Someone on my GChat list had an intriguing link included in their status message. I saw “inauguration”, and since that historic event is still very much on my mind, I clicked it. I was led to the Boston Globe’s website, to a feature called “The Big Picture: News Stories in Photographs“.
Yesterday was a historic day. On January 20th, 2009, Barack H. Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America – the first African-American ever to hold the office of U.S. Commander-in-Chief. The event was witnessed by well over one million attendees in chilly Washington D.C., and by many millions more through coverage on television and the Internet. Collected here are photographs of the event, the participants, and some of the witnesses around the world. (48 photos total)
Picture number 38 caught my attention, setting my browndar off before I could even read the caption underneath it (which I’ve quoted, well, underneath it):
Pakistani Christian children hold portraits of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama during a prayers ceremony for global peace in Islamabad, Pakistan on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. (AP Photo) [Globe]
At first glance, I didn’t notice the word “Christian”. I just saw “Pakistani children”. I thought I’d just post the picture plus a quick blurb about where I found it, and isn’t it sweet, etc. But for obvious reasons, I started surfing around, and a rambling post was born.Over the past five years, I’ve made numerous references to my family’s faith and Christianity as it exists in Kerala, but Christianity exists in every South Asian country (admittedly in miniscule numbers, in some of those nations). The first non-Indian brown Christian I ever met was my ruthless Montessori pre-school teacher in San Francisco. She was Sri Lankan and my parents strongly encouraged her to get old-school naddan on me, if I were naughty enough. That meant that if some little white kid did something wrong, they were gently scolded. If I did something wrong, I got hissed at and pinched. My parents were overjoyed that they were really getting their money’s worth.
It would be 14 years until I met another Desi who was Christian; at Davis I discovered that someone wasn’t just using an anglicized nickname. “Wait, that guy’s actually named ____??”
“Yeah. He’s Christian.”
me: Baroo?
“Not like you. He said he’s Pakistani.”
me: wow.
“Yeah. Now there are two of you…and three hundred of us!”
I still don’t know all that much beyond a vague, depressing sense that it’s rather dangerous to be a Christian (or a Hindu) in Pakistan, due to the brilliantly just Blasphemy laws, which require nothing more than the insinuation of disrespect towards Islam, to ruin someone’s life:
Ten years ago today, Bishop John Joseph, Catholic bishop of Faisalabad in Pakistan, shot himself dead on the steps of the Sahiwal district court in protest at the abuse of the country’s blasphemy laws. Ten years on, little has changed in Pakistan.
The blasphemy laws impact everyone, regardless of religion – and the tragedy is that almost every case is completely fabricated. When the laws were first introduced, they were used primarily as a tool by extremists to target religious minorities – Christians, Hindus and others. These days, however, Muslims have got wise to the potential for using the blasphemy law against each other to settle personal scores.
The reason is simple. The blasphemy law requires no evidence other than an accusation made by one person against another.
There is no proof of intent, and an inadequate definition of blasphemy. When it comes to court the accuser does not even have to substantiate the charge. If the judge asks what the accused actually said, the accuser can refuse to elaborate, on the basis that by repeating the alleged statement they themselves would be blaspheming. [Guardian]
See? Brilliant!
This made me wonder about the Christians in Pakistan; we all know that Sikhs and Hindus had been there before partition, but I’d never heard much about the history of Christianity in that country. I have a deplorably lazy habit of assuming that the answers to such questions tend to involve colonizers and missionary types. Let’s see if I get lucky:
The exact introduction of Christianity to the South Asia is a debatable topic, with the Syrian Christian community in Kerala, South India being recorded as the earliest. Missionaries accompanied colonizing forces from Portugal, France and Great Britain, but in north western Ancient India, today’s Pakistan, Christianity was mainly brought by the British rulers of India in the later 18th and 19th century. This is evidenced in cities established by the British, such as the port city of Karachi, where the majestic St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Pakistan’s largest church stands, and the churches in the city of Rawalpindi, where the British established a major military cantonment. [wiki]
Had no idea about any of this:
Christians in Punjab and Sindh had been quite active post 1945 in their support for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League. Even before the final phase of the movement, leading Indian Christians like Pothan Joseph had rendered valuable services as journalists and propagandists of the Muslim League. Jinnah had repeatedly promised all citizens of Pakistan complete equality of citizenship, but this promise was not kept by his successors….In the mass population exchanges that occurred between Pakistan and India upon independence due to conflict between Muslims and followers of Indian religions, most Hindus and nearly all Sikhs fled the country, but the Christians remained. [wiki]
I have a million reasons for wishing my Father were still alive, but the one which is relevant to this post has to do with Jinnah, specifically the declamatory 15-minute rant he used to launch in to upon hearing his name. When I was younger I thought it was odd that my Dad, who was born in 1937, was so much older than everyone else’s parents. Now I wish I had written it all down.
I wanted to find out more about the ceremony for global peace in Islamabad at which that picture was taken, but all I found were a few more photographs of the event and no news story. Oh, well. It’s poignant how the inauguration of our latest President has affected not just this nation, but the world. South Asians for Obama, indeed. 🙂
Get The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan.
I’ll dig up the relevant parts later.
