Interview with Gabriele Dietrich

Introduction:
    A person of whom I often wondered and wanting to know more about her was Gabriele Dietrich.  She is German by birth and how she naturalised herself to India is a constant question in my mind, whether it is an identity issue, or a survival issue or even a issue of choice.  One fine day in February 2004 I took a trip to Madurai to meet Dr. Gabriele Dietrich.  I want to the Social Analysis Center at the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary in Madurai to meet her.  That was the several occasions I met Dr. Gabriele Dietrich and our meeting was relaxed. I had several questions in my mind and I formulated them point by point.  I was impressed because all of my questions to her ware addressed in a proper manner, without a word of minimizing. 
    I am using initials for our name.  RR stands for Rini Ralte.  Many people know me with Rini in India because people cannot pronounce my full name, and GD stands for Gabriele Dietrich.

RR    1. Where were you born and what was your background and family situation?
GD    I was born in Wedding, a working class district in Berlin in 1943 during a bombardment.  My mother fell down the shelter steps during alarm and they rushed her to hospital once it was over, but she gave birth to a premature baby in a bathroom.  This was told to me frequently when I was a child, because it had been so traumatic.  Only much later, after I myself had given birth and helped young women to practice natural childbirth, I got in touch with my own trauma.  I did have very early memories of the last bombardments and fire and flight.  I also remember hunger and migration.  Most of all I remember when suddenly food was available after my mother took me across the green border during the blockade of Berlin in 1948.  I incredulously looked at all that food and could not even eat, I was not used to it.  I came to know my father when I was five he came home from prisoners’ camp.  He hit me for taking a piece of bread without asking, obviously because of his own years of deprivation.

    My father was a clerk in the district administration and my mother had been a typist.  Only as adults they studied beyond tenth standard through evening classes and other courses and upgraded their education.  So there was a lot of expectation that I should study.  But the schools in which I studied were crowded and uninspiring.  I started taking interest only after tenth standard.  Finally I got a very good scholarship from the Study Foundation of the German People which saw me through up to Ph.D.


RR    2. How did these experiences shape your life?

GD    Obviously I grew up with a great sense of being crushable.  At the same time I marvel at human resilience.  So I have always felt extremely vulnerable.  But I have also always been convinced that people can survive most adverse conditions and find it all quite normal.  I have never been able to take food, shelter and clothing for granted.  My first toy was a teddy bear which I inherited from a little boy next door, whom I vividly remember, Juergele.  He died of cholera.  Later I inherited two dolls from my cousin who migrated to the US.  It made me feel that “having things” had to do with losing somebody.  For almost ten years I mostly grew up in the clothes inherited from this cousin.  But when she visited, we could not feel close, because in the mean time she belonged to a very different culture.

    My parents had been separated by the war for nearly nine years and later divorced.  I was brought up by my mother and grandmother and had no siblings after my cousin left.  This made me to rely on friendship from a very early age.  There were no cars on the roads at that time and we played in big gangs.


RR    3. What did it mean to belong to the first generation after fascism and the holocaust?

GD    It took me some time to comprehend about fascism.  We were busy surviving the devastation and the scarcities of the post-war years, trouping to the soup-kitchen run by the Swedes to escape starvation and things like that.  Also the hassle of occupation armies, as Berlin was partitioned by the ‘allies’.  I remember food queues, the boots of soldiers, tales of rape.  It dawned upon me that the occupation was some kind of a retribution for the conquests of Hitler’s army, in which my own father had served as a soldier.  He had never been in the fascist party.  But since he worked in the administration and was eager not to lose his job, he was in the SA, a fascism mass organization.  His mother was widowed and his brother died in the war.  He was a run of the mill opportunist.  He had to be de-nazified.  He said he never killed anybody.  My mother said she never knew about the concentration camps.  In school, we were shown films, mostly documentaries, on the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the concentration camps.  It became very difficult to live with what we saw and to accept that “nobody had known”.  It implanted in me a tremendous need to live with open eyes and to know and remember and be accountable for a collective history, even though I was born at a point when it all collapsed.  There was this urge of “never again”.  No more war.  Never again fascism, genocide.

    At the same time of course I grew up at the center of the cold war.  I lived in West-Berlin which from 1948 onwards was this island in the “red sea” of the German Democratic Republic, a socialist state.  West Berlin was a symbol of the so-called “free-world”. We were on the road much of the time “to defend democracy”.  Every summer there were threats of a new blockade.  People hoarded food “just in case”.  This situation ended only when the wall was built in1961.

