Father Rasschaert's Martyrdom

Dr. Koenraad Elst

A Flemish Hero

Herman Rasschaert (1922-64) was a Flemish Catholic missionary in Chotanagpur, and now the subject of a hagiography by the Flemish author Robert Houthaeve: "Recht, al barstte de wereld!" (published by the author, 9 Puitstraat, 8890 Moorslede, Belgium). The term "hagiography" is not used pejoratively here: as becomes clear in Houthaeve's very detailed and well-documented description of his hero's life and times, Rasschaert was an idealist of a type which is hard to come by nowadays. In Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, Catholic children of my generation used to be told the then-recent account of his martyrdom; as Rasschaert's sister was a schoolmate and lifelong friend of my mother's, I have heard his story many times. Checking the story we were fed against this new and detailed account proves most interesting.

Herman Rasschaert was born in the Netherlands, where his parents were temporary refugees because of their role in the "Activist" movement (anti-Belgian Flemish nationalists collaborating with the Germans) in World War 1. During his school days in the Flemish provincial town of Aalst, Rasschaert himself was known as an ardent Flemish nationalist and admirer of Joris Van Severen, the leader of the Catholic-nationalist "Union of Thiudic [= Pan-Dutch] National-Solidarists", murdered by French soldiers in 1940. When he entered the Jesuit order, he chose as his own the motto used by Adrian VI, the only Dutch pope in history: Fiat justitia pereat mundus, "Justice be done, even if the world perish for it!" (the Dutch version is the title of the book: Recht, al barstte de wereld). The same sense of justice which made him a supporter of the Flemish cause, also determined his attitude to India in two ways. Firstly, it led him to understand the Indian distrust of Christians and missionaries: he compared their position as former prot�g�s of the British colonizer to that of the collaborators with the Belgo-French oppressors in Flanders. Secondly, it helped him choose a career in the service of a poor and often oppressed population: the Munda tribals in the forests of eastern India.

Travails of the tribals

The tribals of India are often called Adivasis ("aboriginals"), on the assumption that they are somehow more ancient inhabitants of India. In a biological sense, of course, practically all Indians are descendents of the earliest human inhabitants, and separating a minority by calling it "aboriginal" (meaning that the others are invaders) is simply mischievous. It is at most in a linguistic sense that some communities, or at least their languages, may be traced to fairly recent foreign origins.

Even then, the term "Adivasi/Aboriginal" is mistaken in the case of several of the tribes who now proudly wear that label and claim special rights on that basis, e.g. those who speak Dravidian (e.g. Oraon, Gondi) or Sino-Tibetan (Naga, Mizo, Bodo): most linguists believe that Dravidian entered India from southern Iran (Elam/Makran), while the origins of Sino-Tibetan were in the middle basin of the Yellow River in China. However, one may justify the term "Adivasi/Aboriginal" on the patronizing assumption that their lifestyle is culturally more "original", meaning "primitive"; but in that case, the labels "Christian" and "Adivasi" are mutually exclusive, since the act of conversion is a dramatic break with their ancestral traditions.

At any rate, the author consistently uses the term (in its vernacular form Adibasi) to designate the tribals among whom Father Rasschaert worked, in particular the Munda tribe. In their case too, the term is as inaccurate as it would be in case of the Indo-Aryans, the ones typically targeted for exclusion (as being foreign invaders) by the very term "Adivasi". For, it is now generally accepted among linguists that the Austro-Asiatic family to which Munda belongs, originated in Southeast Asia, which remains its demographic centre of gravity, its most spoken member being Vietnamese. If Hindi-speaking Brahmins aren't "aboriginal", then neither are the Mundas.

The author briefly relates how the Mundas had become the victims of exploitation and oppression. Since the Moghul dynasty opened up the forests of Chotanagpur for cultivation, settlement by landholders and tax collection, the tribals lost their splendid isolation. British rule accelerated the process: modern economics did not recognize communal ownership of land, roads and railways further destroyed the protective isolation, increased demographic pressure in non-tribal regions and the discovery of ores encouraged outsiders to settle in the newly opened areas and in industrial boomtowns, with tribals as cheap labour. Since many of the landholders and traders heartlessly exploiting the tribals' inexperience were Muslims, this evolution also set the stage for the Adivasi-Muslim conflagration which was to make Rasschaert a martyr.

The dispossession of the tribals, who often had the law on their side but lacked the societal skills to have the law enforced, created a God-given opening to the Christian missionaries: under the leadership of the Flemish Father Constant Lievens s.j. (1856-93), they offered their services in legal help and social self-organization in exchange for the souls of these poor heathens. It should also be said in favour of the Flemish Jesuits that the schools they opened mostly have the mother tongue along with Hindi as the medium of instruction, in contrast with the English-medium schooling organized and propagated by Anglo-American missionaries. In this respect at least, Hindu nationalists would be wrong to denounce the missionaries as "anti-national" (I remember how in 1974, bishop Kerketta, groomed by the Flemish Jesuits, visited our school in Leuven, Belgium, and was asked why India had just exploded a nuclear bomb; his reply was not the usual protest that a poor country should waste money on armament, but that "we must be strong against the threat from China"!). Houthaeve rightly sings the beauties of the Lievens mission, though he ought to have mentioned the tribal opposition against the missionaries as well.

Thus, since 1947, several legal amendments to prohibit and effectively thwart conversions by force or fraud (practices documented in the 1956 Niyogi Committee Report, internationally misrepresented by missionaries as an attack on the freedom of religion) were pushed by tribal MPs. For another example, the genuinely indigenous revolt led by Birsa Munda in 1899 was modelled on the Hindu reform movement Arya Samaj (he wanted his fellow tribesmen to renounce witchcraft, intoxication and animal sacrifices, and to wear the Brahminical sacred thread), and started with an attack on a mission post. Birsa receives only a single and quite scornful mention in this book, eventhough he is still a national hero for the Mundas.