Of course, there are Christians in Pakistan! Why wouldn’t there be? After all there were Christians in the Pakistani part of British India pre-Partition. It wouldn’t make sense for them to completely disappear. Granted, most of the Christians I knew there were economically marginalized, servants, etc, but they exist and they have relative freedom to practice their religion.
A personal story about my embarasment about my igonorance about a similar thing (regarding Hindus in Pakistan). I was just recently visiting Pakistan, and went to this national park in Balochistan (Hinglaj), where there is a ancient mandir. We were planning to visit this mandir but the road was messed up due to rains or something so we couldn’t. Anyway, there was a group of pilgrams who were going to walk across and get to the mandir on the other side. I asked them, where in India they were from (assuming of course that they must be Indian because they were Hindu), but they were from Karachi! Needless to say, it was pretty embrassing. But also important to realize, that even if the Hindus in PK are 1% of the overall population, 1% of 160 million people is still quite a lot of people.
I think the Roman Catholics got to my part of Kerala first, likely Jesuit missionaries. Instead of the Syro-Malabar or Syrian Rite, we stayed Roman Catholic.
They say the original St. Thomas made his way to Kerala, but I always had my doubts.
“most Hindus and nearly all Sikhs fled the country, but the Christians remained”
FYI. This is absolutely wrong. In the immediate aftermath of 1947 about 15% and 25% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations were respectively Hindu. Of course this has been decimated after decades of ethnic cleansing or forced conversion. Another popular version has been kidnapping Hindu women by Islamic men so that progeny continues as Islamic ( remember the war cries in J&K by Jehadis ‘leave Kashmir but leave your women behind’ or something like that ). Now the respective populations are about 2% and 10%. OTOH Islamic population in India has gone up from 8% to 21%. Some of it is also due to illegal migration. The successive SICKular governments in India are afraid to release actual figures! Christian population also has increased from 2% to about 8% now due to terrorising evangelization. This is sad truth of south Asia where people of the book are involved in demographic warfare.
Sebs,
There’s a beautiful essay on Sulekha on this topic. Please read http://c-alex-alexander.sulekha.com/blog/post/2003/05/proselytization-in-india-an-indian-christian-s-perspective.htm
Kiran
“OTOH Islamic population in India has gone up from 8% to 21% … Christian population also has increased from 2% to about 8% now due to terrorising evangelization”
Absolutely wrong. Muslim population is around 13% and christian population is around 3% at best. I don’t have the data for 1947, but in 1960 muslim population was 11%. christian population is virtually unchanged since 1960.
Please nobody feed the trolls
5 · Kiran P said
WOW! That was beautiful. I’m from the ancient Orthodox tradition the author described and I attend a G.O. church in D.C. where the priest himself decries the bigotry expressed in the name of G-d; when I mentioned on this blog that said priest gave a sermon which explained that we did not believe that Hindu people/non-Christians were automatically going to be barbecued in hellfire, I was called a liar and then a member of a fake church, as if the only Christian view of other religions is the one promulgated with claims of exclusivity and hate. That was a few years ago, when I was repeatedly attacked here for my “evangelizing” ways, which were obviously dictated to me by some missionaries who are using SM as an instrument of anti-Hindu propaganda. It hurt, because I don’t support almost any of what is currently done in India (much like the author of that piece).
My Father (like Alexander’s parents) steeped me in the exact same brew of tolerance, respect and bewilderment at all the Johnny-come-lately’s who sow acrimony where there was none that he was raised with by my grandparents, and people are shocked at it sometimes. But that was the Kerala my father grew up in, for the first thirty years of his life. I’m sad that such harmonious views surprise anyone and I desperately wish that people were sowing those seeds, instead of the ideas currently being used to manipulate the most vulnerable elements of society.
Thank you for one of the best links I’ve ever been given.
7 · Samir said
Agreed. Also, we learned early on that we best have a source for EVERYTHING we type, and that relying on memory alone would come back to bite us in the kundi. 🙂 That’s why even brief posts take me an hour. Fact-checking, y’all. I am terrified of all of you brainiacs pointing at me and doing the Nelson-esque “ha ha”, so I don’t blog nothin’, unless I can back it up, son. 😉
My point is statistics are more useful (and powerful) when you can cite the credible source from which you obtained them.
::
1 · SSK said
Will do! Thanks. 🙂
2 · Kabir said
Well to be fair, at this point I have known of their existence for the past 16 years. 😉 I just didn’t know if they left during partition, or if they were British, and went back, etc.
3 · Sebs said
Why? 🙂
Its interesting to think about the history and perceptions of South Asian Christians… and how it differs between the countries of the subcontinent. If Christians are only about 3% of India’s population, they are pretty overrepresented in the public sphere – which is great! With the number of politicians, academics, movie starts, etc. seemingly from that background it’s great to hear they’ve done well.
I’ve met Pakistani Christian immigrants in the USA… and have heard old-generation Pakistani Muslims mutter bad things about them behind their back (I am not Muslim by the way). The bad things they said had more to do with the presumed prior caste affiliation of the Christians which is disgusting and offensive to hear regardless of the which generation is saying it.