    When I was ten years old, I witnessed two important events.  One was the uprising of the 17th of June, the uprising of the German Democratic Republic workers against the workers’ state, because the state had raised the norms of output and unions were under strict control.  The uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks.  The other thing I remember was the death of Stalin.  I vividly remember the newsreels.  I felt enormous relief at his death because of the Soviet tanks and the show trials against communists.

    About two years later, I read the diary of Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who had been hiding in Amsterdam and later died of typhoid in the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen.  I felt like I myself had lived in hiding in that house in the Prinsengracht.  It was at that time that I first grasped the enormity of fascism and the need to live down racism.


RR    4. What was your relationship to the church?

GD    There was no relationship to any church in my family.  I never saw a church from the inside, though my family had me baptized.  My maternal grandmother, who was a widow and refugee of World War I, had given up on faith as a result of the hardships of her life.  I knew many people who felt that “if God existed, he would not have allowed all these things to happen”.  My mother said it was good for people if they could believe in God.  But it was not clear to me what her own position was.  Nobody ever prayed or read the bible.

    I grew up in pre-television time, but it was quite common to go to the movies.  My knowledge about Christianity was entirely from Cecil de Mille films like “Moses”, “Quo Vadis” and “The Gladiators”.  I was very impressed by these films.  There was no compulsory religious education in schools.  When some classmates went for confirmation class, I felt I also wanted some rite of passage in my life.  Actually, I wanted a secular ritual.  But my family was embarrassed about that, because “people will think we are communists”.  So I reluctantly enrolled in confirmation class.  I found it very interesting and literally lapped it up, started attending bible studies, teaching Sunday class and singing in church choirs.  My mother was quite alarmed.  I discovered that the Confessing Church had been a serious resistance against fascism.  In this sense, I encountered the Christian faith as a liberation theology from the outset.  I decided I wanted to study theology because I wanted to work with people, but my mother and stepfather resisted.  Since I did it anyway, they slowly reconciled.  However, I myself discovered many racist and anti-semitic remnants in Old Testament theology and was appalled by the rigidity of the church structures.  After finishing all the languages, I branched out into Judaism, Indology, Sociology and History of Religions and finally ended up with a Ph.D. in History of Religions with Judaism and Theology as connected subjects.  I never aspired ordination for myself, though of course I feel women should have a right to it.  I cherish church traditions in which the laity is allowed to administer the Eucharist and baptism.  I always had great difficulties with any claim to “absoluteness” of Christianity and with the idea that people are supposed to go to hell if they belong to other religions, or have no religion at all.  I had a deep interest in other religions which had to do with my anti-colonial commitment.  I read Jewish mystics in Hebrew, parts of Bhagavatgita in Sanskrit and Buddhist texts in Pali.  My Ph.D. was on Aztec religion.  Only after coming to India I found it difficult to pursue the study of religion because it was so Brahmin dominated.  I have interacted closely with many Christian denominations, including Catholics, but never felt I belonged to a denomination myself.  Jesus himself did not belong to any denomination.  I always believed in the connection between resurrection and uprising, the need to be with people.

RR    5.  How did you come to India and what were you trying to do?

GD    Coming to India was not a very well planned affair at all.  The idea came basically out of the fact that our generation had been part of the students’ movement.
  
RR    6. Can you explain that?

GD    Well, the students’ movement was in a way the outcome of the two historical problems which I mentioned earlier.  We had to live down the cold war, the conflict between East and West, socialism and Capitalism and we had to live down Fascism and Racism.  I have studied in quite a number of universities in West Germany like Marburg, Muemster and Heidelberg, but I was most involved in the students’ movement in Berlin.  The Free University in Berlin was itself a symbol of the so-called “Free world” asserting itself against socialist dictatorship.  This led to a situation where anything Marxist or Socialist was totally ostracized.  As a result, a journalist, Erich Kuby, who raised the question “How Free is the Free University” was refused permission to speak way back in 1964.  I happened to be in the eye of the storm as my professor Jacob Taubes in the Institute of Judaism where I worked was one of the few supporters of the revolt.  Over the next few years the revolt grew and by 1968 the most burning issues were resistance against the War in Vietnam and resistance against the apartheid-regime in South Africa, as well as university reform.  We were also strongly supported by Helmut Gollwitzer who had been active in the Confessing Church.  We also took strong interest in the revolutionary struggles in various Latin American countries and in the experiments in Tanzania under Julius Niyerere and the struggle against Cabora Bassadam across the Zambezi river.  There was a feeling that the Asian struggles were different, as they had different cultural content, apart from the underlying economic problems.  I was particularly interested in India as I felt there was such a variety of religious and cultural traditions which had fed into the freedom struggle and had at the same time interacted with a variety of socialist and Marxist options.  I was curious to learn from this complex reality, because what I had encountered in Western universities was steeped in colonial hangovers. I never planned to come to “do” anything in particular. I never thought I had a role at all.  I had met Bas Wielenga in the students’ movement in Berlin and when the plan to go to India developed, we decided to get married, as India is not a country where it is easy to live together unmarried.  We were very critical of Western development concepts and basically came to learn in order to understand more about what was then called the “third world”.

