Walter Fernandes
April 22nd 2020 marks fifty years of Jesuit presence in the Northeast. Of the three pioneers, Frs Stany Coelho, Liguory Castelino and Raymond D’Souza, two reached Kohima and celebrated mass at Christ the King Church on 22nd April 1970 to mark the beginning of the Nagaland Jesuit Mission. They had come at the invitation of Mr. John Baptist Jasokie whose sons were studying at the Jesuit-run St Joseph’s College, Bangalore. Sons of some other cabinet ministers were studying at the Jesuit-run North Point College, Darjeeling. So when people in the Nagaland government decided that the state required better facilities of education, a consensus arose that the Jesuits were the best suited for it. Accordingly, Jasokie approached Bishop Hubert Rozario SDB of Dibrugarh, the diocese to which Nagaland belonged till 1972. The bishop in his turn wrote to the Jesuit Superior General who asked the Jesuits of Calcutta to study the possibilities. The educationist Fr Vestraeten of St Xavier’s College, Calcutta who visited Nagaland reported that the possibilities were immense. But West Bengal did not have enough Indian Jesuits to come to this sensitive area. So at their meeting in October 1969 all the Jesuit Provincials of India suggested that Karnataka take it up because it had many Indian Jesuits. A delegation from Karnataka that visited the State gave a positive report.
That is the origin of the Nagaland Jesuit Mission which has today become the Kohima Region comprising all seven states of the Northeast. The invitation was to open a school at Jotsoma or take over the Kohima Science College. But they met with opposition in these places. So eventually they landed in Jakhama, fifteen kilometres away where the village offered them a steep abandoned hill of 65 to 80 degree gradient that was of no use to anyone and was used as a dumping ground for waste from the Jakhama army cantonment. The Jesuits had to sink crores of rupees into it in order to turn into what is today the 15-acre Loyola School campus. They were disappointed at their failure to open an institution in Kohima as planned. But reflecting on being forced to shift to a village, they realised that if they had opened an institution in Kohima they would be educating the ten percent upper class tribals and children of bureaucrats and traders i.e. the mostly non-tribal privileged class. Did the finger of God lead them to a village with very little access to education, health and other services? Yes, they said to themselves. In a village all their students would be from rural tribal families. They considered it a sign from god that all their institutions should be in similar rural areas of the Northeast. That became a policy decision which they have adhered to for five decades, in Nagaland, in the Dimasa, Bodo and tea garden areas of Assam, among the Rongmei and others in Manipur, the Garo and Khasi in Meghalaya, the Aka of Arunachal Pradesh, in Mizoram and Tripura.
Loyola School began to function in March 1971 with only 180 students, 40 of them girls. In order to ensure better access to the tribes, primary schools were built in the Jakhama, Kigwema-Mima, Viswema and other villages. It improved the access to schools of girls in particular. In the jubilee year 46 percent of its 1,437 students are girls. The same system was followed also in the rest of the Southern Angami area and one notices a similar boy-girl ratio in the high schools at Phesama, Khuzama, Viswema, Kidima. More girls than boys seem to be going for higher studies. A study done by North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati, three decades after their arrival showed that two thirds of the graduates and post-graduates in the Southern Angami area were women. The Jesuits did not have a conscious policy on this issue. It is important to study the processes that resulted in it in order to replicate them elsewhere.
When it opened its doors, Loyola School had 11 staff members, three of them Nagas, all non-teaching. Teachers also in most other schools of the Northeast had to be recruited from outside the region. School fees were kept low in order not to turn education into a burden on the family. As a result, salaries too were low and staff turnover was high. It showed the need to train local teachers and St Paul Institute of Education, Phesama, opened its doors in early 1978. Its products are found in the primary schools all over the Northeast. As the number of schools grew more and more students who completed their high school went to cities like Shillong in search of good colleges. To pay for it, most parents had to sell some of their best land. It could become a cause of conflicts. A response to it was St Joseph’s College, Jakhama. The bishop wanted it at Dimapur but based on their policy decision the Jesuits insisted on having it in a tribal village. The college founded in 1985 was handed over to the Kohima Catholic Diocese in 2000.
After two years in Southern Angami, the Jesuits heard the call from Eastern Nagaland. So Fr Stany Coelho took care of Southern Angami and Castelino was sent to the Chakhesang area where he opened more than ten schools and parishes in centres like Kiphire, Meluri, Chizami and others that have been handed over to the Kohima diocese. Only Nazareth School and the parish at Pfutsero remain in their hands. Then it was the turn of Manipur where today they run two parishes and four schools. After 25 years, in 1995 the Nagaland Mission became the Kohima Region extending to all the Seven Sisters. The Jesuits from Ranchi in Jharkhand joined them in the tea garden areas of Assam where they run five parishes and high schools and a college. From Kohima they expanded to five centres in the Dima Hasao district, to the Aka region in West Kameng in Arunachal and to Meghalaya where they run two colleges, four parishes and high schools. Jesuits from Darjeeling have joined them to run a college in Mizoram and from Kerala they have come to Tripura.
After this quantitative expansion today the 160 Jesuits of the Northeast are reading the past in order to write the future. What are to be their next steps? There are demands for more colleges and a university. Should they agree to all of them, stabilise their gains where they work or hear the call of the wild coming from different directions? Will further expansion take them away from their policy of focusing on the tribal rural areas? They need to struggle with these questions as they begin the next fifty years. Whatever they do, they are clear that they would not be where they are without the collaboration they received from hundreds of people in Nagaland and the rest of the Northeast, from religious Sisters, dozens of teachers who have taught in their schools for years together at low salaries, catechists who have spread the word of God and village leaders and people who have supported them in their enterprise.
With this sense of gratitude on 7th March they celebrated their golden jubilee at the Loyola Campus, Jakhama, in the presence of Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, Superior General of the Jesuits, ten bishops, scores of priests and nuns and more than 2,000 people. It was their way of saying to the people of Nagaland and the rest of the Northeast, “For all that has been, thanks. For what will be Yes.”
Dr Walter Fernandes is the Director of North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati
