A Unique School in the "Land of a Million Gods"
Download all the pictures of the talk as a powerpoint slide (4MB)
The main point of my talk this evening will be that self-confident religious disbelievers are uniquely well suited to do certain kinds of social work, and the main part of the talk will be about a current example in a province of India called "Andhra Pradesh." ("Pradesh" means "province.") Let me begin with a sketch of some historical background.
In India, the term "West Asia" is used to refer to the part of the world which we call "the Near East" or "the Middle East." Both Christianity and Islam are, when seen from an Indian perspective, "Western" religions. India was conquered twice by imperialists with that kind of religious identity: first by Muslims, who ruled much of the subcontinent for several centuries, and then by Christians, who ruled for about one century. The term "Hindu" is due to the imperialists from abroad.
Among the Hindus, it was those in the lowest castes, the "Untouchables," who were most likely to convert to Islam or Christianity. Some 15% of the people of India today are Muslims. Only some 3% are Christians, but the cultural impact of the missionaries is greater than this figure suggests, because schools (especially, though not always exclusively, for boys since they are destined to become the heads of families) have been a top priority of the missions.
I come now to two remarkable Indian men each of whom who taught at such a school and then became a disbeliever.
More than a hundred years ago, some American Baptist missionaries, who happened to be "fundamentalist" in the sense that they regarded the Bible as the literal word of God, converted some Untouchables in Andhra Pradesh and made a certain one of them a minister of the Church. That man's son, born in 1895, was named "Joshua" and was educated in the mission's primary- and secondary-school, and then, since he was a minister's son and a good student, became himself a teacher at the school. But then a problem emerged: Joshua developed a love of literature which could not be satisfied by the Bible alone and certainly not by the rather inelegant translation of it into the native language, Telugu, of that part of India. He was ostracized not only by the local Hindus who considered it sinful for a low-caste person to read and write, but also by the Christians because he was reading classical Indian - that is, Hindu - literature. Yet he persisted; a kindly old Brahmin secretly taught him how to read the ancient languageof India, Sanskrit; and in due time he became such a superb and famous poet that the descendents of the people who ostracized him are nowadays very proud of him.
If the missionaries had approved of Joshua's literary pursuits, he might perhaps have remained a Christian throughout his life. But their mistake eventually cost them his allegiance when he became, in the 1950s, an atheist.
Meanwhile there was, in another part of Andhra Pradesh a hundred years ago, a devout Hindu, a Brahmin who wrote beautiful religious poetry and also happened to be employed as a clerk by the colonial Forest Department. His eldest son earned a master's degree in botany at the University of Madras and then became a biology teacher at a missionary college - and this with such extraordinary success (every one of this students won laurels in the annual national exams) that the missionaries offered to pay for him to earn a Ph.D. degree at a prestigeous American university (Yale) and then to appoint him Professor of Science at the college, if he would convert to Christianity. He politely rejected the offer - it was tantamount to a bribe - and found a job elsewhere, but he was such a thoughtful young man that he took seriously the challenge of considering whether to convert. He studied, reading the Bible and other relevant literature, and reflected. After six years of this, he became a religious non-believer altogether, and therefore decided that (a) he deserved no privileges by virtue of being born a Brahmin, (b) people born low-caste deserved no oppressive tabus (such as the one against learning how to read), and (c) he must take up social work for their benefit.
Details of his eventful life are described in a book available at www.bfg-muenchen.de/goralife.htm and entitled "The Life and Times of Gora." The essential point here is that when, in 1960, Gora's eldest son, Lavanam, married Joshua's youngest daughter, Hemalata, they dedicated themselves to social-work projects which have been just as successful as Gora's teaching and Joshua's poetry.
They founded an organization, Samskar, to address certain problems caused by locally powerful religious authorities and inherited traditions. The first main project was with professional thieves and their families who were members of a caste which the British colonial authorities had classified as a "criminal caste" and had placed under the governance of Salvation Army missionaries. The missionaries stayed on after India became politically independent of Great Britain. Without dissuading the thieves from stealing, they taught them that as Christians they must give ten percent of the "take" to the mission. Lavanam and Hemalata, after reading the report by a sociological researcher who had found that many of the thieves felt trapped in an unsatisfactory way of life, visited them and promised to show them how to reform. I shan't tell the whole story here; suffice it to say that the project has been quite successful: nearly all the former thieves in these castes have "gone straight" and become farmers on land given to them, upon the advice of Lavanam and Hemalata, by the State.
Samskar's second main project was with "joginis." In ancient times, the joginis were the women who created Indian classical dance and were also so-called "temple prostitutes" (this is, like, "Hindu," a Western term) developing, together with priests, the practices described in the Kama Sutra. However, the joginis in the villages of 19th- and 20th-century Andhra Pradesh had nothing to do with temples, but were just religiously sanctioned, unpaid concubines whom their debt-ridden families had sold into that "profession" when they were just old enough for sexually predatory village heads to find them potentially alluring. In 1986, Hemalata undertook, with Lavanam's help, to bring an end to this religious exploitation of innocent human beings. The first task was to find them. She did it with a song that she wrote and sang while walking through one village after another. Here is a translation of the beginning, the middle and the end:
Oh Sister, who has brought you to this?
Your life's moonlight has changed to bleakness.
Who has degraded you so?
Your glowing beauty has withered away.
Sister, rebel and shape your own life!
No god has created you like this.
Defend your right by speaking out!
Your life is your right. Your marriage is your right.
Your mind is your right. Choose your way!
Roar like a tiger against the selfish village elders!
Set your youthful wrath against their deceit!
Sister, defend your honor! Defend women's honor with all your might!
No man can block your way,
Nothing can rival and challenge women's might.
