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Is this the final
split?
Mansukh Kaur
So, is this the
final point of No Return? Have the Ravidassias finally moved out of
the folds of Sikhism? They were in any case loosely held inside the
folds. Now they have said they are a separate religion. They have a
separate form of greeting. They have even moved away from Guru
Granth Sahib.
The move had
started right when it was time for the bhog ceremony for the slain
leader of the Dera Sachkhand Ballan sect when the dera did not have
the prakash of Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji. It had indicated a
permanent shift away from the larger Sikh panth.
Now, even as
much talk is on about the dera’s shift away, no one within the
Ravidassia community is posing the simplest and deadliest of the
questions: Is it a sign of progress of a people who, having
collectively remained connected to Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji and
having identified themselves with the casteless Sikhism, now decide
to move closer to 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?
The 110-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” by the 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 moving away from
Sikhism 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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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. 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. |
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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 subtlety 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’.
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 succor 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 latest episode has also showcased the casteist
undertones to social interactions among Punjabis.
Unfortunately,
casteism was not accepted as a form of racism at the last United
Nations conference on racism at
Geneva, but the
central truth of the argument remains and has been well recognized.
Many Ravidassias
follow a number of Sikh practices and call their places of worship
Gurdwaras, and
many will continue to do so. It is for the Sikh leadership and the
SGPC to present the face of Sikhism that brings out its universal
welfare message and its concept of castelessness. Why have we over a
period of centuries not been able to convince a large number of
marginalized and discriminated against people in
Punjab
itself to come into the fold of Sikhism?
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
their 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.
3 February 2010
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