Appropriation Wars: The Bede Griffiths Saga

So far:

Suddenly a 'folk' Christianity has exploded prominently in the public conscience of Tamil Nadu. It is claimed that it is a spontaneous movement of the people who are expressing their Christian devotion through local cultural forms. However, an investigation shows that it is more a result of a well-prepared strategy that goes back decades in the past. The church has been working silently and very systematically in creating these Hindu-like 'folk' expressions.

In Tamil Nadu, it started with a French Catholic priest Jules Monchanin (1895-1957), who wanted to ‘kill’ Hinduism while appropriating the key Hindu elements into Christianity. He had observed that the more a Hindu becomes spiritual the more it becomes impossible to convert him to Christianity. He founded the 'Satchitananda Ashram', which is actually a Benedictine monastery. After his death, Henri Le Saux (1910-1973) took over the institution. He undertook fieldwork by visiting Hindu holy places and conducting clandestine Christian masses in the sacred spaces of Hindus. He wanted to create what he called 'Christian Advaita'; he even had a project for creating a 'Catholic Ramana'.

However, before his death he started criticising the exclusive nature of the church and even questioned the necessity of Jesus for a real spiritual pursuit. Nevertheless, he produced some of the most important manuals for appropriation of Hindu culture and dilution of its spirituality. After his death, the appropriation project was taken over by his successor Bede Griffiths.

Bede Griffiths Saga:

Griffiths who gave himself the name Swami Dayananda, just like Henri Le Saux, started visiting various Hindu holy places. Wearing saffron robes and donning the Hindu name, which he used less frequently, he made friends with Hindus, who took him into the temple interiors. Witnessing Hindu credulity first hand, he was optimistic that soon Hinduism would die. He wrote :

Theology Of Colonialism As Christian Love

Griffiths was an apologist for colonialism. His colonialism was theological. In any negative incident he observed in Indian context, he was ready to stereotype and essentialise Indian culture. When a Syrian Catholic inmate was found stealing and having affairs with women, Griffiths blamed it on both Hinduism as well as the general Indian nature:

The racial and colonial prejudice almost bordering a hatred towards Indians and Hinduism is a constant factor one sees throughout the writings of Griffiths. What is astonishing is that he was able to pen down these views after his own West had seen what such prejudices and hatred could do as in the case of Nazi Germany. However, Griffiths was able to always camouflage his hatred as 'Christian love' which wanted to rectify the innate Hindu deficiency. He explained in a letter in what sense really he loved Indians:

The letter is important because in a way Griffiths brings out the mindset of most of the post-colonial Western Indologists as well. As we will see the worldview of Griffiths and his works prefigure the works of Western religious scholars like Wendy Doniger and Jeffrey Kripal studying Hinduism. His colonial prejudice of Indians and his faith in the lack of morality in Indian psyche was so deep-rooted that he treated even Indian Catholics close to him with suspicion. For example, a Gandhian Catholic named Stephen was attracted by this saffron-clad westerner. About him Griffiths writes:

The 'guru' was finding the 'Indian' nature of his 'disciple' unpredictable. (“like all Indians he needs watching – you never quite know what they will do next!”) Nevertheless, he was very happy that the "disciple" was "very faithful to us" and "had taken a private vow of obedience”. However, soon Griffiths discovered Stephen‘s behaviour not very satisfactory. So the ‘guru’ blamed the disciple in a letter – it was of course Hinduism which had to be blamed.

As one can see the shallow stereotyped analysis of defects in a human individual as a result of the unconscious forces of his culture and reducing the sacred in another culture to 'deeper forces of unconscious', have all been done already by Griffiths. So when a Wendy Doniger or a Paul Courtright does similar 'analysis' of Hinduism, what is essentially being carried out, intentionally or unknowingly, is a crypto-colonial project which embeds in its core theo-racism.

Coming back to his own project in India, of all the three, Griffiths shows remarkable consistency in his approach to Hinduism. He too was an advocate of fulfillment theology. In 1956, he wrote that India needed the “moral force" of Christianity outlining how to present Jesus as the fulfillment of Bhagavad Gita:

Using Hindu Universalism For Christian Exclusiveness

Griffiths also decided to use one important aspect of Hinduism as an evangelical tool – its universal inclusiveness.