RR    7. So how did you go about it?

GD    We had been connected with the Ecumenical Centre Hendrik Kraemer House in Berlin under the leadership of Be’ Ruys.  Due to this, we had a contact with M.M. Thomas.  Through the Youth Commission of the Christian Peace Conference we also had a connection with Margret Flory in 1970 and became the first non-American interns, together with Koos Koster, the Dutch journalist who was later murdered in El Salvador.  We met M.M. Thomas for one hour in the station of Hannover when he came through and he agreed that we could plan a research stint of two years with the CISRS in Bangalore.  We left Europe in December 1971 during the Bangla Desh War.


RR    8. How was it to work under M.M. Thomas at CISRS and how has he influenced you?  How has TTS influenced you?

GD    We felt a great sense of freedom at the CISRS.  M.M. was then the chairperson of the Executive of the WCC and traveled to Geneva frequently.  He also stayed in his house in Thiruvalla frequently.  When in Bangalore he shoved his suitcase under a bed in the CISRS and got on with his work.  He was a great taskmaster and knew how to extract work, to make people read and write.  He was also always keen to create a situation of debate and gave me all his manuscripts to read to get comments.  He encouraged people to figure out what they wanted to do and then expected them to go ahead and do it.  We traveled a great deal and got in touch with Marxists like Ajit Roy of the Marxist Review who became a close friend and who also befriended M.M. Thomas.  We also came to know many Gandhians, most importantly S. Jaganathan and Ms. Krishnammal who had moved to East Thanjavur area after the Kilvenmani incident in which 44 Dalits were burnt in a hut in the end of the sixties, to support Dalit land struggles.  M.M. was very open minded, influenced by Lohia socialism but open to Marxist and Gandhian thought.  He had a strong commitment to participation in nation building and to the marginalized, which he specified to be Harijans, tribals and women. It was only later that the terminology shifted to Dalits and adivasis. Though my own research was mainly in the East Thanjavur area, the work in CISRS helped me to develop a certain grasp of the country as a whole.  I also came to know some of the influential social scientists like A.R. Desai.

RR    9. Did you have any differences with MM?

GD    (Laughs) Actually I first clashed with him when I had been at the youth assembly of the EACC (later renamed CCA) in Singapore in 1973.  I had attended a workshop on women and the report which we brought home was such that, many delegates got into difficulties with their churches over it.  MM was quite disapproving of this report, because we had castigated family violence and accused the churches of being an agent of women’s oppression.  Later he himself became much more of a feminist.

    The other difference I observed was that in the early seventies MM was a modernist who believed in technology driven development.  He said:  We first have to pollute a bit more in order to produce enough to distribute.  Twenty years later he had become much more of an ecologist.

RR    10. Which of his thoughts have influenced you most?

GD    I was very moved by the way he struggled with the quest for personhood in community.  He knew that individualism was not really an option. But for transforming communities from all their casteism, patriarchy and communalism, it was necessary to address the problem of structural sin.  For this, spirituality for combat was required.  But in order not to turn totalitarian in the process, MM emphasized the suffering servant as opposed to the conquering king of colonial history.  I could resonate with this trend of thought very well.  In his old age, MM became a great supporter of social movements and was very close to the NAPM which became very active in the mid nineties.  I still miss him very much.

RR    11. How do you see your work in TTS against this background?

GD    There was continuity and change.  In many ways building up Social Analysis in TTS was a continuation of the earlier work.  I had students from TTS helping me with the field research in East Thanjavur.  Rev. Y. David brought us in touch with the college.  When we were offered to teach in Madurai, we thought of a period of three to five years.  But of course we under-estimated the impact of working in a Tamil medium institution.  This required very profound re-thinking.  It required much deeper cultural adjustments, especially for me as a woman.  It is in many ways a one-way road, very hard to undo after some years, especially after bringing up children in this environment, whose first language was Tamil.  It became a very close integration, it all grows on you, starts running in your blood, as they say.  But at the same time, I also felt a great sense of freedom in TTS.  I was always able to move about with social movements far beyond the horizon of the institution, which in turn has also enriched the understanding of many people.  For this I am thankful.  The atmosphere of commitment to the marginalized and readiness for inculturation in the outlook of TTS was very conducive.


