Archive for Rajasthan Politics
Continuity and Rupture among the Bhil Pentecostals
The paper asks: why are increasing number of Bhils converting to Pentecostal Christianity? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among the Bhils of south Rajasthan, the paper makes three inter-related arguments: first, the failure of the postcolonial state to provide basic social welfare services, especially health care and education, to the Bhils has brought them closer to the Pentecostal projects of healing, conversion and development; second, to understand how Christianity is growing among the Bhils, it is vital to understand how the Pentecostal missionaries have adapted to the local socio-cultural context and followed localized strategies to preach the gospel; and finally, to explain the growth of Pentecostalism among the Bhils, it is important to understand the complex relationship between state and religion, specifically Christianity, in the postcolonial context. Broadly, the paper demonstrates how this complex relationship between state and religion has given rise to a community of Crypto Christians which defies the notion of “making a break with the past” (Meyer, 1998), “rupture” (Daswani, 2013) or “discontinuity” (Robbins, 2003; 2004; Engelke, 2004) that Pentecostal conversion essentially advocates.
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@Sahoo, S. (2023) “Conversion and (Dis)Continuity among the Bhil Pentecostals of Rajasthan, India,” in M. Wilkinson and J. Haustein (eds.) The Pentecostal World, London: Routledge, pp.223-236. https://www.routledge.com/The-Pentecostal-World/Wilkinson-Haustein/p/book/9780367621803
REVIEW: Godroads (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Reviewed by: Lancy Lobo, Centre for Culture and Development, Vadodara, Gujarat, India
Taking the simile of ‘road to God’, well known in India as Panth or Marg, which could be rough, smooth, bent, high and low, and endless pilgrim’s way, this volume brings together well researched essays on the subject of conversion in India. The essays are an outcome of the research project, ‘Modalities of Conversion in India’ and were presented first at the European Conference of South Asian studies, held at the University Warsaw, Poland in the year 2016.
Apart from the introduction written by the editors, this volume includes 10 essays with a Foreword by P. Vitebsky and an Afterword by A. Vilaca. Of these 10 essays, 3 are by anthropologists, 1 sociologist, 3 anthropologists cum theologians and 3 faculties of theology and religious studies. Seven essays are concerned with Christianity, one to Hinduism, one to tribal religion and one on a study of Islamic reformism. The seven essays on Christianity deal with classical Protestant denominations and missions, and none to Catholic Christianity which is numerically preponderant in India.
In the words of the editors in Introduction, the chapters ‘highlight two dimensions of conversion to modernities. While one aspect of modernity refers to missionary education, modern medicine, advanced agricultural technologies and the prospect of material progress and social mobility, the other dimension is represented through enlightenment value systems, such as increasing rationalization and individualisation, the quest for equal rights and human dignity, freedom from oppression and humiliation and the establishment of law, order and social Justice’ (p. 13). One cannot classify the 10 essays by one dimension or the other as the two dimensions are not mutually exclusive.
Though the volume is on conversion, there appears much debate and discussion on the use of this term in the case studies presented. Is conversion a onetime event or rupture with former religion? Is conversion a resilient, slow winding road? Does conversion entail syncretism in varying degrees? Is it the outcome of protest? Is conversion a search for new identity? Is it a sure route to modernity? Is it to access material and healing benefits? Can intra-religious reform or refinement be considered conversion? Why do some convert, de-convert and some reconvert or go back to their original religion? Why some choose to continue in the new religion despite the state depriving them of reservation or affirmative action? This volume draws attention to the conversion process and themes such as: conversion as protest; conversion to modernities; and conversion as continuity, change, process and event.
However, having alerted the reader that most studies on conversion have been on Christianity, conversion and missionaries have been synonymous with Christianity as if other religions do not engage in conversions. In this volume too, most of the essays are focused on Christianity. These essays give the impression as if there is no or little conversion in other religions. When one talks about modalities of conversion, one could also speak of employing violent and non-violent means. For instance, the way in which Buddhism spread over large parts of the world.
Much as I enjoyed reading these erudite essays which deal mostly with historic past, what relevance do they have for contemporary India? The Indian state has stopped allowing foreign Christian missionaries since 1960s and has sent them back or not renewed their visas. The evangelical Christian missionaries come on short term under the guise of tourist visa and which too is under the scanner. The state has also used reservation as a deterrent for scheduled castes from converting. It has given reservation to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist Dalits but not to Muslim and Christian Dalits. Conversions to Christianity have come to a halt in the 1950s among Dalits and tribals thereafter.
This volume raises interesting questions for future research on the nature of conversions in a majoritarian Hindu nationalist state. Mocherla, Sahoo, Berger and Kannan’s essays are significant. Berger’s thick ethnography does not once use the term Sanskritisation among Gadaba and Olek. Kannan deals with sacred art and Hindu nationalism. Sahoo deals with reservation and religious freedom. Mocherla discusses the shift from communist ideology to Christianity.
Sanskritisation was a slow and spontaneous process of lower castes emulating the Sanskritic Hinduism of the upper castes. David Pocock has illustrated how the process of ‘inclusion and exclusion’ has been going on through a variety of means in India. Today a number of Sanskritic Hindu sects are actively looking for adherents among tribals, which I know in the case of Gujarat.
Since the Arya Samaj which began Shuddi, its modern forms like ghar wapsi (home coming) a euphemistic term for reconversion has come into vogue. However, Hindutvisation is qualitatively a different process as compared to Sanskritisation. Hindutvisation by the many Hindu nationalist affiliates of Sangh Parivar, especially VHP, and Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, are engaged in proselytization of tribals and ghar wapsi of Christian/Muslim converts. This volume rightly raises the question if the term conversion is appropriate to capture the phenomena in religious landscape of India. We have hardly any studies on contemporary conversion movements in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism except neo-Buddhism. So also the new variant of Christian Pentecostalism consumed by people irrespective of caste, sect, tribe, and Dalit in India as adherents though not formally baptised. If in the past conversions to Christianity were seen from the prism of protest, modernity, continuity, change, process and event, there is an open field for social scientists to study the nature of Godroads in contemporary India with reference to Hinduism and Hindu nationalism.
This volume also limits its quest largely to socio-historic research with little attention except Oddie to theological and spiritual transformations that accompany conversion. Only Oddie has dealt with this. While there are some who leave or revert to their former religion, why do those many continue in very adverse socio-economic conditions in the new religion? Is there a reality called Godexperience or spiritual experience which grips them? This dimension is missing making conversion a socio-cultural and historic reality.
Another theme that is missing in this volume is individual conversion. Of course there is a case of Zahur-Al-Haqq, a Muslim convert to evangelical Christianity by Arun Jones. This volume studies by and large group conversions thereby making conversions appear solely as a socio-political phenomenon.
This volume has exposed highly researched material on varied dimensions of conversions questioning if the term conversion itself is enough to explain the phenomena of change in religion or change within a religion. All the essays, with the Introduction, Foreword and Afterword, should interest historians, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians and especially those who wish to study religious change, and wish to engage in God-talk.
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@ Lobo, L. (2021) Sociological Bulletin, 70(2): 276-278; https://doi.org/10.1177/0038022920970290
“The Holy Spirit in the Household”: Pentecostalism and Gendered Transformation in India
Studies have shown that women outnumber men in Christianity (Woodhead, 2003: 73) and participate more actively in Pentecostal churches worldwide (Hefner, 2013: 11; Robbins, 2004: 132;). Bernice Martin (2003: 56) has reported that women constitute around two-third of all adult evangelicals in the world. In the Indian context, Bauman (2015: 82) points out that ‘while Pentecostal women in India may less frequently than elsewhere occupy positions of formal authority, they remain quite visible’. According to Bauman, in ‘most Pentecostal churches, [women] comprise a clear majority of congregants (often as much as 70 per cent) and they often participate openly and enthusiastically in worship’. Given this, the question is: why do a large number of tribal women convert to Pentecostalism and what motivates them to ‘make a break’ (Meyer, 1998) with their traditional belief system? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper argues that the Pentecostal churches have made special efforts to address the everyday problems of tribal women, which has brought them closer to the church. Specifically, the paper will discuss: (1) women’s conversion experience; (2) their experience of miracle healings; (3) male-female interaction within family and in church; and (4) changes in socio-economic well-being. Interviews with tribal women testify that they have experienced great transformations in their lives during the post-conversion period.
@ Sahoo, S. (2021) “The Holy Spirit in the Household”: Pentecostalism and Gendered Transformation in India, Paper Presented at the International Conference on Indian Christianity and its Transformative Potentials: A Multidisciplinary Exploration, University of Madras, Chennai, 6-7 December.
Review: GODROADS: Modalities of Conversion in India
Reviewed by: Matthew Wilkinson (UNSW, Sydney)
Discussions of conversion in India generally focus on Christianity, most often imagining conversion to be an unambiguous transition from polytheistic Hindu or animist faiths to the British coloniser’s monotheistic and ‘superior’ faith. This is a narrative that is rife with colonial and social Darwinist undertones, one that endorses a narrow and limiting understanding of conversion as a distinct event. GODROADS: Modalities of Conversion in India challenges these limitations.
Through twelve chapters, 10 of which explore distinct case studies of conversion, GODROADS explores the multifaceted and multidirectional nature of conversion in India. The book offers an alternative script for the Indian conversion experience, one that conceptualises conversion as a heterogenous experience and examines the implications of conversion not just for the individual, but for communities and for greater social structures and processes. Ultimately, GODROADS presents conversion as an ongoing process and not a singular transformational event. This process involves movement in various directions back and forth as converts selectively embrace, resist, and interpret their adoptive religions to suit their own distinct needs and local context.
GODROADS employs roads as a recurring motif to understand the conversion experience and to capture the complexity of the phenomenon of conversion. As Editors Peter Berger and Sarbeswar Sahoo discuss in the Introduction, roads are connected to religion in manifold ways, and not only in the sense that religions offer certain paths to salvation—roads are sites of reflection, a moral geography in relation to which the loss of traditions and moral anomie can be contemplated. In this way, roads are liminal spaces. Berger and Sahoo aptly describe this perspective early on, arguing that ‘like travelling on a road, the process of conversion can be fast or slow, there may be obstacles on the way, a street may turn out to be a dead end, and even if this is not the case, one may decide to turn around and return to where one started (but perhaps revisiting later)’.
The Introduction is followed by 10 empirical chapters each discussing a distinct aspect of conversion in India. These chapters employ various methodologies, from archival historiographies to ethnographic fieldwork, to discuss the multifaceted aspects of the conversion experience. For example, Fernande W. Pool’s Chapter 3, Religious Conversion as Ethical Transformation draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to examine reformism in the anthropology of conversion in Joygram, West Bengal, demonstrating that conversion is part of a larger process of social renewal and moral regeneration attached to local ideas of personhood and to the context itself. In Chapter 4, Conversion versus Unity, Frank Heidemann probes archival records of early Badaga conversions on the Nilgiri Hills of south India, demonstrating that the narratives of Christian conversion were informed by a Brahminical view on Hinduism following a master narrative of Brahmin conversion to Christianity. Iliyana Angelova draws on a career of ethnographic fieldwork with the Sumi Naga (one of the major ethnic groups in Nagaland), in Chapter 5, Identity Change and the Construction of Difference, arguing that a combination of utilitarian and intellectual motivation underpins religious transformation among the Sumi, acting simultaneously to encourage a reconstruction of Naga identity as Christian throughout the Naga independence struggle.
