Abraham Lotha
At the First Naga Missionary Conference at Dimapur last year, Rev. Dr Phuveyi Dozo presented a paper on the need for a paradigm shift in mission. One of the methods of gospel communication, he suggested, was a shift from “Western form to Indigenous form: people’s pattern of church planting and growth.” How appropriate it would be if we were to realistically apply this shift in Nagaland. Most Nagas are Christians, and there is nothing wrong in being a Christian. But for most part, Nagas have been very naïve in accepting anything Western, including blindly accepting the type of Christianity brought to them as the best to be had. What is needed is a paradigm shift from a blind western-imitation Christianity to an indigenous Naga Christianity that has relevance to the Nagas.
Western Christian missionaries brought Christianity and education to the Nagas, but it is also true that they brought along attitudes that were very anti to Naga culture which have resulted in the destruction of Naga culture (ask any Naga kid to sing an original Naga song and you’ll know what I mean. They will know the latest chartbusters of western music but it is highly improbable that they will know any Naga folk song). Everything Western and Christian was considered good and anything Naga was considered pagan and devilish destined for hell. As a result, Nagas developed an inferiority complex about their own culture. It is ironic that Naga nationalists should base their argument on the uniqueness of Naga culture when many Nagas only ape Western culture and don’t have a positive attitude towards their own culture. It is in this context that I would like to discuss the missionaries’ paradigms in their encounter with the Nagas during the colonial period.
Colonials, Missionaries and Modernity
Christian missionaries and the British colonial government developed a collaborative relationship in the project for modernity in colonial India. Conversion to modernity was an important meeting point where colonial control and salvation of souls converged. For both the missionaries and the colonial government, India was primitive and had to be modernized. Even when the colonial government tried to maintain a neutral stand towards the religious institutions, its relationship with the missionaries was often collaborative, reinforcing the colonizing project which in turn helped expand the missionaries’ objectives under the umbrella of colonialism. On the other hand, in the process of proselytizating and educating the Indian masses through schools, the missionaries supported and collaborated with the colonial powers.
Both the colonial government and the missionaries were involved in the project of modernizing India. For the Christian missionaries, modernity was defined in terms of utility, rationality and Christian morality; for the colonial government, British perceptions of modernity were influenced by Utilitarian philosophies like James Mill’s History of India. According to this philosophy, Indian religion was backward and immoral feudalism in India had to be destroyed. Accordingly, Mill felt that the East India Company should push India into modernity.
A similar attitude was echoed when Macaulay argued in the Minute on Indian Education that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Macaulay went on to claim an intrinsic superiority of Western literature and that it would be worthless to spend on Arabic and Sanskrit. He believed that “the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them”. Mill’s utilitarian view of pushing India into history was implemented in Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education. Education thus became the primary instrument to modernize India.
In their relationship with the natives in the colonized worlds, the missionaries and colonial administrators were heavily influenced by contemporary theories of evolution and race in Europe. The writings of the colonial officials and quasi-officials on the caste system, religion and race in India were strongly influenced, as Susan Bayly says, by concepts of a “Darwinian ‘struggle for mastery’ between higher and lower races, with the weak and inferior marked for extinction by their qualities of moral, physical and cultural backwardness.” Bayly further points out that colonial powers like Briton believed they were endowed with “an inherent capacity to rule in harmony with the religious norms of nonwhite peoples, damping down dangerous fanaticisms and wild millenarian proclivities among Indians and other Asian peoples, and advancing and uplifting these favored subjects by offering them a form of Christianity that was widely characterized as moderate, civilized, and unprovocative”.
It wasn’t just the European culture that was seen as rational and thus superior; in this world-view, Christianity, especially British Protestantism, was exalted as a moderate and rational religion that was most notable among all religions. Both the colonial powers and missionaries, influenced by these trends, were in agreement that the colonized had to be converted to modernity. An example of this is best captured in William Carey’s book, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens. The missionaries went further than modernity – the conversion to Christianity was the ultimate rationale and lifestyle of modernity.
Attitudes towards the Tribals
Colonial tribal policies were informed and influenced by theories that originated from the Enlightenment period, particularly by orientalist attitudes towards colonized peoples. Orientalism focused on the cultural essences of subordinated societies, constructing their individual typology. Orientalist ideology and theories of evolution and race placed different societies on a time-line with the modernity of Europe at the apex; all other societies were ranked in relation to how much behind they were in relation to each other and, ultimately, how far they were behind Europe. Thus in the reasoning of Europeans, Indian society was not just an oriental other, but was an uncivilized other. When it came to the tribals, colonials in the Americas, Africa, Australia and India were guided by an ideology that focused on the wild, primitive aborigines and placed them at the lowest point of the civilization ladder.