The general impression I’ve gotten from the old generation is that outside Goa and Kerala, most Christians in the subcontinent came from the a lower social background – and that any sort of discrimination against them by the older generation is more due to old caste biases than anything.
By older generation by the way, I mean those that were alive during partition either as small children or older.
Isn’t he buried near Madras or is that another Saint?
I remember hearing a sad tale of a Pakistani Christian kid in grad school a couple of years ago. It seemed he ran out of money and had no place to stay. He didn’t get much support from the other Pakistani students ‘cos he wasn’t a Muslim and the Indian grad students didn’t want anything to do with him ‘cos he was a Pakistani!!!!
Thoughtful post, Anna. In Pakistan, because of the demographic and ethnic cleansing/migration issue you mentioned, the default for ‘minority’ is Christian. There are Christians in most Pakistani cities, both in Punjab and in Sindh, especially the large port Karachi. And it is true that, most if not all Christians in the interior were converted after the British ‘conquest’ of the Punjab and Sindh, which itself is quite recent – 1840s. Thus in Pakistani Punjab, which is most of Pakistan – the entire discourse around ‘minority issues’ occurs around the treatment of Christians. That is the significance of ‘Christian’ in the caption of the picture you linked in. Pakistan has had a Ministry of Minority Affairs (interesting pic) since the early 1970s, and the Minister has usually been a Christian. Of the Hindus that remained in Pakistan post-1947, most are in rural Sindh – Pakistani Punjab has almost none. There are Sikhs in rural Pakistani Punjab, most of them living near the Sikh shrines of Nankana Sahib and Panja Sahib, but neither Hindus nor Sikhs are as numerous as Christians.
The socio-economic situation of most Christians in Pakistani Punjab is quite bad – in some respects it resembles that of Christians in Indian Punjab as well, but even more, there are compelling similarities with the neo-Buddhists in India: the situation in both cases pre-dates their (relatively recent) conversion to their present religion, seems institutionalized, and is reflected in persisting prejudice.
Anna,
Pakistani Christians were an integral part of developing private education in Pakistan. The first school I went to in Karachi was a school called St. Michael’s – its essentially run by Christians – I remember the Principal being called “Father ____”, the administrators tended to be nuns or other Christians. Now, I’m pretty sure that some of them would be what you call Anglo-Indian, but not sure of the exact breakdown. Now, even after St. Michael’s, I transferred to Karachi Grammar School (Benazir’s alma mater), and I remember our junior school principal being Mrs. Fernandes, and having Christian teachers and administrators. Other schools – St. Patricks, St. Josephs, Convent of Jesus & Mary. There’s also hospitals – my brother was born at 7th Day Adventist in Karachi. So really not that different from the situation in India.
When I was at St Michaels, me and my brother developed a friendship with one of the Anglo-Indian administrators. We credit him with giving us our impeccable English at such a young age, as well generally just taking us to fun places growing up – essentially a cool uncle. He eventually moved to Canada when we got a little older, but I still visit once every few year when I go to Toronto. In fact, his entire family now lives in Toronto, where there is a small community of Pakistani Anglo-Indians. I’ve also run into a couple of Pakistani Christian / Anglo-Indian randomly – one of the ladies at McGill Grad Admissions office where I worked was from Karachi too.
Of course though, in Karachi you tend to have poor Christian families, as well the educated middle-class ones as well. I went to school with a handful at KGS, which is considered an elite school, but I’m sure there were tons of poor working class Christians throughout the city. From what I remember, they live in their own colonies that tend to be pretty obvious (Hallelujah House etc), and from my recollection I don’t remember people troubling their middle clas colonies and neighborhoods when I lived there until the late 90s – the middle class folks knew they were probably teachers to their own kids and generally were quite respectful. Of course this all based on just my experiences.
8 · A N N A said
Anna, sorry that you had to go through. I am very proud of the ancient Christian roots in India, just like I am proud of ancient Hindu heritages. However, it is true that the action of evangelists of India are irking most people in India, and its good to hear dissenting voice of Alexander and you that this is not the Indic way.
5 · Kiran P said
Thanks a lot for that link, such sane voices are disappearing fast in Kerala.
For those of you interested in developing Alexander’s type of broad understanding of religion across faiths, I highly recommend S. Radhakrishnan‘s Indian Philosophy book (two volumes). It is HUGE, but it is definitive, and worth the read. It will change the way you see the world, and yourself. You can find it in most university libraries in the West.
