KHUNTI, JHARKHAND — Most days, Mahavir Das Goswami rides an old black motorcycle on narrow roads that wind through Khunti district. He tries to visit four or five villages.
On a pleasant June morning, he reached the village of Kanki, where a small group had gathered under a tree to wait for him. Someone tells him that he doesn’t have enough cereal and that he is hungry. Another needs a loan for his son to go to college. A third asks Goswami to help him unlock his pension funds. Goswami listens to them all attentively, sometimes taking notes and often giving them the phone numbers of others who might be able to help them.
“I’m a social worker,” he says. “I am doing God’s work.”
Goswami is a member of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, an organization associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group that is the ideological parent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
His work aims to help people, but also to strengthen Hindu identity in Jharkhand, a central state with dense forests, poor infrastructure and high poverty levels. Here, one in four people call themselves Adivasis – people who have existed since the dawn of time. The term includes a handful of indigenous, largely animistic belief systems based on the worship of rivers, trees, hills and other elements of nature. For centuries, Adivasis lived alongside Hindus, borrowing symbols and rituals over time. More recently, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Christian missionaries arrived in the region and many Adivasis also incorporated elements of this faith, many converting entirely.
Hindus make up about 26 percent of Khunti district’s population, barely more than the number of Christians at just over 25 percent, according to the 2011 census, the last conducted by the Indian government.
But today, Hindu nationalists are also pushing to reclaim the Adivasis.
“We think the tribes of Jharkhand are all Hindus,” says Kameshwar Sahu, a regional leader of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram in Ranchi, Jharkhand’s capital.
For Sahu and other Hindu nationalists, efforts to bring Adivasis into the Hindu fold are not about conversion, but rather something they call ghar wapsi, meaning “a return home,” with the belief that all people on the Indian subcontinent were originally Hindu.
There are political implications, but the fundamental motivation is to establish a Hindu national identity. This is the aim of the Modi government. This approach is a tightrope walk by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh aimed at encouraging followers of tribal religions to retain some of their practices, while increasingly rooting them in Hindu ideology. When the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliated organizations provide basic services to people of any faith, they are more likely to align with Hinduism, Goswami and others say.
Goswami, the ad hoc social worker, claims to have brought 1,000 people back to Hinduism in the last five years in Khunti alone.
In these conversion struggles, religion itself is only approached in a biased way. Services such as health care and education are used as entry points to deeper affiliation. It’s a long-standing tactic, says Dinesh Narayanan, author of “The RSS and the Making of the Deep Nation.”
“Hindu groups have copied the Christian model in this matter,” he says.
Hindus do not believe that indigenous people predate the existence of the faith, Narayanan says. They believe that Hinduism has existed since the dawn of time.
“That’s why they reject the term Adivasi,” he said. Instead, they call them “vanvasi” – forest dwellers.
Binita Munda has been married for 10 years. She and her husband had been trying for a baby for almost the entire time.
“I barely bleed during my period,” she says, so she’s sure she needs medical help.
But she doesn’t know how to get it. A GP she saw about a year ago asked her to do an ultrasound.
“No one in my family has ever had an ultrasound,” she says. It’s scary, she admits, and what’s more, she has no money.
Goswami positions himself as the solution to his problems. In one fell swoop, he convinces Munda’s in-laws to let her go to the gynecologist.
“I will arrange for doctors from one of our Hindu trusts to examine him at a low cost,” he says.
Goswami says it is a good day when he can help more than three families.
“If we don’t send them to our hospitals and schools, they will go to Christian schools and become Christians,” he said.
This approach has caused consternation among local Christian leaders.
“We are trying to help people like Binita Munda with their health problem,” says Susheela Purti, an elected member of the Kanki Block decision-making body for a decade now. She is a neighborhood officer and responsible for raising local issues at the district office. She is also affiliated with the local Christian church.
Purti says she brings to the district office the problems that any local person faces, without discrimination.
“In a village, we have to treat everyone equally because we live in symbiosis. Everyone depends on each other,” she says.
But, Goswami says, many people in positions of power in local governments are Christians.
“They hold government funds and benefits that we should receive,” he adds.
Munda, on the other hand, doesn’t really know what religion she follows.
“Maybe Sarna?” she said.
His last name, Munda, is the name of his tribe, and Sarna is the ancient animist faith that has gained ground among his people in recent years.
Would Munda convert to Christianity or Hinduism if either helped her with her health problem? “I don’t care what faith I’m asked to follow, as long as I have a child,” she says.
A resurgent Sarna faith
People identifying as Sarna have increased in recent years. More than 4 million people identified themselves as Sarna in the 2011 census.
Sarna believers pray to mountains, rivers, trees, insects and the earth, says Bandhu Tigga, a Sarna priest from Mudma village.
“Since we pray for everything nature has to offer, many Adivasis are not averse to praying to an idol when they are promised something in return,” he says.
Tigga says his job is to help Adivasis recognize that other religions are political.
“It’s not about Sarna; it’s about being in harmony with everything around us,” he says.
However, in districts where there are strong Sarna groups, the results of the November 2024 elections were determined by them. “It means we have to assert our own identity,” says Bandhu Tirkey, former elected member of the Jharkhand assembly. “We must be ourselves, not Hindus or Christians.”
This claim sparked a wave of what Sarna groups call “reconversion.”
In Malti village in Ranchi district, Sandeep Oraon was a Christian until three years ago.
“We became Christians 13 years ago when a local church said my mother’s paralysis would be cured if she received divine water,” Oraon explains. And she healed. The family began going to church every Sunday morning.
However, over time, he regained his faith in Sarna. Church was less attractive after losing his father to an unidentified illness.
“I just know that Jesus should have been nicer to us,” he said.