A Different Kind of ‘Ghar Wapasi’

In March 2018, a significant event occurred in Ranchi that provided the much-needed inspiration to work on this biography. Father Camille Bulcke's remains were brought from Delhi's Nicholson Cemetery and reburied on the premises of Ranchi's St Xavier's College, located on Camille Bulcke Path, named after him. The reburial of his skeletal remains was announced as part of the tribal tradition of hadgadi, where the remains of ancestors are carried as a blessing and reburied as the tribes move from one village to another. The exhumation of dead bodies and remains is also a known practice among Catholics, especially for beatification and canonisation purposes. In several contexts and for various reasons, the family members of the dead can also make personal requests to the Church and local administration to allow them to rebury their loved ones elsewhere. It is not uncommon to witness the exhumation of remains of a family grave at various times when a new member is to be buried at the same site (Parashar 2018).

The Jesuit Society of Jharkhand worked closely with their Delhi counterparts and had to cross several bureaucratic hurdles to bring back the remains of Father Bulcke. They received help from Father Ranjit Tigga, the head of the Department of Tribal Studies at the Indian Social Institute, New Delhi, who oversaw the digging of the grave in Delhi, the exhumation of the remains and the logistical arrangements to transport them to Ranchi, where the casket was received in a traditional tribal ceremonial welcome. In the past, another Belgian priest, Father Constant Lievens (1856–1893), known to have officially ‘converted’ a large number of Chhota Nagpur tribals to Catholicism, had his ashes transferred from Belgium and interred at St Mary's Cathedral in Ranchi in 1993. Efforts towards the canonisation of Father Lievens were ongoing, even as we were working on this manuscript.

Speakers at the reburial and commemoration event included Father Bulcke's close associates, noted littérateurs, former students and members of the Jesuit Society who reflected on his life and contributions – ranging from original commentaries on religious texts and high-quality translations to arguably the best English-to-Hindi shabdkosh (dictionary) still found in most Indian homes and offices.

As mentioned in the earlier chapters, Camille's evolution as a Christian priest and a scholar of Indian traditions and his knowledge were shaped at the Calcutta School of Indology – an umbrella institution, which made a genuine, rational and scientific approach to explore, examine and explain Indology to its members, to the wider Indian scholarly community and to the entire world. One must recognise the fundamental ethos of the Calcutta School of Indology as reflected in Camille's body of work. Not only did he produce some of the most extraordinary works on ancient and medieval Indian literature, philosophy and theology, but he also undertook the herculean and exceptional campaign to indigenise Christian sacred texts, philosophy and theology for ordinary Indians.

Camille's most renowned contribution to the field of Indology is his study of the Ramkatha; his doctoral thesis was turned into a celebrated book titled Ramkatha: Utpatti Aur Vikas. Right from its publication, this book was considered a tour de force, and as Dineshwar Prasad argues, Camille's work on the Ramkatha is the first of its kind that ‘compiled the narrative from various Indian and foreign sources and analysed each and every fact and meaning of it through a systematic, scientific and conclusive research’ (D. Prasad 2002, p. 22). Camille explored the Ramayana literature beyond Sanskrit and Hindi and studied ‘Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Kashmiri and Sinhalese’ versions of the story (D. Verma 1950, p. 6). The renowned Hindi littérateur Dhirendra Verma1 called this book an ‘encyclopaedia of the Ramkatha narrative’ that includes ‘the Rama-Story found abroad and in this connection information available from Tibet, Khotan, Indonesia, Indo- China [Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam], Siam [Thailand], Burma [Myanmar]’ (ibid.). The details and scholarly analysis highlight that ‘its range is simply astounding and kaleidoscopic’ (ibid.).

Camille's book is a testament to the broad sphere of Indian civilisational influence around South-East Asia based on the popularity of the Ramkatha. The story of Rama (Ramkatha) remained his lifelong passion, and apart from revising this book, he also wrote several research essays in Hindi, English, French and Flemish on this theme.