Throughout the book’s empirical chapters, an overarching theme of conversion as defined by the individual and attached to myriad local dynamics is made apparent. In Chapter 9, Reservation and Religious Freedom, Saberswar Sahoo unpacks the increasing incidents of Hindu-Christian conflict in Odissa and Rajasthan. Sahoo asks why Christians have been increasingly targeted recently, as compared to the early 20thcentury where Hindu-Christian conflict was very rare. Sahoo argues that rising Hindu-Christian violence is related to changing caste relationships and tensions surrounding freedom of religion. The final empirical chapter, Peter Berger’s Rupture and Resilience, explores the complex overlaps between Gadaba and Hindu religions in Highland Odisha and the ways understandings of deities, the politics of diet, and alcohol consumption intersect in a community hosting a number of conversion events. Berger’s chapter offers an insight into the back-and-forth nature of the conversion experience, and the ways conversion involves selective adoption of old and new religious traditions.
GODROADS empirical chapters are followed by Aoeracuda Vukaca’s Afterword, offering insights into India’s conversion experience from the perspective of an Amazonia specialist and highlighting the ways that conversion is better understood as a complex and ongoing process rather than a moment of rupture and distinct transformation.
Ultimately, GODROADS is faced with the complication of understanding and conceptualising religion in a context of diverse and complex religious traditions, where even the most secular and political processes take on a religious idiom. This makes understanding conversion in India, and in some ways understanding the concept of conversion itself, extremely challenging. Overall, GODROADS responds to this challenge well, offering a thorough discussion and analysis of the conversion experience in India from diverse perspectives while also recognising the localised, subjective and individual nature of the conversion experience. GODROADS offers a valuable addition to literature on religion in India and on the wider conversion experience.
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@ Melbourne Asia Review, Edition 4 (https://melbourneasiareview.edu.au/godroads-modalities-of-conversion-in-india-editors-peter-berger-sarbeswar-sahoo/)
BOOK Review: Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Reviewed by: Allan H. Anderson (University of Birmingham)
The author of this book is a sociologist in the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is one of an increasing number of fine Asian scholars in the field of the study of Pentecostalism, and in his case, an outsider who is himself Hindu. However, this is a sympathetic and sensitive study on Pentecostalism in Rajasthan, north-west India among “tribals”. These people, considered the original inhabitants of the subcontinent, are referred to in India by the collective term adivasi. The research focussed on the largest of the adivasi, the Bhils, many of whom live in Rajasthan, where the research took place. Intensive Pentecostal work has taken place among Bhils in this state, initiated mainly by missionaries from South India, especially from Kerala. There have not been many studies on Indian Pentecostalism, despite its enormous significance and growth in the past century. This is what makes this particular research so important. What Western scholars of Pentecostalism often do not appreciate is the burgeoning movement within India of Pentecostal preachers, especially from the South, who engage in cross-cultural mission in the North. Their success among tribal peoples has been quite remarkable. They set up theological colleges and other training centres to send hundreds of missionaries out all over India. What is important about this study is that the author identifies probably the most significant sociological reason for conversion of tribal peoples in India: a search for identity and dignity in a society dominated by Hindutva and other forms of Hindu nationalism, and a persisting caste prejudice.
Pentecostalism in India has grown mostly among the poor, especially Dalits (so-called “untouchables”) and tribal peoples. Hindus often consider these groups as people without any religion, but of course this is a false understanding. In Rajasthan, the author identifies Pentecostalism as mostly a “tribal religion” but one that brings converts into modernity. It provides a new identity that gives them dignity, equality and freedom in the face of discrimination, marginalisation and even perceived oppression by a dominant Hinduism. Conversion, he finds, is not as much motivated by social or economic rewards alone as it is by several other complex factors. His fascinating interviews show very different perspectives on conversion by Hindu nationalists, Pentecostal missionaries, Bhil converts and Bhil Hindus. He finds that Bhil people convert, despite serious risks, because of the benefits of spiritual transformation, escape from their traditional shamanism, and hope of a better future. In particular, many convert because of what they perceive as “miracle healing”, and several narratives by interviewees testified to miracles in their lives. This is not to say that there are no real social and economic benefits – on the contrary, the author identifies improvements in family life and social status that come to converts (especially to women), often as secondary benefits. Pentecostals have indeed followed other Christian missionaries in development work by establishing schools, colleges and health centres. One of the longest and most interesting chapters deals with the conversion experiences of Bhil women (the great majority of converts), and another with the causes of anti-Christian violence. There is also a detailed exploration in this book of the concept of conversion to Pentecostalism itself. Does it represent a “complete break with the past”, when in a world of shamanistic and tribal community rituals, and benefits from identifying as “Hindu” adivasi, converts often have to compromise their strict Pentecostal faith and even hide their new identity? The author concludes that in some cases, Bhil Pentecostals had indeed made a complete break, but in others a “hybrid identity” was created.
The author also discusses the increasing anti-Christian violence in India by Hindu nationalists, occasioned by the increasing conversions of Dalits and tribals to Pentecostalism and other evangelical forms of Christianity. He brings in the political dimension of conversion by pointing out that Hindu nationalists see these conversions as disrupting the religious and social order of India, with its corresponding potential to reduce the proportion of Hindus in the country, and thus, political support for the ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP Party. This book provides a multifaceted explanation of the current religious tensions in India and the political implications of conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, and as such is a very useful source of information.
