It was by sheer coincidence that while I was reminiscing about Mrs. Rosa Park’s influence and contributions to American civil rights movement in the twentieth century I happened to a get a gift packet containing some very powerful autobiographical sketches of a Dalit writer, Bama, called, ‘Karukku[1] and Sangathi[2]’, from a friend, Mini Krishnan of the Oxford University Press in India. When reading these books, I realised that Mini Krishanan should be a congratulated for the amazing work she is doing in bringing out translations of the work of these relatively unknown Dalit writers to a wider reading public, as this is providing a much needed impetus for social and political awareness on Dalit-related matters and their development. Within this gift packet I also found an old newspaper article about a remarkable 18 year old Indian girl.

These events helped me to make a significant connection to the life and circumstances of Mrs. Rosa Park, and Afro-American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, Miss Mamta Nyak, and a 18 year old Dalit girl in Orissa, India. Then a switch clicked in my mind and hence this article; these two women helped me to travel back 2000 years to think about the circumstances of the encounter of the Samaritan woman with Jesus at Jacob’s well (John 4: 3-40). These events prompted me to ask the question, what do they have in common? Something very important, a life changing event, happened in the life of Rosa Park in December 1955, and a very special, but similar things happened also in the life of Mamta in August 2005 and also in the life of the Samaritan woman two thousand years earlier after her encounter with Jesus. These three women stand out and we must salute and remember them for their extraordinary courage.

Let us begin with Rosa and Mamta as they are more proximal to our existence. Rosa died few years ago and I have no reason to believe that Mamta had known about the heroic contributions of Rosa to follow her as a role model and therefore, Mamta’s action fifty years later was as spontaneous as that of Rosa and the Samaritan woman. How unfortunate is that this Samaritan woman did not even given a name in the Gospel story, she was just a woman from Samaria. They responded courageously because of the circumstances under which they grew up and forced to live. They were fenced in with no place to sit to give a rest for their tired bodies and minds for never ending struggles or escape from oppressions and human right violations to breath fresh air by riding out of the circumstances in which they were enclosed in. So the straight forward answer is that they had shown extraordinary courage to challenge structures and systems, which curtailed their inherent birthright to a life, even denying a recognisable name, but not just any life, a full and abundant life. Let us dig a bit and find out the circumstances that link these three women separated by time, distance, culture, ethnicity, citizenship, economics, religious, and social barriers.

In a cold winter morning in December 1955, Rosa had refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger in a city bus in Montgomery and had been arrested for violating the city’s segregation law. She never did this before, she always knew her demarcated spaces in buses and other public places, but on that day she was so tired and she could not take the dictates of an unjust system any more. Her bold demonstration was a gesture of defiance against a corrupt system against Afro-Americans. This old, emaciated and totally shattered woman did not look like a person to challenge the strong arm of the law in the Southern States of United States of America. In later years, when she was asked if she had deliberately planned her protest that morning, she said, “No, I was just plain tired and my feet hurt.” This was the spark that was needed to trigger a fuse in Martin Luther King’s heart and the whole civil right movement got a new momentum and direction from this single act of defiance.

Fifty years later, Mamta Nayak, an eighteen year old Dalit girl cycled her way through the narrow lanes of Narsingpur, a village 10 km away from the capital city of Orissa, Bhubaneswar, where upper-caste Khandayats lived. According to an age-old tradition, lower- caste, Dalit, people are not allowed to ride through the village. Some of the upper-caste people were enraged by the deliberate defilement of their tradition. Mamta was the first girl from her community to pass the matriculation examination and enter the University and she needed to use a bicycle for her lawful pursuit of carrying out her daily chores and going to the University. The angry Khandayats held a kangaroo court and summoned Mamta’s father and ordered him to stop his daughter using her bicycle. However, Mamta decided to carry on cycling through the village, irrespective of the violence and abuse against her, family, and her community.

This was her freedom struggle, a struggle linked with many other personal freedoms because of the accident of a birth into a lower-caste family. She was not prepared to give away her freedom to ride a bicycle in a democratic India with a secular constitution. This single symbolic act of defiance has created a wave of protest across the state and she was given adequate police protection to carry on with her studies. Politician of all sorts are now trying to capitalise on the plight of this poor girl who just wants to carry on with her studies without any hindrance. It is reported that in Narasingpur in week days you can see a girl cycling through the fields and byways on her way to her college with a police woman following her on a scooter. Let us hope and pray that this action has the same impetus like that of Rosa Park to mobilise the consciousness of all communities in India to maintain human dignity and liberate disadvantaged-communities from all kinds of oppressions.

