…and U of C and PSR don’t even try.
 
I just visited Tamilnadu Theological Seminary in Madurai.
 
Bachelor of Divinity students spend their first year on campus studying, their second year in a village where the faculty go and teach them periodically under a banyan tree, their third year in a slum working with an NGO while studying on campus and their fourth year back on campus.
 
Their Dalit Resource Centre (Dalits are sometimes still referred to as untouchable) has academic resources and a very impressive library, but they also have files of clippings related to atrocities perpetrated against Dalits (including by the police and government–you should see the Hindu Nationalist Party file!). And their primary focus is on working directly with dalit communities in villages. In some instances, activists who would not otherwise get into a seminary are recruited to study here. (I can think of a parallel to Union in that respect, which is part of my deep respect for that seminary.)
 
As an aside, at some restaurants, Dalits are not allowed to drink out of the same cups (30 years ago they could only drink out of hollowed out coconut shells) or eat in the restaurant with others. And yet when I talk to many “middle-class” (is that better, Allan? ) Indians, they say, “We’re a casteless society now.” Sound familiar?
 
In the picture is of one of the research assistants. He does academic work and helps with publishing, but he also teaches traditional tribal dances and drumming and traditional self-defense to Dalit youth. Their slogan is “Dalit arts are weapons for liberation.” (All instruments in Dalit dances double as weapons.)
 
For a concrete model of liberation theology in practice, this place is awe-inspiring.

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I visited my uncle in Malda last week, and he tends to fit the stereotype of the wise India elder. During our first conversation (I tend to think of them more as lessons, but…) he said, “Man evolved from monkeys, yes? Every day I pray that God will make man back into a monkey.” The state of violence that runs rampant in society has made him the classic cynic.

Part of the purpose of this trip is for me to learn about the intersection of justice and the life of faith. It was easy enough to find and make sense of while I was at Iona, because the isolation of that place and the rare air and rich history create the illusion that the fit is natural and smooth. (Obviously for the members of the Iona community, who live in the world beyond that island, the lines are not so distinct. For example, one member was forced to renounce his pacifist commitments when working for the World Council of Churches delivering food to the people of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s, when the military kept hijacking their relief trucks.)

While in India, my hope has been to learn about the application of radical Christian theology to lived experiences of oppression in India, by tribals in particular (the term used here for indigenous people, lest anyone think I’m being offensive). My last blog post highlighted one side of the challenge I face: some people on the margins don’t want to focus on liberation so much as finding peace and comfort in the spiritual realm (God knows this is true everywhere in the world). My other challenge is a slightly more subtle one.

My cousin Bujunda and his family took me to visit another cousin’s family in Mednipur. Before we even left, my uncle warned me it might be a bad idea to go to a place facing so much conflict and so many disturbances due to the Naxalites. The Naxalites are Maoists scattered throughout the northeast of India with particular strength among some tribals and some dalits. They’ve been hiding in jungles/forests and gaining power for the past 30+ years.

On the drive from Mednipur to Hazaribag (where I’m currently staying), we experienced a road block. Villagers’ rice paddies had recently been trampled by elephants, and when the government didn’t provide aid, they protested by shutting down a national highway.

The headline in yesterday’s paper was about 17 people (including 5 youth) being kidnapped and shot by Naxalites in retaliation for a land dispute involving about 40 acres of land in the state of Bihar. Today’s paper talked about the railroad tracks being blown up last night by Naxalites because one of their key leaders was arrested last week. Oh, and they’re texting death threats to the head of the state of Bihar.

Last night at dinner at my cousin’s family friends, they explained that part of the reason the roads in the jungle area are so bad is that no one will take the government contracts because the Naxalites demand payment for the contractors to do their work, or else…well, you get the picture.

When I was in seminary, one of my best friends and I were debating pacifism. He said it was easy to be a pacifist unless you watched the extent of the suffering of those on the margins in, say, southern Mexico. Once you had seen it first hand, you would be tempted to pick up arms with the freedom fighters, too.

Right now the conflct I face is that the resistence I’m witnessing doesn’t seem to be hurting the oppressor much at all, but it’s certainly hurting people with little to do with the problem (and yeah, it’s inconveniencing middle class people like me, who probably are a part of the problem, but the odds of us putting all those puzzle pieces together are pretty slim).

As I learn more about the challenges faced by tribals and dalits, challenges which sometimes threaten their very lives, my prespective will probably shift. But as someone a little nervous about whether her bus will actually make it to Kolkata safely, I’m in limbo right now.