RR    12. What was your response to the Emergency 1975-1977?  How do you see this period looking back on it today?

GD    When the Emergency was declared in the summer of 1975, we happened to be in Europe.  Our period with CISRS, which had extended over three years, was over and we were waiting for our working visa to join TTS.  Suddenly there was this headline in the Boulevard Press: “Most powerful woman in the world arrests hundreds of men in their beds”.  We got a terrible shock because we thought this was the end of our visa.  But funny enough we got them very fast, because the administration had become more efficient.  We came back to TTS in October 1975.  We noticed that the progressive forces were divided in their assessment of the Emergency, as the CPI was supporting it, while the CPI-M and the Marxist Leninists as well as many Gandhians were passionately opposed. I myself was never in doubt that suspension of constitutional rights was totally unacceptable.  Later, I understood that the churches were also deeply divided on the issue.  I happened to be an advisor to the General assembly of the WCC in Nairobi in December 1975.  MM Thomas as chairman of the Executive was trying to move a resolution condemning the Emergency.  He was scathingly attacked by Bishop Paulos Mar Gregorious.  There were deep divisions in the Indian delegation.  Finally the resolution was passed all the same.  I felt a great sense of relief.  There were many restrictions on social movements.  S. Jaganathan went to jail.

    The jail ministry of TTS had to look after the families of jailed Gandhians and so-called Naxalites in touching unity.  I myself discovered that being active with women’s groups was still possible, as it was seen as being innocuous and somehow legitimate, since it also was International Women’s Year.  Many of us were very disturbed by the violent evictions of slum dwellers in the big cities like Bombay and Delhi at the time.  In the end of 1975, the Marxist journal Social Scientist organized a big women’s conference in Trivandrum with over hundred participants.  This was a very inspiring event in those stifling times.

    As the press was heavily censored, it became very difficult to be well informed.  Even the Guardian, a critical church weekly, was censored and had to fold up.  The Marxist Review soldiered on under great difficulty.  One of the most inspiring things were the cyclostyled letters which MM Thomas circulated during this period, against the 20 point programme which was anti-poor and the Taj Mahal policy which pursued city beautification at the cost of housing rights.  They have later been published under the title “Response to tyranny” and are still one of the best textbooks for analyzing the Emergency.

    Looking back, I think the most problematic thing in this period was that the resistance against the Emergency produced very strange bedfellows.  There were many mis-assessments of people’s intentions.  The anti-congressism of the J.P. movement opened the doors for Jan Sangh and RSS.  Everybody sat in jail together.  Many progressive Christians thought at the time that Arun Shourie the present disinvestment minister was a great democrat, until they started understanding what all he was able and willing to write about them.  George Fernandes’ role in today’s NDA at the center goes back to Emergency days.

    While the resistance of the J.P. movement against Indira Gandhi’s totalitarianism was commendable, the under estimation of religious chauvinism and communalism was profoundly dangerous.  For this we are still paying the price and may pay more in the future.  So ironically, the struggle against totalitarianism in the mid seventies, including Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilization policies, has indirectly strengthened the forces of rising fascism, which we are facing today.

    The struggle against Emergency itself was very inspiring, we distributed leaflets all over “Why the ruling Congress should be voted out of power”.  It was a great thing that tyranny could be overthrown democratically.  But of course the outcome turned out to be rather depressing after a short while. And as I was saying, the seeds of another totalitarianism were also bearing fruit.

    
RR    13. How did you get involved with women’s movement and unions in the informal sector?

GD    I had been involved with the Socialist Women’s Alliance already in Berlin during the Students’ Movement, because we felt that women were never found in the decision making bodies of the movement.  In Bangalore, while working with CISRS, I got into these conflicts over here and there, but my real cultural shock regarding women’s position in Indian society came only in Madurai, because the place was so much more conservative.

    This experience aggravated after my daughter was born in 1977.  As I was myself tied down at that time, I started to intervene in the debate on women and household labour, which was carried on in Social Scientist.  This brought me in touch with Chhaya Datar, whom I knew from the Social Scientist women’s conference in 1975 and who was a trade unionist turned feminist.  She sent me her thesis written at the ISS in The Hague, where Maria Mies and Kumari Jayawardena had been teaching.  She also invited me to Bombay, where I met many activists who later became very prominent in the autonomous women’s movement.

    I had also been in touch since early seventies with Nalini Nayak of the Fish Workers Movement in Kerala.  There was a whole turn towards feminism in the Fish Workers’ movement at the time in which I got involved over the years.  Likewise, since late seventies Construction Workers Movement had been built up in Chennai by R. Geeta and Subbu.  Pennurimai Iyakkam, with which I got involved since 1979, was founded side by side with the union work.  So there has always been a very close connection between union work in the informal sector, women’s issues and slum dwellers issues.  There has been a clear class perspective and also a good understanding of caste and cultural issues.