Camille's Inspiration and Anchor

During his lifetime, Camille Bulcke appeared to be an enigma, leaving several of his acquaintances nonplussed to see a devout Christian, an ardent missionary and an ordained priest with such inherent and infinite reverence for Tulsidas and his Rama bhakti. Indeed, Indian spirituality and religious traditions have attracted a fair share of Westerners, who left their homes to adopt India and embrace its religious and cultural practices. This illustrious list includes luminaries such as Annie Besant (England-born Annie Wood), a renowned Theosophist and a prominent campaigner for Indian independence; Sister Nivedita (Irish-born Margaret Noble), who became the disciple of Swami Vivekananda; Mirra Alfassa, or the ‘Mother’ of Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry; and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. Undoubtedly, for these foreigners, India's cultural and spiritual values were the initial attractions, though most of them ended up participating in the independence movement that was pursuing self-respect, self-rule and anti-colonial nationalism. Camille was an exception; he joined the anti-colonial nationalist struggle but not as a political activist. Instead, he participated as a cultural campaigner seeking the respect and restoration of Hindi to its rightful place, by challenging the hegemony of English well beyond the formal end of British colonial rule. Unlike Sister Nivedita, Mirra Alfassa and Mirabehn, Camille came to India as a Christian missionary, and did not have a living person as his guide, mentor or patron; instead, he chose Tulsidas, a sixteenth-century Hindu devotional poet as his anchor.

Tulsidas as the core of Camille's personal, literary and spiritual life is all the more puzzling given that the Indian poet did not figure even remotely in Camille's world when he took the life-changing decision to renounce and become a Christian priest and later to take up missionary work in India. He considered it a divine command to give up worldly affairs and take his priestly vows, drawing inspiration from Father Constant Lievens, the wellknown Belgian missionary who served in the Chhota Nagpur region in India. It was only upon reaching India that Camille witnessed the hegemony of the colonial language, English, over the indigenous Indian languages.

Against the ‘Current’

On a train from Calcutta (Howrah) to Allahabad, a tall, lanky European with blue eyes and an auburn beard, clad in the white robe of a Christian priest, sat, immersed in a book. In India, during the 1960s and 1970s, the train-running schedule had enough stoppages at major stations to allow a thorough inspection and recharge–refuel of the engines. At the Asansol station, the train took that extra halt; the European priest put his book down and got off the train to stretch his long limbs. Upon his return to the seat, he found the gentleman sitting next to him reading his book; his fellow passenger wore an expression of sheer amazement as he flipped through the pages. Seeing that the book's owner was back, the gentleman hurriedly put the book back and blurted, ‘I did not know that you knew Hindi’ (Ponette 1987, p. 69). The European priest nodded his head in affirmation, and the two started talking; it soon became apparent that the foreigner-looking clergyman was exceptionally proficient in Hindi. The two talked non-stop for several hours until the train reached Allahabad. As the tall priest prepared to leave the train, his fellow passenger said, ‘What a loss for me; I missed the chance to converse with you in Hindi for the first three hours of our journey between Calcutta and Asansol’ (ibid.). As the two passengers bid adieu, the one on the platform started walking towards the exit door of the Allahabad railway station. He was Reverend Father Camille Bulcke, also known as Baba Bulcke by then.

Camille’s appearance, dress and demeanour all marked him as a foreigner, yet his sense of belonging to India held great significance for him throughout his life. He spent most of his life in Ranchi, Jharkhand (erstwhile Bihar), where he taught Hindi and Sanskrit at St Xavier's College. Manresa House, the residential compound of the Jesuits in Ranchi, proudly displays his statue in his white priestly robe. In more recent times, St Xavier's College has installed a bust of the legendary Christian priest on its premises, with his favourite words from the Ramcharitmanas (Divine Lake of Ram's Deeds) inscribed underneath.

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.

Belgium: A Brief Historical Context

To understand Camille's childhood and youth in Belgium, it is imperative to have an overview of the political, social and cultural milieu of that time and some of the historical processes that shaped them. While Belgium was not considered a major European power, it held an enormous influence in Europe and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carved out of the Netherlands, Belgium emerged as an independent state in 1830 and was a small country of 30,000 square kilometres; its ‘population was divided between often antagonistic French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch speakers of the Flanders region, alongside a small German community’ (Aldrich and Stucki 2022, p. 430). The birth of Belgium as a new nation-state in 1830 reflected the two interrelated trends of the modernisation of state apparatus such as law, institutions and bureaucracy and the quest for ethno-nationalism.

Like the rest of Europe, this trend of modernisation also marked strains between the state and the Roman Catholic Church and growing tensions between autocracy and democratic principles. Coupled with these political churnings, Belgium also witnessed major social and economic changes; capitalist industrial production advanced rapidly, changing the fundamental nature of the agrarian and cottage-industry-based economy. Remarkably, while Belgium stood out as a champion of liberalism and as the world's second industrial nation, the socio-economic disparities were rampant. Karl Marx found refuge in Brussels between 1845 and 1848 and wrote the Communist Manifesto during his stay, calling Belgium an archetype bourgeoisie state. In Das Capital, Marx presented Belgium as the ‘paradise of continental Liberalism’ against ‘the paradise of capitalists’ (Vanthemsche and Peuter 2023, p. 249).