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@ Anderson, A.H. (2019) Asian Studies Review, Vol.44, No.3, pp.556-557.
BOOK REVIEW: Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India
Freedom of religion is one of the most controversial issues in India today. Several international bodies and human rights organizations have reported on the declining level of religious freedom in India over the last few years. Considering this, in 2015, during his visit to India, former US President Barack Obama pointed out the strife between Hindus and minorities and urged India to uphold its constitutional commitment to freedom of religion. Most reports have shown that religious freedom in India has declined significantly under the current BJP-led regime, which follows a Hindu majoritarian ideology. It is in this context Laura Jenkins’s Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India becomes significant. Drawing on historical and contemporary narratives and case studies of mass conversion movements to Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism in India during the 1930s, the 1950s, and the present, Jenkins argues that “challenges to converts’ religious freedom are not a recent, BJP invention; rather, they are rooted in these earlier eras, leading to some surprising narrative consistencies across time and religious communities” (23–24). This, however, does not lessen the involvement of Hindu nationalists in flouting India’s religious freedom. In fact, Jenkins specifically notes that “the steady growth of Hindu nationalism means that long-standing narratives about converts have been put into practice through new legislation, litigation, and campaign, menacing religious minorities to an unprecedented degree” (24).
While Hindu nationalists have argued that aggressive religious conversion by minorities undermines the constitutional principle of religious freedom, the minorities have argued that the Hindu nationalists’ use of violence to threaten and not allow minorities to convert / propagate their religion is a violation of the fundamental right to religious freedom. Given that a large percentage of the converts to minority religions in India are from the poor and marginalized Dalits and Adivasi communities, a major contention has been the question of their agency and sincerity—whether they convert out of “genuine” spiritual transformations or were motivated by material benefits. In this book, Jenkins takes up these two issues—agency and sincerity of the converts—and provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between minorities, majorities, and the state on the one hand and the politics of conversion and religious freedom on the other.
The book is divided into two parts, each having three chapters, and an introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, Jenkins sets the tone for the book by engaging with other scholarship and posing vital questions on agency and sincerity in various conversion movements in late-colonial and contemporary India. In the three chapters in part 1, the book shows how conversion to Christianity (in the 1930s), Buddhism (in the 1950s), and Judaism (in the present) has resulted in socio-economic and political mobility among the converts. Specifically, chapter 1 discusses how Christian missionaries were accused of / criticized for (even by Gandhi) using enticements to convert impoverished communities and how such converts were motivated not by genuine spiritual motives but by material incentives. In this context, American Methodist missionary J. W. Pickett conducted a large-scale survey to understand the motives of conversion. The survey “evidence” clearly established the importance of individual agency and spiritual sincerity in mass conversions. Chapter 2 discusses how mass conversion of B. R. Ambedkar and Dalits to Buddhism in the 1950s provided not just an opportunity to assert their agency against the humiliating caste structure but to establish religious freedom and religious equality. Specifically, conversion to Buddhism made untouchables feel “the equal of every other human being” (71). Jenkins cites Ambedkar’s writings to argue that “the idea of sincerity as ‘pure’ spirituality” (69) is impossible and thus the Ambedkarite Buddhist conversion is an attempt of spiritual and political mobility. In chapter 3, Jenkins discusses the case of the Bnei Menashe community of Mizoram and their conversion to Judaism. While critics have questioned the sincerity of Mizo Jewish conversion, which they believe is being motivated by gaining Israeli citizenship through transnational migration, Jenkins shows how “this spatial mobility actually reinforces rather than undermines the sincerity of the conversion” (99), as the (spatial) migration (aliyah) is itself a religious act.
While in part 1 Jenkins discusses how converts used their agency during conversion and how conversion helped them achieve mobility (social, political, spatial, and spiritual), in part 2 she discusses the structures of immobility (strategies that prevent conversion, such as prosecution, prevention, and persecution). In chapter 4, Jenkins examines the anti-conversion laws, ironically known as the Freedom of Religions Act, which prosecute Christians and Muslims for forcible and induced conversions. The problem is that very often officials ignore the testimony of the converts and question their intention of conversion. In particular, these laws exhibit paternalistic tendencies as they assume that low-caste, tribal, and female populations are easily susceptible to forced conversion. Assuming that these groups cannot decide for themselves, and questioning their agency and sincerity, the officials often make decisions that restrict conversion in the name of protecting religious freedom. Chapter 5 examines the reservation/quota system in India and shows how it prevents Dalits from accessing the quota system if they have converted to Christianity or Islam. Although the reservation system was originally meant for Hindu Dalits, it has subsequently been extended to lower-caste Sikhs and Buddhists, since they are a part of Indic religions; Dalit Muslims and Christians are denied this opportunity because of the fear that it might increase Dalit conversion to these “foreign” religions. As a consequence, Dalit Muslims and Christians cannot exercise both rights together—the right to convert and the right to access; they have to let go of one to exercise the other. In chapter 6, Jenkins discusses love jihad conversion narratives and shows how Muslim men are persecutedfor seducing and converting Hindu women to Islam. Specifically, Jenkins argues that these narratives are not only deeply entrenched in but “exacerbate both Islamophobia and sexism and ultimately restricts religious freedom” (182).
