Perspectief 2018-41

2018 - 41 The Rishi People and the Catholic Church 61 Reag eer 1. Missionary initiatives from the second half of the 19 th century Reading these words, Rishi, Kaora, Dom, Methor 4 etc. should not feel ashamed. We are the ones who should! Be as it may, in the last two centuries or so the Rishi people have gone through a series of major socio-economic transformations mainly due to their encounter with Christianity. And this is the argument of the present paper. But before entering the intricacies of such an encounter I wish to clarify that what I will be saying refers mainly to the Rishi population located in present day Khulna division in its relationship with that particular brand of Christianity represented by the Catholic Church. Rishi people, maybe with different names, 5 are to be found all over Bangladesh, even though perhaps their highest concentration is located in the districts of Jessore and Khulna. The paper will at- tempt, summarily, a reading of the past and present of such a relationship. A relationship which I like to interpret with a metaphor Cosimo Zene reported in his book on the Rishi of Bangladesh. Asking a Rishi person what Christianity was for him, he answered: "We are like a snake which holds in its mouth a juicy frog, too big to be swallowed, but too good to let go." 6 This metaphor gives us right from the beginning the sense of a complex relationship between Rishi people and Christianity, a relationship centred on both attraction and re- pulsion in the context of a difficult dialogue. We will come back to this later on. I do not know if during the first wave of evangelisation carried out by the Portuguese in Bengal (1517-1834) Rishi people in Dhaka, Chittagong and other costal areas were mis- sionised or not. 7 What we do know is that a consistent attempt by the Catholic Church in contacting the Rishi started during the second wave of evangelisation in the second half of the 19 th century in the southwestern areas of today’s Bangladesh. Fr. Marietti arrived in the then Central Bengal Mission in 1856 as the pioneer and herald of a new Italian mis- sionary institute, what later on took on the name of PIME. The PIME fathers soon realised that Muslims and Hindus were not interested in the new religion. They thus directed their attention to the Rishi population of the area around Jessore and Shimulia and to the Na- masudras of Khulna and the Sundarbon. The Rishi were, and largely still are, people of very low caste who are despised by all for their traditional work with leather and for this cursed with the mark of untouchability as already mentioned above. The PIME fathers worked among them until 1927, the year in which they decided to leave the mission among the