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AI: And there are so many things I wish we could talk about, but one other area that I did want to ask about was -- I don't know how to pronounce it, but it was the movement that... Swadhyaya?

PJ: Swadhyaya, yeah.

AI: That you wrote about, because I was so interested to see the connections that you drew in how faith and social change could influence each other and reinforce each other in a way that -- in a movement that also crossed this, the gap between the urban and the village, the rural.

PJ: Yeah. That was, it's a fascinating movement, and I'll give a little postscript at the end that is troubling to me about what's going on with the movement. But when I started learning about Swadhyaya, I was uncomfortable because I have this Western notion that religion, you can't talk about religion. And in India, spirituality is talked about all the time. Everything is according to God's wishes, and depends on what the Lord will bring, or depends on what our goddess says, and, and it's just kind of interspersed in there. But it's not necessarily religious in the context of going to a church every Sunday, or if you are not doing this, then you are bad, that kind of exclusive religion, though there's plenty of places in India where that's true as well. So looking at social change, it never occurred to me that you could have sort of a crossover between spiritual belief and... sort of acceptable spiritual belief and social change, 'cause they're kept so separate, and we want them to be separate here so much. And even there, I understand why we want them to be separate. So Swadhyaya is this movement that really came out of this one man's vision of the world, when he read the Bhagavad Gita, and realized that there was this connection, there were these beautiful lessons in the Gita about how if each of us were really connected to each other and felt that we were sisters in the eyes of God, or some spiritual being, that we would then feel a responsibility to each other. And if you look at a lot of what I think has happened in the last several decades, maybe century, is a break, is a breakdown of the social contract. That "I'm really not responsible for anybody except myself." So Swadhyaya is sort of, if you were to take the exact opposite of that, and it's how responsible we are for each other.

And it started out of this man kind of looking and studying all the religions in the world, and feeling like, wait a second, we have something in our heritage that we need to bring back, and that people need to understand. So he started doing teachings on the Gita and he started with a very small, kind of educated group of urban wealthy folks in Bombay, and said that part of what we needed to do was reconnect. Part of what had happened was this loss of connection between individuals, and one of the places where you saw that the most is the urban and the rural. And so he sent people out on what he called bhakti pheris, which were devotional visits, where they would go every year. They would take their own time, vacation, and go walking -- they would not use any vehicles, so they'd have to walk days with just what they needed. They weren't allowed to take anything from the visitors, because in India we have this tradition of politicians coming and taking things in order to get votes. And just establish a relationship, a connection. And that was it; there was no other instruction. And this went on, and it took ten years, twelve years, just for people to start to trust that that is all that was involved. And that the basic concepts were concepts of sisterhood or brotherhood in God, sort of, God was very prominent there, I don't want to make it sound like it wasn't, but I dealt with that by sort of replacing that with a spiritual being or presence, when I was thinking about whether this could apply in other places.

But it was remarkable. There were social experiments taken on, not in the name of social justice, not in the name of kind of development, but just in the name of "this is what we should do if we're a community linked under God," that were, that changed everything. It changed economic indicators, changed the ways in which people related to each other across caste and gender, turned dry wastelands into green fields. I mean, it was really, it was kind of, it was just phenomenal. This is a movement that's taking place in a hundred thousand villages across India, and the United Nations termed it one of the world's greatest movements, I think, in 1998 or something. Didn't take any money from funders, everything was funded through the individuals' hard work and hard labor.

So one example is in the fishing villages of Gujarat -- I think I write about this in the book -- there's a lot of inequity, and income inequity, because it's all based on the fishing harvest. And so what they did is they -- and a village becomes Swadhyaya village when over 90 percent of the people kind of are part of this bhakti pheri and part of the basic concepts of Swadhyaya. But they donate their labor to build a communal craft, fishing craft, and then each family gives one person to go out and fish on that craft for communal good. And then the fish that are caught are deemed as prasad, which is when you give something to the gods and it's blessed, and it comes back to you, it's called prasad. And so that is called the prasad. Belongs to, it's really Gandhi's idea of communal property, but it belongs to the community. It's sold in the market, and the proceeds are then distributed to those who are in need, but nobody knows who gets it. Except the, there's like two people, I think, who actually distribute the money, or I don't know exactly... I forget now, I'd have to go back and look. But because it's trying to take away the concept of giver, the giver and the receiver, and the unequalness that happens when you're getting something, you feel like you're inferior, and if you're giving -- you know this from the funding world -- you know if you're giving, somehow you're superior. And so it was trying to take away that inequity and just say that everybody's entitled to basic human dignity.

So this is one example, and actually has been tracked by social scientists who said, "This can't be. How could this be?" [Laughs] "Of course, we have to study it and make sure that the results are..." And they found phenomenal things. And so, so much of it is just about this human connection under God. That's all it was about, is this fundamental idea that if I am a child of God and you're a child of God, that means we're connected, and that means I'm responsible for you. And that what I do has to affect your life in a positive way. Overcame caste barriers and all kinds of things.

The disturbing postscript is I actually just got an e-mail message last week, the founder of the movement died, and there was a lot of speculation about what would happen when he died, and he died a couple of years ago. And some of the original people who started the movement with him were the people that I talked to and went on, and saw, went to Swadhyaya villages with, and apparently his daughter took over, she was always thought to be the one that would take over. And this e-mail -- I have no idea if it's true -- but, talks about how she has taken, destroyed the movement and taken it over and tried to use it for financial gain, and all that kind of thing, and started taking money from outside funders. And so all of the things that you always worry about with any kind of movement, I don't know, like I said, if it's true, but certainly it offers to me the possibility of what we can do if we just go back to the basics of human relationship.

AI: Well, I'm so glad we had a chance to discuss it just a little bit, if only to, well, to encourage other people, I think, to be aware of, that this is a movement that, as you had mentioned, is not very well-known in relationship to the power that it has.

PJ: Yeah, yeah. It's phenomenal.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.