Christians, missionaries and Dalits

By

 NT Desk

 -

2020-12-27

66

Covering Goa since 1963

Frederick Noronha

Camil Parkhe featured in these columns only very recently, so it might seem like overdoing it a bit to feature the journalist here once again. Yet, in a way, I’d argue, it’s justified.

Camil’s was an often-appearing by-line in The Navhind Times of the 1980s. Just out of college at that time, he soon got into the world of journalism. Some of us who had an eye on entering this very field would envy people like him or John Aguiar. (The latter was another student-reporter, who retired from government service only just recently.)  While the rest of us could only dream of entering the media, they were already there.

After reporting for the NT for some time, Camil Parkhe simply vanished from the Goa horizon. Or so it seemed. We occasionally got reports of his shifting back to his native places in Ahmednagar (home to 19 sugar factories, and the birthplace of the now-sometimes controversial cooperatives). Or Pune.  But it was only when Facebook grew phenomenally across India, that old-time friends started getting connected once again.

After exchanging a few texts, this time Camil sent across an interesting collection of his books. Two things struck me immediately about these.

The first was that Maharashtra, perhaps due to its size, unlike Goa, has this trend of coming out with some small, rather inexpensive, simply printed books. This allows a whole lot of authors to express a whole lot of ideas. Interesting….

In Goa, despite this being the first home in Asia to print in the mid-sixteenth century, getting into print can still pose challenges. It has been rather tough even in recent centuries to come out with books and to successfully market the same.

Secondly, Camil Parkhe continues to be multilingual, both in speaking and in writing. So, his books are in English and in Marathi, and he seems to slip from one to the other rather effortlessly.

In a way, this also reflects the different times and style by which religious conversions took part in diverse parts of the county. While people outside Bombay-Bassein parts of Maharashtra changed their religion, it wasn’t always the sixteenth century. And it was not strongly felt that faith, culture and language were all treated as a single package.

Anyway, because of Camil’s connections with our region, his texts will go into my Goa books collection.  As mentioned earlier, he had come down to Goa as a young college student. His goal then was to become a Jesuit priest, though he later changed plans. So, he took to journalism instead, both here and in Maharashtra, till the pandemic led to job-losses.

One book I would have been interested in reading is in Marathi, ‘Badalta Patrakita’, or ‘Changing Journalism’. More so, since the media discusses the whole world, but never or seldom looks inward at itself. It’s always interesting to read comments on the media.

Three of Camil’s other books are interesting, however, and might be a bit more relevant to us, more so at this time of the year. These books discuss a missionary priest in Ghogargaon, the Dalit Christian’s “right to reservation”, and the Contributions of Christian Missionaries in India.

The last perhaps has the most potential ruffle feathers.  In India, the discourse over religion and politics has changed a lot over the decades. This subject is no longer seen with the same approach as it was done in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s.

“Missionaries” has become a kind of a bad word nowadays. Permission for foreign propagators of the faith is hard to come by. Which is why we have only a smattering of foreigners working in educational or other institutions in India, unlike earlier.

This is a mixed blessing, a good thing and a bad thing simultaneously, as it were. The Church is forced to depend on its own resources, to build its own. But, at the same time, the skills from overseas – some well-intentioned ones, maybe a few misguided – are not there.

I knew Gaston Roberge, a French-Canadian Jesuit who spent a lifetime in India (in Calcutta-Kolkata), did so much for the world of understanding film till he passed away recently. Scores of others worked in the fields of science, education, health and more.

It is not always easy to understand the motivation of these men and women, who leave their homes and countries, to go and work in another distant corner of the globe. Are they just misguided? Fanatical? Do they really want to help? Do they have a neo-colonial approach towards things? Or elements of all?

Yet, at the same time, the word “missionary””does have some negative connotations attached to it. By the dictionary meaning, it refers to “a Christian who has been sent to a foreign country to teach people about Christianity”. Foreign? Sent? Teach? These words could indeed sound condescending, at the very least.

South Asia is one of those regions of the world which doesn’t quite like the idea of changing one’s religions. There is no ‘free market’ for the world of religious beliefs, it would seem, in these parts.  (Oddly enough, in these changing times, Christian Indian religious priests and nuns are going out to other parts of the globe, instead of others from elsewhere coming in here. This is also true for other religions including Hinduism as well, whose movements, from ISKCON to Rajneesh and more, have been reaching out to the Western world for maybe half a century now.)

In this context, Camil Parkhe goes against the tide with his book titled ‘Contributions of Christian Missionaries in India’. It was published in 2007 by the Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, a Christian publisher, in times when there was less information available online.

This book lists the women’s pioneer Ramabai Saraswati; the pioneering Marathi-Konkani litterateur, Thomas Stephens SJ; the father of inculturation, Robert de Nobili; the first Marathi missionary, Fr Nahemiah Nilakanthashastri Gore; journalist-kirtankar, Satyavan Namdeo Survanshi; Padma Bhushan Fr Camil Bulcke; poet-missionary, Rev Narayan Vaman Tilak; Bharat Ratna Mother (now St) Teresa; Tamil poet, Joseph Beschi; Graham Staines who cared for the lepers but was burnt alive; rural development pioneer, Fr Herman Bacher; historian, Fr Henry Heras; linguist-social reformer, William Carey; Padma Visbhushan Valerian Cardinal Gracias; the first Marathi novelist, Rev Baba Padmajee; social worker Manorama Madhavi; editor-missionary, Archbishop Henry Doering; research scholar, Rev Justin Abbot and inter-religious dialoguer, Fr Matthew Lederle.

‘Fr Gurien Jacquier of Ghogargaon’ is a story of a little-known French Fransalian priest from the late 19th century, who changed the lives of Camil’s maternal family and an entire village. It is narrated in a catchy, journalistic style, and makes it tough to not get drawn in. The third book is also a brief but blunt book about why Dalit Christians should not be deprived of reservations.

Camil’s list of “missionaries” above may seem like a long list, but with easier access to online information now, it is clearly the tip of the iceberg.

A religion, any religion – and even secular ideologies – are a mix of good and bad. A tree will be known by its fruits, or so says the parable.

These are times of globalisation, misunderstandings and even enhanced inter-religious conflict. In such a situation, perhaps what’s the need of the hour is to reinforce the positive, weed out the negatives, and build in a way that benefits everyone.