    At the same time I have to say that I have also been indebted to the so-called autonomous women’s movement.  I was involved in the autonomous women’s conferences in the eighties and also was closely related with the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) since 1983.  I have served on the Executive several times and have organized regional conferences during the nineties.  This has been a very enriching experience in terms of analysis and getting a grasp of the women’s movement at the national level.  The IAWS has had a very activist ethos and has been quite radical, especially in its stand against communalism and war.

RR    14. How have these involvements changed your life?

GD    Very, very much I think.  I sometimes find it a bit hard to catch up with myself.  It started off innocently enough with growing my hair and getting myself into sarees.  There was this traumatic experience on a country road way back in 1972, when a passenger picked a fierce argument with a conductor in a bus because the conductor had made me to get up from a ladies seat, thinking I was a man looking at my jeans and short hair and lack of ornaments.  But the passenger had heard my voice.  I didn’t mind at all getting up for the women with children, but it became a prestige matter between the conductor and the passenger and the driver stopped the bus until the matter was resolved.  The traveling public took immense interest.  It was extremely embarrassing and I concluded that my exterior had to change because it was unpractical.  I did not immediately realize that what is inside is outside and vice versa.  Bangalore was very cosmopolitan and it was a matter of adjusting to rural situations on occasions.  This changed drastically in Madurai with three thousand years of Tamil culture on top of myself.  Even Salwar sets were unheard of at the time.  Besides, there were years of struggle to come to terms with the language.  Most of the time when I asked “how does one say this in Tamil”, someone would say: “We don’t say this in Tamil”.  So I spent hundreds of hours speechless, but listening with concentration and noting down words.  I also took umpteen classes and many friends have helped me with translations for years, for which I am very thankful.  As I learned most of the colloquial language from slum dwellers, I often felt my whole brain had to change.  On the other hand, there was the much more formal language in the college, most harrowing of all the chapel language, which I found most tedious to acquire.  Building up teaching in Tamil was very difficult.  The children spoke Tamil to each other and we had English as a link language.  Though I still read German fluently if necessary and also understand it quite well, except some of the new words and idioms which have come up over the past 32 years, I have lost the familiarity of expressing myself in that language.  It does not come naturally.  I also find it very difficult to follow certain arguments because many things seem to have hanged culturally, of which I do not have a feel.

    I have traveled very widely at the national level and have studied Hindi repeatedly.  But I have never stayed in North long enough to become familiar, I have this typical Tamil mental block against Hindi imposition, even though I would love to be able to overcome that.  But through the movements I have had many friends in many parts of the country and have moved with them and stayed in their houses.  I have felt at home in many places, despite the language difficulty.  My friends in other parts take me with a sense of humour: “She can’t help it, she is a Tamilian”.

    I think I have been very privileged that through so much work in different parts I have been able to develop a love of the country which is like a mosaic consisting of many cherished pieces.  There are two things, which I find most important.  One thing is the movements were our kinship system, our extended family.  Our children have grown up with this feeling of all these uncles and aunties on the road and sometimes in jail.  Secondly, I have always ultimately felt answerable to the workers in the unorganized sector, the Dalits, the Adivasis.  So I do find it very revolting how the politics of the rich and privileged is violating the right to life and livelihood of the vast mass of people.  It pains me that often the churches adhere so much to a middle class ethos that they seem to forget that we can’t serve God and Mammon at the same time and that the good news is really meant to be for the poor.


RR    15. Why did you become an Indian citizen?

GD    It first struck me in the early eighties when I got involved in the IAWS.  It was such a vibrant movement at the time with a very strong caucus of grass roots activists. I wanted to belong.  I also always felt if I involved in struggles, it would affect my visa.  It’s o.k. to be arrested, but being deported is a different matter.  In my application I wrote that I felt I belonged and could not think of living anywhere else, and that was the truth.  I got a lot of support from Veena Mazumdar who was the Secretary and President of IAWS at different occasions and C.P. Sujaya, a feminist bureaucrat who knew our movement and had read my articles.

RR    16. How do you look at your national identity and how do you feel accepted as an Indian?

GD    I had never felt as “being German” because I felt I was only from that special political unit of West Berlin.  At no point in my life had I felt I had a country. It was all in pieces when I grew up.  When coming to India, I had a Dutch passport through marriage because it was easier to cross borders in Germany with it, but I had never lived in the Netherlands either.  Later I found that I had lost German citizenship some time in between without noticing, because living in a third country, I had not made use of it.  So I finally renounced the Dutch citizenship as well when I became an Indian.  The only German identity which has stayed with me is the collective historical responsibility for the holocaust and all that followed from it, including the extremely tragic situation of the Palestinian people.  This history is also helpful to understand many of the contemporary events in South Asia, including the Tamil Sinhala conflict in Sri Lanka and the rise of communalism and fundamentalism under globalisation.