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Part of the reason I’m spending most of my sabbatical in India is in the hopes of better understanding tribal theologies and how they might intersect with liberation theology in the United States. (To some, this might seem a little anachronistic—I didn’t realize, but some of my colleagues think of liberation theology as a fad or phase, rather than as something that needs to be refined. To those critics, I recommend the book “The Future of Liberation Theology” by Ivan Petrella.)

Thanks to my friend Anne Dondapati’s very theologically respected father, I have been connected with a seminary in Kolkata called SCEPTRE, which is affiliated with Serampore Theological College. It offers continuing education for pastors and lecture series (I just missed one on peace studies, and I’ll be traveling during the Asian Ecumenical Conference they’re hosting). The director, Wati Longchar, is a Naga theologian (one of the indigenous groups in India are the Naga).

I visited SCEPTRE on Monday and introduced myself to the staff. I said that Wati Longchar offered to let me participate in a portion of the continuing education course and asked if I might be allowed to attend the first session on Friday. They looked at each other, communicated something I couldn’t catch, and one of them said, “Better on Saturday, 4:30-5:30.” OK, I responded. Another person turned to him and said, “So she’ll be taking a class?” He nodded yes.

I arrived on Saturday at 4 PM and had a cup of tea in the office. At about 4:15, he said “They will finish this session, have a cup of tea, and then they’ll be ready for you.”

A little bell went off. Ready for me….to participate?

That’s the point at which a normal person would say, “Wait…did you think I was going to lead the class? Because I was just planning on sitting and listening.”

But ever afraid of inconveniencing anyone, I sat there and started formulating a possible class on American liberation theology. What could I say and still have good discussion within an hour?

We walked into the classroom, the gentleman helping me said, “This is Sandhya Jha, she is basically an Indian, she is an ordained pastor in America. She has some things to share and many questions to ask. So this will be an interactive session. Sandhya, these are all pastors from Nagaland. They all have theological training and are ordained. So, you have the next hour together.” And he left.

OK, not a liberation theology lecture then.

A room full of people living in the context I’ve come to study.

Let’s just make this a conversation, then.

To be clear, from an outsider’s perspective, the reason I’ve heard of Nagaland is that there has been low-grade resistence to the policies of the Indian government among the Naga for decades now.

The other interesting thing about Nagaland is that it’s one of the only places in India that is mostly Christian—almost entirely Christian, in fact. American Baptist for the most part (with some Pentecostals mixing it up a little bit).

So I tell them a little about my church. I mention that we function out of liberation theology and explain why that theology was an important transition in the Black church. (I also explained how in America we say African American or Black. In India, the term Negro is still the term used.) I mentioned how it can also be a powerful theology for a mixed congregation like mine.

We covered a lot of ground—they thought theological college offered some useful knowledge (maybe half of what they learned applied in the church) but that the calling before attending college was what really mattered. They said they had no problem with church attendance and pastors were held in high regard even by non-church goers, so things were pretty good. I shared that my biggest challenge in ministry was making people see how inspiring the stories of the Bible can be when they’ve heard the stories their whole lives. (I compared that to the passion of First Mongolian Christian Church, for whom the stories are bright and new and inspiring, and those stories invite them to live their lives in totally new ways.) When I shared that, some of them acknowledged the same challenge, and they talked a little about people who show up and act like they care on Sunday morning but cannot be bothered to do anything different the rest of the week. (I told them my phrase for this is “Sunday saints, six day sinners.”)

I told them a little bit about the emergent church, starting with a story I heard from a man in the emergent church movement in Africa, who grew up with a Christianity that had no relevance to his life, his experience of oppression, his struggles even to feed himself. And as an adult he realized this wasn’t Jesus’ fault; it was the church’s. And he began gathering with others fostering a relevant faith trying to establish the kin-dom here on earth. And I talked about it in America.

We discussed the problems with prophesy and speaking in tongues (and one pastor raised concerns about unlearned lay people prophesying. I acknowledged the challenge and said, “I come from a tradition that does not revere the pastor very much, because we believe that everyone who is baptized has the responsibility of some form of ministry. It’s important for us to share our learning, but it’s a tricky balance—how do we also stay open to other people God is using? Especially when Jesus chose 12 fishermen who couldn’t read or write to be the foundation of the church?”

At the end I finally got around to asking about whether there was anything different about their worship, about their actions in the community or about their theology because they were Naga. To a person they said no. Their worship is American Baptist, their hymns, their liturgy, their theology were all given to them by American missionaries. I said OK, and one asked, smiling, “Is that bad or good?”

I said whatever connected them to God was good (bear in mind the language barriers before you judge me too harshly on that one). I said Black Liberation Theology had been very important because the theology we were receiving before that was distorted, and it was distorting God, so we needed something else. If what they have connects them with God in living, vital ways, that’s fine.

