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Point of No
Return?
Or to Re-think and Re-engage?
Mansukh Kaur
 BALLAN: So, is
this the final point of No Return? Have the Ravidassias finally
moved out of the loose folds of Sikhism? By not having the prakash
of Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji at the bhog ceremony of the deceased
leader of the Dera Sachkhand Ballan sect, has the dera indicated a
permanent shift away from the larger Sikh panth/ And can the dera
leadership thus collectively and so wholly control the minds of the
dera followers who have bowed before Sri Guru Granth Sahib and have
identified themselves with the casteless Sikhism? Will they suddenly
now turn towards Hinduism? What will they tell the Census 2011 man
soon about what to fill in the column of Religion?
And must the
SGPC and the other Sikh organisations immediately draw conclusions
from this one move, no matter how seemingly decisive?
Eighteen days
after Sant Rama Nand was gunned down in
Vienna,
allegedly by radical Sikhs, what really does the decision of the
sect mean if it has indicated a shift in religious practice by not
having the parkash of Guru Granth Sahib on the occasion of antim
ardas of the slain preacher?
 The 109-year-old
Dera Sachkhand Ballan follows the teachings of the 14th century
Bhakti preacher Ravidas who belonged to a low caste and is regarded
as a “bhagat” bythe Sikhs though his followers worship him as a
guru, a sore point with a section of the Sikhs. The Ravidas
community’s practice of calling their current chiefs gurus was being
resented by these Sikhs since they do not accept bowing before a
living guru, that too in the presence of Sri Guru Granth Sahib.
The Indian
media, almost full of unconcealed glee, reported that “the dera made
a significant departure from its own traditions by not organizing
the akhand path” and that “the palanquin, usually bearing Sikhs’
holy book, instead held the portrait of Sant Sarwan Dass in whose
name the dera was established a century ago.”
Forgotten in a
split second was the universality and common heritage of the Sikh
scriptures and there was not a single comment on the sect’s utter
disregard towards the message of universal welfare that the
scriptures hold aloft. Not one journalist or editor had it coming
that here was a sect which, after a singular jolt of a loss of life,
was giving up on a heritage of centuries and the only scripture that
has helped preserve and disseminate the words of the very man that
the sect considers Guru.
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At a macro level, the entire episode has brought to the fore the
issue of identity of Adharmis to centrestage, and has also
pushed the Sikhs to once again engage with the issue as to why
the large sections of the marginalised that had turned towards
Sikhism for succour are now drifting away and how the forces of
Brahmanism are working beneath many such conspiracies to weaken
the lure and strength of Sikhism. |
It takes
dedicated refusal and utter blindness to miss a point that could be
subtle only for a non-hybrid buffalo. But then when was Indian
journalism last accused of having subtlity as a quality? It smugly
reported that the shift in practice was a ‘reaction to
Vienna incident’
and ‘a decision of sants of the dera’.
The 40 hymns and
a shloka of Guru Ravidass that was read out at the final prayers
were the very bani of Sant Ravidas enshrined in the Guru Granth
Sahib.
At a macro
level, the entire episode has brought to the fore the issue of
identity of Adharmis to centrestage, and has also pushed the Sikhs
to once again engage with the issue as to why the large sections of
the marginalised that had turned towards Sikhism for succour are now
drifting away and how the forces of Brahmanism are working beneath
many such conspiracies to weaken the lure and strength of Sikhism.
It is time for
the community to take note of how the innumerable deras are being
perceived as providing support to the marginalised castes, something
that should have come naturally from the Sikh elite.
There is no
denying the rising dalit consciousness in
Punjab and
Haryana and the massive political clout that the different deras
wield in Punjab. The violent episode has also showcased is the
casteist undertones to social interactions among the Indian
Diaspora.
In fact, those
disappointed that casteism was not accepted as a form of racism at
the recent United Nations conference on racism at
Geneva, are
hopeful that this incident will help bring international support to
their argument.
 Many Ravidassias
follow a number of Sikh practices and call their places of worship gurdwaras. The
Ad Dharm movement started by a Ravidass follower, Mangoo Ram, in the
1920s brought many of the Chamar caste into its fold and it has a
number of gurdwaras in the
UK and elsewhere
in Europe.
As a recent
editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly, a respected Left
leaning journal in
India has
brought about, the dalits, especially in the Doaba region, have
moved up economically over the past few decades, but have found no
improvement in their social position. In other places, the emphasis
by the deras on social service and campaigns against alcohol and
narcotic abuse has helped garner large numbers of devotees,
especially women.
The
socio-economic growth of the deras has begun to be re-flected in an
increasing political clout as is obvious by the deference shown to
the chiefs by all political parties before the assembly and
parliamentary elections.
The popularity
of these deras, however, is directly linked to the perception among
the backward castes in
Punjab and
Haryana that the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) is
dominated by the upper castes. That the SGPC is close to the
Shiromani Akali
Dal (Badal) in
Punjab is also a
source of discomfiture for these sections. Many within the Sikh
community feel that only a genuine effort on the part of Sikh
institutions to involve the lower and backward castes will help stem
the increasing sense of alienation that these sections feel and the
periodic violent outbursts, which are a symptom of this alienation.
By themselves
such divergences do not necessarily imply a weakness in the body of
research from which they emerge, and can even indicate a vibrant
blossoming of ideas. Unfortunately, in the present case, each of
these two contradictory accounts seems to be oblivious of the
other’s claims and interpretations. Implicit in each narrative is a
denial of the other’s validity. It appears that both accounts fail
to live up to the demands of both falsifiability and coherence by
refusing to accommodate or even accept the challenges posed by the
other account.
It does appear
that the problem is not so much with the depiction of facts per se,
as it is with the theoretical apparatus which is employed to collect
these facts and make sense of them.
While structural
and systemic critiques have failed to integrate the working of
democracy in their interpretative framework, studies of democracy
and democratic theory have not paid sufficient attention to the
structural foundations of underdevelopment. The inability to bridge
this chasm weakens the social sciences as “debates” between
researchers do not lead to a conversation between them or to the
possibility of transcending the given problem. One of the challenges
before social sciences is to transcend this contradiction within its
own body and work towards a richer and better understanding of the
linkages between democracy and underdevelopment.
17
June 2009
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