A Special Journey
Welcome to the New Year. Our main news of the past month is that I (David) have represented Church of North India (CNI) and the Uniting Church in Australia, and presented a paper at an international ecological conference held by the Church of South India (CSI) at CMS College, Kottayam, Kerala. That necessitated travelling from near India’s northern (uttar) border to near its southern (dakshin) one, a journey of 3,500 km. Because it would be hypocritical to travel to and from an ecological conference by air, the most ecologically costly means of travel, unless that was necessary, Lena and I re-lived the romance of rail and of our youth. In lieu of a railway between Manali and Delhi we did that 550 km stretch by bus each way, but the 3,000 km between Delhi and Kottayam, by very different rail routes. On the way south we largely followed India’s west coast; travelling back north we crossed the sub-continent to Vijayawada, near the eastern coast in Andhra Pradesh, the state I still feel, after living there for 3 years during the 1980s, is one of my homes.
Rail remains a wonderful way of getting to know India and its people. I’ve often wondered how this nation, about 40% the size of Australia, can sustain 60 times as many people as my country. Travelling through it made me realise how empty most of it is. Vast numbers of people cram into small spaces. They of course each have an “ecological footprint”: the landscape as a whole is being overtaxed. That is most easily seen in the skies, which are polluted over almost the whole country except the himalayan north. But although the land and waterways are also heavily polluted in built up areas, what my PhD supervisor Dean Drayton said of America also holds for India: “The thing that makes this land great are its rivers.” “Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography” by Sanjeev Sanyal, confirms this view. Wherever we were in the great teardrop the trains in which we travelled described, water was not far away.
The character of these waterways varies greatly, of course. So still is Lake Vembanad, a large freshwater lake in Kerala separated from the sea by a barrage, that fisherman stand in their simple boats to ply their age-old trade. That would be impossible in Manali’s turbulent Beas River which the British stocked it with trout to go along with the apple orchards they introduced to its banks, so another form of fishing is needed. The winter climate varies greatly too, from the snow-bound Himalayas in the north, through the often foggy central north of the country to the lazy, humid warmth of Kerala. And so, of course, does the vegetation, from the mountain conifers, through Delhi’s rich remnant “jungle” to Kerala’s ubiquitous coconut palms.
The peoples of the subcontinent are famously diverse. Although India’s population is still smaller than China’s it has something like 20 times as many people groups. The impressive rail network the British built has been greatly improved of late. It has enabled Indians to migrate all over their country, mixing these groups up. Political instability and economic need or opportunity all drive people to move. We spent the 2 day journey to Kerala in the company Utkarsh and Megha, who were on the way to their honeymoon. Megha’s family are Hindus who fled from Muslim Bangla Desh at Partition in 1947. They eventually settled in Agra where, decades later, she met Utkarsh while both were studying for MBAs. They fell in love, and in some sense symbolise a new, post-caste India. Now we are Facebook friends with them and have shared many photos via WhatsApp, a mobile phone application popular in India.
A sense of call is also causing Indians to move. There are more Christians living as “internal migrants”, working in Christian ministry, than in any other country. The large number of Lady Willingdon Hospital’s staff from the southern states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh exemplify this trend. While waiting on Kottayam station for our train back to Delhi I was hit on the back by Riya, one of the hospital’s dentists. Unknown to us she comes from Kottayam, and had spent her annual leave with her family there. Riya was delighted to share the entire journey to Manali, and the start of a new working year, with us.
The people we met were almost uniformly pleasant and interested in us. Many of the CMS College students acted as volunteers to help the Conference run smoothly. They and the staff and owners of the resort at which we stayed (having been treated to a night there by a friend) were wonderfully hospitable. So was Shona. Until recently employed by UnitingWorld, our sending agency, Shona has been keen for us to visit her at her home in Nagpur, central India. We couldn’t do that on this occasion, but I texted her, suggesting that she meet us when our train arrived at Nagpur station. In the last minute before we resumed our journey Shona came running along the platform, calling out my name and bearing luscious strawberries, guava and bananas, the fruit of her garden. She shook my hand, embraced Lena, and we had to board the already moving train! But it was enough, for now! We’ve had contact with Shona on Facebook, but nothing beats face-to-face!