While he saw the Hindu boys accepting Jesus as one of the avatars like Buddha as a stepping stone towards evangelising them to Christianity, he vehemently opposed any Western/Christian author adopting a similar syncretic inclusive vision of all spiritual traditions. Thus he rejected the thesis of Frithj of Schuon (1907-1998) thus:

So what is useful and valid for evangelism in Hindu mindset, when it accepts Jesus as divine similar to an avatar, becomes ‘fundamentally false’ and ‘fundamentally perverted’ when a Christian/Western author tries to place Christianity ‘on a level’ with other religions!

What is important is that these theological studies are not abstract entities residing only in the papers. They get translated into concrete evangelical entities.

In Sandhya Vandhana, the prayer book that is in use in Shantivanam, the popular Hindu bhajans in every major Indian language are distorted to Christianise them. The famous Ragupathi Ragava Raja Ram – used by Mahatma Gandhi declares Hindu universalism and aims to promote communal harmony. In the Hindi section of bhajans present in the ashram handbook, the verses are twisted to proclaim the superior exclusiveness of Jesus and Christianity:

Sab bole Prabhu Yesu nam Patita pavana Yesu nam…. Sab se accha Yesu Nam Papa nivarana Yesu nam [The name of Jesus is better than other names.] (Sandhya Vandana, Saccidananda Ashram, Shantivanam pp. 41-2 )

Fritjof Schunon to Gandhi bhajan, the Hindu universalism becomes a doorway to proclaim Christian exclusiveness.

Hindu Seers - Belittled Inside But Praised Outside

What was true for Hinduism and Indian culture was also true for the great seers of Hinduism. Thus Sri Ramakrishna was no more holy than Ramana Maharishi and could come only just nearer to St Francis of Assisi, and could not even be his equals. To Griffiths the life of Ramakrishna also showed what Hinduism lacked with respect to Christianity. He wrote:

Belittling Hindu seers by comparing them to Jesus or Christian saints is another consistent feature of Griffith's writing. Almost a decade after writing the above lines, he wrote again about these two remarkable self-realised saints of recent times:

Regarding the disciples of Swami Sivananda addressing him as bhagawan he called that as “a weakness of Hinduism". Though he thought Swami Sivananda as one with great powers and one having done much good, he found the atmosphere “not pleasant”. Swami Sivananda was “very fat and rather sickly man" “conducted to coach and laid out as if in bed by devout females" many of whom were “Germans of a theosophical kind”. ( letter dated 22.04.1964 )

Despite all these reservations and criticism against Hindu saints, which he was free to have as a devout Christian, he would not hesitate to indulge in deception by uttering the names of very same Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharishi as his guides, when confronted by Hindu scholars and seers. When a Hindu sanyasi Swami Devananda questioned the right of a Christian missionary to appropriate aum, he accused the Hindu of being “a sectarian” and wrote:

Even before he took over while staying at Shantivanam he took many scouting visits to the great Hindu temples of South India – particularly Chidambaram, Kumbakonam, Thanjavur and Srirangam: very similar to his predecessor Henri Le Saux. Mixing with Hindus, projecting himself as an admirer of Hinduism and hiding his Christian identity, he could gain access to the inner sanctorum of the temples where only Hindus are allowed. From these visits he conjectured that it was the darkness of the unconscious that the Hindu temples represented and this was their attraction:

After seeing Thanjavur big temple, his visit ended with Srirangam – the greatest of the Vaishnavite shrine. Now he wrote decisively:

Like Henri Le Saux , Griffiths also visited Elephanta cave. He also wrote about it later:

In the same book he also makes it clear that Shiva is nothing more than “shadow of the mystery of Christ” (p.100).

