On 'Ghar Wapsi' and Other Such Phrases

Recently, I was amused by the heading of an article titled “No ‘ghar wapsi’” for Nitish to the Mahagathbandhan. Given that ‘ghar wapsi’ is a phrase used to describe the conversion back to Hinduism, it felt kinda funny to use that phrase in the context of a possible return to the so-called “secular” side…

On a completely apolitical note, the phrase also reminded me of Kathryn Schulz’s wonderful terrific book, Being Wrong. At one point, she talks about Whitaker Chambers, an ardent one-time Communist and committed atheist who flipped back to God and Christianity in the 1930’s. During a subsequent denunciation of one of his former colleagues, he said:

“I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not.”

Rather than admitting that he had changed, Chambers felt “he had simply resumed his true identity”.

Schulz says this claim is a “common feature of conversion narratives”:

“Indeed, the very word “conversion” comes from a Latin verb that means not to change but to return. Thus converts to Islam are sometimes called “reverts”, and many other religious traditions describe new members of the faith as “coming home” or “returning to the flock”.”

Why do people make such implausible claims, that “we have always been the exact opposite of who we once seemed to be”? Schulz says we tend to do this because it’s almost impossible for us to accept that we were so wrong earlier. And that’s exactly why religions use such terms, to ease the pain/discomfort of the convertee about his past beliefs! Oh, and it also fits nicely into the this-was-God’s-plan-all-along narrative:

“Our false beliefs were preordained, our apparent errors occurred strictly in the service of a larger truth.”

As Schulz says, we didn’t start off this way:

“When you were a little kid, you were fabulously wrong about things all the time… Eventually, kids grow up and learn the truth about sex and death and chocolate milk. In the interim, though, they live in a world rich with wrongness.”

But as we become older, we change:

“The pleasurable mistakes of childhood disrupt our lives less often, partly because the world is less novel to us, and partly because we don’t seek out whatever novelty remains – or at least we don’t do so with the same zeal (and the same institutional support: classrooms, after-school programs, summer camps) as children.”