Manali Missives, August 2015
The Road & The Way
“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.” JRR Tolkien
Road songs, stories and movies are popular artistic genres. They plug into ancient traditions of pilgrimage that are being revived, including by many who will walk to Paris in the lead-up to COP 21/CMP 11, the Climate Change Conference due in November this year. Many religions include traditions of pilgrimage. Muslims have their Hajj, the journey to Mecca. Hindus have their Maha Kumbh Yatra, in which the largest gathering of humanity converges every 12 years on the ironically named Allahabad, at the junction of the Yamuna, Ganga and the mythical Saraswati rivers. And the Jews had their Exodus, which led to the annual pilgrimage to the passover festival in Jerusalem. “Se vi går upp till Jerusalem” goes the classic Swedish lenten hymn, describing how that Jewish custom was adopted by Christianity. When Islam prevented medieval Christians from reaching Jerusalem they not only tried to win back the holy city; they also developed new pilgrimages. Spain has its famous Camino de Santiago, the Way of St James. In northern Europe St Olav’s Way crosses Scandinavia to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, on Norway’s west coast. Lena and I have walked a small part of that ancient “pilgrimsled”. And for those who could not manage to walk even these pilgrimages - remembering that these were times when few people travelled - churches adapted the labyrinth, a path that led into the centre of a circle whose diameter was only some metres across, then back out again. The example at Chartres Cathedral, in France, is famous.
The gospels are really road stories sandwiched by birth and passion narratives. The first time we meet Jesus after His birth is when his parents realise that he hasn’t accompanied them on the return journey to Nazareth after the annual passover pilgrimage, but has remained in Jerusalem. His years of ministry were one long road journey, skirting increasing danger until He was ready to walk into it, head on, eyes wide open. Facing, and facing down danger is part of the genius of road stories. Apart, perhaps, from the Gospels themselves Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. Set in post-apocalyptic America it depicts the flight of a father and son to relative safety through a grim landscape that is no longer able to produce food, and peopled by desperate humans whose survival instinct has overridden their sense of morality. Tolkien, too, was a master at weaving danger with fellowship into his narratives. Here is another version of “The Road goes ever on”:
“Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.”
I’m pondering this particular theme because Lena and I have both been on the road, and we’ll soon be on it again. Our 8 weeks in Australia were wonderful from one point of view, but deeply disturbing from another. We attended our niece Bron Reichardt Chu's wedding, stayed the whole time with my generous parents, spent quality time with our adult children, our son-in-law, his family, and with my brothers and their wives, caught up with various friends and colleagues, and had days off in the Bed and Breakfast my schoolfriend Sue Handley runs in Katoomba. We presented our project a number of times in Sydney, country NSW and Melbourne.
I also spent a week literally “on the road” - on a tour of the Darling Basin organised by Uniting Church people to help church leadership and city slickers such as myself to understand, appreciate and support both people living in the Murray-Darling Basin, the context I studied in my PhD thesis, and of course to do this for the Basin itself. So I was able to present copies of my book "Release the River!" to people on that tour from 6 of the 8 Uniting Church congregations I'd visited a decade before when I did my field study. Back in Sydney my supervisor, Dean Drayton, launched my book. For an academic tome sales have been satisfying: I'm well on my way to covering costs.
But overshadowing all of this was the rejection by the Indian authorities of our applications for new employment visas. I have been granted a 6 month tourist visa and Lena a very curtailed employment visa that allows her to continue to work in the Manali Hospital until the end of September. She must have left India by November 4. These decisions took the relevant Indian authorities several weeks to make and communicate with us, which was of course deeply unsettling. We wondered what had gone wrong, and whether we could have done things differently.
However, when we discovered that many other similar visa applications were also being curtailed or rejected we realised that this was not about us; the still fairly new government has changed policy towards granting visas to foreigners working in NGOs. Upon realising this, a number of us in this situation, and our friends and family, were indignant.
“You’re doing such great work!” people said. “Why would they (the ubiquitous, amorphous “they” denoting the authorities!) want to prevent you from continuing it?”
I’ve come to a different view. To explain it will take a longer than normal blog entry, and an exploration of how people of “The Way”, Christianity, relate to people of India’s dominant faith, Hinduism. “They” are BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party, currently the popularly elected government of the world’s largest democracy. It is no secret that the BJP stands for a Hindu India. One of the current ironies in a number of countries is that political parties that represent particular religious perspectives are using the mechanisms of secular democracy, introduced to the world by the West, to promote their own religious, anti-secular agendas. We are dismayed because that’s happening here in India and in several middle eastern majority Muslim countries, and because it may happen in Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere. But every time Fred Nile or Corey Bernardi in Australia, or the Republican Tea Party in the US, all of them representing conservative, supremacist Christian constituencies, use political processes to try to achieve outcomes favourable to their understandings of the Christian faith, they are doing the same thing.
Currently there is much anxiety in India as to the BJP’s ultimate intentions. If they really want an India that is Hindu, what will that mean for India’s many, numerous minorities? Did the Prime Minister reveal his hand when, while Premier of the state of Gujarat in 1990, a slaughter of Muslims occurred that many believe he at least tacitly supported? Does the sudden refusal to issue visas to those such as ourselves who previously received them promptly signal that a time of difficulty for India’s Christian minority is now at hand?