6 · najeeb said
najeeb,
It’s easy to blurt something in a post but you can’t get away from truth. Please read http://greathindu.com/2008/02/demographic-siege-in-bharatvarsh/
You are not including several figures since 1960 which the p-sec media is not reporting or rather (conveniently ) cannot be accurately reported:
Most importantly SICKular parties are suppressing truth to protect votebank! Your figures are close if you ignore the above. To be frank India is all set to be a nation with Hindus as minority by 2060. And that is in numbers only. They already are a minority in terms of their voices, their causes, their heritage and their culture being suppressed slowly but surely. The 4M movement ( Macaulayites, Mullahs, Missionaries and Marxists ) along with western funded/partnered media is marching on to continue the negation and subversion of everything and anything remotely Indic. The Christians and Muslims have power and influence disproportionate to their numbers. Christian institutions inherited from British vast amounts of land. Today the illiterate, ignorant and alien Roman Catholic woman who has no idea of anything Indic is controlling the levers of power of GOP of India. Hindus are already a minority in Kerala, hence Sabarimala is a minority institution now. They are minority in Nagaland ( 90% christian ). Even Anna may not be aware of ‘Nagalim for Christ’ and other secessionist movements going on in India’s North eastern regions. In Andhra Pradesh Samuel Reddy has a huge agenda for conversion and carrying it on with utter impunity. In Congress party circles there are rumors that if one is Christian it’s easy to get a party ticket. More than half of CMs of Congress ruled states are Christians
I can go on and on. Things have changed drastically in the last 20 years. Pope’s visit in 2001 changed it for the worse when he said “The Cross was planted in Europe in the 1st millenium, in Americas in the 2nd millenium, and now it will be planted in Asia in the 3rd Millenium”. Until then India was getting marauded by Jehadis and now Missionaries are fighting for their share. Point is, considering Hindus are not people of the book and not an organized religion they are already a minority. It’s only a matter of time before they are a minority in numbers. India will be a land where Islamists and Missionaries will continue to increase their flock by hook or cook. It’s unfortunate it’s all happening. There is no way to stop this by ethical means en masse.
Especially when Bush/CIA are involved ( see http://compreligion.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/09/chritian-plan-to-convert-india-the-role-of-american.htm )
Sarvepalli,
True. Also I sincerely feel only Indian christians with Indic thought like Alex Alexander, Anna can help us to ward of the evangelical types since as insiders to Christianity they can counter the dogma from evangelicals better. I know that Jesus was a yogi and not the evangelical type. Conversion is the Church’s agenda. And when Bush kinds are involved it also becomes the agenda of western powers with dangerous threats to world peace. Pluralism, Tolerance and Inclusivity are the values we need to preserve and cherish most. The idea of India is so vast and great that it needs to be preserved for all of Humanity. I will try to find some other great Indian Christians and list their articles in my next post. I truly wish Anna after reading all those can write 1 great post here.
regards Kiran
he.he.. Kiran @ 17:
Thanks for the laughs.. It looks like everyone is out to convert the “poor Hindu”. 🙂
But this post is about the mistreatment of Pakistani minorities in the name of blasphemy laws. What do you think about that?.
3 · Sebs said
<
blockquote>I think the Roman Catholics got to my part of Kerala first, likely Jesuit missionaries. Instead of the Syro-Malabar or Syrian Rite, we stayed Roman Catholic.
Syrio-Malabar Christianity existed before Roman Catholicism. So, what’s your point ?
I had Christian family in Pakistan, actually, but now apparently they’ve moved to the southeastern US. My parents had moved to Pakistan in the early 1980s (my father was a foreign correspondent from the states, my mother’s from India), and the story goes that he met a woman who said that she had family in Delhi of a certain name, which my dad said was my mother’s family name. So they met up and determined that, yes, they were related. They’re, confusingly, Bengali Brahmin Christians, as one matriarch of the family way back defiantly put it. I won’t get into much more because I have never met these people, despite the fact that they now live in the states (long story), and the little I do know would detract too much from the topic at hand. Suffice it to say that their families simply didn’t leave after Partition and as far as I know never really had a problem. My mom did, of course, as an Indian woman married to an American Jew with an eastern European name; complications ensued, and they then transferred to Kenya.
19 · Ponniyin Selvan said
<
blockquote>he.he.. Kiran @ 17:
One man’s agony is another man’s ecstasy!
About blasphemy laws do you still need to know what me thinks? Of course they are NEANDRATHAL. What can you say about laws where you need 4 witnesses for a rape victim to prove she was raped? That’s like asking for additional 4 rapists. And then you need 16 witnesses to prove that you were raped. The math continues..
Here is another math from the land of pure ( Arabia ), recall that Pakistani enforcers of such laws want to reach Arabic standards: The value of life of Hindu woman is 3.33333% of that of Muslim man.
Enjoy more such math at http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/dec/16rajeev.htm
Pothen Joseph aka “Potent Joe” parted ways (disillusioned) with Jinnah before the Partition, after he helped found the “Dawn” in Delhi. When we say that Christians were supportive of the Muslim League’s demand for Partition, we are not being clear, whether this was by way of their participation in the general referendum of the time, or through mass movements. There is little evidence for either. Firstly in pre-independence times, there was no universal adult franchise, so as a rule only the propertied classes – naturally an elite – got to vote. Secondly, ignore my hauteur, titans of the Christian Indian community were all from today’s India including scholars such as Dr.HC Mukherjee and Fr. Jerome D’Souza SJ members of the Constituent Assembly. As I have said earlier on these pages, Hindus almost entirely made up the ranks of the sanitation workers of Pakistan (and continue to this day), and when the waves of the Partition violence washed over them in Karachi, many of them prepared to flee to India, and were restrained only when Jinnah issued an assurance of safety. Bal Thackeray, then still a caricaturist, lampooned Jinnah in the pages of the Bombay Chronicle for his expediency. More later…
11 · NV said
NV, Anna—
Oh, I’m just joshin’ around with some good ol’ Christian puns, ha.
