By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi: Was Kocheril Raman Narayanan, India’s first Dalit president, a Christian?
The question was raised by “Outlook,” a weekly magazine published from New Delhi.
“How did the remains of K.R. Narayanan, the first Dalit President of India who was officially cremated on the banks of Yamuna according to Hindu rituals in 2005, end up in a tomb in a cemetery exclusively for Christians in Delhi?” asks an article prepared by the Outlook Web Bureau.
The weekly also carries picture of the twin tomb of Narayanan and his wife Usha in a cemetery on Prithviraj Road in New Delhi.
Narayanan, the magazine says, was born into a Hindu Dalit family at Uzhavoor, a village in the Kottayam district of Kerala. He remained a Dalit Hindu officially until his death.
When Narayan died on November 9, 2005 at the age of 85, he was survived by his wife Usha and two daughters- Chitra, who had been India’s ambassador to many countries, and Amrita. His last rites of consigning the body to the flames were performed by his nephew Dr S. Ramachandran at a spot between ‘Shanti Van’, the memorial of Jawaharlal Nehru, and ‘Vijay Ghat’, that of Lal Bahadur Shastri.
The Outlook quotes Father J. Rebello, chairperson of the Delhi Cemeteries Committee, as saying: “The burial happened because the Christian pastor of his wife, a protestant, could have vouched that Narayanan is a Christian.”
Narayanan had not officially willed that he be buried after death, and his wife was too unwell to have made the decision to inter the remains of her husband. Usha died in January 2007, the weekly says.
“If it wasn’t Usha, the burial decision, which raises questions of grave illegality, could have been taken by his daughter Chitra. The illegality arises from the fact that Narayanan, who rose up the ladders enjoying the benefits of positive discrimination accorded to Dalits by the Constitution, was given a burial without his will. It is not publicly known whether he was baptized after demitting the office.”
The magazine says it has sought a response from Chitra and promised to update the article after receiving her comments.
Narayan, during his stint in Rangoon as an Indian Foreign Service Official, had met his wife, a Myanmar woman named Tint Tint, an Evangelist Protestant, and married her in 1950 after the Indian government gave its blessing. Tint Tint later adopted the name Usha and used to attend Mass at the Cathedral Church of Redemption under the Church of North India, close to the Rashtrapati Bhawan after Narayan became India’s 10th president in 1997.
“The church has no problem in burying the ashes, the Pope too has allowed it. But the person has to be a Christian,” Father Rebello explained. “Even cremation of Christians is allowed.”
The burial of “non-Christian” Narayanana becomes stark against the recalcitrant attitude of the Church toward rebels or those who have married out of community.
A controversy arose last year when actress Priyanka Chopra’s grandmother died. She had wished to be buried in the same Jacobite Syrian Christian cemetery in Kerala where her ancestors were interred. Some church officials declined her last will claiming that she had stopped living the ‘Christian way’, including the manner in which she had married, which was without following Christian conventions.