Broadly, Jenkins argues that some of these “masterplots” or “predominant narratives” have been responsible for limiting religious freedom in India, and it is therefore vital that we collect “counternarratives” to defy and refute these “masterplots.” Thus, in the second part of the book, Jenkins cites various counternarratives that corroborate how converts exercised their agency and acted sincerely during conversion. Furthermore, given that both enthusiasts and critics have used the religious freedom argument to either advance or resist conversion, Jenkins argues that mere religious freedom is not enough to protect the minorities; in fact, as we see in the second part of the book, religious freedom was used by authorities to undermine equality. What is therefore vital is the inclusion of religious equality within the concept of religious freedom. Jenkins thus concludes that “we should replace the selective, majoritarian religious freedom so prevalent in the world today with a more equal freedom” (218).
This book makes several important contributions. First, in contrast to studies that call for strengthening religious freedom laws to protect the rights and interests of religious minorities, this book brilliantly shows how religious freedom laws can be used to undermine religious equality. Second, it exposes the majoritarian and paternalistic tendencies of the Indian state and how it denies minorities their constitutional rights. Finally, it shows the importance of counternarratives in decentering “masterplots” and bringing about political transformation. The book is analytically insightful and methodologically innovative and provides a vital contribution to understanding the relationship between religion, the state, and citizenship rights in India.
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@ Sahoo, S. (2020) Asian Ethnology, Vol.79, No.1, pp.186-189 (https://asianethnology.org/articles/2269)
BOOK REVIEW: Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Reviewed by: Vikash Singh (Montclair State University)
Sarbeswar Sahoo’s Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India is a well-researched exposition on the divide between religion as a medium of social meanings and relations and the often unscrupulous political conflicts over religious terrain. The book is particularly relevant in a time of rampant politicization of religion in India, if not across the world. It is a study of ‘‘competing projects,’’ as spirit- led Pentecostal Christianity and nationalist Hindu groups jostle with one another for con- version and ‘‘reconversion’’ of the Bhil tribes of central India. Perhaps the story is centuries old, as Christian missionaries aiming to spread the Gospel and save the heathens are met by a variety of local resistances. How- ever, there is a different character as Pentecostals fight to save the last soul before the Messiah may return and because of the unique qualities that have made charismatic Christianity so popular among the deprived and downtrodden across the world. The plot thickens when one adds the opposition: a militant, state-supported Hinduism com- mitted to protecting its ‘‘turf’’ and ideologically moored to Indian nationhood. Sahoo’s book is a story of the twists and turns as these forces jostle for the souls (and the votes!) of the Bhils, one of India’s poorest, largely disenfranchised social groups.
The reasons for the popularity of Pentecostalism among the Bhils, Sahoo shows, are similar to the factors that have made it the rage across the global South: poverty, unemployment, health afflictions, and related psychological and social stress reflected in male alcoholism and chronic marital strain. In the lack of modern education and institutional redressal, magical thinking prevails whereby almost every misfortune—death, sickness, loss of livestock, familial strife—is blamed on evil spirits. The recourse is shamanic rituals requiring the sacrifice of a goat, sheep, chicken, or the like and monetary and material gifts to the shaman (bhopa). The insatiable demands of the bhopas and the expensive and ineffective rituals often leave people very frustrated in their miserable situation but unable to directly question the bhopa for fear of retribution from his spirit world. In these circumstances, the Pentecostal church is a godsend.
The church asks for faith in Jesus and works miracles for the sick and dying with the aid of modern medicines. It asks them to do away with idol worship and the corruptions of the bhopa and his spirit world with no fear of reprisal, since they are under the protection of the Holy Spirit and Jesus. To the people’s surprise, the medical and spiritual help of the priest and the Spirit come for free, quite in contrast with the parasitic ripping off by the bhopa. Furthermore, the church is strict and expects from believers sincere work, good hygiene, clean clothing, and regular prayers, and it disapproves of wasteful expenses and alcoholism. This rigorous expectation that people must change their ways is particularly popular among women, as they are able to bring moral and social pressure on men to stop drinking. Very often, these behavioral reforms lead to a significant change in the well-being of the family. Furthermore, the free English education provided by the Church and the humane and respectful behavior of the priests is a far cry from the tribe’s ostracized status and much-stereotyped treatment by mainstream Hinduism as well as government institutions. Formal Christianization and re-naming, however, come with the risk of losing affirmative action benefits in government jobs and programs, for which the authorities often rely on names to determine tribal status. Therefore, people follow Christian practices without changing their names.
The populist character of Pentecostal congregations—the boisterous emotional display when people habitually get possessed by the Spirit, speak in tongues (here, English), and perform miracles—is akin to the tribe’s traditional animistic rituals. In the process, Hindu and tribal gods alike come to be seen as evil influences. Such upending obviously agitates nationalist Hindu imaginaries. By far the most prominent of these imaginaries is the idea of Hindutva or Hindu-ness, which imagines ‘‘Hindu’’ as an umbrella term that incorporates all religions rooted in the subcontinent. This includes Buddhism, Sikhism, and the many sects of Hinduism, along with rituals and beliefs of the hill people or tribes, but excludes Islam and Christianity definitively as foreign cultures with their holy lands lying in far- off Arabia and Palestine. For almost a century now, Hindutva organizations—such as the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the country at this time— have championed the Hindus’ principal claim over Indian territory and nationality. From these perspectives rooted in Cuius regio, eius religio, few things are as offensive as devious Christians converting innocent tribals. Tribal conversion undermines their ideological convictions and threatens to erode their voting base. Since India’s constitution protects the freedom to exercise and propagate one’s religion, the Hindutva groups argue that the missionaries are illegally coercing conversion by providing material incentives. When in power, they have legislated at the state level severe punishment for conversion ‘‘by use of force or allurement or by forcible means’’ (p. 155). The assertions of the Hindutva groups are based on expanding interpretations of the term ‘‘force’’ to include all types of material incentives and facilities.
