A year later I went to another wedding. This time it was Asiya who was getting married. Like Indumati's it was an arranged marriage. This wedding was held in a rented function hall: men were assembled in one section with the groom seated on a throne over a colorfully decorated podium, surrounded by the qadi (judge) and the male friends and relatives. In another separate section sat the bride surrounded by her female friends and relatives. Among them were Asiya's Hindu colleagues and students.

Insignificant as it may appear, the mixing of the two communities on those happy occasions are part of the fruit of our efforts to bring the divided community of Sultan Shahi into better relationship. They are stories of change, not overnight change but change that comes from a long and painful process of healing injured feelings, of creating mutual trust, of rebuilding broken relationships. Ten years back this mixing would not have happened. The elementary school for drop-out children in the neighborhood, the tailoring and embroidery classes for young women, the medical clinic and periodic community health camps have attracted Muslims and Hindus over the years and has provided space for healing, for transcending boundaries erected in the name of religion, for building relationships. The project runs from a former Muslim house. The owner sold it to us because he was afraid of the Hindu neighbors and moved to a safer place. Situated as it is between the two communities, it has become a neutral ground for interaction, for learning each other's language, culture and religion. It is a small step in our efforts to understand what reconciliation means in practice. The bonds we see developing among Hindu-Muslim children and women and through them among their men is an indication that reconciliation is possible.

In this paper I will narrate a few stories that help illustrate some of the programs carried out by the Henry Martyn Institute: International Center for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation in Hyderabad, India. I will briefly refer to the violent riots in 1990 as the setting for the change in the focus of the Institute's activities and the revision of its constitution, which became the foundation for its projects aimed at reconciliation. It is my firm belief that reconciliation cannot take place unless our efforts towards it begin with an understanding of the root causes of violence and its endemic and spiral nature. What follows here is a case study of what reconciliation means in practical terms as well as a story of my own personal struggle to understand the meaning of reconciliation in a multi-religious, multi-cultural society fragmented by many forces. These few thoughts are offered with the hope that, however difficult and dangerous the demands of reconciliation are, we cannot ignore its call if we wish to contribute towards building a just and peaceful society.

From Evangelism to Reconciliation

The Henry Martyn Institute was founded in 1930 as an organ of the church for training missionaries to evangelize Muslims. In the 1960s and 1970s it was also engaged in interfaith dialogue, although it did not give up its evangelistic orientation. In the worsening context of communal misunderstanding and suspicion, of continuing riots often fomented in the name of religion, the Institute continued to change its focus and increasingly shift to interfaith relations and reconciliation. The story of this transformation is already well documented and I will not go into it here.³ This change necessitated a major revision of HMI's constitution and restatement of its goals. Its name also changed from the former Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies.⁴ These were bold steps, although not everyone has agreed with this change in direction.⁵

HMI's revised constitution became the foundation for its work towards reconciliation. It indeed is a veritable magna carta, which defines the primary goal of the Institute to be "an expression of the Church's ministry of reconciliation". The constitution speaks about helping churches fulfill a unique peace-making role, of the need to study and understand Islam and other religions, to work towards the removal of misunderstanding and suspicion, to promote justice and peace, to collaborate with people of other faiths on common concerns. It became the spring board for launching various types of programs to promote reconciliation: the work with Hindus and Muslims in the slums, the training workshops in mediation and conflict resolution, the efforts to help empower like-minded groups in Kashmir, Bihar, and Manipur, some of the most troubled areas of our country, the women's interfaith journeys in which women from different faith backgrounds travel together to discover what interfaith means from women's perspectives.⁶ The focus on reconciliation is not a means to an end but an end in itself. A declaration that the aggressive method of proselytization based on an imperialistic reading of the Gospel passage known as `the great commission' (Matthew 28) has to give way to efforts at peace-building, liberating the captives, healing the sick, feeding the hungry etc. (Luke 4: 18).

