REMEMBERING M.J.
Since July 12th,2010, M.J. Joseph is no longer with us physically. We had to bid him farewell at the Dynamic Action Office in Thiruvalla on 14th July. The extremely diverse crowd which attended this occasion spoke volumes of his wide contacts in the Church, among activists from far and wide and a large circle of friends. For those of us who have known M.J. Joseph since nearly four decades, it is not difficult to recall the atmosphere of the students movements during the sixties, which shaped his spirituality with a passionate concern for social justice and people’s capacity to struggle for political and cultural self-expression.
M.J. was born in 1932 as the ninth of eleven children to Mrs. Achaiyamma Joseph and her plantations superintendent husband M.M.Joseph at Peerumedu (Idukki Dt.). M.J. studied at his ancestral place Kanjikuzhi (Kottayam Dt.) and later graduated in Mathematics from C.M.S.College, Kottayam. He taught Mathematics for a while and then studied Theology at Serampore College near Calcutta and Masters Degree at UTC Bangalore, after having been an organizer of the Students Christian Movement (SCM) in Bihar, with intensive exposure to rural poverty.
M.J. had a deep interest in music, which was nurtured in the church and in the family. He was able to learn different instruments and to involve in singing and writing of songs. This musical bent stayed with him throughout his life and became important later in life when he worked with young people in the Dynamic Action and in Programme for Social Action (PSA). He suffered from several orthopedic and organic ailments since decades, which made him quite vulnerable and dependent on the support of his family, but he was patient and determined to cope. He exuded the charm of a somewhat fragile father figure, while at the same time inspiring many youngsters with his radical critique of injustice and patronizing reforms. His comprehensive political vision brought him into frequent conflict with church authorities. He was a voracious reader and wrote many articles as well as books. Later in life, he discovered painting as a form of self expression, which led him beyond the use of words. He discovered his very own style and made his works accessible in exhibitions.
It is easier to understand M.J.’s life options if one also remembers the life of his senior friend Dr, M.M. Thomas, Director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS) in Bangalore. In the last two years of the sixties. M.J. was the Programme Secretary of CISRS for Kerala. After that, he served as the Development Secretary at the NCCI in Nagpur. I came to know him in the early seventies, when I was a research fellow of the CISRS in Bangalore.
The Christian radicals in Kerala at that time had to do a balancing act between their vision of social transformation through struggle, rooted in their faith, and the discouraging reality of the churches, which had a much more conservative mind set. They
tried also to balance their leftist (mostly Marxist) leanings ,while facing the mistrust of the Party against established religion, at the same time also encountering the lack of democracy in political life, which had to do with the history of Stalinism and the Cold War. M.M.Thomas, a Mar Thoma Christian, had as a young man been refused ordination by the church due to his leftist convictions and had been denied party membership because of his Christian Faith. M.J., belonging to the CSI, remained an ordained pastor, but had to struggle with severe pressures from the church, which also took a toll of his health. The SCM and WSCF had made a deep impact on young people after independence. Later, the resistance against totalitarianism in the time of Emergency from 1975 t0 1977 became another formative period.
M.J. s life can also not be understood without the struggles of Annamma, to whom he got married in 1969. Annamma was a young teacher with a passionate love for her profession, but she had to give up her work in college, because as a pastor’s wife she was not at that time expected to hold on to independent employment. This remained a sore point for decades. As the daughters Asha and Shoba came along during that period, family life got its due for a while, but the radicalizing influence of the Emergency Period also worked on Annamma. I remember her turning up in our house in Madurai one fine day in 1977, telling me that she wanted to go more actively into women’s organization, but that she also was pregnant again, because she felt that one more child was good “to keep the family together”. I was quite flabbergasted by these contradicting inclinations to which we owe the entry of Vijayan into this world. M.J. advocating women’s liberation implied there was an ongoing struggle regarding the price which each side had to pay.
The mid-seventies were the period of the emergence of “non-party political formations” and M.J. took active parts in the debates and organizational processes of that time. He was one of the editors of Dynamic Action and inspired the Programme for Social Action (PSA), a national network of faith inspired struggles for liberation and social transformation, where analysis and reflection covered not only economic, social and political processes, but also cultural and religious dimensions, which were rooted in a humanist sense of inter religious secular commitment.
In the meantime, Annamma spent several years of her life with the Democratic Women’s
Organisation of the CPI-M .This raised eye-brows in religious as well as political circles. Side by side, since the late eighties and early nineties, Dalit struggles found deeper articulation, inside and outside the church. Part of this struggle was located in Pennama Bhavanam, the ancestral home of Dr.M.M.Thomas’ late wife. M.J. and Annamma were in deep solidarity with Dalit struggles and got into substantial conflict with the casteist attitudes in the church. The work with People’s Movement of Faith for Liberation in the early nineties deepened the conflict with the church. M.J. stood for justice and peace throughout. He also supported the Chengara land struggle of Dalit landless labourers, which has hit many hurdles from the side of the State Government. M.J.s firmness on this issue had to do with the deep conviction that Bhumi was the base of people’s Right to Life and Livelihood.
When NAPM was launched all over the country in early 1996, we stayed in Pennamma Bhavanam, at that time still inhabited by Dr.M.M.Thomas, former governor of Nagaland, who also chaired the hall meeting. Dynamic Action, SCM,secular Left of different hues and ecological movements were present in broad formation. Early on in the new millennium, during the NAPM National Conference in Bangalore, M.J. was an active participant together with Annamma. He was always concerned to carry forward the debate on the role of Peoples Movements. In his earlier years, while he was still with the NCCI, he had published a book The Church a People’s Movement, in which he pointed out that the movement around Jesus and his followers had consisted of peasants, workers, fisher people, slaves and roaming women of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. He depicted this as a challenge to the existing institutions. At the same time, he had very deep roots in the church of Central Kerala. This very specific cultural combination was sometimes not easy to understand for those who encountered him in the secular national context. For him, there was no contradiction between these different dimensions.
He was compassionate and angry, loving and full of sharp criticism, a writer of books and articles, but also of poetry and songs. His funeral reflected many of these contradictions and brought together people of many diverse backgrounds, all of whom will miss him, even though some had felt that he was a pain in the neck. Many people will miss that he is no longer there as a challenge and as a loving support.
D.Gabriele
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