Fight whoever stands against you like a fury!
Spit fire at his face, Sister!
Burn this evil jogini-system to ashes!
Spit fire at this wicked sacred custom,
Bury it in the sands of time!
Sister, jogin: awake, arise!
Again, the story is a long one. Let me just summarize it by saying that there are no longer any joginis in Andhra Pradesh; all the former ones have married proper stepfathers for their children; and in 2005, when someone was planning to conduct, in a certain village in Andhra Pradesh, the religious ceremony initiating a pretty young girl as a jogini, the entire village protested loudly, in meetings and marches, until the scheme was abandoned.
In the mid-1990s, Hemalata and Lavanam founded a rural school, Sanskar Ashram Vidyalayam ("vidyalayam" means "school"), near the first village to which Hemalata had taken her song. The school was for the children of the former joginis and the reformed thieves. I am a volunteer teacher at this school. It goes from the first through the tenth grade. It now has 300 students. Half of them are boarders and are the children either of families which Lavanam and Hemalata have already served or else of other families on the dark margins of civil society: children with a parent who is a convicted crook or a common prostitute or a drug-addict. These students come from many parts of Andhra Pradesh. The other half of the children are day-students from peasant families.
It is a wonderful school (even though the teachers' pay is much lower than in most Indian schools). Let me show you some pictures of it and of the surrounding countryside and nearby villages.
Download all the pictures as a powerpoint slide here (4MB)
Fig.01: Hemalata and me and Dr. Sundar, the administrative director of Samskar.
Fig.02: The headmaster, Mr. Naveen, and me and an elegant lady who is in charge of the school's kitchen.
Fig.03: A plough in a nearby field.
Fig.04: An ox-cart.
Fig.05: Women planting rice.
Fig.06: Toting wood (the main fuel for cooking).
Fig.07: Average-quality houses in a nearby village.
Figs.08 & 09: The worst house I saw, and the family who live in it.
Fig.10: The best house (as far as I know) of any family that has sent children to Samskar Ashram Vidyalayam. (Two nuclear families - headed by brothers - live in this house.)
Fig.11: Diligent children doing their laundry.
Fig.12: How to make unleavened bread (chapatis).
Fig.13: Students helping the elegant lady prepare chillies for dinner.
Fig.14: The view from the top of the building where I slept. The three-storey building shown in the middle of this picture contains the older children's classrooms. The ground floor of the two-storey building is the dining room for the 150 boarding students; the upper story of that building is the dormitory for the 75 girls. (They and the 75 boys, whose dormitory is elsewhere, sleep on mats on the floor. They go to bed at 10:00 p.m. and get up at 4:30 a.m.) The piles of gravel etc. are for the construction of a factory for notebooks.
Fig.15: An Indian sport. In the background is the school's assembly-hall and, next to it, the half-completed factory. Behind them is the building from which the photo shown in Fig.14 was taken.
Fig.16: Cricket players.
Fig.17: Youngsters reacting to "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" as sung by me.
Fig.18: Day-students going home around 4 p.m. They wear sandals and have quite rudimentary bookbags. The little tins are their lunch-boxes. The small building on the right is the school library; the three-storey one behind it is the one shown in Fig.14. To the left are the younger students' classrooms. (Originally the school consisted of just two such huts, and in those days, a dozen years ago, the same huts served also as dormitories. At night a watch-dog at the doorway of each hut would scare away the snakes.)
Fig.19: Well-to-do boys (notice the shoes and neckties and elegant bookbags) going to another school in a nearby village.
Fig.20: Samskar students assembling for the morning ceremony in which they pledge to care for the welfare of India's people, to take pride in "her rich and varied cultural heritage" (e.g. her citizens with different religious affiliations), to respect their elders, including their teachers, and to treat everyone courteously.
Figs.21 & 22: Day-students taking lunch. (They have no dining room.) The boarders eat in a dining hall where, at the beginning of each meal, they say: "We respect this food. We wish that every child in the world may have food, clothing and shelter, as we do. Peace and friendly co-existence are our guiding principles."
Fig.23: The playground late one afternoon.
Fig.24: Listening to an evening radio program.
Figs.25-27: Planting and watering trees.
Fig.28: Day-students on the road.
Figs.29-34: Some examples of social work carried out by the day-students in their respective villages.
Fig.29: Requesting the liquor-dealer to take up another profession instead. (Look closely at his face!)
Fig.30: Requesting a lady who sells candy, soap, etc. to stop selling a nasty kind of chewing-tobacco called "gutka."
Figs.31-32: Posting the latest international, national, provincial and local news.
Fig.33-34: Conducting a socio-economic survey. (See www.varni.info)
Fig.35: Recording political songs.
Figs.36-40: Some of my activities in besides teaching English.
Fig.36: Playing chess.
Fig.37: Chatting.
Fig.38: A detail from Fig.37.
Fig.39: Attending athletic meets (and rooting of course for the Samskar teams).
Fig.40: Inaugurating a computer donated by friends from abroad. (The different screens show the same thing, so that a class of 30 students can be served.)
For more information about the school and some related projects, see www.varni.info.
Further information about Lavanam is readily available via Google.
Hemalata's achievements as a social worker have won her considerable eminence in India in the form of an honorary doctorate and some other prestigious awards, but she is, unlike the other ca.100 nationally eminent people nowadays who were born into a formerly "Untouchable" caste, devoid of wealth or power, and is thus unique. One of her guiding precepts is that each person should, regardless of his or her caste, class, race, religion etc., *give and take respect* vis … vis other people. She and Lavanam are, unequivocally, atheists, but without the abrasive militance that is likely to characterize atheists who are still struggling to free themselves from a religious indoctrination instilled in them as children.