Conversion is distinguished, however, from ‘‘re-conversion,’’ which allows the Hindutva groups to ‘‘restore’’ the tribals to their ancestral religion or Hinduism. They have set up their own organizations, on the Church model, to prevent conversion and to re-convert, using similar incentives of pro- viding access to modern medicine and routing government programs to the tribes. These organizations actively campaign to discourage conversion, ostracize the converts, and go as far as physically assaulting priests and church volunteers.
One of the strengths of Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion is its account of the his- tory of Pentecostalism in India. Against the common understanding that Pentecostalism in India came from America, Sahoo agrees with the theory of the polycentric origins of this movement. We learn that Pentecostal- like revivals—particularly in the Khasi Hills in 1900 and Pandita Ramabai’s Mukti Mission in 1901—had happened in India before the Azusa Street revival of 1906, which is usually considered the birth of the movement. The book connects the history and subjective motivations for Pentecostalism among the Bhils of Rajasthan with the surge of the movement in Kerala, and indeed across the world. On the flip side, I found the work somewhat thin in ethnographic reporting. Ethnographic details and the life-worlds of the people get buried under the historical and political details.
In conclusion, Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India is a timely work on the world of contemporary politics of religion in India. This is a world where people’s subjective angst, their precarious material conditions, and the cynical machinations of vote-bank politics make an inextricable and volatile mix. This mix regularly ends up in conflagrations of violence, rioting, and pogroms. The academic here must keep to the task of working toward the just in a thicket of misrepresentations, and Sahoo’s book is an admirable example. This volume will be a useful read for students in Religious Studies, South Asian studies, Anthropology, and of course Sociology.
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@ Singh, Vikash (2019) Contemporary Sociology, Vol.48, No.5, pp.575-576 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0094306119867060jj)
BOOK REVIEW: Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Reviewed By: Vineeth Mathoor (NSS Hindu College, Changanassery, Kottayam, Kerala, India)
This book highlights the politics of Pentecostal conversions and anti-Christian violence in India. Sahoo argues that while Hindu–Muslim conflicts have received wider scholastic examinations and attention, Hindu–Christian violence, especially violence on Christians, has not been analytically examined yet. Focusing on the nature of Hindu–Christian conflicts, this study argues that the absence of proper academic attention to Hindu–Christian conflicts relates to the small-scale and dispersed nature of such conflict. The book locates the history of Pentecostal movements in India in the context of conversion of Dalits and other marginalised sections to Christianity. Violent approaches towards Christianity, it is argued, intensified by the 1980s, and Sahoo identifies the rise of Hindu right-wing groups in the 1980s as the major reason for anti-Christian violence in the country.
The central focus of this study concerns the politics of conversion to Christianity by Bhils in southern Rajasthan. Through extensive fieldwork, the complex interactions between the different actors/agents in the process of conversion are problematised. Sahoo was part of non-governmental organisations working on tribal development in this area, and this NGO experience has helped him gain deeper exposure to the practical aspects of conversions.
The book is divided into six chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Titled ‘Introduction: Conversion and the Shifting Discourse of Violence’, the first chapter addresses the debates on religious conversion in India in the context of Hindutva politics and establishes a theoretical framework to examine the attempts of Christianisation by organised groups. Chapter 2, ‘Spreading Like Fire: The Growth of Pentecostalism Among Tribals’, examines the rapid increase of Pentecostal Christians in Rajasthan. Their missionaries have concentrated on the lower sections of society since they were more flexible than the upper-caste Rajput Hindus in terms of religious discourses. This means that the Pentecostal strategy here, like in southern India during early colonial times, was to use the poor economic conditions of the tribals to accelerate conversion. The chapter shows how the ‘development activities’ of local missionaries resulted in the conversion of many tribals into the fold of Pentecostal Christianity.
Chapter 3, ‘Taking Refuge in Christ: Four Narratives on Religious Conversion’, deals with one of the most prominent debates of contemporary India, the nature of conversions. Following the rise of the Hindu Right in the 1980s, it has been strenuously argued that tribal and other marginalised sections are converted to Christianity for materials benefits, basically that they are what has been called ‘rice Christians’ of some kind (Doss, 2018). This term is not mentioned in the book, while the role of money and material benefits has been projected by Hindu nationalists to show that such conversions are not genuine. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter problematises the four narratives of conversion presented by Hindu nationalists, Christian missionaries, Adivasi converts and those Adivasis who remained in the Hindu fold.
Chapter 4, ‘Becoming Believers: Adivasi Women and the Pentecostal Church’, examines the socio-historical agency of converted women. Compared to men, a larger number of Adivasi women have converted to Christianity in Rajasthan, and this chapter examines the gendered politics of women’s conversion. The chapter shows that Pentecostal churches have made special efforts to tackle the everyday problems of women and are very sensitive to the socio-cultural development of Adivasi women. Through detailed fieldwork, the book shows that during the post-conversion period, Adivasi women have experienced individual/social improvement, dignity and greater autonomy in the church structure. The church has succeeded in addressing individual and social issues and specific needs among Adivasi families, which in turn has attracted more women to the path of Christ. In a tribal society, Sahoo argues, the egalitarian outlook of the church towards women would naturally attract more women to its fold. This is a strategic move, no doubt, which also shows that structural imbalances of gender inequality among India’s tribal sections have not been addressed effectively enough either by caste organisations or government institutions.
