Exploring Hindu nationalist conversions and the Kondhs’ negotiation with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad

Abstract

This paper is based on my ethnographic study of a village inhabited by Kui Kondhs, a community designated as a Scheduled Tribe in India, located in the forest fringes in the district of Gajapati, Odisha. Priorly worshippers of a range of deities, gods, spirits and ancestors, after a recent campaign by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization, Kondhs call themselves Bisma Hindus, have taken up the routine worship of Hindu deities including Bharat Mata and have adopted exclusionary practices towards their Dalit and Christian neighbours. Activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad understand these efforts as a facilitation of Adivasis ‘return’ to Hinduism, perceived to be their original religion. In the wake of this campaign, I primarily unravel one initiative taken by the VHP— the Sunday satsang, a significant weekly religious activity in the village that is strategically carried out on Sundays both as an emulation, and in defiance of the Sunday church. Further, I reflect on Kondhs’ perceptions about commensurabilities and incommensurabilities between their prior religious traditions and Brahminical Hinduism. Kondhs aspire for an inclusion within, and reclamation of Hinduism but are also met with confounding dilemmas after becoming Bisma Hindus concerning the due appeasement of their most influential traditional deity gungi maa, who may seek vengeance if neglected. I hope to show that the micro practices and strategies deployed by right wing activists to constitute a distinctive Hindu nationalist personhood among the Kondhs can be read within the framework of religious conversion. Further, I show that much like conversion to other religious traditions, adoption of Brahminical Hinduism involves a complex reworking of identities and relations for Adivasis that can be revealed by charting out local tensions in the everyday life of the village.