Thotreichan Thomas Khansu S. J.
The Jesuits in Northeast India have reached a new milestone. They opened their mission in Nagaland in 1970 and have now become a full-fledged Kohima Jesuit Province that covers the whole of the Northeast. It will be officially inaugurated by their Superior General Fr Arturo Sosa on 10th March at Umbhir in Meghalaya. All 170 Jesuits in the Northeast celebrate this landmark with gratitude to God and to those who have supported them. “Reading the Past to Write the Future” was their motto when they completed fifty years in 2020. They use the same motto today to look back at the last 55 years and reflect on their future. The piece has come out of that reflection.
Their presence in the Northeast began at Kohima when three Jesuit pioneers from Karnataka, Stany Coelho, Ligoury Castelino and Raymond D’Souza inaugurated the mission on 22nd April 1970. They did not have a master plan, but only a conviction that they were called to walk with the people and discover their path step by step. That was achieved largely through the vision of local leaders. Mr John Bosco Jasokie, Education Minister, later Chief Minister, saw the urgent need for quality higher education in the state that was engulfed in a nationalist struggle. While Christian missionary activity had ensured basic literacy, secondary and college education remained distant. Jasokie approached church authorities requesting them to invite Jesuits to Nagaland for its educational development. The appeal eventually reached the Jesuit Superior General who entrusted the responsibility for the new mission to the Jesuits of Karnataka.
Though invited by the Minister for Education, the three met with opposition from some strong forces in Kohima and Jotsoma where they were asked to open a school or a college. That forced them to search for an alternative location which they found on an abandoned hilltop in Jakhama that had no use except as a dumping ground for the cantonment in the neighbourhood. The pioneers viewed this setback and realised that a school or college in Kohima or Dimapur would benefit the already advantaged classes while institutions in a rural area like Jakhama would make education accessible to hitherto neglected rural tribal communities. A policy evolved from this discernment that Jesuit institutions in the Northeast would be only in the tribal rural areas.
They had to live in the Jakhama village far from Kohima. A Catholic and a Baptist family gave them shelter. While thus living among the people, they realised that education had to go beyond academic formation to community development. They had come to Nagaland with experience mainly in urban educational institutions but they realised that in the Northeast they had to combine education with pastoral care and social empowerment, and become centres of cultural exchange and religious dialogue. Loyola School, Jakhama was founded in 1971 at the height of the Naga Nationalist struggle. From it, Jesuits realised that they had to work for national integration while responding creatively to the identity and political aspirations of Naga and later other people of the Northeast that the struggles represented.
Collaboration was central to their mission and it went beyond inter-denominational to support from other religious congregations. The Apostolic Carmel Sisters, who joined them in Jakhama in 1971 became pioneers in teaching and healthcare outreach, family visits and helped bridge cultural gap between missionaries and villagers. Other congregations followed, like the Ursulines, Bethany and FCC. Their presence ensured that mission centres were not merely institutions but living communities of service. Collaboration, the backbone of this enterprise, included also lay leaders, tribal organisations, and Jesuit provinces from India and abroad who contributed personnel, expertise, and financial support. Such collaboration was not dependency but shared responsibility, partnership, and empowering local communities.
While Jesuits wanted to combine education with pastoral and social involvement, education was the priority of most communities that invited them. People asked first for schools, not churches. For example, a member of the Nagaland Legislative Assembly supported a school at Melluri in Eastern Nagaland while opposing conversion to Catholicism. Other Baptist leaders did the same in Poruba, Pfutsero and elsewhere. Looking at the success of Loyola School, some Baptist leaders of Jotsoma who had resisted their presence, requested them to open a school there. Unfortunately, Jesuits did not have men to respond to this request. Eight centres came up in Eastern Nagaland. To support everyone’s access to education, a policy grew of ‘garland schools,’ a primary school in every village, a middle schools for a cluster of villages and Loyola at the top for Southern Angami. Some of these schools have grown into high schools. Educational expansion across Southern Angami, climaxed into St Joseph’s college, Jakhama. Since Nagaland and the Northeast do not have a grants-in-aid policy, fees had to be levied, but they were deliberately kept low in order not to deny access to poor children.
As requests mounted, Jesuits developed a policy of ‘open a centre, develop it and hand it over to the diocese.’ They opened four centres in Manipur, one of which has been handed over. In the Southern Angami area, they have withdrawn from St Joseph’s College and the centres in Viswema and Kidima. The big challenge came in 1995 when the Nagaland Mission became the Kohima Region to serve all seven states of the Northeast. To free men for it, over a period of a decade they handed over seven of the eight centres in Eastern Nagaland.
Based on the vision of serving the most neglected, when they went beyond Nagaland, they opted to serve the Aka in Arunachal, the Dimasa and the Adivasi in Assam and the Garo in Meghalaya. They developed four institutions for the Adivasi and handed them over to the Ranchi Jesuit Province who have opened more centres in the tea garden areas. Of the five institutions for the Dimasa, they have handed over one. After handing over a parish in the Garo Hills, today they have four parishes and two colleges in Meghalaya.
This narrative thus traces how a small rural mission gradually developed into a wide network of educational and social initiatives across Northeast India, with the vision to respond to the region’s spiritual and social needs. The journey was marked by hardships. Many Jesuits and their collaborators often lived in isolation as the only teacher or priest in a centre. They faced illness, financial shortages, travel risks, and militant conflict. However, amid failures they have tried to remain faithful to their vision and have failed in it at times. After more than five decades, they face new challenges such as avoiding elitism, ensuring access of the poor, addressing unemployment and ecological change, and fostering harmony. They continue the journey knowing well that their mission is not merely one of growth of institutions but of empowering communities, culturally rooted education, and a continuing effort to unite knowledge, compassion, and justice in shaping the region’s future.
The author is a Jesuit scholastic preparing for priesthood.
