Religious Pluralism in Darjeeling and Sikkim Brian Hoffert

Religious Pluralism in Darjeeling and Sikkim Brian Hoffert Abstract In the summer of 2018, I participated in an AsiaNetwork Faculty Enhancement Program (ANFEP) on Religion in National and International Affairs in China and India. Each day of our three week trip was packed with visits to religious sites and meetings with top scholars, but the nine days we spent in the regions of Darjeeling and Sikkim made a particularly strong impression on me. As a religious studies professor, I have an academic interest in the issue of religious pluralism, but what I experienced in Darjeeling and Sikkim went beyond mere respect for religious diversity or even a willingness to discover sacred truth in other traditions, for in these foothill communities of the Himalayas, religious pluralism is deeply embedded in the very fabric of society. This essay is my attempt to convey the flavor of religious pluralism in the region by reflecting on some of my most memorable experiences from the trip. Keywords: Darjeeling, Sikkim, Himalayas, Religious Pluralism, Animism, Interfaith Dialogue Preface: In the summer of 2018, I participated in an AsiaNetwork Faculty Enhancement Program (ANFEP) on Religion in National and International Affairs in China and India. The program, which was generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought ten American liberal arts professors to Hong Kong, Guangdong (Canton province) and northeast India (Kolkata, Darjeeling and Sikkim). Each day of our three week trip was packed with visits to religious sites and meetings with top scholars, but the nine days we spent in the regions of Darjeeling and Sikkim made a particularly strong impression on me. As a religious studies professor, I have an academic interest in the issue of religious pluralism. In my experience, most of the religious communities that I have interacted with in both North America and Asia have exhibited a genuine respect for religious diversity and an openness to interfaith dialogue and other forms of engagement with a variety of religious traditions. What I experienced in Darjeeling and Sikkim, however, went beyond an appreciation for religious diversity or even a willingness to discover sacred truth in other traditions, for in these foothill communities of the Himalayas, religious pluralism is deeply embedded in the very fabric of society. The following essay is my attempt to convey the flavor of religious pluralism in the region by reflecting on some of my most memorable experiences from the trip. One of the special characteristics of rural communities in Northeast India is the samaj. According to dictionary.com, a samaj is “a Hindu religious society or movement,” though in this part of India the emphasis is on “society” rather than “religion.” Indeed, we were told that the local samaj typically includes residents from various religions who share in each other’s religious customs. For example, if a couple is getting married, all will pitch in to make the necessary preparations and participate in the associated religious rituals and members of the community participate in each other’s religious festivals. While this seems to be a good recipe for religious tolerance, it was noted during a Seminar on Religious Pluralism that we attended one morning that seemingly harmonious communities have exploded into religious violence before. For example, when Yugoslavia was broken up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims slaughtered each other even though they had previously lived together harmoniously. There are, in fact, social issues that have the potential to disrupt the religious harmony for which the region is well known, though religious pluralism (i.e., harmonious relations between adherents of different religions and/or religious denominations that go beyond a mere tolerance for diversity) is such a defining feature of the region that it is likely to endure for the foreseeable future. Our first stop in the Darjeeling district was the Makaibari Tea Estates. During our tour of the tea fields, the manager mentioned that there had recently been a three-month general strike in the district, which Makaibari supported despite the tremendous cost to the company (they lost an entire year’s harvest and it took several months to rehabilitate the tea plants once the workers returned). To be clear, Makaibari has a long history of treating its employees well; indeed, on April 12, 2017 Swaraj Kumar Banerjee, the current heir of the family that began the estate, gifted his remaining 12% share in the company to the workers (Giri 2018). As we found out, the Makaibari employees (and the people of Darjeeling more generally) were not striking for higher wages, but in response to the West Bengal government’s announcement that Bengali would be a compulsory subject for grades 1-10 across the state (Staff 2017). At the time, I didn’t have enough information to fully appreciate the sociopolitical factors that led to the strike, though after picking up additional details during the trip and doing further