A panorama of challenge and opportunity
To
the outsider, India can seem a bewildering place: it has one billion people,
and an area of 3,287,590 sq. km, making it slightly more than one-third
the size of the US while having more than three times the number of people.
Between them its millions speak a staggering 1650 different languages
or dialects and official languages alone number 15.
Its massive overpopulation has long been the cause of poverty – and consequently of physical disease and handicap – on a scale seldom seen anywhere else. More than a third of the population is too poor to afford an adequate diet, and recent surveys indicate that only five per cent of households, at most, have an annual income equivalent to US$2,300.
Given that such conditions are taken as ‘normal’, it seems particularly harsh that fate should decree further disasters: nevertheless, in October 1999 the eastern state of Orissa suffered a cyclone and flooding on a scale unseen anywhere else in recent history. Last September millions were left homeless by flooding in West Bengal, and in February this year the largest earthquake for many decades devastated the western state of Gujarat, killing at least 50,000 people for certain, and possibly as many as 100,000.
Lives were spared
If such events challenge conventional Christian apologetics, what Christians do know is that Christ suffers with those who suffer. As if in dramatic illustration of this, February’s earthquake did not leave the Bible Society of India (BSI) itself untouched. Local BSI officials were among those attending a conference in a town east of Ahmedabad when it struck. The ground floor and first floor of the hotel where the participants were meeting were completely destroyed, burying many people alive. Conference delegates had just gone up to the second floor to start business and their lives were spared.
Thrown about
Visiting the stricken area shortly afterwards,
Dr B K Pramanik, the General Secretary of the BSI, heard at first hand
how the family of the Secretary of the BSI’s Gujarat Auxiliary were
thrown about by the force of the earthquake in their apartment in Bible
House. Before his departure, he, the Auxiliary Secretary and the Auxiliary
Distribution Officer drew up an inventory of Scriptures for distribution
to try to give comfort to the grieving and the homeless. (For the full
story of the Indian earthquake, see World
Report 358, March 2001, WR 358/24.)
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Taken
together, the O-21 projects could have a significant impact on the
task of putting the Bible into the heart languages and hands of
more of India’s millions.
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For all its suffering, India challenges those who, looking no further than ‘big picture’ statistics, neatly label it as a nation burdened by universal poverty and disaster. In the state of Kerala, in its southwestern tip, for example, literacy and life expectancy are almost as high as in developed countries, and the birth rate has fallen to replacement level.
In other respects, too, development across India offers striking contrasts: its economy includes traditional village farming and modern agriculture, both handicrafts and a wide range of modern industries. But the country is undeniably beset by many problems: the ongoing dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir may one day provoke one side or the other into using nuclear weapons, and the religious and ethnic strife, which is touched on in this Special Report, is seldom far from the headlines.
First missionary
Yet
if India presents great challenges it is also a land of great opportunities.
And Christians have not been slow to try to tackle them. Tradition has
it that the first missionary to India was the Apostle Thomas. ‘Mar
Thoma’, as he was known, came in AD 52 to convert itinerant Jewish
traders in the port of Muziris. The Syrian Christians of Kerala believe
themselves to be direct descendants of those converted by him (see
article).
In the modern era, the numerical growth of professing Christians since the mid-19th century has been remarkable: from 1.5 million in 1851 to 8.4 million in 1951, to an estimated 40.8 million in mid-2000. Christians currently form India’s second-largest religious minority, after the Muslims – though even this ‘success’ has to be seen in the context of the increased attacks which Christians have suffered for their beliefs in recent years at the hands of nationalist Hindu extremists.
Like so many other aspects of life in this diverse country, the spread of Christianity has been uneven. Reflecting the history of the faith in the sub-continent, believers are concentrated mostly in the south, where the Orthodox tradition was established in the third century AD, and the east, where minority groups such as the Nagas have been converted. In the west of the country (except in Bombay), and in the north and the central region, they are comparatively scattered.
Since the government began actively discouraging the arrival of foreign missionaries – their numbers have been falling for several decades – Christianity is largely in the hands of Indian nationals.
1,650 languages
This, then, is the country which will receive US$6 million from the UBS global expansion program Opportunity 21 (O-21) – only China is due to receive a larger share. Measured against the total of 1,650 languages spoken in India, the number in which a complete translation of the Bible is available is comparatively few – some 55. So it is hardly surprising that the declared aim of the Bible Society of India continues to be “to make the Word of God available to all the different people groups in the country”.
That is also the thrust of India’s 15 O-21 projects. One project, for example, aims to develop and distribute a Children’s Bible in 14 languages (in both print and CD-ROM format). A description of the situation which has given rise to this project will illustrate the scope of the task waiting to be done: some 35 per cent of India’s one billion people are children under 15 years old – but there is no Children’s Bible available in any of the indigenous languages.
The
BSI has translated and produced a colourful and attractive Children’s
Bible in English, however, and this will provide the model for Bibles
in 10 major indigenous languages – and translations are already complete
in nine of them. The final aim of the program is to distribute Children’s
Bibles in all the 14 official indigenous languages so that 215,000 Indian
children can have a copy in their own ‘heart’ language.