of political opportunism as of genuine religious conviction, nevertheless the distinct Christian identity of the Nagas was part of their self-perception, and came to be inextricably linked with Naga militancy as well (Fernandes 2007: 164, 166).

Religion features significantly not just in the more extreme cases of political activism and separatist movements, but also in the tensions in terms of cultural politics and communal relations that underlie Indian society. These tensions arise from governance issues having to do with the relations between India’s overwhelming Hindu population and those of other faiths, and also to do with the contestations over India’s identity as a Hindu nation. Hindus comprise just over 80 percent of the total population; the next largest religious group, the Muslims, constitute only 13.4 percent of India’s populations; and the other main religions—Christians (2.34%), Sikhs (1.86%), Buddhists and Jains (each less than 1%)—are collectively much smaller than even the Muslims (Census of India “Religious Compositions”). Hinduism, at least in the form that it took in the “Vedic period”—with an early version of the caste system, the practice of religious rituals, and the existence of hymns and commentaries—dates from before 1000 BCE (Clothey 2006: 21−27), thus exerting a diachronic cultural weight of thousands of years of continuous practice in the Indian subcontinent. It is further reinforced by cultural capital in the form of a rich tradition of literature and performing arts based on religious texts such as the Mahabharata, ornately decorated temples many of which are big tourist draws and even UNESCO world heritage sites, the “philosophical” value of Hindu thought, the popularity of practices such as vegetarianism and meditation both in India and abroad, and so on.

Hinduism’s demographic weight and accumulated cultural capital, together with the 1947 Partition which effectively defined the modern state of India on religious lines in contradistinction from Muslim Pakistan, have lent themselves to conceptions of India as a de facto Hindu nation. The use of the term “Hindu” to mean “the collectivity of people of India” regardless of their religion, was the usage current in the nineteenth century (Pandey 1993: 245). It was only in the context of “new challenges” of religious communalism and “increasing strife between Hindus and Muslims” in the 1920s that a more nationalist notion of “Hindu” came into being, popularized through the 1923 publication of V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva (Pandey 1993: 247). While Savarkar’s term still extended over “all the people who reside in the land,” it established a criterion of historical, cultural, and ultimately religious qualification to that belonging: a condition of “love” and “worship” of the ancestral land, such that one could be non-Hindu by religion (e.g., a Sikh or a Jain), but have Hindutva (Hindu-ness) by affection and loyalty for the land and people (including, implicitly, a tolerance for the multicultural and multireligious makeup of the land; Pandey 1993: 248–50). This of course still left room for the dominance and centrality of the Hindu religion as the core of the Hindu Bharat, and it was this religious core that was mobilized in the 1940s and 1950s to “appear to include—yet subordinate—minorities” within the unquestioned dominance and mastery of the Hindu majority (Copland 2007: 263–65).

The tendency for caste-thinking to reach out beyond the limits of the community of Hindu adherents is ingrained into the national consciousness of India, and inscribed into the Constitution. Article 25 (2)(b), which reserves the state’s right to provide social welfare for or open public religious institutions to “all classes and sections of Hindus,” carries an explanation that the reference to “Hindus” includes “persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion” (Government of India 2007: 13). Pandey (1993: 245) shows that the term “Hindu” was indeed used by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist writers in a larger and more inclusive way than referring only to religious adherents—an inclusive and “expansionist” move which has been opportunistically resurrected by “Hindu propagandists in more recent times.”

The evolution of Hindu nationalism in the form of the BJP, RSS, and other such organizations has now worked to centralize Hindutva as normative, as an “authentic” Indianness, at the expense of all non-Hindu minorities. Schools and school texts today are very much part of this ideological playing field: in the schools run by the RSS and BJP, tenets pointedly glorifying Hinduism and bashing Islam and other religions are repeatedly taught to students, and textbook material promoting an “extremely virulent communal view of Indian history” is used in classes (Mukherjee et al. 2008: 21; Hasan 2007: 237–38). There is also an underlying strand of Hindutva in media discourses, for example in the playing up of “Hindu” outrage at Pakistani provocations and Muslim terror attacks such as the one on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001 (Manchanda 2007: 356–59). Pandharipande (2001: 237–42) shows that Hindu-ness plays a central role in the linguistic constructions of “authenticity” even amongst diasporic Indians, for example, the Americans of Indian descent that form the subject of her study.