Not only Hindus, but all those outside the Catholic church, according to Griffiths, were just making "better use of lesser grace" and "fullness of grace and revelation" being present only within the church, it becomes "our privilege and responsibility" to convert and bring all non-Catholics into the church. Soon he was deconstructing Hindu symbols as well. The Hindu symbols were not only incomplete which had to be fulfilled by Jesus but left to themselves they would become evil and negative he reasoned:

Griffiths combined the traditionally implicit Christian anti-Semitism in the replacement theology with a Hindu-hatred in his fulfillment theology drawing parallels:

Griffiths often descended into an attack on the Hindu deities declaring that they were 'attractive' but not 'good' and that they lacked morality.

What is remarkable about Griffiths is the way such ideas about Hinduism become so fixed and rigid in his thought process. Despite his claims of "studying Hinduism" and being guided by its universal essence etc. one finds the very same ideas expressed again in almost the very same words almost 17 years late in 1976:

To him, Hinduism was nothing but descent into the darkness of unconscious with all its attractions and dangers and that to swim across it unharmed and reach real spiritual liberation one needed Jesus, as Hinduism was deficient:

The depiction of Hinduism as nothing but the unconscious or the 'dark' or 'negative' (as deemed by the Christian values) forces of the unconscious is so pervasive in the works of Griffiths. Today, they are very familiar in the Western academic circles studying Hinduism – particularly in Wendy Doniger – Jeffrey Kripal school. Doniger-Kripal school of course does not speak of Jesus but in the place of Jesus they place the superior Western academic discourse, which, of course, always has been unwittingly an aid for evangelism during both colonial centuries and post-colonial decades.

Despite all his seemingly adoring words to portray Hinduism, a small scratch on the surface – an intelligent criticism over his real motives would bring out torrents of the hatred he harboured against Hinduism. Almost 30 years after he wrote the above lines, in 1990 he wrote scathingly to Sita Ram Goel when he questioned the ethics of the methods and the theology underlying them:

Obsession with marriage syndrome:

The second part of Griffiths’ autobiography is titled: The Marriage of East and West. In this he wrote:

This marriage notion of Griffiths has been often lauded by his followers as some sort of a deeper spiritual synthesis. A reviewer of a hagiographic video on Griffiths says:

However, a study of the origin of this theme in its formative stages in the works of Griffiths, reveals more colonial prejudice and personal pathos than any genuine spiritual need for the harmony of deeper opposites. To Griffiths, though Hinduism had “affection and natural grace" it lacked being “honest, straightforward, just and reliable" These qualities of Hinduism, he identified with the feminine and found the British element masculine. He wrote:

He would reveal later that in seeking feminine in India he was also resolving a personal crisis:

Repressed sex was also bothering him. After a stroke in the early 1990s he explained:

One wonders if his attacks on Sri Krishna and Shiva as well as his stereotyping of Hindus and India as lacking moral sense, being dishonest etc. were more the amalgamation of his own repressed sexuality combined with the colonial theology. He wrote that he was starved of the feminine. Was his conversion attempts then elaborate predatory rituals on the nation and culture perceived as the feminine prey? In fact in the current context one has to ask if these innate tendencies of Catholic church are what making the priests turn predatory paedophiles on their own flock?

Is it time for Hindus to reverse the direction and do a fulfillment mission on Christianity? Perhaps what Christianity needs is the replacement of crucified Christ by a dancing Siva or a Krishna whose melody can redeem the church of its repressed sexuality?

Despite Griffiths and his acolytes claiming that the so-called 'Christian Advaita' was deeper than Sankara's Advaita, Cyprian Consiglio another Catholic theologian found him saying in his previous interviews that Griffiths thought Abhishiktananda "went too far”.

Appropriating The Vision Of New Physics:

Meanwhile, new developments were happening in physics which had theological consequences for Christianity. Griffiths was painfully aware that Hinduism even with no institutional mechanism like the church was able to get itself into a constructive dialogue with the philosophical impacts of New Physics. Griffiths was equally aware of the deficiencies of his own Christian theology. He noted:

He was acutely aware of the deficiency of Christianity to incorporate into it the holistic vision provided by New Physics and the parallels pointed out by physicists like Schrodinger, Capra, Bohm etc. between the vision of New Physics and Indic systems of inner science, Quoting Teasdale, Everardo Pedraza, an admiring author of Griffiths writes:

To achieve this, he recruited Rupert Sheldrake – a British biologist advocating questionable pseudo-scientific vitalist theories – who also shared the colonial prejudices of Griffiths including the negative stereotyping of Indic traditions as fatalistic and uncaring towards human suffering.