While the conference proceeded Lena was taking a well-earned, much-needed rest. The morning after the complimentary night she told me that she wanted to stay here, So we did. Imagine a well-furnished apartment in peaceful, beautiful, tropical surroundings by placid Lake Vembanad, far from the much-loved Lady Willingdon Hospital with its ceaseless demands and you’ll understand why! As a bonus there was a pool in which she could walk to treat her chronically troublesome hip, an ayurvedic massage centre, a good, in-house restaurant and boats in which we were taken on tours around Lake Vembanad.
Each morning I walked out to the main road and took a bus for the 12 kilometre ride into the conference at CMS College Kottayam. The bus passed through fields sown with rice, beside canals slowly being choked by an exotic weed, and into built-up areas among ubiquitous coconut palm trees. At nearly 1,000 people per square kilometre Kerala’s population density is India’s highest, but it still manages to look verdant. Many of these people are Christians - from the ancient Mar Thoma Church which harks back to the apostle Thomas, the Syrian Orthodox, Catholic and, more recently, the Protestant (including the Church of South India), Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions. The many churches give ample evidence of these traditions, as do the icons of Jesus at the front of many buses. But the evidence that particularly tickled my funny bone was a wonderfully named small business: “Jesus Engineering Works”. So it does!
The conference was hosted by the Church of South India’s Ecological Concerns Committee led by the energetic Professor Mathew Koshy Pannakkudu. Its theme was “Climate Change and the Developing World”. I prepared a paper on that theme, but changed at the last moment to one I know well: “Releasing the River of the Water of Life”. The reason I changed was that the session that morning was about water and good hygiene. The main speakers were Pujya Swamiji Chidanand Saraswati and Sadhvi Bhagavati Saraswati, founders of WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) who came from their Hindu ashram in Rishikesh. I thought it would be helpful to to give a biblical perspective on the theme of water.
However, the conference’s theme examined an ecotheological issue that people interested in justice, peace and equality often think about. For many decades the word “Development” has been used to describe the process that many think should be used to bring the world’s poorer nations to the same standard of living as those of the rich West. It means industrialising, which means exploiting natural resources much as the West has done. In particular, development has involved producing and using vast amounts of energy by burning “fossil fuels” - coal, oil and the like. Now, just as crores of people in nations such as India are being released from poverty through the benefits of development scientists from western nations are saying that burning fossil fuels is causing the whole world to heat up dangerously. No wonder some people believe that this is just another Western trick to keep themselves rich and the rest of the world poor! But the scientists’ warnings are true. Farmers from India, Australia and around the world have known for some time that the climate is changing. Development, first in the West, and now in the “Rest” too, is causing such dangerous climate change that life and human civilisation as we know them could be destroyed. The biosphere is already being badly damaged.
The ecotheological question is, “In a time of climate change, are justice, peace and equality possible?” I believe that they are, but only if the whole world acts together, in unity, to stop, then reverse climate change. We already have the the technology and we know what we should do. All over the world people are installing renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power in place of fossil-fuelled power plants. This and many other measures need to be taken urgently, for the world is in a race against time. Christians need to be involved in all these activities as much as anyone else. But a Christian does so out of the conviction that this is God’s world, for which this good God has good plans. In this crisis there is hope. Though the crisis is huge, we remember that Jesus used the tiny offering of a small boy’s bread and fish to feed a huge crowd. So let us join hands with God and each other to address the climate crisis, trusting that even our small acts will be used by God in significant ways. Let us both pray and act.
I was impressed by how far the Church of South India has come in their environmental program. With ecotheological contact people in each of their 22 Dioceses, who relate to the Church’s Ecological Concerns Committee, a well-organised annual program and a number of publications, they have done a lot to bring ecotheology, and ecological concern and practice from the periphery to the centre of church life. Having met many of those responsible for this I hope that meetings between them and ecologically interested people in the Church of North India can inform and facilitate the latter’s ecotheological development.
This was indeed a special, blessed journey.
David Reichardt
