Tattoos that break taboos

Parsai Ram can't stop guffawing. "Will they skin me from head to toe?" asks this member of the Dalit Ramnami community who has 'Ram' tattooed all over this body. The ripples from Bangalore where right wing Hindus threatened to skin Australian tourist Mathew Keith Gordon's leg for sporting a tattoo of Goddess Yellamma on his shin have reached his village Baldar Kachhar in Chhattisgarh's Raipur district, 1,400km away.

"I heard they even went on to threaten the woman with the tourist with sexual violence for protesting," says the 50-year-old, unafraid of reactions from overzealous groups and their vigilantism. "They are welcome to hurt me. The only question is, will they not first hurt Ram in the process before hurting me?"

He finds it silly that people who call themselves Hindus are offended with how and where god manifests. "Our religion speaks of divinity everywhere and in everything. Who are these people with egos so big that they want to limit both god and our understanding of the godly?" He uses Anand Bakshi's words from the popular Dev Anand film Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) as advice and breaks into song, "Dekho o deewano tum yeh kaam na karo/ Ram ka naam badnaam na karo."

Historical tradition
The Ramnami tradition has been around since the late 19th century among the Dalits of central India. "Parasu Ram, who founded the Ramnami movement, wanted to pave a way of devotion to Ram for untouchables who weren't allowed to enter temples by the upper castes, who treated them as dirty and inferior. He encouraged them to chant the Ramcharitamanas, get tattooed, and wear a special shawl – the Ram odhni – with 'Ram' inscribed all over," explains Parsai.

"When high caste Hindus heard how he was propagating Ram's name among Dalits, they began attacking Ramnamis, who sought protection from a court in 1910. Two years later, a British judge ruled in our favour, giving us freedom to practice our religion, our way."

Dr Shaileshkumar Darokar, assistant professor from the Centre for Study of Social Exclusion & Inclusive Policies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), is all praise for what he calls the Ramnamis' "leap of faith".

According to him, the tradition deploys the very paradigms that upper castes use to exclude and discriminate to shame, defy and resist. "Such socio-cultural alter-narratives help hit back and show the mirror to a society that treats them like sub-humans," he says.

While accepting Darokar's take, Dr Ramdas Lamb of the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, underlines a difference in nuance. "It may have begun as an act of resistance and there may still be a few Ramnamis around driven by that thought, but largely, it's devotion that subsequently drove them."

The septuagenarian scholar should know. Born in 1945 to an Italian-German family living in California, Lamb spent eight years in India (1969-77), becoming a Hindu sadhu and adopting the first name Ramdas.

"It was during the 1974 Kumbh Mela that I met the first few Ramnami briefly at Haridwar," he told dna. "I had to wait another three years for the next Kumbh at Prayag, where nearly 300 of them had converged, to get to know them better. Moved by the utter devotion despite their circumstances, I began studying the community and its practices." This study has been collated into a book Rapt in the Name: The Ramnamis, Ramnam, and Untouchable Religion in Central India, published by the State University of New York Press in 2002. It remains the go-to book for anyone interested in Ramnamis.

According to Kasdol resident Ramnami Bhagwati Charan Bhatpare, 52, who spent a great deal of time with Lamb on the study of the community, changing times has led to a different impact on the community. "The younger, educated generation often don't want to get tattooed even minimally because it marks them as different and worsens discrimination they face." Unwilling to be drawn into a discussion on whether this doesn't by itself prove that caste-based discrimination still exists, he offers: "Our community tradition was never about coercion. If youngsters don't want to, that's their call."

Offence or intolerance?
Lamb finds threats of violence against German tourist Gordon in Bangalore unacceptable and underlines, "The saddest part is that tolerance has long been an integral part of Hinduism's bhakti tradition, and people who threatened the Australian couple clearly have no understanding what that means at all."

"It's equally problematic that the tourist was ill-informed about socio-cultural sensitivities," he adds.

Employing his great command over Hindi, Lamb says, "It's not for nothing we say in India, jaisa desh waisa bhesh. One must understand why people were offended. After all, would the same tourist draw a visible tattoo of Mohammed and go to Saudi Arabia?"

Political observer and journalist François Gautier, who has been in India since 1971, too feels that the entire Hindu community can't be brushed over in a generalisation because of incidents like the ones at Bangalore or in Dadri, where a man was lynched over rumours that he had kept beef in his home. And, earlier this week, two Dalit toddlers were burnt to death in a village near Faridabad, again at Delhi's doorstep. "The average Hindu in the million Indian villages, is easygoing and accepts you and your diversity, whether you're Christian, Muslim, Parsi, Jain, Arab, French or Chinese. He goes about his business and usually doesn't interfere in yours."

He bolsters this argument by pointing out how Hindus have given refuge to all persecuted minorities - Parsis, Jews (India is the only country in the world where Jews weren't persecuted), Armenians and Tibetans. "The first Christian community of the world, the Syrian Christians, flourished in Kerala, thanks to Hindu tolerance; Arab merchants were welcomed by Hindu rulers to trade and live in India, while freely practicing their religion, from early times."

In Gautier's view, Hindus, who accept everybody and welcome all religions, don't receive in return gratitude or respect. "On the contrary, they get mocked at, bombs are planted in their markets, their trains; their temples get attacked, they're chased out of their homelands; TV and newspapers make fun of them and their own politicians ostracise them. After centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus, the most peace-loving people in the world, those Mahatma Gandhi once called gentle 'cowards', those who cringe in their houses at the least sign of riot, erupt in fury -- uncontrolled fury.

And it hurts. It hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It is happening now in Dadri or Jammu. It may happen again elsewhere, as Hindus are reaching a boiling point."

Rubbishing the idea of "Hindu intolerance", he insists, "In fact, if Europe and the US had any sense, they'd already see that millions of Hindus settled in their countries, have integrated, pay taxes, don't riot or plant bombs and their children top in universities."

Whither karuna?
While Gautier's words may sound like music to the ears of Ramesh Yadav, a local BJP leader in Bangalore, who had objected to the Australian couple, there aren't many in the higher echelons of the Hindu clergy who agree.

The Shankaracharya of Dwarka Swami Swaroopanand says, "Karuna (compassion) is the very bedrock of this religion and way of life of this sub-continent for millennia. To see religion being used to inflame passions for political reasons should hurt everyone who calls himself Hindu."

"Dekho o deewano tum yeh kaam na karo/ Ram ka naam badnam na karo"… it's a earworm, rising in crescendo.

Under the lens

Photographer and journalist Travelin' Mick, who scours the world searching for the last remaining tattoo cultures of this planet to record and conserve for posterity, feels tattoos are integral in shaping the identities of societies and individuals over thousands of years.

He finds in the Ramnamis, who he has extensively photographed, an expression of both individuality and creativity, which he says defines the relation of the region and its societies with body art.

"I had to travel to India three times before I found someone with the slightest idea where Ramnamis can be found. And even then it was hard, because they don't stay in one place, but live scattered over a large area or move around. Some of them have not only never seen a white person before, they actually had no notion that such a thing exists! I was sworn to secrecy about their actual location in order to let them live their pious lives largely undisturbed."