To make Christian theology presentable as being in sync with the worldview emerging from New Physics, Griffiths did not hesitate to take Hindu darshanas and then give a little Christian 'tweak' to them. How this is done by providing a Christian twist to an originally Hindu concept is unwittingly described by Catholic theologian Brian J Pierce:

But all these borrowing from Hinduism to compensate the deficiencies of his own religion does not make him acknowledge this fact. Rather he went on pointing to what he perceived as the deficiencies of Hinduism. Apart from the lack of 'moral' compass, Hinduism also lacked social conscience as Advaita made people withdraw from the world. Griffiths wrote:

In hindsight, the historical irony is cruel. In reality, it was a British Christian Winston Churchill who engineered one of the severest famines of that century in Bengal and countless people perished in the streets of Calcutta because of the inhuman Hindu-phobic attitude of Churchill to which his Christian upbringing also contributed in no small amount. It was Hindu nationalist Syama Prasad Mukherjee and Hindu volunteers who fought against the famine created by the British. The subsequent post-independent Calcutta scenario too was more because of the colonial impoverishment rather than the stereotyped Hindu apathy.

Shantivanam, Aryan-Dravidian Racism And Evangelism In The field:

While Griffiths was not primarily interested in Aryan-Dravidian race theory, he did use them in his approach to Hinduism. And where he used them, he tried to show Hinduism as an Aryan development that integrated into itself a positive element of non-Aryan tribal tradition.

Thus Krishna worship, tantra, Shiva worship were all originally non-Hindu, tribal (for he considers tribal as non-Hindu and Aryan as Hindu) traditions integrated into Aryan Hinduism. When analysing the historical development of the Krishna worship and devotion in India, he suggested that “Krishna had been a non-Aryan deity absorbed into the Hindu pantheon through his identification with Vishnu”. With regard to Tantra Griffith speculated:

In an article that was published in the winter 2004-2005 issue of The Golden String, the bulletin of Bede Griffiths Trust, the writer appreciatively described the Griffiths perspective of grouping Indic spiritual traditions into racial binaries:

Again one can see here the framework that would also be used by David Gordon White – studying tantra through the Brahmin-non-Brahmin ethnic binary.

After assigning such non-Hindu roots to tribal spiritual traditions (which in reality are organically associated with Hindu Goddess traditions) Mary is introduced as the “dark mother of the oppressed”. Here is where the abstract theological conjectures and experimental structures fabricated in Shantivanam slowly enter the political space. Another Shantivanam product, Christian artist Jyoti Sahi, elaborates upon this idea of Griffiths thus:

Interestingly, this again, the image of Mary as the mother of the oppressed seems to be for Indian evangelical market. Where Catholicism had triumphed as a feminist theologian China Galland witnessed as late as 2000 in Brazil how Catholic priests exhorting people to be like Mary “obedient, reasonable, serene above all obedient”, writes, "Once again I see how the devotion to Mary ... is also used by the Church to control people, especially women.” (The Black Madonna and the Limits of Light: Looking Underneath Christianity, A teaching for Our Time in The fabric of the future: women visionaries of today illuminate the path to tomorrow (ed. M. J. Ryan, Patrice Wynne), Conari, 2000)

One can find many icons of Mary clad in Indian dress placed in many areas at Shantivanam. The chapel entrance tower displays a Mary similar to a Hindu goddess donning a vermillion mark and performing abhaya hasta, seated below Jesus. Today, we find in select areas of Tamil Nadu such promotion of Indianised form of Mary – specifically to compete with and replace Mariamman – the mother goddess of the folk tradition, who was popularised during the freedom struggle by Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi. After strategically promoting such designed syncretism the missionary scholars enter, do research and proclaim that there are similarities between worship of Mary and Mariamman. For example, in the book Christian folk traditions : an introductory study published from the Bishop House, Nagercoil in 2007 Brigitte Sebastia had a paper 'Maariyamman –Mariyamman: Catholic practices and image of Virgin in Velankanni'.