Kiran—
Thanks for the excellent read. I would consider my family a fairly liberal group of Catholics. My parents came to the US from Kerala in the late ’70s & most of the extended family is still in Kerala. Most of the extended family are Roman Catholics, some further removed are Mar Thoma/ Jacobite/ Orthodox.
I’m from Texas, no stranger to the evangelist movement. I believe so many actions/statements/thoughts/etc are a combination of two things: message and presentation. It’s not just what you say, but how you say it, how that message is delivered. Both aspects should be given care and attention, or the reception of the message might not be very positive. And then we get conflict and unease.
iran P wrote:
This is absolutely wrong. In the immediate aftermath of 1947 about 15% and 25% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations were respectively Hindu
Kiran P, do you have a source for your claim. Here is a link the SM thread with the correct figures. The proportion of non-Muslims in West Pakistan was 3.36% in 1951 and 3.49% in 1998 (counting Ahmadis as Muslim in each case). Also for West pakistan, the proportion of Hindus was 1.8% in 1951 and 1.73% in 1998. Check the links for more detail.
I’d say the issue is less how many Muslims there are demographically and more how susceptible those Muslims are to jihadi brainwashing. Having a growing Muslims population isn’t bad by itself, it’s bad because the reason for that growth is that they’re poor, uneducated, and easily exploited by gangsters, terrorists, and myriad other varieties of brute.
Same thing with the evangelization of the adivasis mentioned in that link from Kiran P. The problem isn’t that they’re becoming Christians, it’s that they’re becoming psychotic right-wing nutjob Christians. The Jerry Falwels and Pat Robertsons cause enough trouble for us in a country as wealthy, powerful, and stable as America. Imagine the kind of havoc they’d wreak in India.
“You are not including several figures since 1960 which the p-sec media is not reporting or rather (conveniently ) cannot be accurately reported:”
What are you talking about? Facts are facts – there is only one source I am relying on, ie the census reports from Indian government. You have no clue what you are talking about. You can have your own opinion about various things – but i challenged only the ‘facts’ that you mentioned. http://socialjustice.nic.in/tab18.pdf is the link if you want to see the full report from Indian government.
Further more, this fear mongering has no basis – for the sake of argument, if I accept that the minority numbers have gone up, same can be said Indian/hindu population in the U.S as well. So are you going to bash hindus in the U.S for that reason? Sorry, you don’t make any sense.
@najeeb There is a difference between statistics and facts. Censuses aren’t objective truths. They’re the results of surveys. Surveys are subject to all sorts of biases that skew the numbers one way or another. In a well designed survey they biases should more-or-less cancel out, but in reality that rarely ever happens.
Even the American census has trouble properly counting the population and routinely undercounts the urban areas and the rural poor. India, which offers even more significant operational difficulties for survey design is likely to get the actual figures even more wrong.
Since much of the Bangladeshi migration he was talking about is illegal, it’s not surprising that they would be reluctant to allow themselves to be counted.
“There is a difference between statistics and facts. Censuses aren’t objective truths. They’re the results of surveys. Surveys are subject to all sorts of biases that skew the numbers one way or another”
When you find a better method, let the world know please. At the same time, you have no trouble accepting the numbers written by people with an agenda. Great!
ok, this is off topic but related to the interloping thread of indian christianity: the dilemma i face as a liberal coming from a fundamentalist (pentecostal) background (the religious change of my family in one generation is astounding when i realize that my father was baptized jacobite, raised csi, and became pentecostal after being in the states in the 70s/80s) is how to separate fact from fiction in what i see as a religious struggle among different groups aimed at the “souls” of the indian poor…i hear of the evangelicals who proselytize to the poor and claim to be prosecuted by the rss and then i hear of hindu fundamentalist groups complaining of forced conversions by the evangelical movement. i get sickened when i hear indian and american pastors pray for their version of christianity to spread throughout india…but if a person wants to convert, why can’t they? i’ve heard of violence that has been done (which gives fodder for the evangelicals–it reminds them of the 1st century persecution of the christians) but can’t everyone just live and let live and use words in a nonviolent fashion against agents of intolerence (such as against the evangelicals)? i guess i’m trying to find an appropriate approach to an irrational subject such as religion…it seems religion defines who you are in india, sorta like caste, no? you change your religion, you change fundamentally who you or your family are…case in point, my cousin who was part of the church of south india, became pentecostal, but in order to marry a catholic girl, converted back to being anglican but before he did so, he had to sign a document stating that what he did in converting to being pentecostal was wrong before he was welcomed back into the church…how silly and so sad.
29 · najeeb said
Wow. Defensive much? I said that it’s very likely that the formal census numbers are an undercount. I gave you actual statistical reasons why they are likely to be undercounted. I didn’t say I had a better method. In fact, this method is perfectly fine as long as you’re willing to acknowledge its shortcomings and compensate for them in your analysis. But you’ve obviously failed to actually dispute my claim, instead choosing to accuse me of having an agenda for trying to set the record straight about your numbers.