Chapter 5, ‘Seen as the Alien: Hindutva Politics and Anti-Christian Violence’, examines the growing evidence of violence against Christian converts in India. Based on the author’s fieldwork, it is shown that the vested interests of Hindu caste structures in maintaining the backwardness and contested inferior cultural identity of Adivasis motivates the progressive outlook of Pentecostal churches in order to attract more converts. This is not about rice, then, but about social position, respect and claims to a share in more equitable democratic development in India. This chapter also shows that the consolidation of Hindutva power in Rajasthan gives a sense of political superiority to anti-conversion groups, which leads to and justifies their anti-Christian violent stance.
Drawing on the extensive fieldwork, the book argues, however, that there is not really Hindu–Christian violence in India. Rather, the book suggests that there is anti-Christian violence in many parts of the country. Sahoo explains that upper castes view conversion to Christianity with suspicion and this leads to violence against converts and churches. He shows that the feudal Hindu elements’ unwillingness to extend a helping hand to Adivasis alienates tribals from the ‘Hindu fold’, which in turn creates anti-Christian sentiments among upper-caste Hindu sections. In other words, the book argues that Hindu right-wing groups, in employing various methods of violence to oppose conversions to Christianity, simply do not understand what actually causes conversions and how to tackle such social phenomena.
BOOK REVIEW: Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Reviewed By: Arnab Roy Chowdhury (School of Sociology, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation)
The author starts with an empirical analytical problem—from the late 1990s, the incidence of violence against Christians (converts) in India has increased—and tries to explain it. He undertakes an intriguing ethnographic immersion in the tribal-dominated areas of Rajasthan, where the Pentecostals have gained a strong foothold in converting the tribal and marginalized populations. His argument is: social, political, and historical contexts, contingencies, and exigencies—of competing projects of conversion between Christian missionaries and Hindu nationalists’—lead to certain tensions and conflicts of interest that lead to violence. The author avoids determinisms, both material and cultural, and offers an argument that gives primacy to the political logic that is contingent upon emerging power.
Sahoo argues that the political field in Rajasthan is divided along a religious fissure between Hindu nationalists and Christian missionaries: they tussle intensely over the competing projects of conversion to Christianity and gharwapsi (or return home, when Christians are re-converted to the Hindu fold). This violence-laced field is produced by the complex dynamics between these groups and tribal converts, and the politicization of tribal identity and its translation into competitive electoral politics, within the developmental state of Rajasthan. The state has been ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 1990 with intermittent phases of Indian National Congress (INC) rule, and it is dominated by upper-caste Rajput Hindutva ideology. Hindutva is the predominant form of religious nationalism in India. Social and political violence is an essential modality of the Hindutva politics.
Deploying Lata Mani’s notion, violence as a concept has been operationalized in broadly two ways. One is physical, interpreted as causing harm to life and property at large. The other is ‘intersubjective’ violence, which is about not following norms and rules of mutual respect and instilling a culture of fear through various gestures and exclusionary symbolisms (pp. 1–2). The author proffers an overall Weberian logic of holistic explanation that does not reduce the logic of social causality to either ‘the economic’ or ‘the cultural’, but understands it as something that is historical, contingent, embedded in power relations, and multi-causal in nature. But he criticizes the secularization thesis of Weber in the Indian postcolonial political context. Though India is a secular country as enshrined in its constitution, its politics has increasingly moved away from secular principles since Independence. Certain Christian denominations, such as AD 2000 and Joshua Project, proselytize aggressively. The Hindu right-wing majoritarian parties perceive such proselytization as a threat, a direct assault on the integrity and unity of the Hindu nation, and a new mode of hegemonic imperialism promoted through religion; and they increasingly perpetrate violence against Christians (pp. 3–4).
By tracking occurrences of violence against tribals in Rajasthan, Sahoo shows that it takes place mainly at the site of conversion activities and where the Pentecostal Church, aggressively promotes conversion. The Pentecostal Church is the central actor and Pentecostals the primary victim of violence. The Pentecostal practice entails a spectacle of charismatic, miraculous (Chamatkari), spirit-filled experiences, and particular styles of dramatic and awe-inspiring enactment performed by pastors that followers describe as ‘life-changing’ and unsurpassable in the mundane life. Conversion to Christianity (and the converts’ turf wars with right-wing nationalists) is the elephant in the room Indian academia do not dare to talk about due to rising influence of Hindutva politics. We must thank Sahoo for his boldness in taking up this issue and treating it with scholarly, academic nuance. The issue is controversial and complex, to say the least, because of several highly political binaries and polarized views. The notion of equality in Christianity is pitted against the caste hierarchy in Hinduism. The question of what kind of inducement led to conversion is often a prickly one, as are those about whether there is continuity between pre-conversion life and post-conversion life and whether conversion has brought about drastically new ranges of experience. Sahoo addresses these issues with some degree of intersubjective and cultural sensitivity.
Conversion creates an interesting religious-spiritual terrain and belief system of hybridity (p. 10), where the ‘hybrid’ belief system itself sometimes stakes the claim for creating a novel category of ‘religious’ discourses and practices. The corporeal violence and ‘manufactured fear’ that the author reads in the social context through his ethnographic immersion of ‘going native’ in the field is real, palpable, and chilling. This fear, as the author explains masterfully, is ‘manufactured’, and the detailed yet crisp narratives of interviewees, with little descriptive flourish, demonstrate this point beautifully.
Due to the history of fractured inter-community relations in Rajasthan, the minorities have developed a fear psychosis because of the political climate of ever-ascending religious rights. The subjective feeling of fear—the author says though embodied, is historically and socio-politically determined, and the collective memory of the community is haunted by the possibility that violence will recur (p. 16). This feeling prevents a normalization of relations between communities; and this polarization at the cognitive level is reflected through electoral political behaviour and social behaviour. Community boundaries are hardened through various exclusionary practices and symbolisms, proscriptions, and prescriptions.
