Dr. Melvil Pereira
Evangelising the Nation sheds light on a hitherto little discussed and little recognised element in the emergence of a distinct Naga identity: the Christian faith, and one divided nation united by one God in Three. It perhaps raises more questions than it answers, but these are questions that need to be asked, and need to be heard, by scholars and societies in their pursuit of a viable identity. The book sheds fresh light on the missionary-tribal interface; it critically recaptures the trajectory of the prolonged political struggle of the Nagas to establish a Naga State and to carve out a national consciousness according to their own terms.
Just over a century ago, a young Naga was walking with his father along one of the few roads in the Naga Hills. As a proud student of one of the newly opened Christian schools, he was wearing the typical and accepted academic shorts. A low-level British officer stopped him. He ordered the boy to remove his trousers. Why? Because they were foreign; because they were modern intrusions into his received culture; because he could. In Evangelizing the Nation, the author presents the incident as an example of the confusing, and often bewilderingly contradictory, demands on the Naga people as they confronted the larger world and struggled to make sense of their position in that new reality.
The volume traces efforts to “resolve the contradiction” of Naga people who first in villages, then in larger polities sought to resist invading forces and develop a purposeful and unified sense of identity under the disadvantage of already having been undermined by one of those invasions,: the slow success of Christian Baptist missionary action.
There is a clear presentation of the development of a Naga political identity as it both intersects and contends with, initially, American Baptist Christian missionary efforts, and, later, the matured Naga Baptist churches. This account begins by tracing the theology and theory underlying the early efforts, begun in the early 1870s by Edwin W. Clark, to evangelize the Naga people. These early missions met with very limited success, though conversion rates accelerated in the 1940s and continued to increase; to increase until “Nagaland for Christ” became a rallying cry for a large number of the peoples in these hills.
The book has succeeded like no other to critically analyze the game-plan and mindset of Baptist missionaries who worked in Nagaland to win souls for Christ. It beautifully captures the initial condescending attitude of the missionaries towards all that is Naga transforming slowly into a studied reverence to native culture and practices in later years.
Initially all was not hunky dory for the British establishing their rule in the hills of North East India: a partner was required to share the burden. Much has been written about the collusion of missionaries with colonial power in Nagaland and later, the Baptist pastors with the Government of India. The present book corroborates such a stance with more documentary evidence and incisive analysis with devastating effect, especially questioning and critiquing the approach of the missionaries, both foreign and local, to evangelization. While reading the book one wonders whether the Baptist missionaries tamed the ‘raging mithuns’ [title of a book by Abraham Lotha] thus weakening the support base for the NNC and other later factions that fought for Naga sovereignty. Could the Church be held responsible for the weakening of nationalist urge in the Nagas? Were missionaries then, and pastors now, responsible for taming the desire of the Nagas to be an independent nation? John Thomas suggests it may be so. The peace conventions inspired by the Baptist pastors climaxing in the signing of Shillong Accord by NNC leaders is seen in the book as an effort to weaken the Naga underground, thus undermining the efforts for greater autonomy bordering on sovereignty. This is just one such example.
Initially, the Nagas did not welcome Christianity with a warm embrace. The book notably queries this initial caution of the Nagas towards Christianity to their later over-enthusiasm in embracing it in great numbers, especially between the 1940s and 1960s.
In the early days, through education and health, the missionaries won over the Nagas but not many embraced their faith. During the 1940s, up against the hegemonic and assimilationist tendencies of the Indian State, the Nagas found in Christianity a refuge to carve out a new identity or perhaps to strengthen the Naga identity based on the ideology of what was once a beleaguered Judaic band of brethren, struggling for survival in one of the largest countries the world has ever known, as Christianity was in its first century of martyrs. Religion became a handmaiden to be put to work by politicians to carve out a unique identity in contra-distinction to the mainstream Indian Hindu-Aryan identity.
Early inroads by the colonial Raj, soon followed by the Baptist missions, broadened the horizons of the previously isolated Naga people, as did the service of Nagas in World War I Europe. The formation of the Naga Club in 1918 followed.
Members sought to establish a unified Naga identity from the several distinct societies in the mountains east of Assam and demanded separation from Assam and India. The emergence of Zapu Phizo and formation of the Naga National Council, a declaration by the Council of Naga independence, and growing militancy followed as desires for Naga independence clashed with the seemingly intractable demands of hegemony by the nation of India.
The author presents these developments as a single, complex interaction and does so in a way that is at once engaging and extremely readable. This presentation includes at least three facets that provide greater understanding of the process and encourage deeper investigation into that complex dynamic. First, the author traces the origins of the Heraka religion among the Rongmei, Liangmei and Zeme Nagas. This movement, founded by Haipou Jadonang and developed by his cousin and disciple Rani Gaidinliu, is presented as a creative response to modernity by the founders, who both responded to encroaching Christian and Hindu ideals and grafted aspects of both faiths onto the traditional beliefs of the Naga societies, in with the good out with the bad, all for the greater good of the Naga Raj.
Further developments—the conflict between Gaidinliu and Phizo’s Naga National Council and the decision by Gaidinliu to align Heraka with the conservative Vishwa Hindu Parishad—seem important to the book’s focus but are not included.
Second, the author presents the profound disjunction of the traditional Naga worldview with that of the evangelizing Christian missionaries. This was present, and unavoidably so, from the outset of the Baptist efforts. A society centered on community-based identity, co-operation, and egalitarian values struggled with acceptance of an individualistic Christian standards; a way of life interacting profoundly with nature and striving for integration with the balance of forces within that context was replaced with an otherworldly, monotheistic value system.
Further, the theological suppositions that were the legacy of the mission church proved inadequate to respond to the concrete challenges of political oppression and violence the Naga independence movement faced. Indeed, the inherited theological focus on individual, ethereal salvation could form no basis for a necessary critique of systemic injustice because of its preponderant focus on personal sin and responsibility.
Again while this is a real strength of the book, its lack is any mention of the later entrance of later Catholic evangelization seems a curious lacuna. One assumes the author would find little difference between the Baptist and Catholic perspectives. Still, given the mutual hostility among the two denominations this seems a fertile area for further investigations.
Thirdly, the book presents a fascinating and fresh account of the efforts of the Naga National Council and its successors to escape charges of being communist lackeys after receiving training and material aid from communist China. Undeniably, efforts to retrieve credibility after being branded as communist agents forced the organisation to further enhance its identity as Christians, leading to a further contradiction of adopting a strangely emphatic “Nagaland for Christ” platform in place of its earlier assertions of religious freedom in an independent Nagaland. These are but a few of the intriguing questions that Evangelising the Nation offers. Despite this, the book seems to have certain flaws. While mercifully free of the prodigal and unnecessary references that so often litter such works, there are times when serious accusations—atrocities by the Indian Army and paramilitary groups under the Disturbed Areas laws— could be better supported within the text. While no history is written without agenda, the book seems to treat too easily pronouncements of the NNC and its allies as factual, but those of voices in opposition as propaganda revealing their alignment with oppressive Christian, colonial or Indian stances.
If the purpose of a book is to provide definitive answers on some topic, Evangelising the Nation does not succeed; if the purpose is to provide a strong viewpoint that both challenges the reader’s pre-conceptions and leaves one eager to investigate the topic in greater depth, the book is a more than worthy point for discussion.
