Evangelising the Nation

Religion and the Formation of Naga Political Identity

John Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317413981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Northeast India has witnessed several nationality movements during the 20th century. The oldest and one of the most formidable has been that of the Nagas — inhabiting the hill tracts between the Brahmaputra river in India and the Chindwin river in Burma (now Myanmar). Rallying behind the slogan, 'Nagaland for Christ', this movement has been the site of an ambiguous relation between a particular understanding of Christianity and nation-making.

This book, based on meticulous archival research, traces the making of this relation and offers fresh perspectives on the workings of religion in the formation of political and cultural identities among the Nagas. It tracks the transmutations of Protestantism from the United States to the hill tracts of Northeast India, and its impact on the form and content of the nation that was imagined and longed for by the Nagas. The volume also examines the role of missionaries, local church leaders, and colonial and post-colonial states in facilitating this process.

Lucidly written and rigorous in its analyses, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, religion, political science, sociology and social anthropology, and particularly those concerned with Northeast India.

1
The original sin

In the late 1860s, a group of Ao Nagas coming down to the plains to trade encountered something strange. ‘See’, said one smiling, ‘those children talk to the white and black things they hold in their hands!’ Another one said, ‘Aiao! They tell the grown-up man the things they say also! It is most wonderful!’ That was their first encounter with a small mission school in session (Bowers 1929: 197). Besides the class room, they also witnessed the typesetting, printing and binding that were happening at the press building just adjacent to the mission school. These strange practices they encountered aroused much curiosity among them that each time they came down to Sibsagar, they would spare some time to stand by and observe all that happened at the mission school and the press building.

After much observation, one day, the leader among them came to the white mission school teacher and asked, ‘Come up to our village in the hills, Sahib, and teach our children to talk with the books’ (ibid.: 198). They were eager to learn the art of reading and writing, since the advantages of doing so were myriad especially at a time when the state and the people of the plains seemed to depend greatly on it for their political and economic activities. However, having been fed on sensational stories about the headhunting raids of ‘wild’ tribes from the hills and fearing for his life, the mission school teacher was not too keen on accepting their invitation. Persistent as they were, these men from the hills, however, approached the teacher again and again, with the size of the delegation becoming larger each time they visited, only to be turned down repeatedly. Reminiscing about those times, Edward Clark, the mission school teacher said: ‘During the next few months the number of parties coming to see the school increased. Time after time they called on me and insisted that I go with them to the hills. I refused their invitation for I knew that there was no security there’ (ibid.: 198).

Finally, one day, an exceptionally large delegation of them came to the mission bungalow and called on the teacher. An elder among them came forward and appealed to Clark: ‘Sir, we are the men from the town of a thousand warriors. We come to request you to return with us in order to teach our children the way of knowledge. Though we ourselves are too old to learn, we will give you our children that you may teach them, the new way’ (ibid.: 198–9). Still very uncertain about his ‘security’, Clark was assured by the elder that, ‘we, the men of a thousand warriors guarantee to protect you’ (ibid.: 199). With this assurance, Clark, a missionary of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS), finally obliged to enter the Naga Hills.

The ABFMS had been in Assam since 1836 and there were many American missionaries who had come and gone prior to Clark. It was the chief commissioner of Assam, Francis Jenkins, who had invited the American missionaries to Assam. Having defeated Burma in 1826, the British had come to assume political control over Assam. As they consolidated their power, they ‘found the Assam valley surrounded north, east, and south by numerous savage and warlike tribes’ who frequently conducted armed raids into the foothills in order to take possession of their land, which over the years had been taken from them by the Assamese rulers (Mackenzie 1884: 7). From the 1830s onwards, these armed raids had further intensified because the British had discovered tea, realised its high commercial value in the world market and begun grabbing land for its cultivation. It was in the 1820s that Robert Bruce, with the help of an Assamese, Maniram Dewan, who later went on to become the first Assamese tea planter, discovered tea in the region. Prior to the death of the former in 1825, knowledge about the plant was passed on to his brother, Charles A. Bruce, who sent the seeds of the plant to Calcutta for further research. In the meantime, Britain had lost her monopoly over tea to China and she desperately looked for means to regain her lost position and control over the market. The tea found in Assam was at the time judged to be of a superior quality and preparations began for acquisition of land, especially in the foothills, and establishing tea plantations with the support and encouragement of the colonial state (Elwin 1969: 111–12). The land that were encroached upon were, however, not ‘waste’ land as the colonial state considered them to be, but belonged to the Singphos and the Nagas, and quite naturally, they resisted the encroacher.

Further south of Assam, closer to the North Cachar Hills, in order to avert further Burmese invasions and to acquire economic and political control over the regions bordering Burma, the British were keen to open direct communication lines between Assam and Manipur, the kingdom lying in between Cachar and Burma (Mackenzie 1884: 150). However, this could be effectively done only by making incursions into the Naga Hills. Meanwhile, the colonial necessity of the British was appended by the ambitions of the Manipur Raja, Gumbheer Singh, to permanently occupy and therein extent his rule over the Naga Hills. He had even begun making military incursions into the Naga Hills even before the British could make much advance (ibid.: 101). Faced with a threat to its interest, at the same time wanting to avoid any direct confrontation, Chief Commissioner Jenkins proposed to the Manipur Rajah and subsequently declared that all the hills between the Doyeng and Dhunsiri rivers, in other words the southern portion of the Naga Hills, would be given away to Manipur (ibid.: 102).