Shantivanam chapel itself built in the style of Hindu symbols. For example, generally, Hindu temples of South India have in the four corners of the gopuram, an animal, which is the mount of the deity. In the case of goddess it is lion and in the case of Shiva it is the bull. The Shantivanam chapel features very similar bull, lion, eagle and they actually represent the evangelists Luke, Mark and John. Those recognised by Catholic Church as officially saints are shown in the base tier of the gopuram – in Hindu saffron clothing – like mendicants or siddhas and above them Jesus is depicted in yogic postures. In Shiva temples usually on the southern side of the gopuram, Shiva is depicted as Dakshinamurthi. In the Shantivanam chapel, Jesus is depicted as Dakshinamurthi.

The inculturation attempt to Christianise Hindu sculptural and temple architectural elements cannot be seen in isolation. In parallel to what Shantivanam is doing, Christian missionaries are developing pseudo-historical narratives that it was the revolution of ancient Christianity brought by St Thomas to India that became all the Saivaite and Vishnu temples in South India, which were later appropriated by Aryan Brahmins. Thus a notorious Dravidianist – Christologist, Deivanayakam and his late daughter Devakala, both of whose works were promoted by Chennai Roman Catholic Diocese, claimed:

Griffiths also gives Christian meaning to the most venerated Hindu symbols like the dance of Shiva and instructs Catholic missionaries how to Christianise Nataraja – the presiding deity of Chidambaram. Kim 'Nataraja', an acolyte of Shantivanam project explains:

In the 'evangelical manual' given to evangelical workers in Tamil Nadu, question number 193 is about Nataraja. The explanation given is that it in reality symbolises Jesus winning over death but the book claims that these meanings were distorted by the Aryan Brahmins.

Today, many such texts which claim India to be 'a Christian nation' and provide evangelical guidelines based on inculturation and appropriation are available throughout Tamil Nadu in many Christian stores. These books are approved by Roman Catholic Diocese officials.

Sleeper Cells For Christianising Hinduism:

Inside Shantivanam, one finds thus various forms of Jesus at experimental stage. These forms imitate popular Hindu sacred icons. Jesus sitting in the lotus position like a yogi with four forms of him sitting adjacent to each other in four directions looks typically Hindu. The aim is to increase the Hindu universal acceptance to a point where he or she will accept the Trojan of Jesus-exclusiveness presented in Indian garb.

There is a statue of Jesus in yoga pose under a five-headed serpent. Given the fact that Tamil Nadu waysides and the banks of village water bodies abound in the images of Hindu gods and goddesses seated under such five-headed serpents, eventual installation of such theo-plagiarised Christian statues can create considerable confusion in the minds of people while at the same time fulfilling the mission of the Shantivanam founders to replace the Hindu deities with the Christian deity at the centre of Hindu spiritual traditions.

They are at the experimental stage – waiting for the right time of launch – for Christianising Hindu institutions and spiritual traditions. The Shantivanam movement finds parallel for this kind of operation in the history of the church – when it captured the pagan religious institutions – their celebrations and places of worship.

A commemorative issue in honour of Monchanin, its founder, published by ‘Saccidananda Ashram’ explains:

Today, the experiments done in the quite obscure corners of Tamil Nadu are being tested openly by the church. For example, John Samule, a Christian zealot and director of Institute of Asian Studies spearheaded the 'Murugan conferences'. He emphasised that his approach was more to approach Murugan as a historical figure than a deity. Though Saivism categorically states that Murugan has no human birth, this thesis was first put forward in the Murugan conferences.

Later, Seeman, a Christian born Tamil secessionist started vociferously stating that Murugan was just a deified ancestor of Tamils. Soon, St Thomas, who in a historically unattested story martyred in Madras, was presented by the church similar to Murugan with his spear, and his forehead adorned with holy ashes and vermillion in Hindu fashion.

Meanwhile, Shantivanam and many such institutions throughout India and abroad silently carry out their mission and operation, making full use of the Hindu ignorance of the preparations for a ‘war’ against them.