Regarding the acceptance, it is difficult to say.  With people who know me well, acceptance has often been very wholehearted and even overwhelming.  But people who do not know me, have their own stereotypes and projections.  I find things are becoming more difficult because of globalisation.  The growth of tourism creates different types of images.  The Sonia Gandhi’s syndrome is also very tiresome.  Of course my history is exactly the opposite, as I got citizenship despite being married to a foreigner.  This is a very great achievement of which I am proud.  She got hers as daughter-in-law and wife of different prime ministers.  So it’s really nothing to do with me.  But I can’t also get worked up if some people (especially in the church) start projecting such things on me, because I can sympathize with the anti-colonial thrust of such sentiments, even if they appear misplaced.

As my friend Nandita Haksar used to say: “Race is a reality, we have to live with it”.  She is a Kashmiri Pandit married to a Tankul Naga.  When traveling, she has sometimes been mistaken as an American married to a Japanese.  So we have a good laugh at it and carry on with out lives.  My children when in school, have at different junctures, been mistaken as suffering from alibinism.  When I applied for citizenship, C.T. Kurien, who gave one of my affidavits, said that someone in the administration had asked him how I thought to be an Indian without having a caste.  This question really troubled him.  As I had lived with Dalits closely from early on and had great respect for Dr. Ambedkar, I said: A least abolition of caste can’t be a problem for me, and I have never been able to rely on any kinship system anyway.   

I feel many people are so pre-occupied with the duties of the lifecycle and the politics of their kinship systems that they do not fully appreciate the very strong networks of support structures which have come into being through social movements. It is entirely by being part of this that I have felt to be an Indian and have also felt very much accepted as one.  It is a matter of location.  Had I migrated to the US like Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, I would certainly like her never have wanted to become a citizen there.  Becoming an Indian is a very different matter.  I have a strong affinity with the history of the freedom struggle and the Adivasi and Dalit movements, also the history of the Dravidian movement in as far as it was serious about social transformation.

RR    17. Can you tell something about your involvement with Dalit and Adivasi causes?

GD    I gravitated towards Dalit struggles quite intuitively right from the beginning, even though they still called themselves Harijans at the time.  I had decided that a study on Religion and Development in which I was involved in CISRS could only be based on people’s organizations and struggle.  This is how I organized my research on Religion and people’s organization around the struggles of landless agricultural labourers in the Cavery Delta.  As I said, I came to know Mr. S. Jaganathan and his wife Krishnammal, who is herself a Dalit.  Both had worked in the Kilvenmani area after 44 people had been burnt in a hut. I also moved with people from CPI-M and CPI who had also organized the labourers.

    We stayed in the cheris and took bath with the water buffaloes and had great difficulties to get good drinking water.  We even got separate tea glasses in the teashop.  I came out of it with typhoid, two types of worms and chronic amoebiasis.  This, in fact, was the outcome of untouchability, though I could not understand it very well at that time.  Other than this, I have always had a great affinity with the life stories of Dalits, because my own early childhood had been marked by hunger, scarcities and violence and struggle to cope with education.  Nothing could be taken for granted.  So I have always felt close to Dalits, while at the same time being acutely aware that they would not spontaneously feel close to me, because to them I look like a Brahmin, white and tall and educated.  So I have always worked with Dalits in class organizations and women’s organization, but have never attempted to get access to their own movements in more direct ways.  We did support from the outside frequently, especially when there was widespread violence, e.g. when there was rampant election violence in Cuddalore in over 50 villages in September 1999, the wWomen’s Struggle Committee had a dharna in front of the Cuddalore Collector’s office while Dalit organizations were still refused permission for any manifestation.  In our mixed organizations we have made education on untouchability among non-Dalits a point and the people in our movements stay in anyone’s houses and eat anyone’s food.  But of course it is a very long process and not easy.  I have always felt that organization building of workers in the informal sector is very important for Dalits because that’s where their livelihood is.  I have given this priority over advocacy to protect from violence, though we have always been ready to intervene when violence erupts.  I also feel that the struggle against globalisation is very important for Dalits, as this is again the field where their livelihood is affected.