Armed with such an outlook, the primitiveness of the tribes was celebrated. ‘Noble savages,’ that’s what the tribals were called. When the tribals were not in the direct path of the colonial expansion, the colonials often emphasized their nobility and independence. The tribals were then considered noble, honest and simple. Unlike the European societies that had social, economic or political inequalities, the ‘egalitarian’ tribal societies were appealing to the British. But, for the most part, to the British, the tribals represented a stage outside civilization. And so even their acts of violence were “not barbaric but savage.” Such communities had to be protected from unscrupulous traders and political powers that came in contact with the tribals. Colonial officials were afraid that contact with the caste Hindus in the plains would have a corrupting influence on the tribals. But it must be also considered that the portrayal of the tribal as a Noble Savage, innocent of the historical processes was not only naïve but, as K. Suresh Singh says, also served “to justify the presence of the Raj and the role of the missionaries as the protectors of the tribals against non-tribals.” From an ideological point of view, the difference between the colonizers and the colonized was a justification for colonization.
Missionaries, Colonials and Naga tribes
Armed with such attitudes towards the tribals, some of the best examples of this collaboration between the colonial government and the missionaries in the project for modernity in India were seen in their encounters with the tribals like the Nagas. Christianity was an important concomitant of the British colonial expansion among the Naga tribes. In 1875, Captain Johnstone “pointed out that the Nagas had no religion; that they were highly intelligent and capable of receiving civilization; that with it they would want a religion, and that we might just as well give them our own, and make them in that way a source of strength, by thus mutually attaching them to us … It cannot be doubted, that a large population of Christian hillmen between Assam and Burma, would be a valuable prop to the State.”
Major Francis Jenkins, who succeeded David Scott as the second Commissioner of Assam, had a good knowledge of the tribals in Assam, including the Nagas. He felt 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 language of these tribes, and devoting their time and attention to humanize these rude races could not fail of being useful to us and to them.” Accordingly, the American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society were invited to Assam to work among the Naga tribes and the colonial administration promised to give all possible personal and official assistance.
The collaboration between the colonial administrators and missionaries is very obvious, for instance, from the following excerpt in Mackenzie: “A missionary, Mr. Bronson, had for some years resided among the tribes, teaching them Christianity and the art of cultivating tea. The Governor General’s Agent thought so highly of this gentleman’s work, that he asked Government to give Rs. 100 a month towards his Naga schools.” The Government directed that the Rs.100 be used “for objects of practical utility connected with the improvement of the Naga country and spent with the view of leading its population into habits of industry.”
The colonial government also used education to further their political cause. It promoted literacy, prohibited headhunting and inter-village warfare, in an effort to break down barriers that isolated Nagas from fellow Naga groups. But the main motive, as Richard Eaton points out, “was to create a cadre of clerks to run the revenue and judicial administration in the newly formed Naga Hills District.”
E. W. Clark, one of the pioneer Baptist missionaries in the Naga areas, established his mission among the Ao Nagas. Imparting of education through the village schools was a primary medium used by the missionaries for conversion. But even though the primary objective of the missionaries was to preach the gospel and win souls, in practice, conversion to Christianity also meant conversion to modernity and Western morality, particularly American Protestant puritan morality in the case of the Nagas, thus calling for a cultural transformation.
As Mary Clark, the wife of E. W. Clark writes, “the Nagas, once civilized and Christianized, will make a manly, worthy people.” Naga converts were forbidden from sleeping in the morungs, forbidden to take part in tribal feasts and rituals, and prohibited form drinking rice beer. Wearing western dress, not drinking rice beer became the markers of becoming a Christian. Christians were differentiated as people who ‘have accepted religion’ and non-Christians were people who ‘drank rice beer.’
In the process of educating and converting the Nagas, the colonial government and the missionaries also made the Nagas accept the evolutionary worldview that the Christian Western world was civilized, modern and at the top of the evolutionary ladder while the ‘savage’ Nagas were at the lowest rung and had to be civilized. Earlier missionaries and the British colonials were seen as embodiments of the modern and the civilized. Consequently, even today among the Nagas, Christianity is associated with the modern and the ‘civilized.’
But what happened to Naga culture and the Nagas’ image of themselves in the meantime? I shall leave that for another article.
Comments may be sent to yanthan@hotmail.com
(The writer is a Freelance journalist, Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology in New York)