Definitions

My colleagues and I in the Institute have struggled to understand and 'translate the meaning of the word 7-econciliatiorr. What does this Christian term mean when used as a focus for the life and activity of our center? From a Christian theological perspective it refers to the belief that we were once friends of God, through transgression we became alienated; the sacrament of confession, general or private, and the absolution that follows bring remission and reconcile us to God by restoring the broken relationship. The Bible, especially Paul, speaks about it as something already accomplished by God through Christ's death on the cross. Christians are called to be messengers of this 'ministry of reconciliation'. Dictionary definitions of reconciliation reflect a Christian understanding. There is first a state of friendly relationship followed by alienation. Reconciliation is the mending or restoring of this broken relationship.

In October 1997 thirty-one women and men from various Indian regions, backgrounds, faiths and commitments met for five days in Orissa for a workshop on Reconciliation in the Context of Communalism and Casteism from the Perspective of the Oppressed. After much reflection, discussion and struggle, the participants adopted the following as a working definition of reconciliation:⁷

In the context of existing oppression in India, we understand reconciliation as a process of struggle of the people to bring together estranged persons leading towards transformed relationships and structures based on justice.

Reconcilation in Practice: In the Aftermath of a Riot

Back in 1990, the old city of Hyderabad was severely affected by riots that lasted almost three weeks. During and immediately after the horrible communal clashes I spent long painful hours in the hospital and on the streets and had seen the consequences of politically orchestrated violence:⁸ the mutilated bodies of children, men and women, the burnt houses and shops, the starving crowds confined to their homes during days of curfew. I can still remember the sea of black veiled women surrounding our relief truck, waiting for a little rice, or the long lines of children waiting patiently in the scorching sun for a few biscuits. I listened to agonizing stories of violence and suffering, and wept with more than one of the victims. It was a terrible time.

Mending a broken relationship with God seems easier than restoring broken trust in the immediate aftermath of a riot. I remember an old couple stretching out their hands in front of me asking, "with whom should we be reconciled? Our only son is gone...". They were poor, crippled by old age; their son had been killed on the street through no fault of his. Who could bring back life that was so brutally taken? Who would care for them in their old age? I realized that reconciliation couldn't happen without addressing the issue of justice. But who can restore justice in a riot situation when the oppressor remains unknown?

Hyderabad has a long history of Hindu-Muslim conflict, which has left indelible scars in the hearts and minds of people. Every fresh riot fuels the anger and hatred and desire for revenge. I experienced the power of hatred in the Osmania hospital during the 1990 riots: Three young men rushed their dying father to the emergency ward. His belly was slit from side to side, intestines spilling out, and a stream of blood marking the passage as his body was carried in. He was declared dead by the surgeon upon arrival. The youngest son coming out of the ward saw a member of the Aman Shanti Forum doing voluntary relief work in the hospital.⁹ The bindi on her forehead signaled to him that she was Hindu.¹⁰ He lunged at her with a cry "I will kill them" so violently that six police personnel could not contain him. His grief over the death of his father had rekindled in him anger and hostility towards the other community and a desire for revenge. In the heat of that moment no soft talk about reconciliation would have helped. His hostile and violent behavior towards a woman who had nothing to do with the killing of his father is typical of many riots in our cities.

Some members of the Aman-Shanti Forum joined the in trying different programs to bring the divided communities together: one Friday we all fasted and in the evening gathered to break our fast and pray for peace; women froth both communities jointly cooked food and around three hundred of us ate together; we started a tailoring unit for Hindu and Muslim women. These were small projects aimed at bringing reconciliation through re-established relationship. But our efforts seemed totally inadequate: the wounds were too fresh, the hurt too deep. No one was willing to either forgive or forget the past. I was frustrated, and so were many of my friends. It was evident that deep-rooted hatred and desire for revenge cannot be removed without a long process aimed at inner transformation.

