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Challenging assumptions

CHANGING GODS — Rethinking Conversion in India: Rudolf C. Heredia; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017.

Rs. 350.

Two issues of profound emotive importance now exist within the space of religion, politics and society in India that impact upon questions of the change of faith implicit in the process of conversion. The first of these issues is the situation of missionaries and their interaction with the local society. Ever since the colonial period, the role of religion in Indian society has come to be seen as problematic, with the intermingling of faiths breeding antagonistic groups an d imagined communities. Although it would be simplistic to attribute communalism to the missionary undertaking, it cannot be denied that Indian religions did learn from its ideology and organisation, and Indian faiths have as a consequence come to exhibit a new militancy.

The second issue is the situation in post-1992 India. Following the vandalism of the Babri Masjid and the strident questioning of Nehruvian secularism, the Indian polity has struggled to reconstruct the secular fabric of the state and to rediscover some semblance of a unifying national identity. Some contend that this was the fault — perhaps, even, intention — of identity politics, and point to the willingness of groupings to empower themselves according to their communal identities, thereby building into the political process a proclivity towards sectarianism as a politically mobilising force. All the same, an important question has to do with how society and politics in India have managed to build a nationalist project to which some, if not all, groupings of people could subscribe.

This book focuses upon elements of these two crucial issues in contemporary Indian affairs and attempts to address what are some of the most important challenges involved in the tryst with religions and the experience of conversion. Rudolf C. Heredia presents an expansive exploration of the complex terrain of religious conversion in India. Working across the extant divides that structure the question of conversion, Heredia seeks to “clear some of the common ground still available and reach out to the moderate middle across these divides.” He addresses the mechanisms by which, historically across the space of Indic civilisation, diverse religious traditions including the Hindu, Islamic and Christian have evolved through encounter and absorption, culminating in the “compact” underlying the Constituent Assembly’s consensus involving restraint and transparency on the part of religious minorities as well as openness and tolerance by the religious majority. He concedes that in the immediate aftermath of the post-colonial period, with the continued conversion of tribals and dalits, “cracks in the compact began to appear”, only to intensify over time and concomitantly placing new demands on the state and its polity.

He contends that, for a more holistic appraisal of the terrain, it is important to consider the question from the point of view of the converts themselves. Both through analysis and case studies, it is pointed out that “politics and economics cannot satisfactorily explain religious behaviour” and that the real issue here is “how conversion will affect other levels of social interaction.” Doubtless, in this context, he is on somewhat sticky ground, unable to traverse the messy world of the converts themselves, which, as recent critical work on conversions has shown, implicates the historical conjuncture of modernity and the rather odd place of faith and belief in this theatre. Heredia, it seems, is not entirely heeding his own suggestions to historically contextualise religious (as indeed social) change.

But, of course, the book’s theme is also missionary activity in general — and Christian mission in particular — an idea that has more than just a political or analytical resonance for Heredia (the author being himself, as the book’s blurb puts it, ‘a Jesuit sociologist’). In passages of bold sociological insight, he admits that conversion to Christianity has at times meant “transference of dependence from the more exploitative patronage of the landlord to the more benevolent paternalism of the missionaries.” He bravely confronts what he formulates as “Christian ambiguity” especially in relation to one’s own faith, and implores “respectful reciprocity” as the basis of retaining openness to other communities. Indeed, the context in which he sets up this problematic is interesting, and the book is all the more fascinating for the window that it lends to the intense self-questioning that is the space of the Mission in India.

It must be granted that Heredia’s is not a lone voice in this self-questioning; and, to be sure, this space could be manipulated by belligerent and fanatical bands in both sides of the religious divide. But the work in question is primarily to be read for the connections that it establishes between several contested issues: the imperative of equality, the movement into tolerance, the question of secularism and religious pluralism, and indeed the ambiguities of salvation within the faith or outside it. Whether of course the knotty question of religious conversion as an experience of interiority is clarified as a consequence is another question. All the same, the book is recommended for the sheer humility with which it traverses its complex ground.

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