I certainly hope and pray that Mr Modi has learnt from the experience of 1990, and that India’s minorities will not be subjected to persecution. Yet a cursory reading of India’s long history may be helpful. The sub-continent has been subjected to Muslim invasions for well over 1,000 years. Some estimate that during this period 70 to 80 million Indians were killed, making the Muslim invasions of India the greatest slaughter ever perpetrated. For evidence, or at least allegations, of Muslim ferocity visit the museum in the Sikh Golden Temple, in Amritsar. While European invaders, and particularly, of course, the British, did not match the Muslims in extended ferocity they were far more effective than them. At its height the British Raj extended from Afghanistan to Burma. And, particularly during the “Mutiny” of 1857 and the slaughter of 1,000 civilians in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 the British showed they could be ferocious too. India, at one time or an other the richest, most advanced culture in the world, but was reduced to poverty.
I would find it difficult to disagree if devout, nationalistic Hindus argued that followers of these invading Abrahamic religions had wrecked Bharat, and that they (the Hindus) are determined to restore it to its former glory. I would find it particularly difficult because parts of the Indian Church still look as though they are living in the shell of the colonial era, and parts are still corrupt. The specific issues differ, but like the western Church the church in India carries much baggage. I have spoken with Indian Christians who would welcome a governmental crackdown on the Indian Church’s accounting procedures and the ways in which it uses money that comes from abroad, and who argue that the Indian Church needs to be both independent of its ties to the western Church, and scrupulous in its financial dealings and its governance. One friend welcomed the news of our departure for these reasons! In principle I agree with him. If local people do not wish to continue the environmental impetus I’ve introduced it’s not for me to tell them how they should live their lives. Nor is it for western volunteers like Lena to supplement a local hospital’s care until all needs are met.
On the other hand, I think the Hindu supremacist argument that India is Hindu, and other religions and cultures are invalid, unwanted interlopers is a convenient re-reading of history. Christianity, at least, is not a recent, unwanted, European intrusion to India. There is good evidence that the apostle Thomas brought it, peacefully, to the southern regions of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In any case, Christianity was well-established in southern India towards 2,000 years ago, part of its under-documented expansion eastwards from its beginnings in west Asia. It may be that it became established in India at the same time as or even before it did so in Britain. Although parts of the Indian church still look European, others have well and truly indigenized, just as Hinduism has changed and been changed by the incursions of other peoples and religions into India well before Islam, and even, dare I suggest it, by its contact with Christianity. Mahatma Gandhi’s close relationship with the British missionary Charlie Andrews is evidence for that.
Secondly, it seems to me that Hindus are liable to contradict their arguments against Christian evangelism by their own actions. If I’m to broach this sensitive subject it’s important to be clear about what I mean and don’t mean by evangelism. By evangelism I do mean living my life in a way that is consistent with my Christian faith, that is, by loving God and loving my neighbour. I also mean discussing my Christian faith, and explaining its “what” (content) and “why” (reasons for that content) according to the normal conventions of conversation. I also think that discussion and explanation can take place in larger groups of people, such as preaching in churches, meetings outside of churches and by writing, so long as no pressure is placed on people to conform.
By evangelism I do not mean placing emotional or moral pressure on people to convert to Christianity. Nor to I mean offering financial and other inducements to do so. I certainly do not condone the use or threat of force, or of trickery to force or fool people into converting. Recently a friend in Australia reported that a Muslim praised him for his facility in languages, then asked him to repeat a formula in Arabic. When he did so the Muslim told him that he had just acknowledged Allah to be the only god and Mohammed to be his prophet, and that therefore he was now a Muslim! A long time ago I stumbled into a Hindu temple, whereupon a priest rushed at me, daubed my forehead and demanded money. I had apparently just performed puja to the temple’s god. Both these acts of evangelism were cheating in my book!
Christianity has long, honourable traditions of caring for and healing the sick, and of teaching. These have found expression in India in hospitals and schools. Typically, the campus on which we have lived for the past 2 years contains a church, a school and a hospital. Granted, these institutions provide splendid contexts for evangelism. At their best, help and care is offered by them with no strings attached; at their worst. indoctrination becomes an ugly parody of evangelism. So, to hear the District Commissioner, the top government official of Kullu District, praising our hospital in a meeting of NGOs some months ago; and a senior Muslim, graduate and now parent of a student at a Christian school in Srinagar, Kashmir do the same for the school last year, indicated to me that despite and perhaps because of their British origins such institutions have made positive contributions to the life of India. I think the focus on education is one of the best things I’ve observed about modern India. It would be “cutting off one’s nose to spite ones face” to force Christian-run schools and hospitals to close, or to disadvantage them, for ideological or religious reasons.
Besides, since Mr Modi praised the UAE’s decision to reserve land for a Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi recently he would open himself to charges of hypocrisy if he refused to allow Christian churches to build places of worship and service in India. Since the 1970s Hinduism has made significant incursions into the West. Not only the Californian-inspired Hari Krishna movement, but the increasing multitude of migrants from India and its diaspora have brought with them various expressions of Hinduism. Having been afforded by Empire many opportunities to bring Christianity to India the Churches cannot now fairly deny this. But neither, I suggest, can the Indian government fairly deny the Churches the opportunity to continue to do good in India.
But they can deny it. So in October we'll take a holiday and celebrate Lena's 60th birthday but, grieving, we'll pack up and farewell people in Manali and around north-western India whom we've learnt to love over the past 2 years. Never have I thought that it was possible to fall so passionately in love with so many people at one time! We hope that Indians will take up what we've initiated. Our project feels cut off before it had matured. But I believe that God will mature it in the way God wants to, and bring good from what is presently heartache. We intend to return when we can. To our Australian friends, God willing we'll be back in Oz, re-establishing our lives in early November. Lena has already accepted a job offer in the practice she previously worked at, and I've re-submitted my CV, and have already had several preliminary discussions. We’re on the road again!
Grace and peace,
David & Lena Reichardt
