Shap Journal 2001/2002

Living Community

Recollections of Community
and Changing Community in India

Frank Whaling

This story is a dramatic example of change of
community. The sociology of religion deriving
from Emile Durkheim tends to stress
communities as though they are stable, set,
monolithic and unchanging. This remains true of
communities in some parts of the world but in the main
we live in a world of rapid change. Communities are
altering and people are changing the communities in
which they live. Religions are altering and people are
increasingly ready to change the religion to which they
give their adherence.

In my earlier life I was a Methodist minister in North
India, from 1962-1966. I was minister in a Methodist
Circuit in which there were three churches, two
western-type and one Indian. I also became deeply
involved in inter-faith dialogue with Hindus, Buddhists,
and Muslims, partly through the PhD I began at
Banaras Hindu University, and also I was manager of
Cutting Memorial College, a college of 2,000 students in
Banaras. The two recollections it is my privilege to
share, relate to the Dom community in Banaras who
used the Indian church mentioned above, and to a
Hindu holy man who changed his community in an
extraordinary way.

My contact with the Dom community was relatively
slight to begin with because of sheer pressure of work. I
preached in their church from time to time. It had no
seats and everyone squatted on the floor. The preacher
led the service from a simple lectern. The service was in
Hindustani, and the hymns that were sung were
bhajans, simple devotional hymns derived partly from
devotional Hinduism. It was both a change and a
pleasure to preach in the church, but at first there was
no clear sense in my mind of what these Dom friends
were really about.

Understanding came in a traumatic way. I was asked to
go in mid-week in early summer to take an out-door
service. The service took place in a Dom mahullah
(collection of huts). I stood under a tree for the sun was
already becoming oppressive - the temperature went up
to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in midsummer. The Doms
stood around in the shade of other trees present in their
settlement. I eventually began to talk about the parable
of the Prodigal Son. The medium of communication was
Hindustani and I told the story simply as befitted my
language skills at the time! As I spoke my mind looked
forward to the way the story was destined to develop.
The prodigal son took his inheritance early and
disappeared into a far country where he wasted his
wealth in riotous living. As this was being related I
looked around me and saw pigs grazing and wandering
about the mahullah. This was common in the Dom
settlements. With a frisson of inward horror I suddenly
realised the story went on to say that the prodigal son
was reduced to feeding pigs and was not even able to eat
the food that the swine ate. Feeding pigs was, basically,
an unclean occupation, and thinking about eating their
food was a demeaning matter. Yet here was I, in a Dom
compound, where feeding pigs and even eating some of
their food was an everyday matter. What was the point
of proceeding with the story as it stood? One's first
thought was to change the story of the Prodigal Son to
make it more relevant to the Dom condition. However,
that was not really an option because of one's lack of
swiftness of thought in Hindustani. I ploughed on in
inner anguish, and finished.

The people were grateful. However, one of them came up
and said in Hindustani, 'You had a dilemma there,
didn't you?' His name was Pyare Lal, which means
'beloved Lal', and he was beloved. This saintly old man,
who had given up the chance to become the first
Christian minister among the Doms to go with an
Indian regiment to Gallipoli in the First World War as a
sweeper, whence he returned injured and minus an eye
and unable to take up ministry. This man became my
friend, and through him I learnt more about the Doms,
and about spiritual integrity and humble faith.

The Doms were ex-outcastes. They ranked among the
lowest of the low, even among their fellows. It was their
role in life to be sweepers, to clear away the night soil,
to get rid of the carcasses of dead animals, and to engage
in other similar necessary but thankless tasks. Ironically,
another Dom group was rich due to presiding over
cremations on the famous Burning Ghats of Banaras.
Due to the caste system and Hindu stress upon purity
and pollution, the Doms are seen as 'unclean'. Although
by 1963 the caste system had been outlawed by Indian
civil law, the social stigma still remained. Their huts
were basic, as was their food, and they had little access
to money, social benefits, or worthwhile education. They
were poorer and more disadvantaged than the Jews of
Jesus' time portrayed in the story of the Prodigal Son.

The church had made a difference to them and given
them more self-respect and in the case of people like
Pyare Lal, a deeply compelling spirituality. It remained,
however, a community that read many of the stories in
the Bible through the spectacles of their own experience.

Three thoughts arise in connexion with this story.
Firstly, all communities interpret their sacred scriptures
or myths according to their own context. This is true of
different Christian communities who have access to the
Bible in their own language or dialect. It is also true of
other communities, even Muslims, who have been less
inclined to translate the Qur'an into local languages.

