Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu Nationalism

1 ‘Sangh Parivar comes under fire’, The Hindu (Madras, 29 December 1998), p. 13.

2 ‘Singhal statement on Amartya Sen misquoted’, The Hindu (3 January 1999), p. 7.

3 ‘Vajpayee criticises VHP remarks on Christians’, The Hindu (31 December 1998), p. 1.

4 The nun claimed in her police report that her assailants queried her about the number of conversions her convent brought about, while also warning her that the killings, rapes, and kidnappings would continue as long as the Christian missions engaged in proselytisation (‘Nun’s assailants untraced’, The Hindu (25 September 1999), p. 1). Three weeks earlier a Roman Catholic priest was murdered in Orissa.

5 See M. K. Gandhi , My Experiments with Truth (1929; reprinted Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 122-125.

6 Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, Government of India , The Constitution of India (as modified up to 1 August, 1977), p. 14.

7 M.M. Singh , The Constitution of India: studies in perspective (Calcutta, World Press, 1975), p. 480.

8 Andrew Wingate , The Church and Conversion (Delhi, Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), p. 35.

9 ‘VHP charge against Sonia Gandhi’, The Hindu (9 January 1999), p. 13.

10 Gauri Viswanathan , ‘Beyond Orientalism: syncretism and the politics of knowledge’, Stanford Humanities Review (Vol. 5, no. 1, 1995) pp. 18-32.

11 Robert W. Hefner , ‘World building and the rationality of conversion’, in Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity: historical and anthropological perspectives on a great transformation (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), p. 5.

12 David J. Krieger , ‘Conversion: on the possibility of global thinking in an age of particularism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Vol. 63, no. 2, 1990), p. 238.

13 It was John Henry Newman’s special contribution to reverse the institutionalisation of assent and produce a grammar of dissent. His major philosophical treatise, A Grammar of Assent, bears an ironic title in that, in order to arrive at an affirmation of faith, the knowing believer must proceed through successive stages of dissent from accepted premises. See Gauri Viswanathan , Outside the Fold: conversion, modernity, and belief (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 44-72.

14 Alan Olson , ‘Postmodernity and faith’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Vol. 58, no. 1, Spring 1990), p. 44.

15 By emancipation, I refer to the series of bills passed in early nineteenth-century England enfranchising Jews, Catholics, Dissenters and other non-Anglican groups and bringing them within the national fold. The price of such emancipation was, as I argue in Outside the Fold, op. cit., that religious groups were often asked to forgo the specificity of their religious beliefs in order to become citizens of the state.

16 ‘PM calls for national debate on conversion’, The Hindu (11 January 1999), p. 1.

17 See Antony Copley , Religions in Conflict: ideology, cultural contact, and conversion in late colonial India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997).

18 Richard Fox Young , Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit sources on anti-Christian apologetics in early nineteenth-century India (Vienna, Roberto Nobili Institute, 1981).

See also my Outside the Fold, op. cit., particularly chapter 3, ‘Rights of passage’, for a discussion of the antagonism felt by Hindu parents towards Christian missionaries, whom they blamed for the Christian conversions of their young children. Deprived of their rights to inheritance on conversion, converts were often assisted by missionaries to bring their cases to court so that their rights would be restored.

20 ‘Singhal statement on Amartya Sen misquoted’, op. cit., p. 7.

21 Sathianathan Clarke , Dalits and Christianity: subaltern religion and liberation theology in India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998).

22 Great Britain , Parliamentary Papers, 1852-53, evidence of J. C. Marshman (Vol. 32), p. 119.

23 See Gauri Viswanathan , Masks of Conquest: literary study and British Rule in India (New York, Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 151-152.

24 Great Britain , Parliamentary Papers 1831-32, Minute by M. Elphinstone, 13 December 1823, (Vol. 9), p. 519.

25 ‘Poverty hindering spread of literacy: PM’, The Hindu (4 January 1999), p. 10.

26 The Probe Team , Public Report on Basic Education in India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 14-17. On child labour, the report is not entirely convincing, as it tries to distinguish between family and hired labour and in so doing vacillates between empathy for family needs and condemnation of capitalist exploitation.

27 Amartya Sen , ‘Basic education as a political issue’, in The Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze Omnibus (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 120.

28 ‘Sen to set up charity with prize money’, The Hindu (28 December 1998), p. 14.

29 Sen’s research in Indian villages consistently pointed to the special value of basic education as a tool of social affirmation. As the Probe report (op. cit.) later confirmed, even among the most socially and economically disadvantaged groups, education was strongly valued for enabling upward mobility. Sen punctures the myth propagated by upper castes that the lower castes do not place much importance on literacy because they view education as an instrument of upper-caste domination. On the contrary, as the Probe report also affirms, education remains highly desirable to low-caste groups.

30 ‘Poverty hindering spread of literacy: PM’, op. cit., p. 6.

31 Sen , ‘Basic education as a political issue’, op. cit., p. 117.

32 See Amartya Sen , Inequality Reexamined (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992), in which Sen trenchantly shifts the question economists typically ask (‘should there be equality?’) to the more important one: ‘equality of what?’ Sen forces the discussion to concentrate on the diversity of human populations, which inevitably involves different standards of equality; in other words, what is equal to one group of people might be deemed inequality to another. The heterogeneity of social groups requires one constantly to rethink how a range of human capabilities might be harnessed to achieve specific goals, from which standpoint questions of rights and equality can be raised more profitably.

33 See Amartya Sen , ‘Well beyond liberalization’, in The Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze Omnibus (op. cit.) for an exploration of these themes, as well as an assessment of India’s recent economic reforms. His conclusion that the ‘uncaging of the tiger’ has not - at least not yet - led to any dynamic animal ‘springing out and sprinting ahead’ (p. 180) draws attention to the still unfulfilled promises of participatory growth evident in the alarming illiteracy rates and social deprivations.

34 See particularly Sen ’s essay, ‘Freedom, agency and well-being’, in Inequality Reexamined, op. cit., which describes freedom as our right to set goals for ourselves and our ability to get what we value and want; in short, to lead a life we would choose to live.