Martin Luther King[3] told his people in Memphis, the day before his assassination, that he had been to the ‘mountain top’ and saw the ‘promised land’ from a distance like Moses. “I have seen the ‘promised land.’ I may not go there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the ‘promised land.’ I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything. I do not fear any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the company of the Lord.” King was assassinated the next day before he reached his fortieth birthday. But he was a prophet of our times with a dream. He described his dream in these words: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but the content of their character.” Before his death he was able to articulate his action plan for the whole nation in these words: “When all God’s children, Black men and White men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old African spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

I am sure this eighteen year old girl from Orissa has a dream and action plan too for bringing freedoms which may liberate her and her people from oppression, poverty and social stigma. Let us hope that one day she will be able to ride through the fields in her native countryside without any escort, breathing the God-given air, drinking the God-given water from any well, speaking her mind without any restrictions, worshipping in any worshipping place or ‘holy mountains’ without any restrictions, and enjoying all the freedoms that God has given her to preserve human dignity and enjoy God’s love in forgiving and loving her neighbour.

Now to the third woman in this story, the woman without a name, the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at Jacob’s well. This encounter raised a question that went to the heart of the exclusions of the Samaritans from God’s chosen people, Jews; it transcended the particular and revealed a universal truth about worshipping rights and privileges claimed by various peoples. The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman under the midday sun took the following route:

Samaritan women asked Jesus, “Oh, so you’re a prophet! Well Sir, tell me this: Our ancestors worshipped God at this mountain, but you Jews insist that the Jerusalem is the only place for worship, right?”

Jesus replied: “Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you Samaritans will worship the Father neither here in this mountain nor there in Jerusalem. You do not know what you are worshipping, you are in the dark………….But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for Father is seeking such to worship.”

I find it difficult to avoid the temptation to quote the 15th century Indian mystic, Kabir[4], at this point because he wrote:

“I am neither in temple nor in mosque:
I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash:
Neither am I in rites and ceremonies,
Nor in yoga and renunciation.”

Therefore, what you are called or how or where you go for worship will not matter, it is who you are and how you live that count before God. It is in his search for true worshippers that Jesus travelled from Judea to Galilee and stopped in the town of Sychar around midday, tired and thirsty from the journey. There he sat down by a well and asked an out cast, a Samaritan woman, for a drink of water.

As I try to connect this incident to that of Rosa and Mamta, I realize that Jesus was seeking a favourable response from the woman in front of him. The irony of the situation was very clear to the Samaritan woman: Jesus could not get water himself from the well because he had no bucket and it was a very deep well, so he needed someone to draw the water for him. Jesus had no hesitation to break all cultural and traditional taboos associated with this woman such as gender discriminations, ritual and communal exclusions, socio-economic barriers and moral stigma associated her serial marriages. Through this encounter Jesus inaugurates a kingdom of inclusion not exclusion, of human dignity and not denigration based on caste and class, of affirmation rather than marginalisation, of hospitality instead of hostility, and of empowerment rather than exploitation. The rich dialogue that we see in this text between Jesus and this woman is because of the willingness of this Samaritan woman to respond to Jesus. This thoroughly powerless woman, who always went to the well at midday because of her social castigation to avoid gossip and other women, made such a powerful impression upon Jesus; she had the grace and favour to accept Jesus as the Messiah. She provided a powerful witness to her community so that community leaders requested Jesus to stay with them and he stayed there for two days. Therefore, her submission to God’s wills makes her a blessing to the community and her witness transformed them. This in a way had happened in the life of Rosa and Mamta as well.

Therefore, what do these three remarkable women, separated by 2000 years, have in common? In a sense, these are holy people as Bapuji called them, Harigens. Louis Armstrong sang of them: “The only sin is in my skin.” They were once marginal to the needs of their communities, but not any more. They have humanity and courage and let us salute them without any reservation. Let their lives and mission be a clarion call for us to offer all our God-given skills for protecting human rights and consider it as a privilege and honour for working for oppressed people everywhere under all circumstances. According to Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, over coming these prejudices and preserving these freedoms are essential part of human development. Our loving Lord is sitting at the well at midday sun waiting for us to join him in His mission to extend his love and care for humanity.

References:

1. Karukku, Bama, translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom, edited by Mini Krishnan, Macmillan India Ltd., 2000
2. Sangathi, Bama, , translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Hailstorm, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, India, 2005.
3. Coretta Scott King. The words of Martin Luther King. Ronson Books, Ltd., London, 1984.
4. Tagore. Poems of Kabir, Macmillan India Ltd., Delhi, 1995.