All these military incursions and arbitrary dividing up of the hills by the British and the kingdoms in the plains quite naturally created much resentment among the Nagas, especially the Angami Nagas who lived around the regions where incursions were made. They intensified their armed resistance and sabotaged all efforts of the British and the Manipur kingdom to attain any foothold in the hills. From the 1830s to 1850, the British conducted no less than 10 military expeditions into the Naga areas to pacify and subjugate the Nagas, but each time they came to be dispelled (ibid.: 101–13). In 1851 alone, no less than 22 Naga raids were reported, in which 55 persons were killed, 10 wounded and 113 taken captive (ibid.: 112).

In the face of such resistance, the British officials in the region realised that it was difficult to subdue and pacify the Nagas solely through military means. Although they did not possess the superior weaponry of the British, armed with spears and daos, the Nagas could launch surprise attacks at any time in the most unpredictable manner. Besides, their villages, built high on the hills, had elaborate defences, with stockades, fortifications and panjied ditches (Shakespear 1914: 107–8). Thus, alongside military incursions, it was considered essential that efforts be made to ‘humanise’ and ‘civilise’ these ‘savage races’ so that they may become ‘disciplined’ and ‘obedient’ subjects of the colonial empire. As an initiative towards this end, Chief Commissioner Jenkins argued that ‘the tribes on the Assam frontier should be brought within the scope of missionary activities as early as possible as the influence of persons skilled in the languages of these tribes, and devoting their time and attention to humanise these rude races could not fail of being useful to us and to them’ (Yonuo 1974: 113). Thus, with the help of Charles Trevelyan, deputy secretary to the government in the political department, who was himself an evangelical, Jenkins extended an invitation to the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS). As the BMS did not have resources to take on a new mission field, the invitation was forwarded to the American Baptists who were already working in Burma. Looking for an opportunity to make inroads into China, the American Baptists saw in Assam a region that would bridge their Burma mission with China (Lal Dena 1988: 21–2). That is how in 1836, missionaries of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS) came to work in Assam.

But, who were the American Baptists? Where did they come from? What is the historical and ideological background that shaped their actions and outlook? In order to answer these questions, it is important to go back to the time when their forefathers came in waves, forcibly occupied the lands of the Native Americans and preached Christianity to them. It was in the 17th century that Puritans¹ and other Separatist protestant groups,² fleeing religious persecution in England, first landed in the region today known as New England in the United States. On arrival, they declared the land they had reached the ‘promised land’ where they had been brought by divine providence to build a Christian commonwealth, ‘a city set upon the hill’ firmly rooted in Christian principles for the entire world to see (Edwards 2004: 165). However, there was one problem. The local people of the land, the Native Americans, who the new settlers identified to be racially and culturally different, and hence, not worthy of dignity and respect, seemed to pose a hurdle towards the realization of this Christian commonwealth.³ Structured by certain binaries of good and evil, of God and Satan, of civilised and savage, the new settlers came to regard the various Native American tribes as their immediate ‘other’ in the New World – the other who was the embodiment of all that was unacceptable, and hence, the other who had to be conquered, disciplined and converted if they were to realise the ‘city’ they aspired for.

A couple of years into their stay, the new settlers developed a militia of their own, set up their own government and began forcibly evicting the Native Americans from their land and looting their resources. Subsequently, this campaign became far more aggressive and systematic as further shiploads of white settlers with an unrestrained appetite for land and resources poured in. Several laws were passed making the Native Americans illegal residents in their own land: laws that systematically removed them from their lands, outlawed their customs and ceremonial practices, and eventually confined them to settlements known as reservations, where every movement and action of theirs was put under strict surveillance. By 1920, almost 97.5 per cent of their lands had been expropriated by the new settlers (Churchill 2003: 52).

The Native Americans who resisted were systematically massacred through military campaigns and deliberate spread of diseases that were alien to the region. The massacres were of such scale that by the 20th century, a population that had probably numbered more than 12 million was reduced to 237,000 (ibid.). Accompanying this physical annihilation of a people, which was more visible and obvious, there was the more pervasive yet subtle cultural annihilation, wherein the culture and the system of values that defined them as a people and gave them life came to be undermined and destroyed (Tinker 1993: 6). This was something made possible through the initiatives of white settler missionaries and missionary societies.

To begin with, the white settlers were not keen to engage in missionary work among the Native Americans, though the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, 1629, upon which the English government granted the colony to the Puritans, had urged them to do so. They feared that the ‘natives’ would taint the racial and cultural purity of the Christian commonwealth they wished to build. Moreover, drawn to ‘High Calvinism’, they were of the belief that human agency was incapable of doing anything to further the ‘salvation’ of human beings. For it was only God’s act of ‘election’ that made it possible for human beings to even yearn for salvation. Hence, any human effort to evangelise would be a futile endeavour (Chaney 1970: 162).