The fact that you are going to tie yourself to the mast with the census numbers despite my having pointed out that they are an undercount actually says more about your agenda than mine.
31 · NV said
your latest amendment to your original response is very different in tone from your original statement, which did not call into question any of the tenuous competing claims, but only chose to cast doubt on najeeb’s. this is not the first thread on which you’ve chosen to engage in selective clarification.
I dated a Southern Baptist once. On the 4th date she started trying to gently convince me to go to church with her. A few weeks later she started communicating her grave concerns about my soul. I said “namaskaram” and bid her “good day” after that.
It’s not just an Indian thing. Religion is a fundamental part of a lot of peoples’ lives. I didn’t hold anything against her for wanting me to convert initially. I didn’t actually start to feel offended until she started bad mouthing my own religious beliefs by implying that I was ignorant or deluded.
In a society governed by laws this may be appropriate. But it’s not just a matter of demographics. It’s a matter of electoral politics and economic power. The Indian government’s habit of doling out patronage based along ethnic, religious, or other lines means the more Christians there are in an area the fewer jobs and government monies are available for non-Christians. It also doesn’t help that American evangelical churches are actively funding separatist movements in India’s NorthEast. Boy does that ever get the nationalists in a furor.
Apart from the safai karamcharis of Karachi, some of whom are related to the Balmikis, Satnamis, and Ravidasias, a fair number of Sindhi and Kutchi Hindus too stayed back in Karachi and other parts of Sindh. In fact there is one Hindu majority district in all of Pakistan and it is in Sindh. Due to a disintegration of the Hindu communities in Pakistan for various reasons, the safai karamcharis have had no one to turn to among their own, further unlike in India, where there has been a constant attempt to reform and rehabilitate the most marginalised among the dalits, the better off Hindus of Pakistan have taken no responsibility. Some of these families have embraced Christianity, and are widely employed in public sector notably the Pakistan Railways. The educational institutions set up by the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Pakistan have grown and prospered and educate the elite Muslims of Pakistan in both Punjab and Sindh (who have gone on to join the elite themselves), thus helping secure a measure of protection for themselves and the Christian community from the excesses of fundamentalist organizations. But here again the humble folk who live in the less affluent neighborhoods still live in fear of violence, and recent events have shaken the community. Christians have served with distinction in the Pakistani military, with the air force producing fine officers in Cecil Choudhary, Pete O’Reilly, and Merwyn Middlecoat (the last of whom went missing in action), but all that seems to have ended in 1971, after which the Pak military adopted a strong Islamicist orientation. I am not sure if there have been any Christian judges after the late Justice Cornelius of the Supreme Court. Some sportswriters (all Muslim) in Pakistan wrote about their speculation over the conversion of Mohammed Yousuf (then Yousuf Yohanna), and warned against what they saw as an excessive interference by Tablighi and Jaiat elements in the affairs of the Pakistan cricket team. The same writers alleged that Yousuf was told that he would never be considered either for captaincy if he remained a Christian. It is not known if there was any such pressure on Danish Kaneria (a Hindu). Yousuf’s conversion was a bit of a surprise because I remember, so vividly, seeing him cross himself when he scored a 50 in Madras in 1996 – he was a Christian then – and standing apart when the rest of the team performed their prayers on Friday that week in Madras.
32 · nuh uh said
Yes, being attacked by people who have an axe to grind tends to change my tone. What are the competing claims? What makes them tenuous? Kiran’s numbers didn’t seem especially unbelievable to me, but being as how I don’t know how Kiran got his numbers I can’t really comment on his methodology can I?
But fine, I’ll admit it. I’m more likely to correct people on the wrong side of an issue than on the right one. STOP THE PRESSES!
35 · NV said
how unbiased of you. great that your ability to judge right from wrong is so perfect.
ah, that was najeeb’s fault! being transparent about his methodology. good to know your standards for judging right from wrong.
I just recently started attending Latin (Western) Catholic church because there are no Orthodox or native Indian churches where I live and I’m still deciding whether I should keep going because there’s definitely a “us and them” tone in the sermons that I find difficult to deal with. I come from a religiously mixed family and I’ve never noticed that in the native Indian churches and I love them for it. Still, I should add, I find evangelizing (which the native churches don’t do) incredibly distasteful and I hate the discord that it’s causing in India, but I think we should also acknowledge that persecuting and killing converts and evangelizers is horrible. I’m proud of the religious tolerance that is the desi tradition and all sides are contributing to it’s destruction right now.
25 · Ikram said
Ikram,
I am looking at the link you sent. What you are quoting is what you want to believe in. I am not talking about 1951, I am interested in 1947, immediately after Independence. Did you read the whole article? Read the summary after Table. 2 35% of the minority population in Pakistan and 26% of the minority population in Bangladesh were unaccounted. Thanks for the link though.
Thanks Jyotsana. Is the Dawn founded by Pothen Joseph the same as the Dawn in Pakistan? Their online editorials are usually quite well-informed and they also have a Parsee gentleman, Mr Cowasgee, as part of the editorial board.