And with that, we were out of time. I saw a few glints of recognition of the edges I wanted to push from a few of the younger pastors. Not the session I expected at all. And yet, if I got a room full of Missionary Baptist pastors together in Oakland, would I get a wholehearted embrace of James Cone? That would be pretty presumptuous.

An interesting beginning to my process of learning Naga theology both in theory and in practice.

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workers unite! (to party and drink)

I am fairly certain I misspelled that particular god, but you know how certain themes keep appearing?

I was very excited to have come to Kolkata coincidentally just in time for Durga Puja (Durga is the goddess of good over evil). I came in September 2006 with my parents specifically because neither my mother nor I had seen Durga Puja, the biggest festival in West Bengal, ever before.

Not knowing the exact dates, I couldn’t figure out why in all these small pandals (temporary religious structures) the fashion this year seemed to be for Durga to wear a mustache and dhoti. Turns out there’s a festival a little earlier than Durga Puja in honor of Viswaskorma–the lord of the world of work. (Possibly also the lord of bangla, the local hooch…apparently this is a festival when the workers really unwind.)

You’ll see an image of a pandal for the celebration in this post. It’s celebrated by the workers–so you’ll also see an autorickshaw all decked out for the celebration. Reena Bose said when she was in college, they put a bindi and garland on the mimeograph machine to honor its work on Viswaskorma puja.

There are three reasons this festival is striking to me:

1) Iona was created in part to honor labor as holy and to reclaim the church as a place that recognized labor as belonging to God, because the church had become too removed from the lives of the working poor in Scotland (and everywhere else), so this is a repeated theme in a lot of ways.

2) The low-wage manual labor force in India is HUGE, and largely taken for granted. There are lots of things that we use machines for in America that, if those machines were more common here, another family would be without a source of income. Watching a building go up means watching men dig trenches and carry thatched baskets of bricks up five stories. Yesterday I saw a man pulling a rickshaw with husband, wife and two children all squeezed in. This wasn’t a motor rickshaw or a cycle rickshaw. Kolkata’s one of the only cities that still has hand-pulled rickshaws. Because the labor pool is so big, this type of work is taken for granted. (In the same way that America takes for granted the migrant farm laborers and dishwashers at restaurants etc etc). I love that the workers have time to recognize themselves as part of God’s work (I don’t know whether middle class hindus get into this particular puja or not), and that even the machines that aid the work are honored.

3) West Bengal is a communist state. (For how long is in question; they seem to be losing power after forty or more years of control.) This means that workers’ rights are embedded in the political rhetoric of this area, of the opposition as well as the ruling party. This rhetoric sometimes comes at a cost to the workers as well as to progress in West Bengal (although be it noted that, much to my chagrin, there is now a McDonald’s on Park Street. It was the one place in Kolkata I saw multiple white people. Why come to India to eat at McDonald’s?! Note to my family: when you come to India, I’m not taking you to Bengali restaurants. In exchange, I won’t eat at McDonald’s on Park Street.). As Viswaskorma Puja fades into the distance, I find myself wondering what kind of god it will take, what kind of political leadership it will take, what kind of revolution it will take, to create health and decent conditons for the people whose lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as Hobbes said in the Leviathan.

And what kind of puja will we have then?

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The art in Madrid sticks out as the most remarkable part of my trip. I’ve seen a number of Spanish artists out of context, but seeing them together, in the context of the land that shaped them, the art made sense in a new way.
 
In particular, I knew virtually nothing about Goya’s black paintings until the end of my visit to the Prado. I had seen Saturn Devouring His Son before, but I hadn’t realized that it was painted as part of the collection of paintings Goya created and surrounded himself with after moving into la Quinta del Sordo (villa of the deaf man), named for the resident before him, although he was also deaf by then. He was also anxious, fearful, cynical, and aware of the potential for evil all around him.
 
One picture in particular that sticks out is “Fighting with Clubs.” http://www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya29.html 

Foreshadowing the violence of civil war in Spain and sitting in judgment of provincial clashes, he originally painted the two men with their legs free of the mud that he eventually adds….talk about symbolic of his cynicism about humanity.
 
I think what I’m captivated by is that no matter how cynical he might be, he still painted these cautionary tales, as if he felt an obligation to give his people a chance to avoid the path they seemed inevitably bound to.
 
Look up Goya’s black paintings. Imagine a soundless world. And imagine having witnessed Bonaparte’s attack on your city, your kinsmen’s heroism and their rapid destruction as well as the seething tensions in the city ever after. What would you paint?

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