WRAPPED IN BLANKETS, face fully covered, only streaks of grey hair from a loose braid visible, the body lay in the back of a rugged Tata Sumo parked outside a house in Bhanupratappur, a small village in Kanker district, in the Bastar region of the Indian state of Chattisgarh. In life, it had belonged to an elderly woman who had died suddenly from a cardiac arrest. When we arrived, on 7 March, it had already been there for over 24 hours, in the scorching heat, unattended and unmoving.
The body had been taken from one possible burial site to another, only to be brought back again as no final resting place could be agreed upon. About 100 metres away, the woman’s family was locked in two parallel battles: one to secure her burial – or, failing that, her cremation; the other to decide their own religion. The two were deeply intertwined. The body had begun to smell, and the family had no time left to dwell. Three of the family’s four members had signed a bond paper stating that they were “willingly” doing ghar wapsi – a “homecoming” to Hinduism, the faith they had been born into – and would never follow Christianity again. The woman’s son had been pushed to breaking point; his urgency left his wife and daughter with little room to resist. But his son, in his early twenties, had refused. He insisted on following Christianity, the faith of his choice, as was his right under the Constitution of India.
When that right ceased to hold meaning in practice, he chose to flee rather than conform. He had been missing for several hours, and nobody, including his family, knew where he had gone. His choice carried a consequence: the village where his grandmother had been married, built her life and raised her children would not allow her even a small piece of land to be buried in.
“We have let him bury her,” Shiv Prasad Gota, the local sarpanch – the head of the village council – said. “But they will have to convert their religion.”
By then, the entire village had gathered at the space designated for important meetings. The Kawde family sat apart, visibly ostracised. Savita Kawde, the dead woman’s granddaughter, said they were waiting for her brother to “come to his senses” and agree to end his grandmother’s final ordeal.
The previous day, in the chaos that followed the old woman’s death, the situation had escalated into violence. Villagers had allegedly attacked the family, telling them to leave in order to prevent Christianity from taking root here. For many in the village, as in other parts of this region – home to a great concentration of Adivasi tribal groups – their objection centred on the belief that the family had disturbed ancestral customs and faith. The atmosphere in the village was already febrile; just days before the old woman passed away, members of the Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu nationalist organisation, had stormed the village and vandalised a church.
It was Gota, the sarpanch, who intervened to stop the assault on the Kawdes, assuring the villagers that the family would eventually reconvert.
Now, however, everything had stalled, with no resolution in sight.