My encounter with Vargese opened a small window into the troubled old city. Vargese is a member of the Montfort Brothers. a Catholic religious congregation whose main mission is education. He invited me to Moosa Nagar, a slum thickly populated by Muslims and a few Hindus. Adjacent to it is Kamal Nagar, housing mostly Hindus interspersed with Muslims. The communal tensions there were high, the self-styled leaders exploiting the situation for political and economic gains. Together with Vargese and his organization, People's Initiatives Network (PIN) I began efforts to bring the two communities together by organizing such projects as a tailoring center for women. Two Catholic sisters from another religious order joined the project. They and Vargese chose to live in the slum and started a school for children in a rented room. With funding from HMI and organizational support from PIN we began a cycle rickshaw and pushcart cooperative for jobless young men. HMI also funded evening classes for high school dropout children. Vargese, the sisters and I went from door to door raising issues of hygiene, of common programmes to alter the condition of the slum, of getting pure drinking water. Brother Vargese was interested in development. My heart was in reconciliation. We put our energies together. Development for reconciliation became our goal. With tremendous energy from PIN and collaborative support from HMI, the face of the slum began to change.¹¹ People were maintaining cleaner surroundings; there was less communal tension. After five years of working together. HMI moved on to its own development project in Sultan Shahi, while PIN spread to many other slums along the Musi River. These were years of rich learning: how to transcend barriers of hostility and begin to build relationships. I also learned something about the nature of violence itself.

The Spiral Nature of Violence

Violence begets violence. Every act, whether physically expressed, verbally spoken, or manifested through a gesture, creates a reaction. The spiral nature of violence was brought home to me as a group of us were driving on a national highway out of Hyderabad. Truck drivers are some of the most dangerous persons on our two-lane roads: they are aggressive and heedless of traffic rules. The unspoken rule is that bigger the vehicle, the greater the rights. It is difficult, even dangerous, to drive on a road used by truckers especially at night. The tragic consequences of aggressive driving are evident all along the route: broken trucks, crushed smaller cars, upturned lorries with their contents spilt on the road. On this particular trip, two scenes attracted our notice. In the first, two trucks lay wrecked on either side of the road. The impact of their head-on collision was so powerful that the vehicles and their contents were thrown off to opposite sides of the road. In the second scene a woman's body lay in the middle of the road, her head covered with leaves and the space around her marked with mud bricks. She was a victim of someone's rash driving.

When we discussed these gruesome scenes, I learned that most of the truck drivers do not go through a formal driving school. Instead they learn driving by serving first as a cleaner. They become a driver only after years of humiliating, often abusive and aggressive apprenticeship under the driver. It seemed the suppressed violence of those years manifests itself when the victim himself becomes a driver. Then he bequeaths the same legacy to his own apprentice.

M.J. Akbar, a noted Indian journalist, speaks about the legacy of violence as he describes in a graphic way the aftermath of riots in Jamshedpur, Bihar:¹²

... the wounds of the heart festering, and hate oozing from the eyes like malignant pus that will communicate all that it touches... In the recesses of the hospitals lie the dead, in hideous shapes, and each of them, each man, woman and child, has written a will in the presence of a hundred witnesses, and the will says that each member of the dead person's family receives a legacy of hate, an equal share each; and this legacy has no limits, no boundaries...

Akbar's words confirm what I said above about the spiral nature of violence. Whether it be the young man at the hospital or the truck driver on the road, or the Hindus and Muslims who killed each other in the riots -all have left a legacy of hate that in turn leads to desire for revenge erupting in more violence. It is like a pebble thrown in the center of a lake. The smallest ripple caused by that stone would create more ripples. This is what I mean by the spiral nature of violence.

To stop violence we must address the inherited tendency towards violence that all of us carry within us. Often we are not conscious of its existence; it manifests itself when least expected. For example I vent my anger from a frustrating day at office on my spouse or my children or myself. That violence is endemic to all of us seems self-evident. Despite good intentions to remain calm, we often burst out angrily. Such outbursts may not be bad in themselves; even Christ got angry and chased the merchants from the temple. Although anger need not always be suppressed, we should be conscious of how, when and against whom it is expressed. The internal wounds inflicted by even a violent gesture affect the other and are then passed on. Only by tarring our own nature can we hope to become true agents of reconciliation.