The politics of conversions

Culture has always played an integral role in religious conversions in India. ALBAN COUTO reviews a book that addresses the complexity of the issues involved. 
 
What gave Christianity in India an endurance transcending Portuguese force and violence were the asceticism, saintly lives and faith of the missionaries. (Above) The Se Cathedral in Goa.  CULTURE, not religion, is central to the concept of conversion in India. Etymologically in the English language, conversion means a choice between professions of the Christian creed, understandable in the inter-sectarian wars of religion in Europe. In the Indian languages, for instance in Sanskrit and Hindi, conversion is construed as opting out of a way of life, traditionally the Indian or Hindu way of life, of a non-proselytising culture, open to other cultural influences that did not destroy the geo-political imprint which from the outsider received the name of India. The founding fathers of the Republic, adopted the name, ``India that is Bharat'', encapsulating the variegated cultural tradition of an all-embracing Hindu India. The geographical identity, fractured with the creation of Pakistan, has raised the issue of its appellation, the Hindutva re-designation of Bharat that is India, with repercussions on the secular paradigm of Indian politics, giving an edge to the debate on conversion by Christian missionaries. Its overtones of violence have been marked since the assumption of government in October 1999 by the rightist BJP led coalition that has led to deaths of priests and nuns and the desecration of churches. A modified retraction by Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister, that the methods of Christian missionaries, some if not all, are dubious, is of little comfort to Christians who have decided to pick up the gauntlet and seek clarifications from the RSS, the party ideologues of the BJP. There is a thin line between the constitutional right to propagate and the derived right to convert and be converted. Granted that these are fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution, the debate skirts around it and circles around methodology, the argument being that if some of the means are bad and are prohibited the problem would have resolved itself.

End and means, the complexity of the problem and the issues are posited in Disputed Mission — Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India by Ines G. Zupanov (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999) Zupanov examines two contrasting approaches to Christian conversion advanced in India by two missionaries, fellow
companions of the Society of Jesus, who worked together in Goa and then in Madurai in Tamil Nadu, during 1606-1636. The two protagonists were Gonsalo Fernandes (1541-1619), a Portuguese military adventurer, a late entrant to the priesthood, with no pretensions to philosophic speculation or culture including his own, which he considered superior to any; the other was Robert Nobili (1577-1656) of the Italian aristocracy, a product of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a seeker of truth and knowledge in cultures other than his own. The setting, 17th Century India, marks the end of the resurgence of the Vijayanagara Empire in South India against the inroads of the Muslim Delhi Sultanate Empire of the North and its defeat by Muslim feudatories, paving the way for the Empire of the Moghuls and for the West with the arrival of the Portuguese. Hinduism very much on the defensive against Islam, still kept its character of a non-converting, non-proselytising and non-dogmatic way of life. Migrations, intrusions, and even invasions into this region were absorbed and assimilated into a
pantheon and pluralism of cultures and languages that derived sustenance from and contributed to the mainstream. The way of life was amorphous and inchoate but that was its strength and the great virtue of its tolerance and open mindedness. It was at a loss when affronted by Islam and Christianity that claimed exclusivity which that threatened to destroy and not to add and fulfil. Such a threat from Portuguese Christianity came in with Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route and his landing in 1498 at Calicut.

Spices was half of de Gama's motto, the other half was Christians. He did find spices in Calicut but not the Prester John Christians, a tribe of early Christians lost in the Islam dominated parts of Africa/Asia. Instead he found the Syrian Christians professing in his eyes a strange form of Christianity, which the Jesuit priests who accompanied the voyagers said was
Nestorian, condemned as heresy by the Roman Catholic Church, and professing allegiance not to Rome but to the Eastern Orthodox Church of Syria and Antioch. Heresy or not, what was remarkable about Syrian Christianity in India is its accommodation to the Indian or Hindu way of life. It had that non-dogmatic fluidity that absorbed and added without the use of military or political force which in any case early Christianity did not have in India. What was equally important was its loyalty and fealty to the Hindu rulers in a mutual compact of religious toleration subservient to political power. Integration with the social fabric of the community was promoted by the retention of the caste system and the expression of Syrian ritual in the language of the community, Malayalam, which gave native vigour and roots, and access to the mainstream Sanskritic culture. The fluidity and accommodation was such that de Gama could mistake a Hindu temple for a Christian church and Francis Xavier was puzzled by Syrian Christians in Goa wearing the Brahmanical thread and growing tufts of hair at the back of their heads.