The English government was quite weary of this attitude. They admonished the settlers for not having a zeal for evangelism, and directed the Massachusetts Bay Colony administration to undertake missionary work among the Native Americans, wherein John Eliot, a Puritan missionary, was appointed to work among the Massachusett tribe in 1646. The government offered the missionary all support and protection, and to make his task easier, legislations that declared blasphemy a capital crime and the practice of local religion unlawful were also passed (Tinker 1993: 29). Founded on the premise that ‘civilisation’ of the ‘native’ was to accompany his or her conversion to the religion of the settlers, the subsequent missionary work involved breaking up of existing families and communities, undermining of traditional tribal leadership, disintegration of the local economy, imposition of settler customs and methods of agriculture, architecture, clothing, language, etc. (Tinker 1993: 25–36). The missionary work of Eliot did not last too long, but for the subsequent generations, it became the paradigm for doing mission.

Following Eliot, there was hardly any impetus among the protestant denominations for missionary work, though efforts on the part of individual missionaries continued. Then came the ‘Second Great Awakening’, a series of religious revivals that occurred in the late 18th century: in the aftermath of the American Revolution there was much fear and anxiety over the extent to which the revolution had weakened the hold of religion over people and secularised the social, cultural and political landscape; provided space for the justification of enlightenment ideas and rational explanations to the problems that society confronted; and created stricter division between church and state, wherein state could not be depended on any longer to enforce religious morals on society (Bowden 1977: 43–4). To assuage this fear, religious leaders increasingly felt the need to expand their influence among all sections of the society, lest religion itself become obsolete in the lives of people. This marked the beginning of a series of religious revivals. Among the settlers, these revivals aimed at nurturing earnestness in personal devotion and life, and among the ‘ungodly’ outside the settler community, they aimed at preaching the gospel and converting them to Christianity. It was the latter objective that led to the formation of missionary societies such as the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS) in 1832 and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) from which later came the ABFMS in 1814 (Gonzalez 2004: 245).

These revivals did not dispute the earlier understanding that salvation was possible only as a result of divine election rather than human agency. However, rather than entirely dismissing the role of human agency, they brought out its importance in creating and nurturing situations where divine intervention would be possible. In other words, the need to consciously create a want in people for faith and salvation came to be emphasised. It is this shift in theological thinking that made the religious take interest in the idea of preaching the gospel and providing the prospects of salvation to the ‘ungodly’ outside the white settler community.

The new impetus for missionary work also grew out of the expansion of the settler state and people. The late 18th century and much of the 19th century witnessed unprecedented waves of migration of Europeans to North America. The related hunger for land, resources and profits drove the new settlers, under the sanction and protection of the settler state, into the lands of the Native Americans. Obviously, there was much resistance on the part of the Native Americans to this settler expansionism, and finding effective ways of curbing this resistance became a matter of concern for the settler state. While physical annihilation was effective to a certain extent, it was felt that the more effective measure would be to undertake missionary work among the Native American people, wherein the latter would be pacified and disciplined, and made to appreciate the virtues of white settler culture and rule (Zinn 2001: 126). George Washington and Henry Knox were the first to recommend this measure. They argued that the Native Americans could be made to appreciate the settler culture and rule through education, promotion of commerce, initiation of experiments aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and capitalist economic practices, and the introduction of Christianity. Subsequently, in 1819, the US Congress passed a Civilization Fund Act, wherein individuals and societies were encouraged to initiate education and training in agricultural and mechanical arts among the Native Americans, so that the latter may be introduced to the ‘habits and arts of civilization’ (Tinker 1993: 3). Taking this a step further, in the 1870s, Ulysses Grant, the president of the United States, initiated what is known as the ‘Peace Policy’, wherein church denominations were given powers to appoint local agents and manage the reservations, so that Native Americans may be ‘Christianised’, ‘civilised’ and trained ‘in the arts of peace’. These measures were supplemented by the legislation of 1890 that banned the traditional religious ceremonies of the Native Americans, and hence, making it favourable for the introduction of Christianity. This political support and encouragement extended by the settler state, through the 19th century and especially from 1860s onwards, contributed much in ushering a period of intensive missionary work among Native Americans, with each missionary society vying for their own spheres of influence.

‘The government had an interest in domesticating the Indians, and the Baptists were willing to cooperate’, wrote a Baptist historian (Gardner 1983: 24). The American Baptists were more or less critical of the physical annihilation of the Native Americans. However, they were enthusiastic about the prospects that political expansionism created for missionary work. Their work gained momentum following the triennial convention, the first effort to forge unity among the Baptists and become a single denomination, and the formation of ABHMS. By 1845, about 2.5 per cent of the Baptist population were Native Americans. Before the civil war of the 1860s, there were about 60 Baptist missionaries working among Native Americans, claiming to have converted about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The original sin
• 2 Sending out the spears
• 3 War, nationalism and conversions
• 4 Peace, crusades and pacification
• 5 Church, politics and the limits of theology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index