    Regarding Adivasis, my understanding of their life is most indebted to the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA).  We first got strongly aware of the NBA when it had succeeded to throw out the World Bank (WB) from funding Sardar Sarovar Dam Project in 1993.  It was a time when the WB was evicting slum dwellers in Madurai in the name of canal cleaning.  The fact that the Adivasis had thrown out the WB from SSP inspired us very greatly.  It created a spontaneous bond.  I met Medha Patkar in Delhi at the time in a meeting against the World Bank and we have been supporting the NBA ever since through protest letters solidarity visits, writing, exhibitions.  My daughter has been a full-timer with NBA and other movements for years.  I have also been in touch earlier with friends who worked with Adivasis in Singhbhum and for many years we visited regularly the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM) from which we have learned a lot.  The Marxist Coordination Committee (CMM) of Comrade A.K. Roy also is close to our unions, so Jharkhand is always on our minds.

    I feel the Dalit and Adivasi struggles are most crucial in times of globalisation to protest the dominant development paradigm and to remind us that we have to really build a very different mode of production in which subsistence production is taken seriously and will not be wiped out.  It is a matter of building alliances among the internal colonies.  I have also worked a lot over recent years visiting different states in the North East and trying to understand how forest and agriculture can be made more viable.  We have held workshops with activists and villagers to help with assessment of resources and skills and with building alternatives.  We have had many students from those states at the PG level, and they really appreciate if we take the trouble to learn from their life world and help them to understand transformation.  We have also taken people from the North East to Narmada and vice versa as part of alliance building.  Of course there are enormous differences in lifestyle, education and religious background.  But slowly a better understanding can grow.   

RR    18. What is your response to communalism, Ayodhya and conversion debate?

GD    From my background you may be able to understand that I have always had quite an aversion to mission, because I was acutely aware how much it has been historically connected with conquest, colonialism and imperialism.  This was particularly true for the conquest of South America.  Of course, I am not making this as a general statement.  I am aware that some of the missionaries in India were critical of the colonial powers, but even they were often not very respectful of indigenous cultures.  So I do find that the attempt to make converts is always deeply problematic.  There has been a lot of cultural imperialism in mission.  At the same time, I am a strong believer in the freedom of religion.  I feel the constitutional right to profess and even propagate one’s religion is very important.  If people wish to change their religion, nothing should stand in their way.  It is a fact that in India, Dalits and Adivasis and sometimes women like Pandita Ramabhai have wanted to change their religion because of oppressive social customs in their environment.  It is therefore objectionable if laws are made, like recently in Tamilnadu, which construe the desire for social emancipation to be “inducement”.  Of course I am deeply critical of any attempt to push people to change their religion, be it by spiritual or material promises or by instilling fear.  But I feel that some of the anti-conversion laws can anytime be misused against social activists and minorities.  At the same time, these laws will never be used to curtail trishul dikshas among Adivasis.  The whole conversion debate has enhanced hatred and suspicion among different communities.  When Graham Staines and his two sons were murdered, there was this debate whether he had tried to convert anybody, as if that would make it legitimate to roast little children alive.  I feel freedom of religion is a humanist value which should be held in common by all communities and people without religious faith.

    Regarding rising communalism, it is indeed a menace, which has grown in leaps and bounds after Rajiv Gandhi had compromised and allowed the locks of the mosque to be opened.  The destruction of the mosque was a looming threat for years.  I remember, how many of us had expected it to happen in November 1989.  Instead, it was the Berlin Wall which was brought down at the time.  There is a link between the spread of imperialist globalisation and the rise of religious chauvinism.  This has become very visible in the events of September 11th 2002 in the attack on the world Trade Centre.  It is impossible to give an analysis of the Ayodhya problem in an interview.  I have written on it in different places.  The situation has become much worse after the Godhra incident and the carnage in Gujarat, which followed it.  What has happened in Gujarat defies our imagination, and the re-election of Narendra Modi in December 2002 has been a very alarming event.

    On the other hand, I am very deeply convinced that the people of Ayodhya themselves want peace, as the constant tension affects the flow of pilgrims, which is their livelihood.  Many of the temples in Ayodhya have been built on voluntarily donated Muslim lands, and many of the Muslim artisans have been traditionally involved in temple construction.  The artificially built up confrontation is quite unnatural to the history of the place.  When the Desh Bachao, Desh Banao Abhiyan of NAPM ended in Ayodhya on 30th march 2003, we could see with our own eyes that the people of Ayodhya wanted to build peace.  It is mostly vested interest from the outside which prevent this.  At the same time, I also feel that there is a rising movement of secularists and humanist members of different religions which have a strong commitment to protect the pluralistic and often syncretistic culture of our country.  There have been many attempts to attack the Baba Budhangiri shrine near Chickmagalur in Karnataka and to convert it into the Ayodhya of the South.  But Muslims, Hindus, secularists, social movements, intellectuals and artists have come together in the tens of thousands to prevent vandalism and religious chauvinism.  The recent rally on December 28th 2003 was a powerful manifestation after severe state repression in the beginning of that month.  This makes one very hopeful that all is not lost and that chauvinism is not the last word.  But I often feel, in the churches, people do not take note of such important events and only think that they are victims of religious repression.

