Gabriele Dietrich

GABRIELE DIETRICH

Gabriele Dietrich, born in Berlin, Germany, started her life in India with a research project on Religion and People's Organization at the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. She has been teaching Social Analysis at the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary, Madurai since 1975

She grew up with a great sense of being crushable.  At the same time she marvels at human resilience.  So she has always felt extremely vulnerable.  But she has also always been convinced that people can survive most adverse conditions and find it all quite normal.  She has never been able to take food, shelter and clothing for granted.

Her parents had been separated by the war for nearly nine years and later divorced.  She was brought up by my mother and grandmother and had no siblings.  This made her to rely on friendship from a very early age.

RELATIONSHIP TO THE CHURCH

There was no relationship to any church in her family.  She never saw a church from the inside, though her family had her baptized.  Her maternal grandmother, who was a widow and refugee of World War she, had given up on faith as a result of the hardships of her life.  She knew many people who felt that “if God existed, he would not have allowed all these things to happen”.  Her mother said it was good for people if they could believe in God.  But it was not clear to her what her own position was.  Nobody ever prayed or read the bible.

Her knowledge about Christianity was entirely from Cecil de Mille films like “Moses”, “Quo Vadis” and “The Gladiators”.  She was very impressed by these films.  There was no compulsory religious education in schools.  When some classmates went for confirmation class, she felt she also wanted some rite of passage in her life.  Actually, she wanted a secular ritual.  But her family was embarrassed about that, because “people will think that they are communists”.  So she reluctantly enrolled in confirmation class.  She found it very interesting and literally lapped it up, started attending bible studies, teaching Sunday class and singing in church choirs.  She discovered that the Confessing Church had been a serious resistance against fascism.  In this sense, she encountered the Christian faith as a liberation theology from the outset.  She decided she wanted to study theology because she wanted to work with people. She branched out into Judaism, Indology, Sociology and History of Religions and finally ended up with a Ph.D. in History of Religions with Judaism and Theology as connected subjects.  She never aspired ordination for herself, though of course she feels women should have a right to it.  She cherishes church traditions in which the laity is allowed to administer the Eucharist and baptism. 

DIALOGUE

She always had great difficulties with any claim to “absoluteness” of Christianity and with the idea that people are supposed to go to hell if they belong to other religions, or have no religion at all.  She had a deep interest in other religions which had to do with her anti-colonial commitment.  She read Jewish mystics in Hebrew, parts of Bhagavad-Gita in Sanskrit and Buddhist texts in Pali.  Her Ph.D. was on Aztec religion.  She has interacted closely with many Christian denominations, including Catholics, but never felt she belonged to a denomination herself.  Jesus himself did not belong to any denomination.  She always believed in the connection between resurrection and uprising, the need to be with people.

LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND SOCIAL WITNESS

She gravitated towards dalit struggles quite intuitively right from the beginning, even though they still called themselves Harijans at the time. She also moved with people from CPI-M and CPI who had also organized the laborers. They stayed in the cheris and took bath with the water buffaloes and had great difficulties to get good drinking water.  She even got separate tea glasses in the teashop. This, in fact, was the outcome of untouchability.  Other than this, she read many life stories of Dalits.  So she has always felt close to Dalits, while at the same time being acutely aware that they would not spontaneously feel close to her, because to them she looks like a Brahmin, white and tall and educated.   In their mixed organizations they have made education on untouchability among non-Dalits a point and the people in our movements stay in anyone’s houses and eat anyone’s food. She also feels that the struggle against globalisation is very important for Dalits, as this is again the field where their livelihood is affected.

Regarding Adivasis, her understanding of their life is most indebted to the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA).  They first got strongly aware of the NBA when it had succeeded to throw out the World Bank (WB) from funding Sardar Sarovar Dam Project in 1993. She met Medha Patkar in Delhi at the time in a meeting against the World Bank and have been supporting the NBA ever since through protest letters solidarity visits, writing, exhibitions.

She feels the Dalit and Adivasi struggles are most crucial in times of globalization to protest the dominant development paradigm and to remind us that we have to really build a very different mode of production in which subsistence production is taken seriously and will not be wiped out.  It is a matter of building alliances among the internal colonies.