Secondly, a good number of people coming into religious
communities around the world are poor, some not as
poor as the Doms, some even poorer than them. The
number of Christians in the world is two billion, a third
of the world's population, and Christians are growing
rapidly in places such as South America and sub-
Saharan Africa that are often endemically poor. Thus
the likelihood of re-interpretation of well-known stories
in terms of local, and usually poverty ridden,
communities is high.

Thirdly, in India and elsewhere in disadvantaged
communities, the tendency is that, side-by-side with the
saintly view taken by Pyare Lal in Dom Banaras, a more
Liberation Theology view may arise that gives more
weight to social justice and human rights. In fact this is
happening in the Dalit Movement among the outcastes
in India, and in similar liberation movements of different
religions around the world. Thus communities matter!

My second recollection is concerned with a story about
change of community. One night a Hindu sadhu came
to the Sunday evening Methodist service in Faisabad, a
place in north India where I lived for a year before going
to Banaras. He said he wanted to 'find out about the
Lord Christ'. He was a Hindu priest in a temple in the
holy city of Ayodhya, six miles from Faisabad and his
chance reading of St John's gospel had brought him
along to make contact with the Christian community.
His extraordinary life story, involving four different
communities, began its third stage in Faisabad, and is as
follows.

He was born Ram Kumar Singh in a village in the
northern part of Uttar Pradesh in which Faisabad and
Banaras were also situated. He was a member of a sub-
caste of the Kshattriya caste of Hindus, the second
highest or 'warrior' caste. He was married at the age of
eleven to a girl aged ten. She came to live with him in
his joint family home and before long had given him
three sons. He read History at Agra University but failed
(and thus became, in Indian parlance of the time, a B.A.
(Fail)) and went to the east of India, to Calcutta, to get
a job in a factory. His family remained in the village, and
he came home at the time of the great Hindu festivals to
be with his own people. In other words, he lived the life
of a caste Hindu householder, albeit part of the time
away from home.

This changed tragically when he received news that his
wife was ill. He came home and shortly afterwards she
died. He decided to stay with his three sons for a while
but incredibly they all died, one after the other. He
determined to walk away from the village and to keep on
walking until he died. Life was meaningless and suicide
seemed to be the answer. On the road, however, he met
an old Hindu hermit a member of the Ramanandin
branch of sadhus. He was impressed with him and
settled down to stay with him. His first name was
already Ram, and the Ramanandin chosen deity was
Ram. He became initiated into the Ramanandin
tradition of holy men, and took the Ramanandin
surname of 'Das', which means 'servant'. He was now
Ram Kumar Das. He stayed with the old hermit for a
time. He then became a freelance sadhu, travelling the
roads of India from holy place to holy place. He had
renounced the ordinary norms of the Hindu community
by becoming a 'renouncer' and was free to go to the
great pilgrimage centres, or to such great events as the
Kumbha Mela. He did this for a number of years until he
decided to settle down and become a Hindu priest in
Ayodhya, while remaining a sadhu. His quest as a holy
man was to seek for 'moksha', salvation or release, and
so far this had not happened. Thus he came to the
Methodist service that Sunday night.

A period of serious enquiry ensued. It was open-ended
and free-floating and tailored to his needs. There was no
criticism of Hinduism or mention of baptism. He came
whenever he liked out of the blue. We became close
friends. He mentioned one day that he had got up at 3
am and spent four hours in deep meditation and that he
did that every day. I learnt far more from him than he
did from me. To cut a long story short he 'found out
about the Lord Christ'. As I was preparing to go to the
hills in the summer for more language study he asked
for baptism, and on my return he was baptised in
Banaras to where I had been transferred. He changed
his name a second time and became Paul Kumar Das
having been fascinated by Paul's experience on the
Damascus road.

He now began a third stage of life in a Christian
Ashram, fashioned on Hindu lines, near Bareilly in Uttar
Pradesh. He knew little about the Christian community,
and he could hardly continue as a Hindu priest in
Ayodhya, so this was a kind of bridge time in his life. He
lived in a community of five people dedicated to lives of
prayer and meditation. In the Ashram there was no
electricity, there were no chairs, there were household
chores, and there were Christian rituals and meditations
adapted to the Indian environment.

Finally Paul, as he now was, went to work in the YMCA
in Delhi and began to prepare to become a Christian
minister. Sadly before this was accomplished he had a
heart attack and died. He had begun to settle into his
fourth community that he was planning to serve
through ministry. Though still a comparatively young
man he had lived four lives in four communities.

The reasons that motivated Ram Kumar Singh to
change, appalling family tragedy and a deep religious
quest, are supplemented and enhanced in our age of
secularisation, rapid communications, urbanisation,
population growth, and greater choice. Communities
are deeply important. So too are changes of community.