research at home, I learned that the so-called “Gorkhaland Agitations” date back to the 1980s, when Subhash Gisingh initiated demands for a separate state in the Darjeeling region. The movement turned violent and ultimately led to the deaths of over 1200 people (Wikipedia, n.d., “Gorkhaland”). In 2010, conflict within the movement led to the assassination of Madan Tamang, a political leader who was hacked to death by supporters of a rival faction for his insistence that the Gorkhaland issue be resolved through negotiation rather than violence (Wikipedia, n.d., “Madan Tamang”). One of the professors that we met lost his father to such violence when he was young and eleven more died in the 2017 strike. The term “Gorkha” refers to a conglomeration of various tribal ethnicities, each of which has its own language, though the entire region has adopted Nepali as the lingua franca. Whenever I asked someone about the languages they spoke, they always listed a minimum of three (their mother tongue, Nepali, and English), though none of the people I asked spoke Bengali; this was already a controversial issue, so the West Bengal government’s move to impose this language on the region would appear to have been an intentional provocation. In any case, the Gorkhaland separatist movement has considerable support in Darjeeling district and therefore serves as a unifying force, though as the assassination of Madan Tamang demonstrates, issues that unify can quickly become disagreements that divide. In the words of Yonah Bhutia, “The movement for separate state status of Gorkhaland ventilated dissatisfaction with the prevailing level of low development and it also shows growing consciousness as regards ethnic identity…. In the wake of cultural, linguistic and political dominance by the Nepalis, the demand for Gorkhaland raised questions as regards the position of other ethnic communities in the region…. [In particular, there has been a] marginalization of the Lepchas who are considered to be the original inhabitants of the region” (Bhutia 1996, 7). It is also worth noting that the West Bengal government has been encouraging the revival of tribal identities by providing economic benefits for “scheduled tribes” (i.e., tribes that have historically been disadvantaged), which could “open up space for inter-community conflicts based on differential political affiliations” (Sarkar 2014). As an outsider with insufficient information to reasonably evaluate the issue, it is not my place to weigh in on the question of whether Gorkhaland independence would ultimately be good or bad for the region. It does, however, seem likely that independence would increase the amount of internal conflict in the region, as the various ethnic and social groups that are currently unified against the state and national governments would refocus their attention on power struggles within a new state administration. As the above discussion suggests, Darjeeling is not immune to social and political conflict and has experienced a considerable amount of violence over the past few decades. Yet religion has not been a significant source of tension, despite the fact that in April of 2017 the Pew Research Center ranked India as the fourth worst country in the world for religious hostilities (Pew Research Center 2017). This is a complicated issue with many facets, but it is surely worth noting that religious intolerance is implicit in the official “Hindutva” (Hinduness) ideology of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which “many Indian social scientists have described…as fascist, adhering to the concept of homogenised majority and cultural hegemony (Wikipedia, n.d., “Hindutva”). In the words of George Plathottam, Director of the National Institute of Social Communications, Research and Training, “Hindutva has permeated much of the fabric of Indian society, polity and culture. The dangerous, or at times catastrophic, ramifications are there before our eyes or are unfolding” (Plathottam 2012, 38). So, what are they doing right in Darjeeling and Sikkim—and to what extent can their “recipe” for religious harmony be exported to other parts of India? In the aforementioned Seminar on Religious Pluralism, T. B. Subba (a highly respected anthropologist who recently served as the Vice Chancellor of Sikkim University) suggested that the successful development of religious pluralism in the region was due to what he called the “sedimentation” of religious traditions. According to this theory, non-indigenous religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity are merely the surface layers of a belief system that is ultimately grounded on a substratum of animism—the idea that all things, both animate and inanimate, possess some type of spiritual essence. This process of sedimentation is particularly clear in the case of Tibetan Buddhism (the primary form of Buddhism in the region), which continues to preserve animistic elements from pre-Buddhist Himalayan traditions. Yet we saw evidence of a similar layering of traditions in the two churches that we visited in Kalimpong.

Load more