RR    19. How do you look at the new alliances among people’s movements like NAPM and the WSF process?

GD    NAPM has been very active against globalisation and communalism/fundamentalism since over a decade.  Many of the member movements have been working since two or three decades.  Again, it is something on which many articles have been written.  The Desh Bachao Desh Banao Abhiyan from Plachimada – that is the anti-Coca Cola struggle near Palakkadu in Kerala – to Ayodhya, which stands for the desire for religious and cultural pluralism, went on from republic Day 2003 to 30th of March and covered about 70 districts in 18 states.  This was a major attempt to pull different forces together.  I took part in Kerala, Tamilnadu, parts of Karnataka, Guwahati, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, Lucknow and Ayodhya.  It was a very positive experience, as it made so many local struggles visible, like the struggle against the privatization of Shivnath river or the valiant resistance of the fisher people against selling the island of Jambudweep to SAHARA company.  But of course, all of this is still only campaigning.  It has not yet taken off as a new freedom struggle to really quit WTO and build alternatives.

    I feel the real transformation has to happen through all the local organization building, the changes in people’s lives, which come out of this work.  This is very arduous.  But it is happening steadily and persistently.  The good thing about NAPM is that so many different organizations are coming together and an attempt is made to let different streams of socialism, Marxism, Ambedkarism and Gandhism dialogue with each other and to come to better mutual understanding of each other and get a better grasp of the reality in which we live.

    As far as WSF is concerned, I think it has an important history, regarding the struggles in Chiapas in Southern Mexico and the struggles of the workers party in Brazil.  Also, it is certainly important to project a Social Forum vis-à-vis the hegemony of the World Economic Forum which meets in Davos.  This attempt itself questions the hegemony of the global market over our lives.  It is indeed a gigantic effort to bring this about.  But of course it also requires enormous fund raising and coordination and it becomes like a big melah, without much focus.  This is why NAPM was not part of the organizing committee, because the members were giving priority to the organizational activities in their own movements.  It was confusing that many of our friends and members were in the Mumbai Resistance, while at the same time these two ventures across the road were not really able to see eye to eye.  Many of us moved around on both sides.  I think many of the forces who were separated by the big highway in Mumbai, came together in the struggle around Baba Budhangiri in Karnataka end of December.  I feel the struggles have greater potential to unite people than the conferences.  But ventilating different opinions is also important.

RR    20. Looking back on your life so far, what is it that depresses you and what is it that fills you with a sense of satisfaction?  What do you hope for?

GD    I think the difficult thing with getting older is that the work steadily expands, while the energy levels meet with more limitations.  The sense of urgency clashes with the need to slow down.  The capacity to pick up new languages goes down.

    I also find it difficult to see globalisation push a development model, which is so totally unviable in a country like ours.  It is amply known that what has happened in the so-called developed countries has caused global warming and trying to achieve all these cars and gadgets here, would be totally unpractical.  But the middle classes ignore all these realities, and so we get these centralized projects like linking of highways, of power grids and even of rivers.  This is really disturbing, as it can contribute to war.

    At the personal level I sometimes get depressed when I see how people get settled in life and narrow down their aspirations for transformation and alternative lifestyles in the battle to make a career and educate their children.  They may still retain a radical language, but it loses meaning.  Globalisation deepens this problem.

    On the other hand, it is very heartening to have had such a large number of friendships and to see the persistence of many old battle horses.  I also feel that some people in the younger generation, my own children and some of their friends included,  are much more practically creative in the constructive work field than many of us have been.  This is one thing which makes me very hopeful.  I feel despite all this global onslaught, I can also see a lot of sanity and determination to live differently growing.  I see a lot of courage and determination, and the sense of vulnerability is a bit less than in my post-war experience.

    I often feel that so-called achievements mean very little, as life has to be lived each moment afresh.  But I am immensely thankful for all the friendships which have sustained me, and often I have also discovered that I have sustained people far away whom I did not even know.  What do I hope for?  I really ardently hope and pray that we should find ways of preventing war and controlling violence at every level.  This includes the sustenance of soil, water and forest in the hands of local communities and the right to work.  One can also call it sustenance of God’s good creation, the beauty and variety of it.  At the personal level I would hope to be able to live life fully and gracefully as long as it is given to me.