I wanted to add that Sikhs seem to have done ok in Pakistan judging by the flickr pix on Nankana Saheb, Punja sahib. Does anyone have any stats on the sikh population and trends in Pakistan? Also, do Sikhs in India, rest of world do pilgrimages into Pakistan, givn the roots of the religion in that part of punjab?
fyi – Here’s a portrait of a lady praying at nankana sahib in pakistan.
fyi – here’s a woman playing holi at the lahore krishan mandir
didymus,
I will try to answer your qn. Considering that you are born here and know little about dynamics in India it will be very difficult to bridge the gap. But I will try. First try reading the link I shared with Anna earlier. Read the comments in that essay also. Couple that with this link about Bush nexus.
Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists are not actively seeking ‘souls’. Same with sufi version muslims and Indic Christians. The ones who do are the radical kind. I believe the material provided above is enough to rest the claims and counter claims. RSS does have programmes to reclaim the lost flock but it’s ‘reactive’.
Sure. Voluntary conversion happens rarely. Anyone is free to change their religion on their volition. The issue that is tearing societal fabric apart in India is conversion that happens using enticement, inducement, fraud, allurement or coercion.
Please see these and you decide.
Absolutely. If you want to be a student of India and Conversion please read this.
Christians in Punjab and Sindh had been quite active post 1945 in their support for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League. Even before the final phase of the movement, leading Indian Christians like Pothan Joseph had rendered valuable services as journalists and propagandists of the Muslim League
I searched and read a few articles about Pothan Jseph. Looks like he has worked in quite a few newspapers and Dawn is one among those. Seems like he resigned from Dawn much earlier to partition. I don’t think it can be construed as supporting Jinnah or Muslim league atleast with what we know.
But I agree that there is a quite a bit of support for Jinnah from non Muslim leaders in his India partition plans after 1940. I recently read about meetings between Jinnah, Ambedkar and Periyar in the early 40s where the Pakistan, Dalitstan(Maharstan ??) and Dravidastan ideas were floated. Recently , Karunanidhi the current chief minister of Tamil nadu said in a Muslim meeting how he waved the Muslim league flag and shouted for Pakistan in the early 1940s. ( he..he.. don’t know if the Muslims now like to be reminded of old history. 🙂 ) I think even the communist party supported partitioning India into many pieces. A lot of non Congress leaders were toying with their own fiefdoms and not letting the “upper caste” Congress to get all the spoils.
Hi people, this is my first ever post on Sepiamutiny. I’ve been skimming the thread for a couple of years, and I am quite surprised that many people here have never met Indian Christians.
I’m a British born Punjabi who’s now located in LA. My father was a Ravidassia from a Muslim village, my mother was born into a Ravidassia family and raised as Sikh, and me, well I had a Christian education, attended Bible study, Sunday school etc. Personally, I’m not religious, but I’ll call myself a Hindu if anybody asks.
I grew up around loads of Indian Christians in UK, all Punjabi. These families were Christian in India before they moved to the UK in the 1960s. I’d say the Indians around me were probably 40% Hindu Untouchables, 40% Christian untouchables, 15% Jatt Sikh, and a few of other castes. There were never any issues about religion anyway.
I have a few relatives in UK who converted to Christianity, and nobody minds. There’s no issues over it. They just carry on the same as they did before, and they’ll still do stuff like Diwali etc. Contrast this with my dad’s friend’s daughters in Delhi. They were converted by American missionaries and refused to enter the Krishna Janambhoomi mandir, because it was “pagan”.
Most Punjabi Christians are of the Choora caste. Many keep the last name “Masih” (Messiah).
There are many incidents of in Pakistan of Muslims kidnapping Christian girls who are never seen again. This happened to the niece of a Punjabi Christian guy I know.
There’s actually very little Hindus in UK converting to Christianity. Christianity is dying in Europe anyway, so there’s not really any inclination for people to go that way. The whole Evangelical crap in the US doesn’t really exist in the UK. Church of England Christianity is very inclusive and gentle.
The Christianity that these aggressive evangelicals believe in is nothing like the Christianity that I grew up surrounded by.
“People of the Book” – that is the term in Islam to describe the followers of the two preceding Abrahamic religions, Jews and Christians. “People of the Book” in an Islamic state are given “Dhimmi” status. It is to those whose religions are allowed Dhimmi status that there is no compulsion in religion. For those who are not allowed Dhimmi status they are treated differently.
Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East: “Unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam squarely confronts the problem of religious tolerance, and lays down both the extent and the limits of the tolerance to be accorded to the other faiths. For Muslims. the treatment of the religious other is not a matter of opinion or choice, of changing interpretations and judgments according to circumstances. It rests on scriptural and legal texts, that is to say, for Muslims on holy writ and sacred law. These texts and laws make certain basic distinctions among non-Muslim religions and their followers. The first and most crucial is theological. Certain specified religions possess a scripture which Islam recognizes as authentic, or rather, to be precise, as having been authentic. Three are named in the Quran, as the Jews, the Christians, and the somewhat mysterious Sabians. In the Muslim perception, Judaism and Christianity were predecessors of Islam, earlier stages in the sequence of prophetic revelations sent by God to mankind, and thus in a sense of Islam itself…Those who follow a religion which is not specified as lawful that is to say, who do not have a recognized sacred scripture, are not to be allowed the tolerance of the Muslim state. Their choice is conversion or death, which may be commuted to enslavement. This did not present any great problem in the countries of the Middle East in the earliest areas of Islamic expansion – in the Fertile Crescent, North Africa, Sicily, Spain – because everybody was either Christian or Jewish. It presented some problem in Iran, where most people were Zoroastrians, and even more when Muslims got to India and confronted Hindus, who were manifestly polytheist and appeared to be idol-worshippers.”