This book is a holistic interpretation and analysis in the Weberian sense. A Marxian class analysis would have brought attention to class differences and inequalities within the tribals who have newly converted to Christianity and would have added another analytical layer to it. However, we cannot expect everything from a single book; nor does this issue diminish the quality of the book in anyway.
Through this book Sahoo speaks truth to power—the power of the state, ascendant right-wing populists in India, and the power of religious orthodoxies by presenting a nuanced and scholarly critique of their politics. This book is a very timely interjection given the intense socio-political churning India is currently going through due to consolidation of Hindutva politics after BJP has been re-elected to power with clear mandate in 2019. This book is a must-read for any one dealing with the political sociology of religious conversion in postcolonial India.
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@ Roy Chowdhury, Arnab (2019) Politics, Religion and Ideology, Vol.20, No.4, pp.520-521 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2019.1699231)
BOOK REVIEW: Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Reviewed by: Nilay Saiya (Nanyang Technological University Singapore)
Despite its status as the world’s largest democracy, the ideals of religious liberty and equality set forth in its constitution, and Christianity’s long-standing presence in the country, India has the highest rates of social hostilities involving religion in the world, according to the Pew Research Center. Historically, religious violence in India has targeted all of India’s major faith communities. But in recent times, Christians have suffered from a disproportionate level of religious persecution, which has only intensified after the coming to power of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014. Today, India ranks among the world’s worst countries in its levels of anti-Christian hostility.
Given this context, Sarbeswar Sahoo’s timely book, Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India, is a welcome addition to the existing literature on religious conflict in India. While a number of studies on religious conflict in India have focused on relations between Hindus and Muslims, Hindu-Christian relations have been largely absent from the literature, insofar as violence against Christians has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Among the many issues involved in inter-religious conflict in India, few are as charged as conversion. Sahoo’s focus on conversion to Pentecostalism among the Bhils of southern Rajasthan thus fills an important gap in the literature.
Sahoo sets out to answer three questions. First, why has India been experiencing increasing incidents of anti-Christian violence since the 1990s? Second, why are many among the Bhil tribe of Rajasthan increasingly converting to Pentecostalism? Third, what are the social and political implications of conversion, both within indigenous communities and for Indian secularism and religious freedom? To answer these questions, the author employs ethnographic fieldwork among the Bhils of southern Rajasthan.
Going beyond simplistic accounts of anti-Christian violence in India, Sahoo argues that “competing projects of conversion” coupled with the emergence of religiously based identity politics combine to produce anti-Christian violence (p. 127). Sahoo writes that there has been a shift in India’s religious climate beginning in the 1990s. The coming to power of the BJP has empowered Hindu nationalists throughout the country committed to the ideology of Hindutva (the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India). These Hindu nationalists have felt increasingly threatened by the intensification of Christian missionary activity, especially among lower-caste Indians, seeing it as a form of neo-imperialism. They are greatly concerned that the number of Christians will continue to rise at the expense of Hindus and significantly affect the dynamics of electoral politics and India’s status as a Hindu nation. Violence against Christians has often been a response to conversion and the rapid rise of Christianity among marginalized groups.
The book is divided into six chapters. The introduction covers debates on conversion and describes the methodology used in the analysis. The second chapter details how Pentecostals have made inroads into the primarily Hindu state of Rajasthan. The author finds that Pentecostal missionaries have focused their efforts at the margins of society, rather than attempting appeal to caste Hindus. Chapter three examines in detail four narratives on religious conversion held by different “stakeholders”: those of Hindu nationalists, Christian missionaries, Adivasi converts to Christianity, and Hindu Adivasis. These overlapping narratives provide a holistic picture of views toward conversion. The fourth chapter focuses on tribal women, noting that women have been more likely than men to convert to Pentecostalism. The chapter features a number of intriguing stories of spiritual, marital, and material transformations in the lives of these women converts who have been empowered by the church. The fifth chapter takes on the contentious question of why violence against Christians has experienced a recent surge. Its explanation centers on “competing projects of conversion” on the parts of missionaries and Hindu nationalists for the souls of Bhil tribals. The final chapter summarizes the findings of the book and discusses their broader implications for Indian democracy, secularism, and freedom.
One of the great strengths of this book is that it debunks the widespread view that those of lower castes convert to Christianity because of material incentives offered by missionaries. Rather, the author convincingly shows that conversions are done out of free will and frequently result in genuine personal transformation. Conversion to Pentecostalism has resulted in socio-economic empowerment and liberation for those formerly trapped in the hierarchies of the caste system. The process of conversion is not a straightforward practice whereby missionaries seduce people with material benefits, but a highly complex one containing “multiple and contradictory discourses” (p. 86). Not only does the author demonstrate that missionaries do not provide direct material benefits to Bhil tribals, he convincingly argues that the allure of temporary material incentives, even if present, would not be enough for tribals to leave their religion to the extent that conversion is accompanied by serious negative repercussions, including the loss of traditional identity.
In conclusion, Sahoo has produced a first-rate and fascinating account of the politics of Christian conversion in India. He successfully unravels the complex interactions involved in the production of anti-Christian violence. The book is a model of sophisticated ethnographic fieldwork that, while covering a complex, multidimensional, and controversial issue, is written in a balanced and accessible style. Throughout, the author weaves interesting ethnographic narratives on conversion into his erudite analysis, making for pleasurable reading. In the end, Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India is a landmark contribution to the comparative study of religion and the study of contemporary India.
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Source: Journal of Church and State, Volume 61, Issue 4, Autumn 2019, Pages 709–711, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csz073
Sarbeswar Sahoo
The Practice of Sociology 