The population of Belgium remained devoutly and almost exclusively Catholic; the region was seen as ‘a bastion of the Counter-Reformation’ (ibid., p. 6). For the first 50 years, the Belgian parliament was dominated by the Catholics, facilitating the expansion of the Catholic Church and its morals over the society. Liberals were another significant political group who sought an end to religious domination in the state and society. The church overcame the opposition of the liberals to regain domination over the education system, holding a monopoly on primary education while controlling secondary and university education.

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).

The Linguaphile Activist

The celebrated Hindi poet Mahadevi Verma claimed that a monk does not need to be a scholar or an author. However, should the three qualities of spiritual practice, scholarship and literary craft blend, such a synthesis is sublime and sacred (M. Verma 1987, p. 32). For Verma, Camille, her dear younger brother, embodied this rare confluence. This chapter explores his progression from a young engineering student into Father Bulcke, the worldrenowned scholar on the Ramkatha, Hindi literature and Indology. Rama's story in the Ramcharitmanas, written by the celebrated Indian poet from the Bhakti era, Tulsidas, is considered a literary masterpiece and one of the most popular versions of the Ramayana in India. Tulsidas believed that the narration of Rama's story (in Awadhi, a north Indian vernacular language), undertaken purely for his own personal happiness, would ultimately bring him moksha, the highest spiritual goal in the teachings of Hinduism. Camille always referred to Tulsidas as his idol; propitiously, one may argue that by working on the genesis and the development of the Rama story, much like what Tulsidas wished for himself, Camille also strove for his intellectual moksha.

He was proud of his linguistic heritage; he loved his native Flemish language, while the society around him considered embracing French as the mark of upward mobility. His deep emotional bond with his mother tongue inspired him to become one of the leading activists in the political movement to adopt Flemish as a medium of academic, institutional and official language. As a protagonist of the Flemish language, he was greatly inspired by the Flemish writer Guido Gezelle; in fact, Gezelle was one of the first serious intellectual and theological influences on Camille's life. As a linguaphile, Camille was not against the French language per se; his opposition was directed against the imposition of a language as part of a colonial project to erase the local language and culture. His early brush with the French cultural and linguistic hegemony and his belief that language is the custodian of the cultural essence of any society eventually shaped the future course of his life, and his scholarship and activism in India.

With the Occupy protests in the West, which have lately been superseded by the Black Lives Matter movements, we started telling the stories of protest movements in the Global South, with a focus on Kerala. It would also imply that right-making/state-making dialectics ought to be applied to understand and assess state formation and state performance, including that of the Kerala model of development. After the post-independence state formation, the historical landscape of Kerala, by and large, validates the right-making/statemaking thesis despite shortfalls; it appears that after state formation, and until recently, there have been tendencies on the part of the state to put constraints in the process. It strengthened the case for why the confluence of class and race/caste, with its gender expressions, matters for appropriate politics, particularly in leftist groups. Furthermore, research has shown that different communities have been negatively impacted by global crises like the coronavirus pandemic, with the most marginalized members of society bearing the brunt of this burden because they lack access to adequate healthcare, are malnourished, and live in poverty. Neither the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism nor the pandemic is caste- or class-neutral. All the more important is the livelihood and environmental vulnerability of the marginalized in a state which is otherwise known for its social developments and socialist experiments which in turn demands what has been described in this monograph as political ecospatiality.

Threats and enclosures are additional features of the current world, and the pandemic has made individuals who defend their rights even more vulnerable. Countries of the Global South such as Colombia, Niger, Indonesia, and the Philippines are used as examples of neoliberal predations (Burns and LeMoyne 2001; Lucas and Warren 2003; Iwilade 2012; Quimpo 2009). In the case of India, as argued elsewhere, the modalities of emerging power is by and large constituted by the Hindutva–corporate regime; this is further contrasted with the ‘graduated social democratic state’ as in Kerala (Raman 2023). As we describe the problems of the excluded, the future seems as hazy as ever. Yet the ecospatial struggles we narrated so far are optimistic, and so is ecospatiality in its totality, which is in and of itself politics proper.