Protect me from Salvation
Sepia Mutiny had an interesting post on the discriminatory practices of the Salvation Army (which is supported by public funds), and its support for the same by the Justice Department. It turns out that the Salvation Army also has a “venerable” history in the Imperialist project. Among other things they were involved in the rehabilitation of “criminal tribes” in India, as they say, “at the invitation of the Government in 1908.”
India has about 60 million people who belong to “Denotified Tribes.” The colonial government did not like nomadic and tribal peoples they could not control and tax, so entire communities were notified as Criminal Tribes by the British in 1871. Forcible settlement and persecution followed this piece of legislation. One of the players in this sorry history is the Salvation Army. Rudolf Heredia in his review of two books, Branded By Law: Looking at India’s Denotified Tribes by Dilip D’Souza and Dishonoured by history: “criminal tribes” and British colonial policy by Meena Radhakrishnan, says:
The official intention then of the legislation was not so much punitive and retributive as preventative and remedial. It was all part of the ‘civilizing’ mission of the colonial raj. The Criminal Tribes Act provides a window through which we can examine how such good intentions of the government work themselves out into an oppressive hell for those it was supposed to benefit…..
An important player in this sordid drama was not just the government but the Salvation Army that served more as a self-conscious imperial agency rather than the evangelical sect it portrayed itself to be. It had a significant role to play in criminal legislation in Britain and all over the empire. The various schemes visualised by William Booth, its founder, in his rather pompous proposals, In Darkest England, The Way Out: A Study of Poverty and Vice in England and a Scheme by the Salvaion Army for Reclamation of Criminals and Prevention of Crime, laid out a regime in 1890 for ‘the starving, the criminal, the lunatics, the paupers, the hopeless, the drunkards and the harlots’ (p. 17) which became models that influenced British administration elsewhere as well.
Settlements were established to “rehabilitate” these communities, and it became a way to appropriate land for agriculture and provide cheap labor for industry.
We were in India in December working on a documentary about a community from one such settlement in Ahmedabad, (read about it on Kerim’s blog), and we met an old lady who had lived in the settlement, she told us how they had to take permission to even go to the bathroom, how they couldn’t go anywhere without a pass, and the list just continues.
Its so hypocritical that organizations like the Salvation Army are not held accountable for the immense harm they have caused to so many people and in fact get support from the State, and Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham want to air drop salvation into the “area of darkness” that is Asia. While the powers that be scream themselves hoarse about the threat from those “religious fanatics, out there.”
March 14th, 2005 at 1:29 am
Down south, the Army has done more good than harm. I need only talk about the village my parents were born in. The village is all Christian and they all went to the Salvation Army church. We are what the government calls Scheduled castes and a look at the neighboring villages is telling as to how different our lives turned out to be.
All the people in my village are land owners and there is no untouchability as they do not have to depend on an upper caste land owner for their livelihood. The story is not so in the neighboring villages. The Army was the vehicle of progress in my village, sending my grand father to college. Now that might not strike you as special but those days, a Dalit graduating from college was no mean feat.
I am not writing this to say that the Army is an angelic organization (I take issue with them discriminating against gays) but just to take exception to the one dimensional portrait you paint here.
How do you suppose one hold Hinduism accountable? The Kanchi mutt does not have a Dalit working there to date. No, I am not suggesting that one ought to hold Hinduism accountable but your post is not very different from what a Southern Baptist would have written about a Hindu organization.
March 17th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Thank you for the interesting information about your grandfather, I am glad he didn’t have to live in a settlement, which is what happened to the denotified tribes, who number 60 million today. But your point of the Army not being a complete malefactor is well taken, even though they don’t seem to have even acknowledged their role in the oppression of so many people, regardless of their intentions. The point about Hinduism , its not a competition to see which religion is more oppressive, but rather the role organizations play in some very oppressive policies.
January 26th, 2008 at 6:55 am
If you look up the very word salvation, it has two different meanings:
a. Preservation or deliverance from destruction, difficulty, or evil.
b. A source, means, or cause of such preservation or deliverance.
Which definition above are you implying when you write ‘Protect me from Salvation’?
The denotified tribes were and still are lowest caste of the Hindu society. The fact that they were branded as criminals has no relevance to the salvation that many have recieved and are still receiving to this day through the work of the Army. I am a proud recipient of that salvation, in fact I am more excited now more than ever in my faith. To know that I was once a part of a tribe full of ‘the starving, the criminal, the lunatics, the paupers, the hopeless, the drunkards and the harlots’ but now am a king in the eyes of a merciful an loving Creator. James Dinkerrao Taylor
February 16th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Interesting information; thanks for posting. Here in the U.S. the Salvation Army is viewed as a harmless organization that you mostly see around Christmas time, standing outside of the stores and ringing bells to try to get people to donate money for good works. Nothing coercive about it at all, and it gets no support from the government. Your post about the S.A.’s involvement in some of the coercive practices of British imperalism was an eye-opener. I plan to seek out more information about this.
January 25th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
[...] all over India - while the British attempts at “Meena genocide” in India failed. The rest of India refused to participate in these pogroms - unlike the Europeans. Free India de-notified these tribes in 1952 [...]