The Portuguese gave their discovery of India the impetus and signification of the Counter Reformation that sought to reclaim Christianity from the Muslim infidel and even more so from apostates and heretics and Protestants. Their kind of Christianity was through conversions by force with the aid of military and political power, through edicts confiscating the land and trade of Hindus and destruction of temples and the torture and the burning of Muslims, Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Hindus, sanctified by the Inquisition which already had its hands bloodied by auto-da-fes in Portugal against the Jews and the
Muslims. Capitulating to force and violence, many were converted en masse, including Brahmins who succumbed to the prospects of retaining their fields and properties. To avoid the theological superfluity of baptizing heretics who had already been baptized as Syrian Christians, the ritual of conversion assumed a cultural character forcing the reconverted and the
converted to be attired in a European dress and to eat pork and beef that would irrevocably separate them from the Muslim and the Hindu.

What gave Christianity in India an endurance transcending Portuguese force and violence were the  asceticism, saintly lives and faith of the missionaries. Many of them were non-Portuguese and their diverse nationalities from England, Italy, Holland and Spain were combined in the formidable esprit de corps of the Society of Jesus created at that time in 1540 by the Basque Ignatius of Loyola. He gave the Jesuit order the stamp of his military profession-austerity, discipline, and absolute obedience to the commander, the Pope in Rome, at a time when he had lost in authority and influence, as the head of the Catholic Church and was unable to stem the revolts and schisms that erupted all over Europe. The Counter-Reformation spearheaded by the Jesuits halted the break up, and reversed the trend; what was lost in numbers was more than made up by conversions
in the Americas and Asia. The single end and purpose of the Counter Reformation was to re-establish faith and morals as determined by the Catholic Church through the Supreme Pontiff in Rome. The end was supreme and unquestioned; the failure lay in the lack of will to achieve that end. The will was to be strengthened not by idle speculation but by what Ignatius called-Spiritual Exercises, which, not without justification have been compared to the swordsmanship of the samurai, or more closely to yogic asanas.

While the end was not to be disputed, the means were various and variegated, reconciling the Jesuit paradoxes of unflinching discipline to the end and assiduous cultivation of a wide range of means that embraced cultures, sciences, and languages. The singleness of the end contrasted with the multiplicity of means, allowed for the full exercise of human faculties. Accommodation, the keystone of Jesuit policy; and discipline meant that the Jesuit had to combine scholarship and the rigorous application of
the secular sciences to enter into cultures other than his own. Go in so that he comes out with you, was the watchword. Non-discrimination in means was reflected in non-discrimination in recruitment — from Gonsalo, the rude Portuguese soldier-adventurer to Nobili, the aristocrat scholar-philosopher. As Zupanov caustically remarks, one end of the Jesuit spectrum was the recycling of soldiers, merchants and other adventurers, of whom Gonsalo was an example and at the other end were the Italian Jesuits, of whom Nobili was an example, ``recruited from the highest classes in Italy, who came to India straight from the Collegio Romano where they learned not only how to refute and convert heretics and pagans but they were also the
avant-garde corps of the Catholic reconquista transcending nationalities''

The arena of both the missionaries was 17th Century India, where Hindu revival in the Vijayanagara Empire of South India against the Muslim Bahamani Empire, had crumbled in the victory of the Bahamanis at Talakota in 1565. Satraps of both the empires assumed power in their own feudatory territories, the most important of the Vijayanagara remnants were the Nayaks of Madurai. India was going through one of her periodic swings when centrifugal forces were ascendant with the decline of the Mughal empire. It was also a time of flux in religious certainties, Hindu and Muslim, which had contributed to the spread of the bhakti cult, which cut across dogmatic religion and entrenched caste, transcending divisions in a mysticism suffused with rustic faith in village deities and above all finding utterance in the medium of the prakrit or regional languages and in music, song, and dance.

Not only in their personalities but also in the locale of their missionary endeavours the polarities of their approach were determined. In Gonsalo's Goa, as Zhadnov describes it, ``all the temples in Goa were destroyed, Hindu ceremonies were forbidden, orphans were kidnapped and converted, rice Christianity flourished, Hindus were discriminated against by the government in a multitude of ways.'' In contrast, Zhadnov adds, ``In Madurai, however the political situation was clearly
not conducive to such slash and burn evangelisation''; its sovereign nayak was free from foreign domination. The patronage of Indian royalty and Brahmin grace of Madurai, its royal architecture and its intellectual effervescence radiating from the beautiful temple complex dedicated to the goddess Meenakshi and her celestial lord Sundareshwara flourishing with the grace and patronage of an Indian ruler. Here was something similar to his home and upbringing, a combination of princely church and religious state. It also presented the classic test case for conversion. Here was the arena where the theologian could prove
himself according to principle that conversion should be voluntary, an act of the free will, without force or material inducement, through faith and reason. And to do this he had to enter into the universe of discourse which is Sanskrit, the Latin of India as
Nobili called it, and with the Brahmins who were intellectually and spiritually the fit disputants.