As Angana Chatterji (2009: 41) puts it, Hindutva can be seen as “the hyper-practise of Hindu cultural dominance.” The resonances and reverberations of this “hyper-practise”—despite its roots in a “narrow centralized” and “Brahmanical” code, as Chatterji (2009: 41) points out—frequently wash through a wider Indian society, not necessarily by explicit public consensus, but rather by the political mileage and cultural momentum it contains. In 2007 then-Culture Minister Ambika Soni was criticized by a colleague in the Indian Cabinet when her ministry denied the existence of a Hindu god, Lord Ram, in order to justify a project to dredge a sea lane in the shoals between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (Agence France-Presse 2007). According to the Hindu epic The Ramayana, the shallows in question (also known as “Ram Setu”) were the work of Lord Ram; Soni’s ministry in a report submitted to the Indian Supreme Court essentially took a rationalist perspective that denied this religious account. Reaction to the report unfolded on several fronts: the RSS and its affiliated organizations mobilized a mass demonstration on December 30, 2007, in Delhi, featuring Hinduism “awareness” talks by spiritual leaders, and the decoration of the cityscape with saffron (Hindu) flags and buntings (Hindu Janajagruti Samiti 2007). In the state of Punjab (the state represented by Soni, who belongs to the Congress party), effigies of Congress party leader, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, were burned, accompanied by outcries that as a “Christian” (an imputation that followed from her being non-Indian and European in origin) she is ignorant of and unsympathetic to the “Hindu religion” (Agence France-Presse 2007). Tamil Nadu state also saw an outcry against its Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi who had supported the dredging project (Hindu Janajagruti Samiti 2008). As a result of these outcries, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put the project on hold, and Soni offered her resignation (Agence France-Presse 2007; Banerjee 2008).

In 2010, religious and nationalist sentiments erupted in the highly popular spheres of Indian cricket and Bollywood. In January 2010, Pakistani players and fans protested against the fact that no Pakistani players had been picked up by the Indian Premier League teams (Agence France-Presse/Associated Press 2010). When Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan (whose parents were born in what is now Pakistan) expressed sympathy and conciliatory sentiments, he was attacked by the Hindu nationalist group Shiv Sena (a habitual critic of Pakistan for what it perceives as Pakistan’s backing of Muslim terrorism), which tore down posters of the actor’s upcoming film My Name is Khan and threatened violence against movie houses showing the film (Agence France-Presse 2010b).

As a final example (among many others), food culture too is heavily influenced by Hindu values, with vegetarianism—a custom amongst many Hindus, Jains, and others—colonizing not only the food scene, but also housing and real estate (Associated Press 2006). The states of Gujarat and Rajasthan are known to be dominated by (largely Hindu) vegetarians, but in recent years immigrants from these states have also brought a new wave of vegetarian influence to the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, where restaurants and supermarkets have felt the pressure to go only vegetarian, and even housing societies and cooperatives have rejected applicants who are non-vegetarian (Associated Press 2006).

Such examples of Hindu-ness as a “hyper-practise of … cultural dominance” (Chatterji 2009: 41)—from politics to educational practices to popular culture and certainly to many aspects of communal life—can easily be multiplied. While there are of course many instances of tolerance, social harmony, and liberal open-mindedness in India, particularly within the business and professional spheres of large-city Indian life, this does not deny the prevalence of Hindutva as a dominant cultural practice and attitude, and its periodic flare-up into political incidents and communal violence. It certainly extends overseas as well, in the cultural influence of organizations like the RSS, the VHP, and the BJP, and the project of creating a “diaspora Hindutva movement” linked to the “majority rights of Hindus” in India (Kinnvall 2006: 151–54). The cultural pervasiveness and dominance of Hindutva might well signal a “crisis of secularism” in India, as Rajan and Needham (2007: 2) contend. Certainly it is a feature of the Indian socius, markedly different from the models of multiculturalism and secularized individualism familiar in many North American and Western European countries, which must be borne in mind in seeking to understand the religious-cultural landscape of India.

One particular aspect of Hindu pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora: the Nature and Scope of this Project
• Chapter 1 The Christians of India: Religious Identities, Communal Feeling, and the Dialectics of (Dis)Engagement
• Chapter 2 The (Re)Constitution of Regional/Communal Identities in the Indian Christian Diaspora: Cultural Negotiation, Familial Tensions, Pentecostal/Evangelical Influences
• Chapter 3 Insistent Ruths: Women, Marriage, and Gendered Spiritual Roles
• Chapter 4 Leaps of Faith: Evangelicalism and/or Pentecostalism, Supernatural Transformations, and Transnationalism
• Chapter 5 “India” in the Diasporic Imaginary: Christianity, Class, Values, and Religious Affect
• Conclusion Indian Christians: (Not) At Home in the World
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover