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Bionote: Born 1956, MA 1982, Diploma (magister) 1984, PhD 1995, Associate Professor 2000, Head of Department of History of Religions, University of Copenhagen 2002–2004. Currently Associate Professor Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. My research focus is on religion in modernity. In Denmark and the West. This has mostly been through surveys (European Value Study, Denmark, Scientology, Teacher Training, Danish Home Mission and others) and fieldwork in India, including interview and archival research on Scheduled Tribes like the Santal and Bodo, and on the Christian churches in India.
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- TMYS: Would you like to recall your personal experiences while working with or around the Santal tribes? As a sociologist of religion with a diverse research portfolio, including studies on Hindu and Buddhist practices, what initially sparked your interest in studying the Santal community and their religious practices?
Dr. Andersen:
I studied Sociology of Religion at the Faculty of Arts, University of Copenhagen, and had a broad introduction to religions from historical and contemporary perspectives: the mystery religions like the Persian Mithras and Egyptian Isis cults, as well as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. Around 1980 my mentor, Arild Hvidtfeldt, and Professor Ashok Ghosh of Calcutta University discussed a joint project near Silda and Belpahari in West Bengal. I was introduced to Professor Ghosh and under his guidance I was introduced to the Santals through P.N. Hansdak, who had done his PhD under Professor Ghosh. I began to learn Santali before my first visit to the area in 1982 and had translated some religious texts with the support of Santosh Soren, librarian at Roskilde University near Copenhagen. So, I had a kind of grammar, but at arrival in the village my active spoken vocabulary was somewhere between five and ten words. I have gotten better since then! I was allowed to stay in the house of the jog manjhi and made friends in the Santal village: Ram Chandro Mandi, the jog manjhi C.M. Mandi, their families, and so many others. I was allowed to follow the negotiations in the village council consisting of the adult (male) Santals of the village. And I joined the men and boys of the village for fowl sacrifices in the sacred grove. I dived into the rituals and daily life of the village and returned again and again until the 1990s; all in all, I have been there for about a year.
In introducing myself, I explained that I wanted to study Santal religion and culture. The village arranged for me to record the long epic of Karam, the Karam Binti, a core of Santal culture that narrates the Santal creation. Santals were created independently of caste people also living in the area. That collection of the epic was in 1982. I attended another presentation of the ritual in 1986, wrote my PhD on it in 1996 and later was invited to work on a Karem ritual staged in Santiniketan in 2015 in collaboration with ARTISANA, the Crafts Council of West Bengal (headed by Mrs. Ruby Pal Chaudhury) and the Anthropological Survey of India. In this way, I feel that I have fulfilled my promise to the Santals of the village by making their religion and culture visible to the outside world. My research documents the interaction between oral and printed transmission of culture. But keep in mind, that I am one of many scholars who work on these issues, and the most exciting work is being done by Santal ritual specialists, artists and writers.
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Amazon India link for TMYS Review December 2023 will be available here.
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2. TMYS: In your book, The Santal Rebellion 1855–1856: The Call of Thakur, you forward a new interpretation of the Santal Rebellion. Could you briefly explain the main arguments and perspectives in your book?
Dr. Andersen:
Regarding religious studies, the focus is on the religious legitimation of the rebellion, which is a major contribution, as a number of studies from the very beginning in 1855 to the present have claimed that Santal religion at most, was used instrumentally by the rebellion’s leaders. These scholars did not even raise the possibility. Their evaluation is based on the gaze of an outsider with an agenda: to delegitimate the rebellion and the reasons behind it. I have tried to fit the religious arguments into a wider frame, focusing on the content of the religious reform. You see, in addition to creating a new political relationship with the colonial authorities, rebellion leaders aimed to create a new vocabulary that would enable Santals and outsiders meet and understand each other as they negotiated social issues at an equal level.
The background is found in the social changes after 1765, when the East India Company took a giant step from its existence as a commercial company towards becoming a colonial enterprise by taking over the civil administration of the Suba of Bengal. In 1793, the collection of land rent was sharply increased by the Permanent Settlement (Land Revenue) of Bengal. To make land profitable even with a larger slice being paid in land rent, agriculture was commercialised and new land was brought under cultivation. The Santals played a big role in this. Whole Santal village groups were employed to clear and cultivate new land, where they faced problems during the transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture. New forms of contractual and social relations reached beyond their local settings. These included written agreements, mortgages, receipts for payments given or received and several varieties of formal ownership of land. As seen from today, where all of this is general knowledge and even though in the educational system, this does not seem strange. But at that time, the Santals did not have much experience in negating economic transactions in these forms, and both moneylenders and tax or rent collectors (naib sazawals or darogas) took advantage of their naivete. The local courts were of little help. The same tax collectors acted as court officials, and the Santals did not understand these processes, either. All of this is clearly documented. Despite or possibly due to these troubles, the Company managed to increase its revenue in the core area of the Santal rebellion, the Damin-i-Koh, over the short period from 1837–1838 to 1854–1855, when the rebellion broke out.
At the economic level, the leaders Sidu and Kanhu attacked the moneylenders’ usurious rates of interest, as well as the East India Company for turning a blind eye since at the same time it raised its income by increasing land rents and taxes. So, the rebels wanted to introduce a different kind of land reform and expel the Company and the landlords. But to forward these claims, they had to move beyond the village level and develop a universal vocabulary that could be understood by the authorities as well as the Santals in the expectation of an Age of Truth to come. It is evident that the Company’s translators of Sidu and Kanhu’s proclamations struggled, as they understood that a clear line divided religion and law. This also common in India today, but Sido and Kanhu had other ideas.
3. TMYS: The Santal Rebellion is often portrayed as a class-based peasant uprising. However, you have put forward your argument that this interpretation neglects the unique tribal viewpoint. Could you shed light on this?
Dr. Andersen:
You refer to Ranajit Guha and N. Kaviraj. They argue that the Santals managed to mobilise peasants at large. Both identified people belonging to different low caste groups and the Paharia tribe who joined the Santal rebellion. Occasionally a local leader would direct members of their village to support the Santals. More often, single individuals joined as scouts or by forging and providing weapons. Some non-Santals even participated as writers in Sidu and Kanhu’s court. Guha and Kaviraj are right in this regard, and I can also see such participants, but they were few and far between. In the Company’s correspondence on the rebellion, we hear repeatedly about Paharia villages being attacked by the Santals and how the Paharias generally were foes of the Santals. Regarding the caste-organised peasants to the east and west of the core of the rebellion, it is reported that they were mishandled by the Santals and fled. Guha and Kaviraj make an elegant theoretical claim: a common aversion to the Company enabled alliances to be forged. Unfortunately, the historical record does not support this. Even if some few non-Santal peasants joined the rebellion, the rebellion was not class based. It was by far and large isolated to the Santals, so it cannot be considered as a class movement.
4. TMYS: The Hul rebellion of 1855–1856 holds historical significance for the Santal community. How do these memories of the community’s rebellion contribute to our understanding of the period?
Dr. Andersen:
The Santal Rebellion tells us how peasants with no formal education can organize a rebellion with clear plans and aims. This teaching breaks with classical Marxist understanding, but not with the understanding of Guha, Kaviraj or the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who all stressed that the lower orders of society have their own agendas and that they may fight for them. This leads to an important reminder that is highly relevant today: we shall not let the urban focus of our understanding of economic development dominate. Many culturally or economically defined groups have their own interests and ‘higher GNP’ is only one of many factors to be considered in the calculation of the ‘best outcome’. In the case Santal Rebellion, the Santals were economically exploited and developed an ideology which might have benefitted all of West Bengal if only the authorities had been more attentive.
5. TMYS: The colonial administration and the Bengalis were opponents of the Santals during the rebellion. Could you shed light on their roles and interactions with the Santal community during that time?
Dr. Andersen:
This is a relevant follow-up on the former answer. During the years before the rebellion, some Santal leaders had formulated some of the grievances in a letter to the commissioner in Bhagalpur. The commissioner did not even bother to forward it to Calcutta. At a lower level, Santals had been in contact with the superintendent in Damin-i-Koh, trying to persuade him to provide some relief. We are told that Sidu and Kanhu had addressed him themselves, but the archives are unclear about this. It is enough to state that the feedback mechanism along the lines of authority to Calcutta did not work. After the rebellion, both the superintendent and the commissioner were dismissed from their posts.
6. TMYS: As a sociologist of religion, you have focused on the transmission of Hindu and Buddhist rituals into Santal religious practices. How do these influences manifest themselves in the Santal religious tradition, and what impact do they have on the Santal community's identity?
Dr. Andersen:
The message of the Age of Truth to come is related to the concept of Satya Yug, common in Hindu thought. Other influences from Hinduism are finding their way into Santal religion. Here, it is relevant to remember that openness to Hindu concept are not indicators that the Santals are becoming Hindus – some Santals are, but definitely very far from all! Integrating a ‘Hindu idea’ can be a strategic means of enabling the Santals to forward demands of equal treatment. That is, ideas and even rituals are taken in with the aim of strengthening Santal culture and religion among people who are in a continuous dialogue with other peoples living around them.
7. TMYS: In your research, you have examined the documentation of oral Santal practices and beliefs into print form. Can you throw light on the changes in the Santal community and their religious practices that have emerged during the transition process?
Dr. Andersen:
In the oral Karam Binti I collected in the village in 1982, the universalising moral notions forwarded by Sidu and Kanhu were not found, even though similar notions had been part of the printed Santali literature circulating in the area since at least the 1940s. One of the writers relevant in this regard is Mongol Chandro Turku Lumam Soren (1899–1992), who published another epic, the Jom Sim Binti, in the 1940s. In English, the title is The Major Purana of the Santal People: The Major Book of the Kherwar Race, Jom Sim Binti, Lita.
Some of these developments were also present in the performance of the karam puja organized in Santiniketan in 2015. Here, the social transformation of Santal society was evident as the drama looked back at the traditional village organisation under the manjhipargana system. Parts of the epic had been changed into a dream sequence, allowing the audience to attend the ritual as devoted participants or as unengaged spectators.
In spite of this very specific presentation of the exchange of ideas between printed and ritual performance, we have to remember that Soren’s publications were read in the area as well as in Calcutta, where he was a MLA for a period. So he and other Santal authors influenced the social attitudes and religion of the Santals even before they led to changes in the ritual performances.
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Amazon India link for TMYS Review December 2023 will be available here.
(Available worldwide via Amazon)
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8. TMYS: In the context of religion in modernity, what are the key challenges faced by Indigenous tribes like the Santals and the Bodos in maintaining their cultural and religious identity?
Dr. Andersen:
Their main task is to develop their religion and culture in in a way that resonates in the present day. Santals and Bodos (in Assam) have to engage in general education, some of them move away from their birthplace to settle among non-Santals and non-Bodos; others stay in the area of their birth, but the society is being transformed. Here it is necessary for them to develop new ways to sustain and develop their culture to fit the changing situations. Both the Santals and the Bodos organise their arts and culture in ways that fit with modern society. That regards cultural events representing new and traditional culture, theatre performances and museums. Here it is needed to identify issues which people from different fractions of society can join commonly, whether they belong to Sari Dhorom, Saotar Dhorom, Kherwar, Hindu, Christian or any other religious group among the Santals. Or Bathou, Brama, Hindu, Christian or any other religious group among the Bodos.
It is highly important to engage and build collaborations beyond the specific large or small group one belongs to and engage with groups beyond one’s own heritage. In Assam, Bodos and Santals live together, as Santals began migrating to Assam long long ago and many Bodos opened their villages to them. Even so, each group has had conflicts with the other. One can only admonish them to collaborate and to identify events where all parties can partake.
I have happily attended a number of such events among the Santals and the Bodos, sometimes with representatives of both groups at the same event. This bodes well and one can hope for more, as tribes, being minorities, benefit from establishing links with each other and speaking with a common voice.
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Dr. Veio Pou has been interviewed by Joyashree Dey.