Entering into their mindset, which unlike post Reformation European had not separated the religious from the secular, and into their persona in which the religious, political, and social were integrated, Nobili adopted the dress, diet, and the ritual of
religious practice of the Brahmin. He observed strictly the taboos against pollution from the inferior castes. In sum, says Zupanov, ``he enthusiastically renounced polluting substances (meat and alcohol) and polluting persons (low caste people)
in order to penetrate among those whom he considered his equals.'' He applied sandal paste on his forehead and wore the sacred thread across his body and was rigorous in the ablutions before prayers. He learnt Sanskrit and discoursed with the Madurai brahmins on the Vedas. It is significant that in matters of theology and philosophy, Nobili found nothing to contribute, an acknowledgement that in this field of speculation the Hindus had reached the summit and were in no way inferior to what the Greeks and Europeans had achieved. What the few Brahmin converts received from Nobili was a secret mystic communion derived from the fifth Veda, unknown and still to be discovered. The ritual and caste received an added signification that could not be put into words. 

Gonsalo's approach on the other hand was to discreetly pass over the fact of forcible conversions with the might of the Portuguese state and dwell on the potential of attracting the inferior castes with the material and egalitarian inducements which Portuguese Christianity could offer. It was an approach which stigmatised the foreign missionary and his brand of Christianity as farangi, a pejorative term derived from the Portuguese, identifying Christianity with the Portuguese and with the lower castes, eaters of beef, pork, and drinkers of wine. They were pollutants in every sense of the term. It was against this stigma
that Nobili proclaimed his identity as Brahmin, vegetarian, of the Italian aristocracy, celibate and an ascetic. The two approaches could have co-existed separately, had not, personal animosities and internal contradictions, brought on a head-on clash. Though they started their mission together, as members of the same Jesuit Order first in Goa and later in Madurai,
Nobili soon in Madurai not only disassociated himself from Gonsalo and his Christians but also considered them as inferior. Even worse they were considered as pollutants.

In Nobili's eyes they did not exist; if ever there was communication and contact, it was through Nobili's charity, and that too at dead of night and through a back door. In Gonsalo's phrase, he and his followers felt decapitated from the Madurai mission. Accusations and counter accusations followed and the litigation encompassing theological, social, and political arguments developed in weighty documentation and sworn affidavits <147,1,0>from converts of both the sides spiced with personal allegations of Nobili's sexual relationships and his illegitimate son were heard and examined like a court martial at various levels of the Jesuit hierarchy, ending in the highest court in Rome in an acquittal for Nobili, and a hollow victory for both sides. The arguments and counter arguments were on hair splitting minutiae and prepared by Brahmins on both sides who had a field day in their contentions that one side was not Christian since they belonged to the farangi caste and the other side was not Christian
since they did not consider the inferior castes as children of God.

In the short term, Gonsalo had his victory. The dwindling numbers of Nobili's converts lead to the closure of his mission in Madurai and he died a broken man at Mylapore in Chennai in 1656; in the medium term, before Nobili's death, with the waning and decline of Portuguese power, Gonsalo's support had vanished, and the control of missionaries was shifted
from the Portuguese State to the Church in Rome.

In the perspective of current events, an evaluation of both the approaches suggests significant lessons. Nobili's access to conversion through Brahmanical ritual and customs and separating it from the signification of temple worship was a meaningless
dichotomy.

Its signification was only in terms of himself as sanyasi and guru, the sole dispenser of divine grace in an amorphous and inchoate Christianity connected to the revelation of the Vedas, and the fifth Veda known to himself. What won Nobili's case against his detractors was his argument that his assumption of the caste, dress, diet, and demeanour of the Brahmin had
nothing to do with religion but belonged to ``cultural and political commerce''; in his defence he advanced twelve arguments ``that the so called sacred thread and tuft of hair, kudumi, were purely political social signs.

*courtesy: The Hindu (magazine section)