Bernard Lewis – ISLAM AND THE WEST “However, the principle has always been adopted in Muslim law and usually in practice that Christians and Jews – but not atheists, polytheists, or idolaters – are entitled to the tolerance and protection of the Muslim State…. …The Zoroastrians, seen by secular nationalists as the custodians of the true Iranian national identity, are viewed with corresponding suspicion by devout Muslims and are in any case too few to matter. The Baha’is, followers of a post-Muslim dispensation, are as such excluded from the tolerance prescribed by the Shari’a. Under the shah, they flourished and achieved a palce of some consequence in Iran. Under the republic, those who persist in their faith are proscribed outlaws… …For Jews and Christians, followers of religions recognized by Islamic law, this status is one of protected subordination, with some but not all of the rights of the Muslim compatriots. For those who practice nonrecognized religions, like the Baha’is in Iran, the Ahmadis in Pakistan, and the followers of African religions in the southern Sudan, the strict application of shari’a law would give them the choice between conversion and death, with the latter possibly commuted to enslavement.�
There — corrected it for you.
The Christian tradition and Islamic tradition aren’t paragons of tolerance as any visit to Elephanta / Mathura will show.
Actually skip Mathura, or looking up Jazia, or anything to do with Islam – it is ridiculous to even suggest that the muslim rule of India was a paragon of tolerence. If you think so I guess you feel that the Hindu Kush mountains were so named because Hindus were happy.
For the Christian presence, which was far less bloody, a simple Google of forced conversions in India under the Portuguese will show. Or a simple look through the Wikipedia entry on forced conversions
The only thing that Hindus can be grateful for was that the British were becoming more secular a large extent by the time they ruled most of India (As we can see of the acceptance of Disraeli who was born a Jew as a Prime Minster — something that would had been unthinkable a few decades prior to this).
Since they were far more interested in just looting India than on imposing religion, Hinduism was able to survive and revive itself. This became especially true after 1857, when decided that needlessly antagonizing people on the basis of their religion, was not worth risking the empire for.
44 · SomeBodyUk said
I think Anna and some others here were talking about Pakistani Christians, not Indian Christians. That said, your information on Punjabi Christians from UK was interesting as well as the background about the Masihs that I see many times when Pakistani Christians are mentioned.
46 · DizzyDesi said
THE Christian presence? That’s unfair and insulting. There was a Christian presence well before those Portuguese @$$#o!?$ persecuted both Hindus AND the existing Christians in Kerala (for not bowing down to their pope). It’s easy to point to glaring examples to make a point, difficult to be fair and nuanced.
43 · Ponniyin Selvan said
Most blogs in Sepia gets so divisive when it comes to religion, caste, ethnicity. I wonder many times whether India will remain united as people become more literate and wealthy. The passion about religion, caste in India is certainly on rise with the rise of wealth and achievement of education in India. Many a times I wonder the old untouchable system would come back as they have more money and education. But one comfortable fact that calms me is that the people of India will remain united, because the effect of getting divided would be horrible. There would not be an end to the division in India, if that process ever starts(which I am sure will not happen). There are very little in common between two Indians(other than love of Bollywood, which is so uncool). There are very little in common between 2 people in US, but that will have to include taste of liquor, politics, genre of music, political party, sexual preference etc. So guys, Why dont we ask Indian people to chill out, drink more liquor, smoke more of the native stuff, practice more of Kamasutra etc. The normal course of an Indian now is to go to school, get educated, become a doctor, engineer (everyone else used to be losers). I am wondering why the liquor companies are not doing well in India(exception Kerala).
13 · oldtime-SMer said
Thank you for staying with SM for so long, and for such an interesting addition to this discussion!
14 · alybaba said
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences– they made this thread a valuable read!
15 · zee said
That is so kind of you. Thank you, I really appreciate it.
24 · sebs said
I am an idiot. 🙂 Can’t believe I missed it.
30 · didymus said
I am glad you commented, even if it was tangential to the topic because I wanted to hear a Penty’s perspective. I’ve heard of so many Jacobites being drawn to the Pentecostal/Fundamental side of things. It was good to hear from you.
34 · jyotsana said
!!! This post took an hour longer than I expected because I was trying to find more information about Yousuf Yohanna! I wasn’t satisfied with the links I encountered, that’s the only reason he wasn’t included. Thank you so much for your comments– they are really helpful.
37 · Lea said
I’ve done that, when there were no Orthodox churches near…hope you find a place you feel welcome and comforted. :\
44 · SomeBodyUk said
I am honored that you delurked because of this little post! 🙂 What an informative comment you left, too.
47 · Nobody said
Thank you for clarifying that for me. 🙂 And I agree with how you re: how interesting SomeBodyUK’s information was.