Reconstructing Religious Tolerance in South Mumbai Mumbai, India Colby College Sarah Joseph Kurien, India, Mahindra United World College of India
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
In Peaces: Reconstructing Religious Tolerance in South Mumbai Mumbai, India Colby College Sarah Joseph Kurien, India, Mahindra United World College of India Ia. My Project for Peace aimed to revisit and strengthen our national ideals of tolerance and openness by educating children from economically impoverished communities about different faiths and their traditions. I chose to work with students from South Mumbai’s slums because it is in these areas that several fundamentalist organizations concentrate their recruitment resources. Ib.. I modified my project slightly in order to accommodate changed ground realities in Mumbai. The organization I had originally intended to work with, Meljol, was unable to procure local government permission to work in South Mumbai’s public schools in the time frame that I had envisioned. Faced with an indeterminate wait were I to continue partnering with Meljol, I decided to approach Akanksha, an NGO that enrolls children from slum communities in Mumbai’s public schools and provides them with after-school classes to better equip them for classroom life. Akanksha agreed to let me work with children in their South Mumbai centers. I was therefore able to work with the same population of children as proposed, albeit in their after-school programs instead of in their public schools. Given the changed circumstances and the fact that I was no longer working with public school teachers in their classrooms, I decided to use the funds originally allocated to the Teacher Awareness Training Conference to improve upon the field trip and classroom discussion aspects of my project. Due to this redistribution of project funds, I was able to take students on longer and more in-depth field trips to various sites of religious importance around the city. The teachers of the classrooms in which I worked were unbelievably supportive, and constitute an important aspect of my projects success. I approached each teacher with my ideas for sessions with their students, and they invariably had a lot of valuable feedback that helped me understand and evaluate the needs of each class differently. One of the teachers introduced me to the video “Another Way of Seeing Things” which helped spark classroom discussion about the persistence of Islamophobia after 9/11, and the ways in which our students could help combat prejudice and bigotry. During our structured class sessions, students discussed the history of communal violence in India, the reasons for continued animosity amongst various religious communities, and the ways in which their religious leaders fanned or extinguished sentiments of religious hatred amongst their congregations. As with most such discussions, the proposed solutions were often large- scale. Some of the students suggested revamping our political structure and banning parties that relied on religious factionalism to obtain votes. However, students also suggested several individual steps, like trying to spark similar discussions with their families and communities, which suggested that they intended to continue raising tolerance long after our discussions were over. The teachers of these classrooms intend to pursue similar sessions with their students to come, and their colleagues from other centers outside of South Mumbai have expressed interest in conducting like discussions in their classrooms as well. Through the sustained efforts of the teachers I worked with, and those of their colleagues, the spirit of my project will be carried forward within Akanksha classrooms. Apart from the in-class sessions on religious tolerance, which involved discussion, theater and various activities, I also took students on educational field trips that allowed them to visit different places of worship around Mumbai. Although not all the students from each center were able to come on the trips, the majority of them that had attended the trips were able to share their experiences in debrief sessions the following week. I took each group of students to the Haji Ali Dargah, a Sunni Barelvi mosque and mausoleum that is arguably the most famous place of worship for Muslims in Mumbai. After the visit to Haji Ali, we went to the Ban Ganga temple and tank where students immersed themselves in what Hindus believe is a holy reservoir of water before they visited the temple located on the same property. The next stop for each group was the Holy Name Cathedral in Colaba, which is the seat of the archdiocese of Mumbai. Due to the fact that Parsi shrines forbid entry to non-Parsis, we were unable to visit any such sites in Mumbai. The field-trips were followed by debrief sessions in the classroom where students were able to reflect upon their collective experience, and relate the ways in which their perspectives on other religions had changed after our discussions and field trips. We also spent a considerable amount of time talking about the architecture and layout of the different buildings that we had visited, the similarities and differences between the sites, and their individual histories. IIa. When our group of students had come back to the bus after visiting the Holy Name Cathedral, one of the boys came up to me and asked, “Didi1 can you please tell us more about Jesus? We don’t know what happened after his friend betrayed him.” As I looked down on the expectant faces of Hindu and Muslim students waiting to hear more of the Bible story, I realized that maybe this was what we needed. Perhaps the new dawn of religious tolerance and communal harmony for India will not be ushered in with clanging cymbals and loud drums but rather, in the quiet beginnings of people exchanging the stories of their different faiths in the back of a hired bus. This summer, I learnt that peace can indeed be imagined and negotiated by small groups of people who are willing to listen and learn from each other, and to negotiate spaces between indoctrination and various versions of truth. I started to believe that I can help create my ideal community through small steps like the ones I took this summer. What I found through my project for peace was not a tangible sense of achievement in the field of social justice but rather, a growing group of people who are committed to the same type of world that I am. The students, teachers and religious leaders that I met through this project are an immediate and important threat to the religious fanaticism and hate-mongering that continue to plague our lives and our realities and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to help solidify our cause. Ultimately, undertaking this project has also contributed enormously to my sense of personal responsibility and commitment to helping reconstruct the climate religious tolerance and communal harmony in Mumbai. Previously, I had criticized the lack of initiative displayed by state and national governments in dealing with the growing menace of fundamentalist people and their politics. While I still believe that such large scale policy measures are necessary, I no longer think that is the only way in which we as a country and a people can combat hatred. My summer project has helped me understand the value of grassroots activism and of building resistance from the ground up. Not only was I able to act against the bigotry that I abhor, but I was also able to do it in the fashion that I had always envisioned. It was both terrifying and enormously empowering to realize that if something was not working well, it was my responsibility and well within my control to change it. Having spent years interning at various non-profits whose strategies I itched to tweak, it was a revelation to be completely in-charge of my own social justice initiative. While the immediate effects of my project are evidenced by the communities I have been privileged to build with students, teachers and religious clerics, I cannot ignore the larger impact that we can make collectively. I am determined to ensure that the ripples we created this summer will help build a more informed and tolerant Mumbai in the years to come. IIb. I used to be extremely comfortable dissecting the social justice initiatives of others from afar, while remaining unwilling to advance alternate solutions of my own. My project for peace this summer has emboldened my will to be on the frontlines of social resistance and change, instead of remaining a frozen spectator. While religious fundamentalists continue to exist, so too should empowered voices of tolerance and hope. I resolve to be one such voice. 1 Older sister Sarah Joseph Kurien and a volunteer with some of the students at the Haji Ali Dargah Mosque. Students preparing their chart for their presentation on the Godhra massacre and its aftermath. Students interacting with a pandit in Ban Ganga. .